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COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
In his 1971 study City of Words, Tony Tanner employs the term "entropy" to characterize the vision of the city offered by American novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. The term applies equally to the accounts of Lagos given by novelists such as Ekwensi and Okara in the 1950s and '60s and, even more markedly, to the work of members of the "third generation" of Nigerian novelists writing in English. An examination of texts by Helon Habila, Akin Adesokan, and Maik Nwosu reveals, however, that Lagos is characterized by these--and other--novelists not only as a site of disorder and decay but as an environment in which creative energies are nurtured that are held to constitute a corrective and liberatory force.
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While two key terms in the title of this paper are "entropy" and "energy," I wish to place the former of the two on hold for a while, and to begin by acknowledging positive energies, by admitting that the stimulus for this paper was to honor the remarkable efflorescence that has taken place in the Nigerian novel over the last few years. After a period--roughly speaking, from the mid-1980s to the mid-'90s--during which in Nigeria less creative energy seemed to be spent on fiction that on drama and on poetry (see Adesanmi and Dunton 8-12), the novel has come spectacularly to the fore again, with major and often award-winning works published by a number of debut or little-known novelists, including Maik Nwosu, Helon Habila, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, Akin Adesokan, Sefi Atta, Jude Dibia, and Uzodinma Iweala. (1) Many of these novels are set partly or wholly in Lagos, and part of the contention of this paper is that--contextualizing this output amongst novels dating from the 1950s onwards--Lagos has, by the early years of the twenty-first century, become established as one of the world's preeminent fictionalized cities, as with London and Paris more than a hundred years before.
In returning to the idea of productive energies, I acknowledge that this notion is not innocent, but ideologically charged. One of the first classic European texts to employ the word "city" in its title is the history of Imperial Rome by Titus Livius, commonly known as Livy (c59bce-17ce). Despite the fact that his subject was predominantly a rural power--and a colonizing one--Livy chose as the title of his work Ad Urbe Condita, that is, From the Founding of the City. The implication is clear: for Livy, Rome is the agent, the driving force behind everything worthwhile that occurs in the world, the well-spring of virtue and of structuring authority.
For hundreds of years this idea is sustained in the literatures of Europe, however tenuously and even when the city is recognized as home of anarchic forces, even if the city is seen as being riven by opposing camps (because even then, a still point is acknowledged, an ideal source of virtue, authority and order). This remains so until perhaps the middle of the nineteenth century, when fictive accounts of the city begin to undergo a transformation, when a new insecurity arises as to what the city might have to offer its populace, even as to how viable an entity it might be.
A classic account of this more skeptical vision is Dorothy Van Ghent's essay "The Dickens World: A View from Todgers's," which focuses on the ninth chapter of Dickens's 1844 novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. Van Ghent takes her cue from Dickens's vision of a rapidly expanding, postindustrial London as seen from its rooftops, a vision of "[g]ables, housetops, garret-windows, wilderness upon wilderness," a place where even if the observer might momentarily identify individual objects, soon "the tumult swell[s] into a roar; the host of objects [seem] to thicken and expand a hundredfold" (130). Martin Chuzzlewit is a novel on alienation, a text in which Dickens explores the question "how the individual can survive and flourish in a hostile world ... dominated by selfishness and the cash nexus" (Schwarzbach 80). While for Livy, nearly 2000 years previously, the city performs a coherent role, the purpose and merits of which may clearly be read, for Dickens it is a place where the individual human subject perceives him/herself as coming adrift, a place the structuring components of which have become too diverse and too atomized to be fully comprehended.
A century further on and this recognition (that is, the awed acknowledgment of a potentially catastrophic dissolution of recognitions) has consolidated to the point where, in his study City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970, Tony Tanner can foreground the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a starting point for understanding the realities of the contemporary fictive city--that law that revolves on the principle of entropy.
Entropy is a measure of order (low entropy) but also of disorder (high entropy). Though I shall return to this later with reference to the Lagos novel, in its bare outline the Second Law states that the entropy of the universe increases during any spontaneous process (such as growth or expansion): "universe" here being defined as a "system" plus its surroundings or context (an idea crucial for understanding the life of a city within a context such as that of national polity) and "entropy" as the dispersal of energy, becoming less concentrated as the system it supports develops, running down, running out. (2) With entropy, beyond a point, the center cannot hold, just as in the modern fictive city it seems barely possible to identify any coherence-enabling center. In an extension that is also significant for studies of the modern urban...
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