1
ABSTRACT
Re-Defining Madness: A Study of Chinua Achebe’s “The Madman”
This literary critical study of Chinua Achebe’s short story, “The Madman,” considers popular
clinical and majority definitions of madness in contrast to the minority self-definition of those so
classified, as well as their conception of the “others,” especially in the traditional context of the
Igbo culture of southern Nigeria that provides the cultural perspective from which this renown
writer offers his redefinition of insanity; an indicting redefinition that stamps not a few of the
‘respectable’ majority with the same label. According to this literary perspective, reinforced by
other African works on the subject, madness is more plural than published, but merely a matter
of degrees, the dominant definitions and classifications themselves being only the opinion of the
voiced majority.
Kontein Trinya, Ph.D
Department of English Studies
Faculty of Humanities,
University of Education, Port Harcourt, NIGERIA
[email protected]; +234 (0) 803 3388 489
2
Re-Defining Madness: A Study of Chinua Achebe’s “The Madman”
In its generic attempt to represent life, art has often adopted metaphors from aspects of
life; metaphors through whose lenses it aims to project its recreations of life. Although
the choice, structure, and exegetic possibilities of metaphors have been as diverse and
infinite as creators of art have been different and countless, metaphors of madness have
been prominent in literatures from early times, notwithstanding the peculiarities of
writers, cultures, regions and periods. For example, in the Renaissance plays of
Shakespeare, we are confronted with Malvolio’s strange manners in Twelfth Night, arising
from his obsession with the notion that Lady Olivia is in love with him; we come upon
Hamlet and Macbeth who think that they see ghosts in those eponymous plays; we
grapple with the prominent instance of what is described as the “female madness” 1 of
Ophelia the young noblewoman in Hamlet.
Farther back in history and tradition, we find the Bible account of King David who feigns
insanity as a means of escape from enlistment into the Philistine army against his own
people of Israel. In that account, the Philistine king wonders aloud, “Lo, ye see the man
is mad: wherefore then have ye brought him to me? Have I need of mad men, that ye
have brought this fellow to play the mad man in my presence? shall this fellow come into
my house?” 2
According to Allen Thiher, even “Greek antiquity found madness in Homer in its
interpretation of the character of Bellerophon.”3 For Lillian Feder in Madness in
Literature, there is evidence that human beings have been preoccupied with “extreme
forms of mental and psychic experience long before they recorded it in literature.” In
seeming definition of the concept, Feder cites, as examples of the assertion, “myths and
legends” with their “primordial symbolizations of delusion, mania, and other bizarre
forms of thought and behaviour.”4
Modern African literature, particularly drama, has also had its share of explorations into
this universal theme of madness. Even though in some of the works, such as Wole
Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists and Ola Rotimi’s Our Husband has gone Mad Again,
the concept pushes up as much as into the very title, it is in Chinua Achebe’s short story,
“The Madman,” that one finds a robust attempt at redefining the concept, not merely
from the traditional perspectives of the ‘sane’ majority but also that of the unpopular and
stigmatized eccentric.
In Rotimi’s Our Husband has gone Mad Again, madness is an adjective of exasperation
by which one outspoken younger wife in a polygamous marriage describes the
3
objectionable recurrent expressions of authoritative and unfeeling control of their
husband, the ex-military officer.5 Even though madness finds a place in the title of the
play, it is not essentially the subject of investigation. In Wole Soyinka’s absurdist
political satire on post-civil war Nigeria, Madmen and Specialists,6 we seem to find a
gallery of eccentricities, a compartmentalized madhouse where each category of social
deviants points a reproachful finger at the other, calling them mad. For example, about Si
Bero the collector of herbs, Goyi the amputee announces to his “fraternity” of
Mendicants, “But everyone knows she’s mad. They get that way after a while living
alone” (p.12). The Cripple subsequently affirms, “She must be slightly crazy. Living all
alone, I suppose” (p.20). Si Bero herself queries Aafaa the head of that fraternity, “I said
have you gone mad? Are you here to work or fool around?” Aafaa says of the
Specialist’s father, his former boss in the war, “I always thought he was crazy” (p.25). Si
Bero and her medical Specialist brother, Dr Bero, agree about their father, that he has
“Mind sickness” arising from the much suffering that proved so much for him that “His
mind broke under the strain,” making it necessary for them to take care of him, because
he is dangerous (p.31). The eccentric medical specialist asks Aafaa the discharged
chaplain and leader of the fraternity of Mendicants, “Would you call yourself sane?” He
would not. He had “pleaded insanity” and had “got off lightly” from the army when,
according to him, “the thing I called my mind… was no longer there” (p.37). He got that
way through the brainwashing of his therapist, the Old Man and father of the Specialist
himself. For Soyinka in this play, then, madness is a metaphor for describing a vicious
circle of social aberrations; it is the name by which one group calls the ‘outsider,’ even
when it is itself deserving of the same label; it is, as Salkeld would describe some of the
occurrence of the concept in literature, perhaps, just a “political metaphor.”7
Whereas with Soyinka and other Nigeria writers who have adopted the theme of madness
it is essentially a name, a critical label by which a vocal ‘fraternity’ designates the absent
or silent ‘other,’ it is with Achebe the master storyteller that the concept, though
obliquely, is approached with a bold intent at redefinition. Unfortunately, because
Achebe does this in a short story, it has received little critical attention. It is the burden of
short stories the world over, irrespective of their creative worth, that they often get
comparatively less attention in literary conferences and critical essays.
Achebe’s “The Madman”8 tells the tragic story of a rising rustic noble farmer, Nwibe,
who seeks to top up his social climb with the attainment of the highest title in his village
of Ogbu. With two wives, a big yam farm, a ‘modern’ house with a zinc roof, separate
houses for his wives, and a reputation for “wealth and integrity,” this “man of high
standing” (p.3) is the symbol and epitome of eminence in his pristine traditional society.
4
The storyteller does not fail to add that “Nwibe was such a sensible man” (p.3). Nwibe’s
eminent rise, however, takes a path of climactic collusion with a naked and homeless
opposite – the madman.
Achebe’s initial antithetical characterizations of Nwibe and the madman may have
derived not only from what Nwahunanya describes as this writer’s characters’
embodiment of the values and aspirations of his traditional Igbo context9 but also from
the traditional assumption of the concepts of reason and madness as “fixed binary terms,”
and madness as standing, according to Duncan Salkeld, “as the absolute other to
reason.”10
The story opens with the madman through whose rationalizing mind we see the
preliminary scenes of conflicting perceptions. The aim is to reveal the inner logic behind
the outer irrationalities of that character; to reveal the psychic processes accounting for
the ‘strange’ behaviour. The world outside of him wonders that he mumbles insanely to
himself, but he is engaged in intimate conversations with the mysterious “highway”
which, to those ‘others,’ is merely a “dusty, old footpath” (p.1). The evening market
seems to them just a small affair of “a handful of garrulous women,” but it is, actually, “a
huge, engulfing bazaar beckoning people… from far and near” (p.1). Like every man,
he also has a hut – in the market; but he is challenged by two inelegant “fat-bottomed”
market women who claim that it is their market-stall, and who bring their men-folk,
uncouth “four hefty beasts of the bush,” to whip him out of the hut. He learns thereafter
to plan his day and avoid the conflict. Even “little beasts” pelt him with stones, taunting
what they say is his nakedness, but that is insult for their mother, not him. The list of his
assailants also has the “vagabonds,” a lorry driver with his assistant, who assault him
physically, interrupting his engrossed conversation with the highway, claiming that they
nearly ran him over. Not him, but their mother.
It is another eventful market day. The madman, as he is designated in the beginning of
the story, joins the crowds streaming from far and near towards the “great” market. On
the way, he notices some young ladies going in the opposite direction from the traffic to
the market; they are returning from the stream with water pots on their heads. “This
surprised him… and he stopped to think it over” (p.3). Becoming thirsty at the end of
his reasoning, he leaves his basket of possessions in the care of the thirsty highway to
which he promises to bring back some appreciative water. He goes down the stream.
There he finds a naked man bathing. It is Nwibe, who had gone to wash off the hot
afternoon sweat from the work on his farm, after which he would proceed to the market.
The madman, amused at the naked behind of the bathing man, suddenly ‘remembers’ him
as the one who had assaulted him on every occasion in the past, as well as sent his
5
children, the little beasts, to pelt him with stones, taunting not his nakedness but their
mother’s. He picks up the clothes of this personification of the ‘others,’ all his assailants
and antagonists, wraps the bathing man’s cloth around his naked groins, and flees.
Nwibe, naked and “maddened by anger,” threatens the madman, “I will whip that
madness out of you today!” He proceeds to wade out of the water, chases the fleeing man
up the hill, down the bush path, and finally into the crowded market, telling everyone
who cares to listen, to help him find the madman who has taken his clothes. From this
climax, the roles are reversed for the tragic. The man with the clothes simply melts into
the market day crowd, into society, and Nwibe becomes the “stark naked madman” (p.7)
in pursuit of another madman that nobody else sees. He is conspicuously isolated by his
nudity.
In the worldview of Achebe’s Igbo society, madness crosses the irrecoverable boundary
when a sick person goes so indiscriminately far as to carry their eccentricity into the
public domains of the marketplace where mortals and spirits traffic. A famous traditional
therapist is consulted to recover Nwibe of his tongue-tied madness; he declines. A lesser
man does the magic and takes the fame as “Sojourner to the Land of the Spirits.” Two
years later, Nwibe is still stigmatized as once having been mad, and his re-application for
initiation into the apex community of title holders is politely refused.
The story has a structure of three prominent parts with gray boundaries. In the first, we
see the world through the disoriented mind of the man popularly designated mad because
he is unclothed. The second part represents the perspective both of Nwibe the “sensible
man,” “the great judge,” as well as of the majority on the opposite side of the naked and
unclothed soliloquizing wanderer. The final part is an epilogue, coming after the conflict
between Nwibe the epitome of societal norms and the naked madman at the other
extreme. In this part, everyone is implicitly invited to make a judgment not merely on
Nwibe and the nameless erstwhile madman but on the very definition and modes of
materialization of madness.
The story presents a conflict of perspectives expressed in the conflict of archetypal
personalities. In it, Achebe raises several profound rhetorical questions: What is
madness? Is it simply the unfeeling public display of nudity, according to popular African
(and specifically Igbo) judgments? If we should say so, did the madman become sane
merely because and when he covered his nakedness, even though his reasoning remained
unchanged?
6
Perhaps like Libertine, Achebe also asks in this story, “Who is to say what is mad and
what is not?”11 Who is the right “judge” of madness: the indicted individual or the
sanctioning majority? The insider or the outsider?
Another prominent question is whether anger is not also a kind of madness. In the
“sensible” and elevated opinion of Nwibe “the great judge,” it is, which is why he calls
Udenkwo his garrulous junior wife “one crazy woman,” and he himself at last gets his
“vision” so blurred by the “mist” of anger that he is only “vaguely aware of crowds” even
at the thresholds of “the occult territory of the powers of the market” (p.8).
According to Panepinto, “Throughout literature and society alike females are portrayed as
much more susceptible to madness then males, some even go so far as to call it a ‘female
malady.’12 Others are also in agreement with the view.13 However, Achebe, on several
occasions accused from Feminist perspectives for his negative characterization of
females, posits otherwise in this story of two extreme mad men and one cantankerous
wife called mad by her husband the “great judge.” She does not accept that labelling by
the ‘others,’ whom she derides as “those of you who are sane…” (p.5).
Could we, according clinical psychiatry, define madness merely as mental and
behavioural disorder? Or might there also be metaphysical explanations for certain kinds
of eccentricities? In the traditional Igbo worldview, yes; which is why cure is sought for
madness from as far as the land of spirits. The Igbo worldview shares affinity in this
respect with Medieval perspectives, according to which madness was “caused by the
gods, by causal agents outside the world of humanity.”14 The position is perhaps more
clearly expressed in Judeo-Christian theology in which madness is the consequence of the
intervention of demon forces, as would be evident from the account below:
26 And they arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, which is over against
Galilee.
27 And when he [Jesus] went forth to land, there met him out of the city a
certain man, which had devils long time, and ware no clothes, neither abode
in any house, but in the tombs.
28 When he saw Jesus, he cried out, and fell down before him, and with a
loud voice said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God most
high? I beseech thee, torment me not.
29 (For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. For
oftentimes it had caught him: and he was kept bound with chains and in
fetters; and he brake the bands, and was driven of the devil into the
wilderness.)
30 And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion:
because many devils were entered into him.
7
After Jesus exorcises the devils, the man is proclaimed “healed” and he is restored to “his
right mind.”15
Another rhetorical question that Achebe poses from this short story is whether or not
madness is relative to social status, and if eminence equates sanity. Had not Nwibe’s
madness become so publicly expressed, even if on one angry occasion only, it might have
been easy to think that only the low could be mad.
The story also raises the apparent poser of degrees of madness. In other words, that given
the right provocations, many a sane person would betray their measure of madness. For
instance, “crazy” Udenkwo, herself already within the ‘occult’ space of the market, is,
paradoxically, the one who takes off her upper cloth to cover the nakedness and more
reprehensible madness of her husband driven that far by a blinding mad rage? In this
story, Achebe would seem to be in agreement with Gemma Wiseman according to whom
there are not only “forms of madness” but also “moments of madness and levels of
madness.”16 For Rose, “we may all be hiding some kind of 'madness.'” 17 That might
explain why Feder thinks that “It is hard to find any one description of the phenomenon
of madness that will explain all the expressions (or ranges of the expression) of deviant
behaviour and extreme psychic confusion that could come under the name of madness or
insanity….”18
By the crucial questions Chinua Achebe raises in this short story, he tacitly indicts many a
sane and vocal ‘judge’ with the name by which they call their weaker minority. The
unobtrusive style is, perhaps, as Adebayo Williams describes the writer, part of his “fine
manners, his courtesy, and infinite politeness.”19
8
End Notes
1. eNotes Publishing. <<http://www.enotes.com/hamlet/character-ophelia-why-does-she-go-mad.>>
Modified Saturday, September 01, 2012 7:13:06 AM.
2. Holy Bible, The King James Version, International Bible Association, Texas, [ny], 1
Samuel 21:14-15.
3. A. Thiher, Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature, University of
Michigan Press, Michigan, 2002. << http://books.google.com.ng/books?id=G_Ww9iiKe0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=examples+of+madness+in+literature&source=bl
&ots=ZEE05ntYGJ&sig=Q1HbaOFWg65YOGHvyCfP0aXFNQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=BPwzUI6iOqqj4gSylYCYBQ&ved=
0CDsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=examples%20of%20madness%20in
%20literature&f=false.>> modified Saturday, September 01, 2012 8:24:50 AM.
4. L. Feder, Madness in Literature, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1980, p.3.
<<http://books.google.com.ng/books?
id=t3eDYBNXITcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=madness+in+literature&source=bl&ots=apwlkh8Km
q&sig=n5W19O0P2dIajcLKlxlB9F0UBaQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dgc0UICsIoSo4gTHrIDoBQ&ved=0CDU
Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=madness%20in%20literature&f=false>> May 07, 2007, updated July
08, 2009, viewed September 1, 2012.
5. O. Rotimi, Our Husband has gone Mad Again, University Press, Ibadan, 1999.
6. W. Soyinka, Madmen and Specialists, Three Crowns Books, Ibadan, 1971.
7. D. Salkeld. Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, Manchester UP, Manchester,
1993, p.2. <<http://books.google.com.ng/books?
id=lRsNAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=examples+of+madness+in+literatu
re&source=bl&ots=HQG7PO3V73&sig=Z1ba27Tpn7Ql5KdLnza4PDCmZtA&sa=
X&ei=JOozUP2cNMvS4QTT2oEQ&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=example
s%20of%20madness%20in%20literature&f=false.>> Modified Saturday,
September 01, 2012 8:21:21 AM.
8. C. Achebe, ‘The Madman,’ In Girls at War and other Stories, Heinemann, London, 1977, pp.1-10.
9. C. Nwanhunanya, Tragedy in the Anglophone West African Novel, Springfield Publishers, Uturu,
Nigeria, 2003, p.47.
10. D. Salkeld, op cit. p.80.
11. Libertine. ‘Literary Themes: Madness in Literature and History.’
<<http://www.helium.com/items/111979-reflections-on-madness-in-literature-and-history>>
January 04, 2007, updated May 07, 2007, viewed September 1, 2012.
12. L, Panepinto, ‘Renaissance Notions of Madness.’
<<http://www2.cedarcrest.edu/academic/eng/lfletcher/shrew/lpanepinto.htm>> modified
Monday, July 25, 2011, 2:46:21, viewed September 1, 2012.
13.
Oppapers. ‘Madness in women's literature.’ <<http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Madness-InWomen-s-Literature/485151>> Modified Saturday, September 01, 2012 8:10:41 AM.
9
14. A. Thiher, op cit.
15. Holy Bible, op. cit, Luke 8:26-36.
16. G. Wiseman, ‘Literary Themes: Madness in Literature and History.’
<<http://www.helium.com/items/321535-reflections-on-madness-in-literature-and-history>>
May 07, 2007, updated July 2008, viewed September 1. 2012.
17. C. Rose, ‘Literary Themes: Madness in Literature and History.’
<<http://www.helium.com/items/1120694-reflections-on-madness>> July 21, 2008,
updated September 27, 2011, viewed September 1, 2012.
18. L. Feder, op cit., p.5.
19. A. Williams, ‘The Autumn of the Literary Patriarch: Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Remembering.’
In Research of African Literatures. 32, No. 3 (Fall 2001), p.8.