narrative of the birth and life of Jesus. T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” attests to the
situation of his birth as being that of “a temperate valley/ wet, below the snow line,
smelling of vegetation” (1983:109). But this same incarnation of the king through his
birth would adumbrate a feeling of apocalypse where “these kingdoms/ [are] no longer at
ease here, in the old dispensation” (110). The destruction that accompanies this birth and
adumbrates the subsequent consequences are found in W.B. Yeats’ “The Second
Coming” in which the understanding of the coming attempts to place the world within a
planetary frame, subjecting it, as it were, to the forecast of a macabre dance by which
“Things fall apart” as “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (cited in Daniel Albright
1990: 235). The particular extent of the impact of this “anarchy” is what Achebe captures
so inimitably in Things Fall Apart. But of all, William Blake, though once designated by
Eliot as “mad” (T.R. Barnes 1967:165) for his critical and unpopular comments on the
shielded side that completes the duality of Jesus’ identity, was the most explicit in
achieving the needed balance in the depiction of the Christ figure. In his uncompleted
poem titled “The Everlasting Gospel”, Blake interrogates popular assumptions about
Christ’s humility, pointing in the end to certain traits in the attitude of Christ that could
also make him pass for the opposite of the lamb or a combination of both humility and
pride.^21 This in a sense interrogates the missionary humility narrative that may have
attended the prosecution of colonialiasm.
Invariably, there is anxiety over what emerges where there is a focalization of the
multiplier effects of the review of the interaction between two different worlds, or when
such worlds are in confrontation, “or when boundaries between worlds are violated”
(McHale in Ato Quayson 2004: 830). These are part of the questions central to the
concept of postmodernism. It is these questions that serve to identify the various
instances of change that are precipitated on the intrigues which characterize such contact
and conflicts of different worlds. Related to this is the attempt by one world to impose on
others a purportedly superior ontological perspective intended to serve its own purpose.
Such was colonialism’s sentiment of the Enlightenment as mediated through
modernization; however, as Quayson (ibid.: 828) reveals, the value of postmodernism lies
21
See T.R. Barnes, 1967:163-5.