The ‘Deadly Secret’ of the Prophecy: Performative and Parabolic Language in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30827/tnj.v2i2.9510Keywords:
Prophecy, Speech act, Performative language, Secrecy, Figurative language, Parable.Abstract
In Chigozie Obioma’s novel, The Fishermen (2015), we witness the tragic events triggered by a prophecy delivered to four Nigerian brothers. My main aim in this essay is, following J. Hillis Miller’s analysis of speech acts in literature, and also ideas by Jacques Derrida and Derek Attridge, to develop an argument about this prophecy as a performative use of words that makes things happen in the world by way of its listeners and believers. The prophecy is presented as a speech act characterised by secrecy, obscurity and ambiguity, given the impossibility of subjecting its words to true and false verification and its undecidability in relation to the literal and the figurative uses of language. It is a speech act that requires an addressee that literally and naively believes in it, with Ikenna–the oldest brother–emerging as such a believer, who in this sense is just like his siblings, repeatedly presented as taking language at face value, unable to recognize its duplicitous and ambivalent nature. Because of this inability to perceive the parabolic or indirect dimension of language, the children establish a continuity between language and action, which leads them to act on reality led by words, in all cases with fatal consequences.
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