Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugen 2023

Literature and the Exploration of Cultural Rituals and Traditions
Comparative literature and cross-cultural analysis

The Ritual of Reading: How Stories Weave Culture and Unravel Us

Let’s talk about rituals—those strange, deeply personal, yet oddly universal things we do as humans to make sense of our lives. Whether it’s lighting a candle on a birthday cake or spilling champagne on New Year’s Eve (why are we so obsessed with spilling drinks?), rituals anchor us. They’re like tiny, stubborn time capsules, preserving what matters most in a world where everything feels like it’s sliding off the table. But here’s the kicker: books are rituals too. Every novel, every poem, every story is a ritual dressed up in paper and ink (or pixels—let’s not be snobs).

This hit me somewhere between reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore—two books that, on the surface, couldn’t be more different. One is steeped in the ancient traditions of Igbo culture, a reckoning with colonial disruption. The other is a surreal odyssey where talking cats and mysterious stones feel as normal as your morning coffee. Yet both are obsessed—compulsively, almost eerily—with rituals. Achebe gives us the rhythms of community life: harvest festivals, wrestling matches, the sacred kola nut. Murakami, meanwhile, plunges into the eerie rituals of solitude, metaphysical quests, and, of course, making spaghetti in an empty apartment at midnight (a Murakami trademark).

And suddenly, I couldn’t unsee it. Literature isn’t just a mirror for culture—it’s a stage for ritual reenactment, an experiment in the alchemy of tradition and change.

Achebe and the Fragility of Tradition

Let’s start with Achebe. If you’ve read Things Fall Apart, you know it’s impossible to get through without feeling a pang of something—a mix of awe, rage, and, let’s be honest, despair. Achebe’s prose is deceptively simple. He doesn’t grab you by the collar and yell, “This is important!” Instead, he whispers, and that whisper lingers like a mosquito in your ear.

Here’s the genius of it: Achebe doesn’t just describe Igbo rituals; he makes you feel their weight. When Okonkwo, the book’s tragically stubborn protagonist, participates in the Week of Peace or the yam festival, it’s not just storytelling. It’s an invitation to inhabit a world where these rituals are the glue holding everything together. But the moment colonial forces arrive, the glue starts to crack. Suddenly, what felt eternal becomes precarious. The arrival of Christianity isn’t just a plot twist; it’s a cultural earthquake, and you’re left wondering: What happens when rituals—the very things that make us who we are—collapse?

It’s easy to dismiss this as a “historical problem,” something that happened long ago in a village far, far away. But isn’t this what’s happening everywhere, all the time? Traditions clash with modernity. Cultures assimilate, resist, or mutate. Whether it’s the global push-pull of capitalism or the endless debate over whether pineapple belongs on pizza (it doesn’t, but I digress), the question remains: Can rituals survive the onslaught of change? Achebe’s answer is brutal and beautiful: maybe, but not without loss.

Murakami and the Rituals of Absurdity

And then there’s Murakami, who approaches rituals from the opposite direction—through the lens of absurdity and isolation. Where Achebe shows rituals being ripped apart by external forces, Murakami explores how we invent rituals to survive the chaos inside our own heads.

Take Kafka on the Shore. It’s a book where characters follow bizarre, inexplicable routines. A boy runs away from home and camps out in a library, religiously reading philosophy. A man talks to cats like it’s a nine-to-five job. Even cooking pasta becomes a kind of ceremony. These aren’t rituals tied to tradition or community—they’re weirdly private, almost obsessive acts that give shape to an otherwise shapeless existence.

And isn’t that the most 21st-century thing ever? We’re all desperately clinging to our little rituals—our morning coffees, our Spotify playlists, our doomscrolling—because the world feels like it’s spiraling out of control. Murakami’s characters don’t fight this; they lean in. They build rituals out of the absurd and the inexplicable, and somehow, it works. Or it doesn’t. But either way, it feels profoundly real.

The Collision of East and West (or Why Rituals Refuse to Stay in One Lane)

Here’s the twist: while Achebe and Murakami write about rituals from wildly different cultural contexts, they both tap into something universal. Rituals, whether communal or solitary, are survival mechanisms. They’re how we cope with the fact that life is messy and unpredictable and often just plain weird.

But what’s fascinating is what happens when rituals from different cultures collide. In Achebe’s world, that collision is violent and destructive, a bulldozer of colonialism leveling centuries of tradition. In Murakami’s universe, it’s subtler, a strange hybridization where Western influences mix with Japanese aesthetics to create something entirely new. A jazz bar in Tokyo. A Japanese woman obsessed with French literature. It’s not about preservation; it’s about adaptation, even reinvention.

And isn’t this the story of globalization? Cultures don’t exist in isolation anymore. They rub against each other, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes beautifully. And literature is where that friction becomes visible, even tangible. Every time you pick up a book, you’re stepping into someone else’s ritual, someone else’s world. And maybe, just maybe, you leave with a piece of it.

So What’s the Point?

If you’re waiting for a tidy conclusion, I hate to disappoint. Literature isn’t about answers—it’s about questions, about stepping into the labyrinth and getting a little lost (and yes, I just said labyrinth—deal with it). Achebe and Murakami don’t give us solutions; they give us stories. Stories that force us to confront the fragility of our rituals, the absurdity of our routines, and the messy, glorious collision of cultures that defines the modern world.

So the next time you light a birthday candle, or cook pasta at midnight, or (God forbid) argue about pineapple pizza, remember: you’re performing a ritual. And in some small, strange way, you’re telling a story.