Textual Dynamics in Chinua Achebe's Home and Exile and No Longer at Ease

In this paper, I use Chinua Achebe's nonfiction work Home and Exile (2000) and his novel No Longer at Ease (1960) as reference points for arguing that application of intertextual theory to postcolonial literature such groundbreaking studies as Wolfgang Klooss's collection Across Lines (1998) (1) and Monika Reif-Hulser's Borderlands (1999) (2) runs risk of suppressing critical multidimensionality of some postcolonial texts. I will call these additional dimensions and borrowing latter term from Robert Scholes, who defines it as situating text in relation to culture, society, world, (3) to which I would add: relation to life experience of writer. I will argue that Achebe's work inter-, intra-, and extratextual dimensions exist dynamic relationship, producing mutually deconstructive tension that permits authority to no single textual dimension, creating instead textual dynamic which continually challenges and subverts critical efforts to fix its position as literary text. Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe, makes similar point observing that Achebe's narrative strategies are intended to stress multiplicity of meanings and indeterminate zones of representation. Gikandi's acute analysis of Achebe's intratextual narrative strategies, however, is premised on what I would call extratextual assumption: that author's project is to resist fetishization within which Africa has been fixed by the discourse of Western world. (4) Gikandi's position therefore illustrates risk I am positing of assigning primacy to single textual dimension from which further critical comment is to be generated. Clearly there is no way to prove that extratextual dimension, whether biographical, ideological, or political, is determinative. The postcolonial critic, however, may have agenda that includes assigning to subject work high degree of moral or political intentionality. Achebe's most consistent theme, Gikandi argues, is idea of affirming national community, and his pessimism is an expression of his anxieties about transference of his discourse on African destiny from imaginative realm, mythical space, to practices of everyday life. (5) By assigning primacy to extratextual, and to one facet of extratextual at that, namely, historical/political, Gikandi must continually slight textual wrestling match that I am advancing here as most productive way of viewing Achebean narrative environment, or mediatope--a term I am borrowing from Bernd Schulte (6)--and, I would argue, that of some other postcolonial writers such as Nuruddin Farah, whose work has also been subject to incisive treatment by Gikandi. Gikandi's treatment of Farah's use of modernism is similarly predicated on extratextual claims about Farah's intention of providing a critique of idea of Somali nation and traditions associated with it. (7) In short, Farah's narrative is elucidated by Gikandi same terms as Achebe's, illustrating pitfall of assigning primacy to historical/political intentionalities: postcolonial writers come to be viewed through similar lens, except for apostate few, like V. S. Naipaul, whose work cannot be fitted within extratextual parameters critic has drawn. While Robert Scholes does not regard extratextuality as form of narrative textuality, it is clear that his situating text in relation to culture, society, world, and to author's construction of his personal experience articulates creative act occurring within narrative teleology of some kind, such as empowerment, liberation, decolonization, or even tragedy. The critique I am offering here of postcolonial criticism based on extratextual assumptions can also be made of criticism based on intertextual premises. Intertextuality--premised, Julia Kristeva's definition, on assumption that every text builds upon itself as mosaic of quotations . …

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