Ian H. Munro, William Jewell College, Liberty, Missouri
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 the application of intertextual theory to postcolonial literature in such groundbreaking studies as Wolfgang Klooss's collection Across the Lines (1998)1 and Monika Reif-Hulser's Borderlands (1999)2 runs the risk of suppressing the critical multidimensionality of some postcolonial texts. I will call these additional dimensions "intratextual" and "extratextual," borrowing the latter term from Robert Scholes, who defines it as situating a text "in relation to culture, society, the world,"3 to which I would add: in relation to the life experience of the writer. I will argue that in Achebe's work the inter-, intra-, and extratextual dimensions exist in a dynamic relationship, producing a mutually deconstructive tension that permits authority to no single textual dimension, creating instead a textual dynamic which continually challenges and subverts critical efforts to "fix" its position as a literary text.
Simon Gikandi, in Reading Chinua Achebe, makes a similar point in observing that Achebe's narrative strategies are intended to stress a "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 an extratextual assumption: that the author's project is to resist the "fetishization" within which Africa has been fixed by "the discourse of the Western world."4 Gikandi's position therefore illustrates the risk I am positing of assigning primacy to a single textual dimension from which further critical comment is to be generated.
Clearly there is no way to prove that an extratextual dimension, whether biographical, ideological, or political, is determinative. The postcolonial critic, however, may have an agenda that includes assigning to the subject work a high degree of moral or political intentionality. Achebe's most consistent theme, Gikandi argues, is the idea of affirming a "national community," and his pessimism is "an expression of his anxieties about the transference of his discourse on an African destiny from the imaginative realm, the mythical space, to the practices of everyday life."5 By assigning primacy to the extratextual, and to one facet of the extratextual at that, namely, the historical/political, Gikandi must continually slight the textual wrestling match that I am advancing here as the most productive way of viewing the Achebean narrative environment, or "mediatope"a term I am borrowing from Bernd Schulte6and, 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 the idea of the Somali nation and the traditions associated with it."7 In short, Farah's narrative is elucidated by Gikandi in the same terms as Achebe's, illustrating a pitfall of assigning primacy to historical/political intentionalities: postcolonial writers come to be viewed through a similar lens, except for an apostate few, like V. S. Naipaul, whose work cannot be fitted within the extratextual parameters the critic has drawn. While Robert Scholes does not regard "extratextuality" as a form of narrative textuality, it is clear that his situating a text "in relation to culture, society, the world," and to the author's construction of his personal experience articulates a creative act occurring within a 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. Intertextualitypremised, in Julia Kristeva's definition, on the assumption that "every text builds upon itself as a mosaic of quotations ... [and] is the absorption and transformation of another text"8 has become a theoretical battleground in postcolonial criticism. Julie Newman, for example, cites Arun Mukherjee in maintaining that "writing back to the center" perpetuates a binary relationship in which European discourse is forever the "other" of postcolonial writing.
Newman argues in Bakhtinian mode for an alternative "dialogic relation with other social discourses circulating in [postcolonial] society, rather than those at the center." Discussions of intertextuality, she writes, need to take account of the fact that "postcolonial societies may have their own internal centers and peripheries, dominants and marginals, that the postcolonial subject is not a unitary subject, and that there are nationalisms within nationalism."9 Newman offers as a solution a "broader heteroglossic strategy": the "re-reading [and] creative adaptation from at least two traditions" represented by Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel, in which E. M. Forster's Passage to India is retold within the framework of the Mahabarata, the parodic interaction of the two texts simultaneously desacrilizing both the European "imperial text" and Indian "cultural epic."
Newman's strategy restricts Kristeva's concept of intertextuality to literary texts, but as Frank Schulze-Engler points out, Kristeva's original concept of intertextuality deals not just with relations between literary texts but with relationships between literature and various types of social texts, approximating Schulte's "mediatope." "In her eyes," writes Schulze-Engler, citing Hans-Peter Mai, "it is a politically transformative practice. In the last resort, hers is a political concept which aims at empowering the reader/critic to oppose the literary and social tradition at large."10 Schulze-Engler is surely correct in critiquing "writing back" concepts of intertextuality such as those of Helen Tiffin for constructing an essentialist "imperial textuality" against which the postcolonial writer, from an equally essentialist "postcolonial textuality," is presumed to be writing. However, he fails to recognize that the "political concept of empowerment" he identifies in Kristeva's critical project is also narrative in form, with extratextualincluding biographicalprovenance. Terms like "transformative" and "empowering" underline the narrative framework within which Schulze-Engler is viewing postcolonial texts.
Before turning to Achebe's Home and Exile, I want to introduce the third prefix in the mix of textualities I am proposing: the intratextual. I am using this term here to refer to what Michael Riffaterre calls the "texts within the text embedded in the fabric of the whole novel."11 Just as I would argue that the extratextual and intertextual are themselves narrative in form, I would contend that Riffaterre's "sign systems" embedded in fictional narrative as subtextual sememes are likewise not simply "the mirroring of the whole into one of its parts,"12 as Riffaterre contends, but constitute internal narratives in contention and collaboration with each other and with inter- and extratextual narratives. Riffatterre's "mirroring of the whole" makes these sign systems secondary to the "whole," and assigns primacy to a "whole" that is presumed to exist. I would modify Riffaterre's claim that exterior referentiality is "but an illusion, for signs or sign systems refer to other sign systems"13 by arguing that "exterior referentiality" occurs within the same narrative framework as "interior referentiality," and that at least in Achebe's narrative texts, including Home and Exile, neither is more or less illusory than the other, if by illusory we mean constructed by the human imagination, since all narratives are so constructed. As well, neither is more or less "whole" than the other, since such an assertion begs the question of what "wholeness" means in narrative.
I would like now to turn to the "mediatope" of Achebe's Home and Exile, Chinua Achebe's extended meditation on his life and work framed within the experience of returning to his father's hometown of Ogidi after his father's retirement, when Achebe was five years old. After thirty-one years away, his father had become an outsider in the village, the villagers nicknaming him "Mister Nineteen-Four," after the year in which he'd left the village as an Anglican missionary. Achebe has elsewhere, in such essays as "Named for Victoria, Queen of England," described his family's alienation from the non-Christian population of Ogidi.
In Home and Exile, Achebe writes that his personal journey "home" from this condition of exile and outsiderness "ultimately [became] transformed into a lifelong quest,"14 leading back to "that dusty road in my town, and [to] every villager, living or dead, who has ever walked on it.... That dusty little road is my link to all the other destinations" (H 91). These linked narrative tropes of journey, road, and quest provide a means of situating Home and Exile within inter-, intra-, and extratextual dimensions of narrative. I would make the same claims about the autobiographical narrative as of No Longer at Ease: that the three textual/narrative dimensions exist in dynamic tension with one another and that placing critical emphasis on one over another has the same distorting critical effect on the mediatope as it would by analogy to Schulte's biotope, where hypertrophy of a single component alters the environment as a whole. The intertextual dimension of Home and Exile employs the trope of the mythic journey home of the prodigal son and epic hero, a journey intertwined with the extratextual impact of the "wound of the centuries" of slavery and colonialism on Africa, and the intratextual construction of an Igbo epistemology able to provide a foundation for the epic wrestling match of narratives in which the hero is to become engaged.
The personal journey home at age five is rendered problematic by the protagonist's alienation from "home" represented by the conversations and disagreements between his father and their peers and relatives. Intertextually, too, it is impossible not to be aware of implicit, and sometimes explicit, connections with Achebe's fiction: with the child Chike of "Chike's School Days," enthralled with finding an African wizard in one of his readers; with another child, Oduche, in Arrow of God, silently spelling out words from one of his readers while his siblings listen to an oral tale told by their mother; with the retired missionary Isaac in No Longer at Ease surrounded by words on paper which he preserves regardless of their value; or with the "fragment of local lore" Achebe recalls, of Ogidi sharing its gods with its neighbors and Ezeulu's recollection in Arrow of God of Okperi sharing its gods with Umuaro. Beyond Achebe's own work, we are conscious of the explicit or implicit presence of other works with echoes in Achebe's fiction: the Old and New Testaments, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, Pilgrim's Progress, Cary's Mister Johnson, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, among others.
The intertextual and extratextual/biographical become so inextricably intertwined as we read Home and Exile that it is tempting to treat the work as a gloss on Achebe's fictional work rather than a mediatope of contesting narratives, deployed around the trope of mythic journey as epic literary battle from "home under fire" through resistance and the "empire fighting back," to repossessing narrative, and finally to victory in "Today, the balance of stories." For this picture of a sustained intertextual battle culminating in victory runs parallel to and is qualified by the extratextual biographical journey in which the culture hero engaging in epic battle to reclaim narrative becomes the child who seeks to assemble "fragments" of his own existence into coherence and meaning out of a concept of "home" that is itself a "story ... over which even today, decades later, I still do not have sufficient mastery" (H 38). The central image of home is, indeed, not the town itself, but "that dusty road in my town ... my link to all the other destinations" (H 91), and is thus an image of displacement rather than permanent residence.
The creation of coherence out of a narrative concept of "home" as a locus of authenticity springs up in Home and Exile, as it does in Achebe's fictional work, not from a place but from the intratextual and narrative construction of an epistemology to which is ascribed permanence lacking in the absent place. The characteristics of that epistemology, articulated in essays like "Chi in Igbo Cosmology," include individual and communal autonomy, religious tolerance, and a capacity for accommodating dualities represented by the song called Egwu Obi, or "Song of the Heart," which Achebe recalls from his first year as a child in Ogidi. The song, he writes, had a nickname, Egwu Tochi, or Song of the Torchlight, combining Igbo and pidgin words within a sememe having inter-, intra-, and extratextual dimensions.
Intertextually, the reader will recall the "Song of the Heart" in No Longer at Ease, sung by villagers to the returning Obi Okonkwo, a song that plaintively remarks on the hegemony of the written word within an oral culture. Even the most fundamental of cultural tenetskinshipappears to be represented and authorized by a medium that only a minority, the literate, can grasp. The Egwu Tochi of Home and Exile appears to have no thematic connection with the song in the novel, yet the song's English pidgin nickname proceeds from a similar cause: "Europe ... unwrapping her wares of seduction at the threshold" (H 8).
The song, Achebe notes, remained popular for a decade while others came and went. Its popularity is related to a feature of the epistemology Achebe is constructing, its attraction to "tautness ... torsion." The Igbo, Achebe writes, "have always lived in a world of continual struggle" while at the same time possessing a "cosmological fear of anarchy." The epistemological narrative Achebe constructs thus moves from autonomy or freedom to anarchy, contained within a framework of tension. Extratextually, this narrative formulation can be read as a countertext to representations of the African like that of G. T. Basden, Achebe's father's mentor: "The will of the tribe or family," wrote Basden in 1921, "permeates his whole being ... there is seldom independent action."15 It parallels Achebe's countertextual assertion that the narrative of his life is "not the same story Joyce Cary intended me to have" (H 38).
The construction of an "Igbo epistemology," however, is as much a creative, narrative act as the creation of a personal narrative of home and exile. Intertextually, it creates links between Achebe's works and serves as a countertext to the assumptions of colonial narratives. Intratextually, its narrative elaboration provides what Riffaterre would call a subtextual "mirroring of the whole into one of its parts,"16 the most essential element for Riffaterre in creating fictional truth. Extratextually, it offers an explanatory interpretation of Igbo history: of its weakness in the face of "an enemy with a centralized power," and its flexibility in dealing with cultural dualities. Yet, I would argue, these "truths" are not mutually compatible and reinforcing, but mutually deconstructive, since each identifies truth or authenticity with a different locus: the extratextual with the biographical cum cultural quest for a counterpoise to "hundreds of years of sustained denigration we and our home had been subjected to in order to make colonization possible and excusable" (H 33); the intertextual with the wrestling match of texts for space and voice in a world which remains, Achebe writes, divided between two sides who will "never see the world in the same light" (H 77); and the intratextual with the effort of the autonomous author to create narrative truth, a different undertaking than winning the intertextual wrestling match.
Narrative truth, comments Riffaterre, rests on verisimilitudenot the mimetic presentation of the external world, but the creation of "a system of representations that seems to reflect a reality external to the text, but only because it conforms to a grammar. Narrative truth is an idea of truth created in accordance with the rules of that grammar."17 The Igbo epistemological narrative provides some of the basic rules of intratextual grammar, not only for Home and Exile, of course, but also for most of Achebe's fiction. All three textual dimensions are creative acts of storytelling, carried out within the different teleological frameworks within which the author must necessarily function. It is, perhaps, a necessary tonic to the hypocritical absorption of much postcolonial criticism with intertextuality, as if texts create themselves through mutual if sometimes raucous conversations with other texts in Borgesian libraries, to recall the authorial presence and the multiple worlds in which the writer's narrative invention functions.
The textual dimensions I have attempted to define are, for the postcolonial writer, necessarily incompatible. Because they proceed from a critical relationship to hegemonic forms and discourses, they tend toward the breaking down of the authority of the work of fiction through a relentless querying and undermining of any monolingual, monodimensional claim to truth or authenticity.
In Home and Exile, Achebe insists that fiction can be "true or false," and clearly wishes also to argue that fiction that is "true" must be rooted in the "writer's home address" (H 104), thus vindicating his critique of writers like Ayi Kwei Armah and Buchi Emecheta for abandoning their own metaphorical villages. Yet the village of Ogidi with its "dusty little road" is as much of an imaginative creation as Armah's grimy Accra, and equally rooted in the creation of a sustained intratextual epistemology. I am offering here not a critique of Achebe's own literary criticism, which is inseparable from his great fictional achievement, but of some aspects of criticism of his work whose emphasis on a single textual dimensionsay, the intertextualmay suppress other textual dimensions in contestation or cooperation with that dimension. An intertextual analysis of an Achebean work, even if widened to incorporate varieties of social texts beyond written literature, is, I would argue, insufficient if it overlooks internal networks of intratextual allusion and reference that comment on and undermine the primacy of the written text.
In support of this position, I'd like to conclude by examining the "mediatope" or narrative environmen0t of No Longer at Ease, a work bearing points of resemblance to Home and Exile. The novel has attracted relatively little critical attention in comparison to Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, or even Anthills of the Savannah. What criticism it has received tends to assign primacy to a single textual dimension. Yet perhaps no other of Achebe's fictional texts raises so clearly questions of textual primacy and authority.
The title, for example, comes from T. S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi," a poem which transposes a "secondary" narrative, that of the journey of the Magi to Bethlehem, into primary position, displacing the culturally authoritative narrative of the birth of Christ into secondary position: The witnessing of the baby, the speaker recounts, was no more than "satisfactory." Yet, it left the viewers placeless, "no longer at ease ... in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods...."18 Thus, another narrative line is initiated: an implied narrative of alienation and placelessness. The position of Eliot's poem in the novel's title and epigraph appears to confer on this poet and on modernism in general an authoritative intertextual status, in the view of some critics. Philip Rogers, for example, in an article entitled "No Longer at Ease: Chinua Achebe's 'Heart of Whiteness'," argues that No Longer at Ease parodies Conrad's Heart of Darkness and is a critique of Western influence on the world of its characters. Rogers sees Obi in the role of a black Kurtz: an idealist with optimistic theories, but in reality a hollow man.
Rogers has constructed a parallel narrative placing No Longer at Ease in an extratextual relationship to a European modernist narrative, Heart of Darkness, as Catherine Innes's reading treats it as a parody of Cary's Mister Johnson. Rogers's narrative treats Obi's "fall" as parodically equivalent to Kurtz's: while Kurtz falls because he succumbs to the uncivilized "heart of darkness" within, Rogers argues that Obi succumbs to the putatively civilized "heart of whiteness" he encounters in England, taking on English traits including a devotion to notions of efficiency and utilitarianism that alienate him from the realities of colonial Nigeria.19
Rogers's and Innes's approaches create a suggestive equivalency that nevertheless slights the complex nature of the novel's intratextual approach to modernism. If the citation of T. S. Eliot in the title and epigraph seems to confer authority on Rogers's characterization of Obi as a "hollow man," Obi's pedantic affectations of modernist stylehis interpretation of Heart of the Matter, for example, or veiling of Lagos street life behind an Eliotic allusion to "putrid flesh in the spoon"suggest that modernism legitimates a narrative track of withdrawal, alienation, and individualism in contest not only with intratextual and extratextual dimensions of the novel but also with other intertextual allusions to Things Fall Apart. Obi, for example, unknowingly cites a crucial proverb from the earlier novel when he remarks cynically to his friend Christopher on "what the old men say": "if you pay homage to the man on top, others will pay homage to you when it is your turn to be on top."20
The proverb rewrites Okonkwo's statement to Nwakibie in Things Fall Apart that "a man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness"21 in a form which corresponds with Obi's individualist view, substituting a social position, "on top," for a morally recognized one, "greatness." The concept of a social covenant based on mutual obligations has been displaced by a grasping for privilege in which Obi is a participant, though he is convinced that younger men will not be corrupted since they "can afford to be virtuous" (NL 23).
Obi has created a fanciful historical narrative of social renewal and rebirth, in which he is the protagonist. He imagines himself becoming a writer, although the only subject he can imagine is "the tragedy of the Greens of this country" (NL 122). His narrative trajectory is prefigured in his poem "Nigeria," written while he was in England. The poem, contained within the pages of a book of A. E. Housman's poems, calls on "God" to "bless our noble fatherland," and to "teach [our noble countrymen] to walk in unity / To build our nation dear; Forgetting region, tribe or speech, / But caring always each for each" (NL 17172). The poem, repeated twice at full length in the novel, allowing the reader to reread it in light of events, reduces Obi's countrymen to passive roles in the creation of a new covenant, corresponding to Obi's conviction that only "one man with visionan enlightened dictator" (NL 50) can achieve social reform.
The confinement of the poem "Nigeria" within the pages of Housman's book, and in close proximity to Housman's "Easter Hymn," Obi's favorite poem, underlines the depiction of a protagonist trapped unwittingly within webs of conflicting narrative texts. Against Obi's narrative of a God teaching and blessing, mirroring Obi's continual assumption of the role of teacher, Housman's posits a world without God, with the voice of the poem embarking on a journey that is the reverse of that of Israel out of Egypt: "To my inheritance amid / The nation that is not"a wasteland. The contrary mythic journeys to promised land and desert contribute to the creation of the characteristic Achebean "mediatope" I alluded to earlier: the wrestling countertext.
From the beginning of No Longer at Ease, Obi is the locus for conflicting extratextual, intratextual, and intertextual narrative discourse. Extratextually, he is among the first fruits of the colonial grand récit of leading "the backward races into line" through immersion in European culture and education. This narrative has written Obi, so he can only echo the colonizer's judgment, "Our people have a long way to go" (NL 41), without having in mind a concept of destination. Like the autobiographical narrator of Home and Exile, the character of Obi is developed as the locus of inter-, intra-, and extratextual narrative tropes of journey, road, and quest, none assuming dominance in the novel.
The novel begins at the end of Obi's personal heroic quest. Its failure is interpreted through four narrative lenses, each implicitly questioning the legitimacy of the others' claim to truth. The first is that of the colonial court judge, who, framing his narrative within the colonizer's myth of the "been to" as the hope of the colonized, "cannot comprehend how a young man of your education and brilliant promise could have done this." His judgment is preceded by a reproof of one of the court counsels related to "the problem of locomotion" (NL 2), an intratextual reference not only to the importance of automobiles in the novel, but also to the journey and the nature of its ultimate destination. A second is that of Mr. Greene, amidst his cohorts at the European club, who poses a tragic narrative against the judge's comic one: Colonialism could never have succeeded, in Greene's view, because "The African is corrupt through and through" (NL 32). Greene's narrative of decline ("over countless centuries the African has been sapped mentally and physically," NL 5) is evenly balanced with the court judge's tale of "brilliant promise" betrayed. The third narrative line is that of the Umuofians, both those in Lagos and those back in Umuofia, who embed Obi within a mythic line of heroes extending back to his grandfather and who have visited distant places and wrestled with spirits in order to preserve their communities. The Umuofian narrative line evolves amidst a continual ironic intertextual play of oral and written texts, the Old Testament and New Testament and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, all rewritten to conform to a self-serving ideology of kinship. Even the saying "Wherever something stands, another thing stands beside it" (NL 181), which Achebe uses as a foundation for his articulation of an Igbo epistemology in his essay "Chi in Igbo Cosmology," is yoked by a speaker at a Umofia Progressive Union to "this thing called blood" and in turn to Obi's failure to attend his mother's funeral, though the reader is aware that the "pompous man" has completely misunderstood Obi's motives.
Each of these narrative constructions of Obi Okonkwo is complete in itself, and each eclipses and erases the other. The novel's characters are caught within webs of monologic narrativeand one could include in this examination the abundance of songs, stories, and proverbs to flesh out the picture of the mediatopethat exercise authority over them. Indeed, much of the novel's comic effect lies in their solemn efforts to rewrite texts to bring them into conformity with that dominant narrative. The Umuofians rewrite the history of Okonkwo into one of a hero who fought the English, and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer's phrase "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end" (NL 60) into an affirmation of the traditional Igbo concept of the rebirth of titled men.
Given his status at the center of competing narrative constructions, it is not surprising that Obi himself seems barely to exist as a character at all: The continual rewriting and erasure of texts clustering around him mark him not as the hero of a piece of realistic fiction but as an artifact of his culture, or of an aspect of his culture, as his grandfather was the artifact of an aspect of his.
As I suggested at the beginning of this paper, it is this epic wrestling match of narratives that shapes a continually evolving epistemological narrative held in tension between what Achebe has called "continual struggle" and "anarchy." It is not simply a dichotomous vision of the type that Julie Newman refers to in Taroor's Great Indian Novela meeting of two texts from contrary traditionsbut a "mediatope" of multiple narratives arriving from all three textual dimensions and affirming, by their dialogue, their resistance to conversation, and their interpenetration, the power of narrative continually to remake itself and to reshape the human imagination.
Notes
1. Wolfgang Klooss, ed., Across the Lines: Intertextuality and Transcultural Communication in the New Literatures in English (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998).
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2. Monika Reif-Hulser, ed., Borderlands: Negotiating Boundaries in Post-Colonial Writing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999).
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3. Robert Scholes, The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 166.
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4. Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (London: James Currey, 1991) 10.
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5. Gikandi 9.
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6. Bernd Schulte, "Unrest in the 'Mediatope': Symptoms of Hypertrophy in Inter-Cultural Studies and the New Literatures from the Perspective of a Media Theory," in Klooss 2137. Schulte's "mediatope" is the environment of "mixed mediascapes" drawing on the media available to the writer, and it deals with how the "the functional interrelatedness of traditional and 'new' media is managed with a givenneither isolated nor staticcultural space, constituting a dynamic system that one might call a mediatope. This latter term is meant to evoke the image of an interactive media network made up of co-existing old and new media, and to underline the systemic functional relativity of individual media (such as literature) by creating a heuristic analogue to the notion of the biotope" (2526). The usefulness of Schulte's concept for this discussion is in its insistence on interrelationships between all "available media" rather than strictly literary forms, and on its analogy to the "functionally closed" but interdependent system of the biotope, in which the character of the biotope is changed when any single element changes, is lost, or becomes dominant. Achebe's fiction (like that of Nuruddin Farah, for example) is replete with examples of what occurs when a single medium becomes dominant within the mediatope.
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7. Simon Gikandi, "Nuruddin Farah and Postcolonial Textuality," World Literature Today 72 (1998): 755.
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8. Cited in Judie Newman, "The Ballistic Bard: Intertextuality and Postcolonial Fiction," Nationalism vs. Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. Wolfgang Zach and Ken L. Goodwin (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1996) 96.
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9. Newman 98.
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10. Frank Schulze-Engler, "Cross-Cultural Criticism and the Limits of Intertextuality," in Klooss 4.
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11. Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 55.
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12. Riffaterre 27.
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13. Riffaterre 3.
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14. Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 9. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation H.
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15. G. T. Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966) 10.
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16. Riffaterre 27.
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17. Riffaterre xiv.
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18. T. S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi," The Complete Poems and Plays 19091950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962) 68.
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19. Philip Rogers, "No Longer at Ease: Chinua Achebe's 'Heart of Whiteness,' Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott, ed. Michael Parker and Roger Starkey (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995) 5363.
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20. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (New York: Doubleday, 1994) 23. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text following the abbreviation NL.
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21. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Doubleday, 1994) 19.
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