Chinua Achebe Writing Culture: Representations of Gender and Tradition in Things Fall Apart
Author(s)
Osei-Nyame, Kwadwo
Abstract
This essay intends an appropriation of Bakhtin’s notion of “heteroglossia” and dialogism in its exploration of some concerns relevant to the question of the representation of ideology in Things Fall Apart. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism views narrative discourses as forms of social exchange that locate “the very basis” of individual and social “behaviour” within conflicting worldviews and “determine the very bases” of “ideological interrelations” in a manner similar to that found in Achebe’s narrative. Novelistic discourse thus performs “no longer as mere information, directions, rules, models,” but enables us to locate dialogue in its more immediate ideological and political context. Hayden White implies something of this immediacy of context when he suggests distinguishing between “a discourse that openly adopts a perspective that looks out on the world and reports it” and one that “makes the world speak itself and speak itself as a story”.
