Possibilities and Pitfalls of Ethnographic Readings: Narrative Complexity in Things Fall Apart, The

College Literature, Spring 2008 by Snyder, Carey

The passage is respectful of the Oracle's sacredness to the Igbo: the narrator does not overtly proclaim disbelief.Yet the existence of Agbala is left in question: no one has seen it, except in dubious conditions ("vaguely in the darkness") and no one has "heard its voice." Indeed, what can be heard in the cave-the "flapping of wings"-above all conjures the image of bats, the probable denizens of a dark, dank place. Hence, again, the narrator subtly provides an alternative frame of reference, accommodating skepticism alongside Igbo belief.

The very few critics who avoid the reductive insider reading of TFA tend to equate the intermittent distance of the narrative to which I have been alluding with an anthropological perspective. For instance, Gikandi observes that the narrator at times "adopts distance and represents the Igbo as if they were an anthropological 'other'" (1996, 46). Similarly, Koretenaar notes that Achebe occasionally "lapses into the knowing tone of the anthropologist" (2003, 132), as in the glossary, when he defines several Igbo terms with "thoroughgoing disbelief."20 While usefully complicating naïve ethnographic readings that fail to problematize the narrator's insiderness, these critics operate from an equally fallacious assumption that an anthropological perspective is inherently alienated. In doing so, they fail to realize that the anthropological perspective itself mediates between near and far, inside and outside, distance and proximity. They conflate distance and disbelief with the alien perspective of an anthropologist, rather than recognizing that the anthropological voice mediates between ostensible native and foreign perspectives-alternately suspending disbelief, to closely identify with a native perspective, and explicating belief, from an external vantage point.

This is more than a question of semantics. By reading the narration's often overlooked complexity as ethnographic, I hope not only to underscore the novel's artistry, but also to usefully complicate our understanding of ethnographic relationships themselves. When Achebe's best critics reverse the more common "naïve ethnographic reading" that I've been discussing by equating the novel's anthropological perspective with "a view from outside," they unwittingly replicate the kind of dichotomous thinking Achebe himself so assiduously avoids in his nuanced narrative. On a stylistic level, the slippery narrative voice manifests the ongoing process of positioning and repositioning oneself at cultural crossroads.

Acknowledging inconsistencies in perspective that most Achebe critics ignore, Gikandi argues that the ambivalent narrative voice signals contradictions inherent within Igbo culture, contradictions highlighted by the character of Nwoye, who functions as an internal critic of such practices as the disposing of twins and the killing of Ikemefuna. For Gikandi, it is erroneous to read the narrator as either a representative insider or a unified, collective voice because a stable field of social values doesn't exist in the novel: precolonial Umuofia is represented as "a society with various voices and conflicting interests" (1996,45).While taking Gikandi's point, I would stress that the fluctuations of the narrative voice also express the shifting affiliations of the author, who, like the native anthropologist, is pulled between the values and traditions of sometimes conflicting cultural frameworks.