The Middle World Fantasy

That there is more to the world than is dreamt of in philosophy (Hamlet ) may yield supers tition, when, based on amb iguous evidence, it is taken to be a truthful statement that describes the world order as it really is. But it can be seen as an output of mythic thought. In fact, superstition may be thought of in terms of selfco nstruction by mythic thoug commitment to a ht. But mythic thought does generate literature and art, by allowing the free play of any of the possibi glimpsed at the edges of the knowab l lities e world, where it opens to the unknown and uncharted. The fantasy of there being ot adjoined to the her worlds human world, whose order and internal working help to shape the human one, whether directly or indirect ly, is one of the most universal of mythic formations. This fantasy is fully elongated in myths of origin and myths of recapit ulation of all things in t he origin from which they proceed. Whereas the everyday world can give impetus to the creation of a work which may evoke the real, but is really independent of it, mythic material is already marked creativity, and it has great potential to become poetry . by The neglect of Tutuola's work in Nigerian literary criticism is probably because its relation to the real world is farfetched. By contrast, the works of Achebe, Amadi, Nzekwu, Munonye, Aluko, Nwapa, and Alkali may easily be see n as models of traditional Iyayi , society, those of Soyinka and Echewa, as models of recent history, and those of Omotoso, Okri, D ibia Humphrey, and others as models of contemporary society. The literary critics are prepared to study the models because the ir real interest is societ y or the kinds of persons that people it. They do not follow this interest through by taking up social or anthropological phenomena themselves in order to produce effective and meaningful criticism of the social order and social morality. Content to be literary critics, they nevertheless treat literature as a starting point and a roundabout way to their real destination. The lack of interest in Tutuola boils down to this: that this writer, that is to say, the set of texts covered by that name, belongs nowhere else than the field claimed by the literary critics—and is for this very reason of no interest to the literary critics, whose aspiration is to be social critics, moralists, and revolutionaries. What we see in each of his works is that the discursive formations comprise what Levi-Strauss calls the themes 'for mythical thought' (1972:547). According to Georg Lukács, 'whatever can be made into myth is by its nature poetic' (1965/1976:446). It becomes possible to see Tutuola and in general the Nigerian novel, in a new light, once stress is laid on the features which are by their nature poetic. The movement of thought in the mythic dimension is clearly one such element. For instance, what is very interesting about a work like Echewa's The Crippled Dancer is the extent to which it appears to distance itself from mythology, and yet is really unintelligible, except in terms of such themes of mythic thought as crime and punishment and the solar or summer archetype. The unveiling of these underlying minimal narratives in such a work may only be achieved by means of what Levi-Strauss calls the structural analysis of myth. All literature, and art too, is premised on the function of mythic thought, and nothing which provokes movement in this dimension can ever be seen for what it is in itself. Even the behaviour of a Chief Nanga in politics will reduce to analysable signs once it is exposed to mythic thought. The converse equally applies, namely that if Nanga's actions are analysed in terms of their significance, they are not seen any longer as objective facts: they have been brought under the rule of mythic thought. In Tutuola's The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town, the principle of structuration which may be attained by mythic analysis is the question of the place of the home of man in the world order. Such a question is familiar in philosophy, and seems to belong there. But the position, as Jacques Derrida has shown, is that philosophy is 'the reflection of poetic inauguration' (1978:28). That is to say, it is by means of poetry that philosophy begins its career, and that what comes to attract and hold the philosophic gaze is first given to philosophy by poetry. Such is the question of the place of man's home in the order of the world, a question which philosophy follows with whatever lucidity that rational thought can bring to bear on this object of reflection. In literature, the confrontation of the question is mainly by mythic thought, not rational. As a result, it has given rise to countless myths, but none of the answers that may be derived from these myths can directly raise a validity claim (Habermas), or redeem one. If these enter into the experience of a concrete human being, they occur as inchoate experience, and every representation of them at this level is poetic, that is, the output of thought in the mythic dimension. Philosophy as hermeneutics may try to understand these mythic formations, to interpret them. But there are, of course, mythic formations which philosophical thought will tend not to admit into its discourse. For example, the myth of the double, as in Tutuola's The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town, and the magical theme of the sokugo in Ekwensi's Burning Grass seem to subvert reason to the extent that myths of this type are treated as products of illness. Sometimes these myths and themes are taken up outside poetry, where their character as myth is lost, and they become 'anterior' reality. These myths are the formatives of superstition, or of religion, if they have correlates in other processes, such as revelation. In The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town, man's home, the inhabited world, is surrounded by other worlds which are vaguely known to exist, but are apart and out of reach. That mode of representation is encountered quite frequently in the Nigerian novel, even in some which follow the realistic and the naturalistic trends, like Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys and Flora Nwapa's Idu. In the latter, for example, the other-domains are directly and physically connected to the real world of the characters, with the result that there is a sense of their being an extension of this homeland. As Frye has shown, each domain has a language of narration appropriate to it. The divine and quasi-divine domains are associated with the elevated style, while the low mimetic novelistic world goes with a language which is nearer the everyday one of human interaction. Because the two domains form a continuum in Idu, the distinctive linguistic forms of narration tend to be reduced in the reading to one only, the naturalistic mode, which pertains to the real world of the characters. The domain of the Woman of the Lake, Uhamiri, is under the lake, and divers sometimes stumble upon it. However, notwithstanding that the Woman of the Lake is the protector of the community and custodian of its moral code, a brush against her domain can be fatal, even when unintentional. The narration is, in fact, consistent with her luring a person marked for destruction to the fatal spot. This seems to be the case in the drowning of the demented son of Uberife, when he goes fishing in the lake: '… his hook struck on to something in the deep water. He said he would go and investigate and when his friends told him not to go, he ignored them and dived in. In a short time he came up with charcoal in his hands.' 'Charcoal? Ewuu, is that where the children were? The boy plucked Uhamiri's palm fruits?' 'Yes, and when he came up he was surprised to see that instead of the palm fruit, he saw charcoal in his hands. The other children were afraid. He told them it was a palm fruit he had plucked and that he was surprised to see charcoal, and so he would dive down again. That was the last they saw of him' (124). We do not see in the narrative any reference to a time when it might be permitted to visit Uhamiri's underwater home, but the remarks of the auditor in the above suggest that some of the details pertaining to Uhamiri's dwelling are common knowledge. The woman herself is the more frequent visitor to the human world of Idu and the other characters. On page 171, the narrator speaks of her attending Nkwo market on a particular day 'to buy, as other women.' None of this is absurd in mythic literature. For myth is the mimetic mode (Frye), where the characters are divine personages and the environment is superhuman. In terms of experience, the behaviour of the gods is similar to that of the human characters; for example, when they suffer pain or experience anger or interact among themselves. Hence they marry, beget childr e n, go to war, and so on. But the space in which they operate is not as constricting to them as human beings are constrained in t heirs. The outer world visited in Idu, problems which baffle human knowto obtain help against the how is that of Ogwagara. Th character has physical properti i s es which pertain to human beings, but his knowledge and vision are superhuman. He certainly see ms to be capable of acting at the superhuman sphere. He does not need to see a sick person in order to say what is wrong with h i m and remedy; and it is what the reported by those who have gone to consult him on behalf of Idu's husband, Adiewere, that, He spoke in praise of our great Woman of the Lake Uhamiri, and said that if he were from our town, he would many her (141). There is a claim here that Ogwagara bel ongs in the same sphere as Uhamiri. He and the Woman of the Lake can interact at any level of r elationship because they are equals. The remoteness of the world of Ogwagara to that of Idu is brought out very tellingly in t h e narration of the journey to his domain, which is in the format of the epic journey of folktale: 'We journeyed for seven days and seven nights, it was as if we were going to the land of Idu n'oba. We came to a place where everybody, men, women and even played c hildren carried knives and with knives, fear came over us. My friend here saved us. Uzoka tell them what happened' (139). The pair who go to consult Ogwagara on behalf of Idu and her husband are away for a total of ten days. But in their account o journey, we learn that it t f this akes seven days and seven nights to reach the place where people are playing with knives. Here they inquire about Ogwagara, and are told that his place is a shouting distance away. They take one full day, however, to get t h ere; and then, they have two full days of waiting before they are admitted into Ogwagara's presence. That makes a total of ten d ays. It would therefore appear that their return journey is accomplished on the same day of the interview with Ogwagara. This compares with the Hunter's journey in Tutuola's The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town, of which the outward journey to the Remote Town has taken many years to complete, but the return to the hero's Rocky Town is done in a few days. The arduous and protracted outward journey balanced against a swift and eventless return journey is clearly a pattern which is conventional in the folktale, and shared by adventure sequences generally. This structure is what the novel as a literary form dissimulates. Typically, the novel's complication is by a process of proliferation as cardinal functions give rise to other cardinal functions, until the denouement, which quickly plays itself out. As with Idu's Ogwagara, Tutuola's Remote Town presided over by the Witch Herbalist or the Witch Mother is a place of pilgrimage and a last resort to people driven by one kind of necessity or another. The way to the remote place is uncharted, and the wayfarer is faced with all manner of discouragement, in terms of monsters, demons, fairies, the wilds, and physical obstacles. He also passes through other worlds, which act as a distraction. Of the many obstacles facing our adventurer, who is on his way to the Witch Herbalist to obtain a remedy for his wife's barrenness, some are pertinent for his second journey to yet another world, the underwater world of the River-god. These are the adventures with the Crazy Removable-Headed Wild Man and the Stalwart Gate Man and his Devil, in that the trophies he has brought with him from these encounters are the means with which he negotiates his return from the underwater world. Some adventures involve obstacles, which a resourceful and clever man turns to his own advantage in clearing his way and furthering his journey, as the encounter with the Long-Breasted Mother of the Mountain. Others like the adventure in the town of the 'Born and Die Baby' involve forms which are encountered in other works of this range. Far more connections hold among the various phases of the world of the uncharted wilds separating the Rocky Town of the character-narrator and the Remote Town of the Witch Herbalist than between the Rocky Town and the Remote Town, or between the Rocky Town and the underwater world of the River-god. Between the Rocky Town and the underwater world, however, there is a cultic relationship involving sacrifices to the River-god, just as in Idu in which the Woman of the Lake has a cult and a shrine, where her rites are observed, and her name invoked. On the other hand, the Town of the 'Born and Die Baby' communicates directly with the Rocky Town, with much coming and going by the 'born and die babies. The Hunter himself is one such, but has been detained in the Rocky Town by reason of the magical powers of his father, 'the chief priest and pagan of the gods, idols and spirits. 'The Town of the 'Born and Die Baby,' in fact, has an outpost, an Iroko tree in the Rocky Town, where the 'born and die babies' could stay 'until when they would be fortunate to find wealthy mothers' (19). Between the wild world and the river-world, there is no point of contact at all. The only connection is by the Hunter traversing both spheres and bringing trophies from the wild to the river-world, which the River-god and the goddess set up as sacred objects for them to worship. Major transformations do occur in this tale. Perhaps to be expected is the loss of culture and breeding, with the Hunter's protracted and literal bewilderment. At his encounter with the Stalwart Gate Man, we read: But he was greatly sulky when he saw the two 'removable heads' in my left hand and also my dreadful appearance, which was by this time too gruesome to the sight of a human (101). When the fight between him and this Stalwart Gate Man reaches its fiercest, the report is that, And as he was shouting greatly on me at intervals like a mad man and sometimes bursting into a horrible and cruel laughter, it was so I too was shouting horribly on him at intervals like a wolf, ape, etc. So our terrible shouts were filling up the air like thunder (108), The Hunter's journey therefore, over geographical space, has a complimentary process whereby he himself is traversed and reduced by what he experiences. That is to say, his experiences reflect on his body as a kind of inscription, his Memory alone follows the a his First and Second Minds ctio ns of closely, recording everything, particularly their offences against their Possessor, t he Hunter himself. His journey to the underwater world is at the level of significance a movement to reduce the gift he has received from Remote Town, which has so ex the ceeded the desired limit as to make him pregnant. The Hunter is not just an Everyman, his Rocky Town, the life forms and all the possible worlds he experiences and passes through reproduce their forms in him. He is cons tant and remade. If his ly being made Rocky Town is a place in the middle, impinged upon by the wild and the river worlds o n either hand, the Hunter who has travelled in all possible worlds and returned with their inscriptions on his person is himself the m eeti ng place of all the possible worl ds. His very offspring is a child of all the possible worlds: the means of his concep tion having been given by the Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town, the conception takes place in the Rocky Town, but it is the underwat er w orld that delivers the child. He adjoining worlds to the human world, a citizen is a gift of both the of all possible w orlds. The narrative ends at a point of difficulty, where two patterns of reason meet in confrontation, the Hunter himself being the thea tre of this confrontation. The Hu nter's preparation for his first journey includes furnishing himself with food, the m aking of magical devices of all kinds, and arming himself with poisoned arrows. His food will be first to run out, and several times his m reach w agical devices are out of hen he is in dire need of them. In this case, he has to fall back on his native coura ge and cunning, his hunter's skills and endurance, but most of all, on the advice of his two Minds, Memory, and Supreme Second. These are part of his constitution, and are with him when he has to travel to the Town of the 'Born and Die Baby,' and when at l ast he reaches the Remote Town and has to abandon his gear and trophies at the town's gate, since he must enter the town unaccompanie d and unarmed. For the former adventur e, he has to abandon not only his gear, but his mortal body as well. Only the free se lf of the Born and Die Baby, the inhabitant of the Hunter's earthly body, is involved in this action. But if he can step out of his b order to act at an other level w ody i n here the body has no role, he cannot shake off his Mind, Memory, and Supreme Second. his constitution as a person. These belong to Of these elements, the two Minds are charged to warn him in advance of danger, and to advis e him in dealing with emergencies . The Memory has all the knowledge of his skills and past experiences which he can ca ll up when all else fails. As a record of all his breac experiences, however, it monitors the two Minds and records all their failings and hes in the duty they owe their Po the functioning of these faculties: But I wondered at last that, ssessor. We read of as I was travelling along on this road with happiness, my first 'mind' and second 'mind' which were my partners and advisers and whi I was in ch ha d deserted me since when troubles with the offensive wild peoples, etc., began to congratulate me now for con quering the wild people, etc. But I hastily quarrelled with them for failing to advise me at the time that I was in difficulties. But as t their hey wanted to apologize for desertion, my 'memory' hastily recorded it down as an offence for which they would b e punished along with many others which they had already committed and which they were also going to commit again. However, at the sa me ti me, my second 'mind' hinted me th at I was going to meet a cruel stalwart gatekeeper on that road. It hinted me further t hat if I could fight him boldly, I would conquer him. 'Though you may conquer him, his friend, the devil cha se you to a shrine-- worshipper like himself, w field and ther ill e you will conquer that one as well!' Thus my second 'mind' hinted me (101). Of the trio of the first and second Minds and the Memory, the weakest is the first Mind, which not only deserts with the second in moments of tro uble, but tends to give unworkabl e and unreliable advice. Above all three, and 'totally invisible is his 'Supreme Seco to guide him throughout his journey. nd,' whose role is At the trial of the two minds which comprises the last and climactic movem ent of the narrative, a fifth principle emerges, which is the Judge. All these partners, except for the Supreme Second, have their seats in specific organs, and function in the body ordinarily as the particular organ. The Judge is the Hunter's kidney, the Memory is his heart, the two Minds inhabit his brain. As partners, each is defined as a certain intellective operation. The Supreme Second alone comprehends him as an entity: his task is in fact to sustain the Hunter in being. The work he performs at the trial is legal defence, His appearance at the trial is at a moment of extremity, as the Judge had agreed with the Memory, the prosecutor, that the First Mind deserves to die for misleading and deserting the Hunter, the Second to have six years of hard labour for desertion. But the Supreme Second unveils a dilemma: in the first case, the result must be that the Hunter himself dies; in the second, that he remains dysfunctional until the prison term is fully served. No one can suggest a less harsh punishment, nor will the Judge countenance a pardon: 'No. I am not happy to pardon them but to give certain punishments is my happiness and contentment. For I must do justice!' (203). Sentencing is postponed, until public opinion is sounded out. The narrative ends without the Hunter knowing for certain whether or not his life is spared. But he has made an important discovery: So it was on this day that I understood that everybody is created double. The one which is not visible to us is called 'Supreme Second.' One's 'Supreme Second is more powerful than him or her, and it is forbidden for one to see his or her own "Supreme Second," otherwise he or she will die the very day or the day following that on which he or she has seen his or her 'Supreme Second ...' But as I was going along in the town to my father's house, there came to my memory again the kinds of punishments which could be given to my first 'mind' and second 'mind,' and which could not disturb them from performing their duties to my body. But anything which might happen to me will also happen to my 'Supreme Second.' But who could help me to solve this problem, which really puzzled me? (204).

This puzzlement does not incapacitate him for long. It is to be eclipsed in his mind when he meets the revellers at his father's house rejoicing over his triumphant return from the river world. In part, the role played at the trial by the Supreme Second is based on self-interest, for his destiny is identical with that of the physical person, and they differ only in the power they exercise. The Judge's dilemma relates to his function. He must do justice, which means that he sees the two Minds as two distinct entities. He sees totalities where there are only functions. Therefore, he is unable to see the real totality. This is because he himself is a function. Each of the participants is strictly a faculty, which the Supreme Second is not. He is the totality, and moreover, overlooks everything, including the man of flesh and blood. For example, the latter does not understand this, but the Supreme Second knows that the Hunter's very continuation in existence is thanks to the tension between pure reason and expediency. This is the plea he makes on behalf of the Hunter's First Mind: He pointed to the deceptive Judge 'Kidney' and said: 'To sentence Mr First "Mind" to death means to make one of the members of his Possessor's body incomplete. And to make one of the members of a body incomplete means that body will lose its true function and that may cause death to the possessor of the body. Therefore for this reason, your worship may change that sentence to a sort of punishment which, in any way, will not affect or harm Mr First "Mind's" Possessor!' (202). In between the path of justice and reason, and the necessity of a concession for the purpose of survival, he rests his case. This is the tension in which the Hunter himself settles his existence. For him to be is to be in the middle. His very home is the rocky place between the placeless Remote Town and the underwater world of which the way is equally uncharted. The issue of the double is reflected elsewhere in the Nigerian novel. In Idu, for example, it is seen in the relationship between the real world and the world of the ancestor. These two levels do not seem to be geographically separated. The ever-present nearness of the ancestors is ritualized at meal times, when morsels of food are thrown outside in their honour, and in acknowledgement of responsibility for their sustenance. We see this ritual act when Idu becomes a widow: Idu washed her hands as if she was cleansing them for a ritual. She took a morsel of the food, threw it outside, and said it was for Adiewere, the ancestors and the gods, and then she began to eat. This was the first time she had done this, although her mother and grandmother never ate without throwing a morsel of food to the gods and the ancestors (217-218). The domain of the ancestors and the gods is the non-physical side of the world where food is made and eaten; and this world has to keep itself in openness to the other by means of ritual. The spirits who are supplied with food and nourishment in the above ritual are the ones which are friendly and well disposed towards the human world. The evil spirits seem to inhabit the same space. These are ill disposed towards the world of human beings and may be recruited by human beings through magic and witchcraft to harm their fellows. One must protect oneself from the spirits operating invisibly at this domain. In the following dialogue between Amarajeme and Idu, the latter discovers that she has taken the world too much on the surface, whereas the exercise of fear and caution, and the attitude of pessimism were what was needed: 'Have you made any preventive medicine for him?' 'No, I have not.' 'The only child you have got? When Ojiugo and my son return, I shall cook my son in a pot, so no witch will be able to reach him.' 'I am going to Ogbonna today. Ewoo, Adiewere is not back yet. When he comes back, I shall tell him what you have said and we can go together to Ogbonna' (133). The fear which runs in Amarajeme's contributions in the above dialogue is encountered as a kind of collective fantasy in Onuora Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys. Ononye, a main character and figure of authority in this sequence's traditional society is able to hold an audience of senior members of the kindred enthralled with his narrative of the doings of witches, including the improbable story of a female child whose sex organ has been removed by witchcraft 'and the place it used to be was as smooth as the surface of a new dish' (78). The organ had to be replaced by means of a surgical process in a mission hospital. The same witch is said to have bereaved a young couple of a seven-month pregnancy by magic, and all the unhappy woman sees the next morning is that she is no longer pregnant. But unlike the first couple who take their child to a hospital, the young woman here has magical resources at hand to protect herself from the witch's magic. Her husband being, a man of the world [ ] he immediately set out to find out what had happened in the dead of night. The medicine-man he consulted accused Oliaku of witchcraft, and of having done the evil deed simply because she did not like the face of the pregnant woman. He said he would bring back the child that had been lost to the couple and he did (79). This kind of collective fascination is seen to invade a university environment in Chukwuemeka Ike's The Naked Gods, and highly educated university academics are under its sway. Believing their colleagues to be after them with magical means, they try to defend and protect themselves or even to fight back by the same means. In Echewa's The Crippled Dancer, we see the motif of magic and witchcraft not in the form of collective fascination, but in that of an occult practice concerning the working of which it does not even enter the minds of the people to question. To them, it is like physical, everyday reality. And they fear it. In this story, the young hero is plucked to safety just before succumbing to a magical process called okoro-eto, which has been used apparently successfully by the enemies of his family to decimate and wipe out its young. Here the survival of the child signifies the stalemate which the other party must needs find objectionable. Their reopening the case for a final and satisfactory resolution corresponds to the opening of the present narrative. Now the field of conflict moves from the magical to the environment conventional in realist literature. Magical conflicts and representations in which the universe is seen in terms of magical relations are characteristic of romance, in Henry James's sense of experience liberated, so to speak, experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it and … drag upon it, and operating in a medium which relieves it, in a particular interest, of the inconvenience of a related, a measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar communities (see Nettels, 1977:84-85). This mode of representation where experience is rendered unfamiliar and alien appears to be the norm in the works of Nigerian fiction which we identify as traditional. Such is the functioning of a magical process for the extermination of the enemy in The Crippled Dancer and John Munonye's Oil Man of Obange, and in bodily functions becoming principles in their own right, and locked in a deadly engagement, as in The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town. This is quite different from the conflict of consciousness, as is experienced by Patrick in Blade Among the Boys, a feature shared with modernist literature, and reminds us that not even the traditional novel is free of the impact of modernism with which it is contemporary. Patrick Ikenga, the only child of a couple who profess to be Christians, though they are in fact half-converted, has an early upbringing, which has focused his thinking upon the celibate priesthood of the Catholic Church. Both his parents, however, look to him to continue the family line, though he never discovers his father's real attitude before the latter's death early in Patrick's childhood. They have begun arranging with a family friendly towards theirs for a marriage between their children. Not long after his father's death, Patrick is elected okpala by his extended family, with the role of leadership at the political, juridical and moral, and at the religious-cultic levels. With his Christian upbringing and the demands placed on him in his cultural world, marriage and family, the Christian priesthood, and the service of the cultural tradition do begin to function for him as moral imperatives. And each, at one time or another, holds a position of eminence and dominates his consciousness, only to be eclipsed, after a while, and succeeded in that position by one of the others. His great moral crisis occurs when he meets the childhood match, Nkiru, who is quickly maturing at sixteen years of age, and goes with her to visit his father's grave. The prospect of marriage to this young girl Nkiru has temporarily eclipsed the other desires and passions that have exercised his mind. He has almost made the decision to accept the match and begin to work towards marriage, when he makes the visit to his father's grave. With this, there is a new surge of desire for the priesthood. This movement of desire is in turn broken off, as the call to duty as okpala re-echoes in his mind: He had enjoyed immensely every minute he had spent in her company, and had often felt that marriage with her was the only sensible thing to do. But ... he asked himself whether marrying Nkiru was the best course he could take in his desire to please [the] supreme Being. Suddenly his trend of thought was intruded upon by Ononye's request that he should, while he worked, provide himself with the means necessary for him to assume the office of okpala of his patrilineal lineage, an office which was his rightful inheritance. It rang in his ears with a clarity and an insistence which he found very disturbing. He tried to push the voice to the background without success (144). Of the three key elements which generate the major sequences of the narrative, and develop into three forces, alive and active, laying claim upon him, marriage is compatible with the role of okpala, in fact, an essential condition for that office. But these two are in opposition to the Christian priesthood. Though marriage may equally go with acceptable Christian practice, where pleasing the Supreme Being is concerned, Patrick does not define his predicament in terms of being torn between three different forces, but rather two. He is either going to become the protagonist of tradition and culture, or he will become the protagonist of the Christian religion. The marriage question is assimilated by him into this dyadic process. To him, marrying is simply going to render him incapable of being the protagonist of the Christian religion. The force exercised by tradition and the voice of Ononye is so strong that he asks for light from on high. A series of incidents which take place after this prayer are interpreted by him as God's response and proclamation of his task and vocation. That these incidents have meaning is agreed by both the Christian priests and those of traditional religion. This is reflected in the interview between his mother and the principal of the seminary he has joined in the face of family opposition and his mother's desperate plea. We read: 'Did Patrick tell you about the train accident at Gerti?' the priest asked, changing his line of argument. 'Did he tell you about the robbery and the bribe incident?' 'Yes, he did. 'And you did not see in them the finger of God guiding your son towards the role He meant him to play?' 'His uncle would have told you that the gods and ancestors were employing these incidents to warn him that he should take up the office of okpala of his patrilineal lineage,' she answered (159). The irony of this situation would not touch a Christian priest who takes for granted that the gods and ancestors invoked by the uncle are incapable of exercising the intention attributed to them, the first because they do not exist, the second because they have already succumbed to God's power and judgement. But the fact remains that as 'sign-signals,' these incidents are open to more than one interpretation. Patrick himself knows this, and prays God to 'prove him right or wrong in the meaning he had read into the events which had unsettled him' (149). What serves to him as confirmation that God has in fact given him the order to go into the seminary is an escape not long after he has been praying, from undercover police agents trying to sniff out corrupt officials. When he explains to his companion that he has had a very narrow escape indeed, the man's comment is 'Your chi is very active' (151). In Elechi Amadi's The Concubine, the sign-signals thought to issue from the other world are strictly interpreted. But this is not simply because of the context which comprises a little altered traditional society. The narrator has much to do with this strict supervision of the possibilities of interpretation. In this work the instances of scepticism as to the reality of the other world of fantasy appear in two forms. One is reflected in the remarks of an experienced boatman under contract to bring Ekwueme the protagonist, his father, and their medicine man to a place of sacrifice in the river in the middle of the night. At this sacrifice the Sea-King is to be invoked and caused to appear; but the man who has often ferried suppliants to the same place does not think that the god is ever raised: 'Well, you see, people often said they saw the Sea-King, but I never saw him myself. I always felt the medicine men were deceiving them.' Ekwueme thought that over for a while. 'Maybe,' he replied, 'he appeared to them, but not to you.' 'Could be,' the man said and moved away. Somehow Ekwueme liked the man's scepticism. If there was no spirit to be seen the better (212). The boatman places absolute value on evidence, in terms of what he himself has directly experienced. This is a materialist position, impregnable to superstition. For Ekwueme, however, it is not a question of self-engagement to the world or worlds outside ordinary human experience, or the forces that control these worlds. It is precisely the very possibility of their existence, irrespective of what an individual may know or think, that has brought him to try and arrange the sacrifice. Religion in the world of The Concubine does not seem to require much of self-engagement from the individual, except the priest, in respect of his own specific deity; whereas in Onuora Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys and Nwapa's Idu piety seems to comprise self-engagement to the ancestors primarily, and secondarily to the friendly and protecting deities and spirits. The world of the ancestors as a system existing alongside the physical one is taken for granted. But the world of The Concubine allows its people greater materialistic tendencies, and the narrator is committed to proving the materialists wrong. An early example is where Emenike attends a thanksgiving sacrifice to Amadioha for his recovery from illness, and the suggestion is that this is his first time at this shrine, even though he is a grown-up man, married, with children. Apparently, the cult and the decorum appropriate to it are not part of his cultural knowledge, quite unlike in Blade Among the Boys, where young boys begin to participate in these things as soon as they join the umu-ilo, whose task is to keep the village squares and pathways clean. As a result, they become familiar with the cultic practices of their people, the rituals and ceremonials quite early. The difference in the upbringing of Emenike is easily seen in the following: Emenike noticed that the old men averted their faces when the priest appeared to glance at any one of them; so he decided to stare back whenever the priest's glance fell on him. His opportunity came before the thought was through his mind. He gazed at the priest and immediately regretted that he had done so, for in the priest's face he read mild reproach, pity, awe, power, wisdom, love, life and, yes, he was sure, death, in a fraction of a second he relived his past life. In turns he felt deep affection for the priest and a desire to embrace him, and nauseating repulsion which made him want to scream with disgust. He felt the cold grip of despair, and the hollow sensation which precedes a great calamity, he felt a sickening nostalgia for an indistinct place he was sure he had never been to. He regained consciousness with a start (17). It would appear that in this ritual act the god himself inhabits the priest. The god is not only the receiver of the sacrificial action, but equally the performer. This movement of identification which occurs in Achebe's Arrow of Cod by attribution, the transference of the characteristics of the god to the priest because of their proximity one to the other, becomes a physical and unmediated reality in The Concubine.

Emenike in his desire to understand everything, to miss nothing of what is going on, is a figure of the tragic knowledge seeker. He seeks a knowledge that is forbidden knowledge, while the old people know better not to desire to know. They avert their faces. Emenike has already rendered up his life for seeking to know. In this he is related to the archetypal knowledge seeker in the biblical tradition, Adam. At the same time, he carries the mark of the Oedipus type knowledge seeker, in that he has no inkling that what he seeks is death. Thus his infraction of the law of the forbidden knowledge is done in ignorance. A great many Greek tragedies are set in motion by just such a tragic mistake; and it is one of the ways in which the tragic emotion of pity is aroused, pity for undeserved suffering, as Aristotle puts it. What is striking here is the narrator's siding with the old people who resist the temptation of knowledge. This is what renders him inhuman, more than his anonymity as an omniscient third person, able to know what is going on in Emenike's consciousness, and to make out of an 'instantaneous flash of comprehension' (Frye, 1963/1972), every single one of the symbolic nodes that make up this momentary awareness of otherness, before which the character stands enthralled: 'mild reproach, pity, awe, power, wisdom, love, life and, yes, he was sure, death.' The restraint of the human spirit by confronting it with an unknowable which it cannot face, before which it must avert its face, is fundamentally in opposition to the sympathies of literature, reflected in the tradition going back to the Greeks. It is equally in opposition to the adventure fantasy of The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town, which challenges and leads out the human spirit of the Hunter and rewards its effort with discoveries. In The Concubine, it is one thing for the god to inhabit the priest, but the latter is as bound by the interdiction of seeking to know as any of the other worshippers. We read: The cocks were killed according to ancient rites and boiled with the yams. Before any part of the meal was touched, the priest cut off one wing of the chicken and threw it casually to the right side of the temple. The old men were evidently used to this and did not watch his movement. But Emenike stared after the apparently wasted chunk of meat; in a matter of seconds a huge grey serpent crawled out from behind the shrine and began to swallow its share of the feast. It showed no fear and the old men bowed their heads in reverence…. The god having been fed, the men fell on the remains of the feast (17-18). The priest does not follow the movement of his hand with his eyes. He throws out the god's share of the feast casually. He does not think about it. There is no need to think anything. In Nwapa's Idu, and still more clearly in Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys, the spiritual beings of the other world participate in a sacrificial feast by taking its essence. In The Concubine, apparently, they take physical form in order to share in the feast physically. The religion of this narrator is really a materialist religion, if such a thing is thinkable. Just as the boatman cannot affirm the existence of the world of the spirits without material evidence, and just as Emenike follows a ritual event for the chance of knowledge of the deity by direct experience, so is the narrator unable to conceptualize the spirit, the deity except in a material form. Nor can he form a notion of its power, except by pointing to what it has destroyed, Emenike is the one by whom the awesome power of the god will become patent. But the human participant is faced with the dangerous exercise of power by the deity from more than one source. In this narrative, the exercise of force by the deities is in reference to two main interdictions. The first of these in which Emenike is swept away is as regards forbidden knowledge, the second in which Ekwueme is destroyed is as regards forbidden love. These comprise the two crises which comprehend the narrative as frames; in-between, the freedoms of play and sport, song, music, and dance are exercised without let. The second crisis towards which the bulk of the narrative from the death of Emenike shortly after the ritual event is the build-up and complication presents two love sequences. The first involves an arranged marriage following the traditions of the people of Omokachi. This is apparently the love relationship permitted Ekwueme: it is a purely conventional marriage relationship, not one based on love. The marriage he contracts with Ahurole who is betrothed to him from a child is fraught with imperfection and trouble, and demands of him daily efforts and sacrifice, none of which seems to be appreciated or is rewarded. Rather the young wife thinks she is the one making all the effort and sacrifice, and that Ekwueme is hard to please. The marriage breaks up in circumstances in which Ekwueme is the perceived victim, and the object of universal sympathy, inasmuch as Ahurole's effort to bind him to herself by means of magic and a love potion goes badly wrong. Without being pushed, she flees homeward to her parents. The love relationship which is effortless on both sides and totally satisfying, or rather intoxicating (202), is the one that develops between him and Ihuoma, Emenike's widow. This is a love that proves strictly inevitable in the tragic sense. Whatever is done to nip it in the bud, head it off, or dampen it only renders the couple dearer and closer to each other and justifies them in the eyes of the people. What they are to discover, however, as they approach marriage is that this is forbidden love. The following is revealed to Ekwueme's parents by the diviner, Anyika: 'Do you mean to say,' he said between clenched teeth, 'that this girl was never meant to get married...?' 'Well, she could be someone's concubine. Her Sea-King husband can be persuaded to put up with that after highly involved rites. But as a wife she is completely ruled out. There are few women like that in the world,' Anyika continued. 'It is death to marry them and they have left behind a harrowing string of dead husbands. They are usually beautiful, very beautiful, but dogged by their invisible husbands of the spirit world. With some spirits marriage is possible if an expert sorcer[er] is consulted. With the Sea-King it is impossible. He is too powerful to be fettered and when he is on the offensive he is absolutely relentless. He unleashes all the powers at his command and they are fatal' (196). Another diviner in a distant town tells them exactly the same story about Ihuoma's nature. She is a goddess; just as in the ancestral ideology the world is infinitely more than what is seen, so it is with Ihuoma. In her, being accommodates more than itself, though without her having an awareness of another dimension of being apart from the ordinary everyday individuality of everybody else. This surplus of being, we have already seen in the priest of Amadioha at the instance of ritual. Ihuoma's specific form of the double is encountered elsewhere in the Nigerian novel, as in Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, where it is undecided whether Beatrice is the priestess of the Daughter of the Almighty, Idernili, or the Daughter herself. She is as ignorant of the myth of Idemili as Ihuoma of her nature as a divine being, whose existence is properly settled in the other world as a goddess and the polygamous Sea-King's favourite wife. All that Beatrice knows is that sometimes she is not quite herself. And so in her case, what Clive Scott (1976) calls the 'aesthetic of suggestion' may hold. In Ihuoma's case, even if she certainly doesn't 'feel like a daughter of the sea' (The Concubine203), we have double confirmation that she is; and as we have seen, this kind of evidence is essential for the narrator of The Concubine. The giving of the kind of evidence is, of course, not an artistic requirement. For art, the suggestion or attribution, as in Anthills of the Savannah, or the character's mode of self-knowledge, as in August Strindberg's The Dream Play is quite sufficient. If Ihuoma was not to have married, but she has married and had three children with Emenike, it is clear that Ernenike has been faced with a double danger from the beginning; on the one hand, from the forbidden knowledge, on the other, from the forbidden love. To have escaped with his life in the first case through observing the interdiction would not have signified that this life had ceased being under the menace of death. The second interdiction would simply have got him, since he is already in breach of it. He is the man marked for destruction, and dogged by a fate which has him covered on all sides. He is the tragic protagonist of this tale, both in the Sophoclean sense of being confronted by 'more than man' (Oedipus the King, line 31), and in the Aristotelian sense of being caught up and swept along in the movement of inexorable necessity. But if the tragic sequence continues, unbroken after the man himself has been overtaken by his tragic fate, is it not because Ekwueme has taken his place by metonymic substitution? In functional terms, therefore, Ekwueme is the same as Emenike: the two are 'contiguous heroes' of the same sequence (Roman Jakobson, 1954). The first we meet Emenike is in fact at the moment he arrives to take the place of the fallen hero as the character to serve as the subject of narration, in the absence of whom the narrative is 'powerless to come into being' or continue (Banfield, 1984). We read: Okachi was about to rise when she heard the steps of someone approaching. She was not going to let her daughter be tortured unnecessarily, so she sat tight. Ekwueme entered the reception hall grazing the soles of his feet against the ground with a peculiar sound. It was an expensive habit. He confessed he often ran his soles against sharp points, but he could not help it. Still his gait was none the worse for it. He had called on Ihuoma before, immediately after Enienike's death. The men were so busy arranging for the funeral and its rites that it was not easy to tell who was there and who was not (21). In functional terms, this meeting a few days after the burial of Emenike is the first between Ekwueme and Ihuoma, or at any rate, the first real meeting. The very first given us in the narrative had not been a meeting at all. It had been immediately after the death of Emenike, while the funeral is being arranged. There had been very many people and much coming and going, and it had not been 'easy to tell who was there and who was not;' whereas what he wishes is that his coming be noticed. He is the one who comes after Emenike, who takes his place. Of course, the passage tells in addition of a habit which wounds but which Ekwueme cannot help. Something else he will find that he cannot help is loving Ihuoma, even when he realizes that it portends a disastrous struggle with the Sea-King. When he first hears the result of the divination from his parents, he returns for all answer: 'Dede, I do not know whether you believe this or not. It does not matter. One thing is clear, I shall marry Ihuoma. She is a human being and if marrying a woman like her is a fatal mistake I am prepared to make it. If I am her husband for a day before my death my soul will go singing happily to the spirit world. There also I shall be prepared to dare the wrath of four hundred Sea-Kings for her sake (197). He does not reach the point where he could properly call Ihuoma his wife, when he is struck down by the arrow fired at a brightly coloured male lizard which was to be used for sacrifice to bind the Sea-King to overlook the marriage. Ihuoma's situation recalls the Daughter in Strindberg's The Dream Play, not only in belonging properly to another realm, and in transit in the human realm, but also in terms of the amount of suffering that is her lot in becoming a member of the human family. Ihuoma seems to have a double share of human suffering, and she is inclined to see it as a sort of punishment attendant upon the beauty for which she has renown, much as in Greek tragic thought, any form of excess (hubris), whether in the vegetable, human, divine, or other realms is at the same time the triggering off of reversal, decline, suffering, the triggering off of tragedy. According to Anyika's divination, the great suffering is part of the consequence of who she is; if she marries or is loved, she must suffer bereavement. For her in fact, human love is under interdict. She may be a knowledge seeker as well, to have sought against the advice of her husband, the Sea-King, 'the company of human beings and … incarnated.' But he is resolved to let her live out her normal earthly span and come back to him (195). The world is not the place for her to settle her existence; she is radically more transitory than Emenike and Ekwueme who pass on early to that realm the latter calls the spirit world (197). The pathos of all these characters is that they want so much to get on with their lives in the human world as (if) the only one they know. It is rather on the narrator that the other world exercises fascination. In modern Nigerian fiction, as distinct from the traditional, comprising heroic narrative, adventure, and folktale forms, the fantasy world in the middle is played out mainly in the individual consciousness. With the props of the physical encounter with the world of the gods and the ancestors having been given up, the structure usually develops as a confrontation of two opposed forces and systems. The individual himself, nevertheless, retains elements which render him 'better' (Aristotle) than the norm. He is a bearer of values, the projection of a system: the one in whom the system articulates itself. For example, when Patrick dreams of himself as a priest about to celebrate Mass, he pictures himself as a saviour of the people: He could see the congregation, comprising [ ] people he knew at Ado, [awaiting] his arrival. He saw the intensity of the expressions on their faces and it drew from him a few drops of tears, tears of pity at their helplessness and of joy at the arrival of salvation for them. Songs of hope, songs of traditional tunes, which referred to him as their saviour, accompanied by traditional drumming, floated to him through vents high in the wall separating them (Blade Among the Boys146). On the other hand, by merely inheriting the okpalaship of the lineage, he is immediately 'recognized by all as the veritable representative of his great-great-grandfather, the founder of their lineage (112). This corporate individuality is the destiny assigned to Obi Okonkwo in Achebe's No Longer at Ease. But Obi differs in that be resists to the end, seeing himself purely as an individual, and preferring to be seen in that way. But even he is tempted by the dignity—and curse—of corporate existence, for we read that his heart glows within him when Ogbuefi Odogwu declares that he is the reincarnation of his famous grandfather, who had fought the first European colonists single-handedly, and lost.