- This analysis proposes an examination of the function of myth in differing postcolonial contexts, and argues that particular contexts of class configuration and state hegemony define the way myths are developed in novels. The paradigmatic, resonant and symbolic quality of myths means that they cannot be easily contained and condensed, hence they encode resistance to the hegemonic drives found in the narratives of the state. State narratives interpellate the subject as intimately connected to it in an effort to ease out potential dissent from the social formation. Their monologic forms do not easily offer the subject any space to articulate dissent in the form of dialogue. Myth then offers a counter to this monologic form and encodes dissent particularly when located in novels produced in the context of entrenched power formations. Historical context then makes myth an appropriate form at specific times. It will be argued that myth acts out dissent in ways that go beyond gesturing to and providing evidence of precolonial cultures and methods of organising. It engages with dominant discourses through hollowing out potential alternatives. As Stephen Slemon states:
Such acts of post-colonial literary resistance function counter-discursively because they "read" the dominant colonialist discursive system as a whole in its possibilities and operations and force that discourse's synchronic or unitary account of the cultural situation toward the movement of the diachronic. (13)
The context of Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah (1987) is that of a stagnant political situation and entrenched repressive regimes in Nigeria. It uses various degrees of humour and irony as a set of negative knowledges, and reveals potential alternatives through transgressing the forms of dominant discourses and by countering, through myth, the monologic and hegemonic forms of the official discourses of the state through plural and dialogic styles. The deployment of myth in Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965), written about the time of Nigerian independence, is necessarily different: myth is articulated through a link with a class about to take power, but one which is fearful of the demands of other classes. The way myth is used in this novel, then, negates these classes, but the mythical form still manages to initiate an act of dissent precisely through the way it cuts across and creates ruptures in the surface of the text.
- The study of myths is linked to exercises within literary theory which seek to push the author away from the centre of the text and to show him/her as the medium through which larger models speak; the text is a language the author never fully understands or organises. In part this is so because myths have no point of origin that can be located in the figure of the author. Whilst in literary theory this has been the project since the advent of structuralism, within the study of mythology this notion of decentring goes back at least as far as Freud, who locates myths within the unconscious and thinks it "extremely probable that myths are distorted vestiges of the wish-fulfilment of whole nations - the age long dreams of young humanity" (qtd. in Okpehwo, Myth in Africa 10). If we are to see mythopoeic literature in Africa as an inflection of dissent, then we are faced with the fundamental, and taxing, question of agency because myths have no authorial point of origin. Agency becomes problematical whenever we want to see phenomena within the sphere of decentring and dominant, residual and emergent narratives, whether within the sphere of revolution, of revolt, or of literary production. As Okpehwo says, "the premium placed on the unconscious by Freud and Jung removes myth-making from the sphere of creative awareness and skill" (Myth in Africa 13).
- Okpehwo's statement concerning a juxtaposition of the unconscious and creative skill does pinpoint the problems faced when taking analyses of myth into areas of literature whose place in relation to the dominant order is by no means fixed. By this is meant that without some sense of composition and organisation, it is difficult to place the way myths in novels are set negatively against the social and political order, unless it is assumed that myths of themselves are set against the circumstances within which they are voiced. This cannot be assumed since the stories of myth are usually of a neutral nature, but once they are linked to some other element, at the level of plot, character or metaphor, they can be transformed into narratives of dissent. By the term neutral I suggest that myths are not of themselves political; they are in some senses inactive until motivated by context. As they are always motivated or set in motion by political context, neutral myths do not exist as such except theoretically.
- Perhaps we ought not to be distracted by notions of creative skill for, despite much that is useful and insightful, Okpehwo's study is geared towards establishing myth-making within the autonomous free play and "fancy" of the imagination, a task that necessarily reinvents the completely self aware and centred author as producer of a work. Elsewhere Okpehwo has suggested that "we are free to call any narrative of the oral tradition a myth, so long as it gives due emphasis to fanciful play" and further suggests that myth is defined by a move away from real life experiences into fantasy as it "liberates itself from the bondage of historical time" ("Modern Fiction" 1). Here it will be argued that this sense of autonomy is important, as myth does clear a symbolic autonomous space where little actually exists, given the constraints of history, but it will also be argued that myth in the novels discussed is closely linked to history.
- It should be noted that Okpehwo assumes complete coincidence between oral literature and tales of a mythical nature. This is a common assumption to make, and is made by JanMohamed, who writes that the fundamental factor involved in the development of African literature is literacy and that literacy leads to the development of a historical consciousness:
by allowing any (literate) individual to scrutinize the fixed past, to distinguish between truth and error, and consequently to cultivate a more conscious, critical and comparative attitude to the accepted world picture. Such an attitude eventually produces a sense of change, of the human past as an objective reality available to causal analysis, and of history as a broad attempt to determine reality on every (diachronic) area of human concern. This in turn permits a distinction between "history" and "myth." (280)
In giving assent to this argument, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin point out that history as an institution itself is controlled by cultural and ideological forces "which may seek to propose the specific practice of history as natural and objective" (81). Literacy allows history to be seen as development whereas oral literature and myth emphasise timelessness, seems to be the argument, and that the spread of literacy and the subsequent struggle for appropriation and the control of the means of communication is crucial. JanMohamed also suggests that the move from orality to literacy brings an affinity with realism as opposed to the fantasy and magic of oral literature and myth; literacy will not allow memory, "the major mode of temporal mediation in oral cultures" (281), to eliminate facts that are not consonant with or useful for contemporary needs. This seems to downgrade fantasy and memory, both important elements for the production of dissent. It will be remembered that Bhabha has written of realism as syntagmatic and sequential, and spoke of its "historic utterances and easy identifications between I and you" (119). This definition of realism reads like an analysis of the narrative of the state, forming links in the condensing of ideological narrative and in interpellating the subject as a single individual. These "easy identifications" also suggest that the narrative of the state is generally monologic -- its forms try not to offer any space in which dialogue can be formed. - Dialogue is further dissuaded by state narratives imposing themselves as natural and given, hence no room for dialogue as it is superfluous. Myth, fantasy and magical narratives necessarily perform an act of dissent here by displaying an alternative method of societal organisation and narrative construction. This organisation involves the paradigmatic dissenting nature of myth; myth as paradigm cuts across the syntagmatic narrative of the state.
- Some sorting out of terms is necessary here. Throughout this analysis, myth is referred to as a narrative, a term which would seem to bring it close to the realist narrative of the state; instead, I argue that the two terms indicate distinct types of writing or speaking. Myths do have elements of narrative in that the stories they tell do narrate events sequentially, as do realist narratives, but it is the form and texture of myth that give it a paradigmatic quality, one which disrupts and vibrates the pure logic of sequential narrative. It should also be kept in mind that myths circulate as a discourse and that they are necessarily supraindividual and therefore do not easily offer positions the subject can take up as an individual. The cumulative effect of a people's myths tell the story of how that tribe operates and organises itself. When this article refers to myth as a narrative, the distinctiveness and paradigmatic quality of myth will be kept in mind.
- The problem arises that we also have little by way of definition to use in locating and identifying myths. As Levi-Strauss said, formalist analyses of the ingredients of myth have left little to separate myths from other stories or narratives (in Okpehwo, Myth in Africa 53), an echo of which is found in Terry Eagleton's comment that analyses of the structures of literary texts have as good as dismantled the criteria which separated them from other narratives (6). The study of mythology and its situation also finds an echo in Althusser's analyses of Marx, Ricardo and Smith, where it is suggested that economic phenomena are inadequately discussed because the proper concepts to discuss them have yet to be produced (For Marx). Perhaps mythological study has yet to discover the language and concepts to discuss its object properly. Hence when we discuss mythological literary texts we are in a murky medium and a framework guided by intuition and only a half glimpse of the outlines of the object of study. Into this murky area we do take the concrete studies of myths as tales which tell of the origin of a political group or culture and the cosmic narratives of deities.
- Whilst examining if the mythological literary text is the rewriting of historical experience and seeing if it carries with it some "truth-value," we must be careful to resolve, or at the very least avoid, the usage of the term "myth" within those contexts which link it closely to that of "a lie" or "false narrative." Alisdair MacIntyre tends to see myth as a set of narratives, archetypal or otherwise, through which the subject is interpellated:
We enter human society . . . with one or more imputed characters -- roles into which we have been drafted -- and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed. (50)
This comment has a functionalist tinge in that myth is seen to function in a normative and regulative fashion; subjects are positioned within society through the narratives that society tells itself. This is certainly true, but MacIntyre stretches the process until it becomes too normalising, too regulating, too passive. The picture presented suggests that all stories that human societies are capable of telling themselves have already been told and that the subject finds a place in already given narratives. Hence there is no room in his version of myth for renewable myths, oppositional myths and reworkable myths. In short, the possibility of a dialectical process in which myths both subvert and are subverted is a priori ruled out. Furthermore there is no room for new myths or new narratives. - As a philosopher of postmodernism, MacIntyre might argue that any new myth or subversive myth is merely a version of a previous narrative and society can withstand these shifts -- it has pre-empted them -- and indeed he does talk of the protester as a "stock character in the modern social drama." In this pessimistic view it would seem that new or subverted myths correspond to new or subversive desires in Deleuze and Guattari's sense -- inflections of the social order which are just ways of registering dissent without moving, or without any way of moving towards dismantling the object of dissent. The pervasive social order has pre-empted and can withstand any shift in or subversion of its dominant myths. However, deploying the term "myth" as MacIntyre does not only seems a little loose and but also offers no possibility of distinguishing between different forms of narrative. To suggest that myths only register dissent underestimates the importance of myth acting as a symbolic space through which desire for change can be encoded. Myth also acts as a symbolic space through which dissent can be communicated. Its intersubjective qualities provide forms through which communication is transmitted. For this reason myth seems particularly useful in postcolonial societies dominated by repressive regimes. The unavailability of discourses of resistance at times leads these to be encoded through myth. Its importance is therefore precisely the fact that it is a form, through which communication and the desire for alternatives is channelled.
- At the same time it is important to try to develop a reading process of interpretation which avoids reducing all literary mythical narratives to a supposedly primary level of plot, character and realism. With the example of Soyinka's The Interpreters, I will show how it is limiting to produce a reading of the novel which has as primary the characters and setting of contemporary Nigeria and as secondary the Yoruba mythology as the style and method through which the contemporary scene is presented. I will suggest that the process is more complexly inter-textual than a question of primary and secondary texts. It is perhaps a question of avoiding seeing the literary process as the symbolic representation of the real, of avoiding seeing the actants within the novel as somehow corresponding to real people in a real world beyond the boundaries of literary textuality. A way needs to be found of assessing the importance of mythical narratives in their own right, almost autonomously, without seeing them as a version or rewriting of a real realist narrative which corresponds to a real historical condition.
- When I talk of the autonomy of forms and of avoiding reducing all forms of literature to the realist narrative of real history, I should state immediately that I am not proposing the complete autonomy of literary forms or that they are constructed outside of history. The single most important methodological principle in this study involves examining the relationships and determined limits placed on the literary text via the ideological, political, and economic circumstances of its production. However I suggest that we miss the vibrancy and pleasure of the mythical process if we reduce its status to a secondary version of a primary realist narrative. It is argued that it is this vibrancy, pleasure and the thick textures of metaphor involved in the integration of myth into novels, that constitute one of its oppositional elements, as its style contrasts the metonymic narratives of power and the state.
- Analyses of Anthills of the Savannah and The Interpreters have often tended to see the place of myth in contemporary literature as a symbolic meta-narrative for contemporary Africa; myths provide a window and a way of seeing as well as a symbolic solution and resolving of political impasses. Clearly these analyses have an element of "truth" in them and it is useful to see some literature in this way, but having established this it might benefit us to engage more dialectically and to ask if this "truth" takes its position within a framework of intentional hermeneutics and a model of language/literature as simply referential. The benefits of this latter framework are that it does have inscribed within it a notion of the subject, however suspect, whereas structuralist practice tended to relocate the subject as marginal. Literature is a human practice, if not a fully centred one; hence a criticism concerned with politics and power has had to articulate the double shifts from "work" to "text" and from "language" to "discourse." The former moves away from the author as "master" and initiator of the work and dislodges previous notions of the subject, whilst the latter moves from the view of language as neutral medium to language viewed as uttered and interactive involving speakers and hearers and writers and readers within relations of power. This complex move involves dislodging the subject and reinvesting it as immersed in the materiality of signifying practices.
- Levi-Strauss' view of myth as a semiotic system was challenged by Dan Sperber who wanted to view myths as symbols and, in elaborating his theory, questioned the structuralist method:
Indeed, a system of homologies, oppositions and inversions is, in itself, mysterious enough. It is hard to see in what sense it explains or interprets symbolic phenomena. It organises them. But what is the role, what is the nature of this organisation? Failing to answer this question, one leaves oneself open to the reproach of having constructed a model without an object. The reply that Levi-Strauss makes -- i.e., that this object is a semiological system, a structure that articulates signs -- does not satisfy me. (4)
Sperber is also sceptical of any interpretation of symbols:It is the way with symbols as it is with spirits. If spirits speak by causing tables to turn, they don't -- for all that -- have much to say. If symbols mean, what they mean is almost always banal. The existence of spirits and the luxuriance of symbols are more fascinating than are their feeble messages about the weather. (7)
By elsewhere suggesting that interpretations of symbols only provide another text to be interpreted, Sperber approaches the poststructuralism of Barthes, as he does here where a textual system is viewed as luxuriance and the abundant free-play of signifiers. A lot of energy is released and set in motion with little desired effect. Sperber seems to suggest that symbols are a form rather than a language with an object or statement. This is true of the way myths work in the novels I analyze. Postcolonial societies can shift away from reintegrating myth as a functional narrative, but its form persists as a memory and disruption of the present and some communication is still maintained through the presence of myth. - Sperber's scepticism concerning interpretation can be seen as a critique of the reduction of mythical literature to the status of a referential system organised by an intending subject, but some explanation and discussion of the symbols of myth is necessary as the concept of communication so central to structuralist analysis is too crucial to drop. Hence the need to develop a critical framework that sees mythological references as implicit or unconscious communications and negotiations either at the level of class discourse, or as negotiations between various other power groups.
- In Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, power, language, the power of language and the ownership of language, all important kernels within the text are drawn into the mosaic of mythological narrative. Monologue, dialogue, shifts in tenses, the Idemili myth told by the omniscient narrator, Beatrice's "friendships with strange words" add to the shift and dislocation experienced by the reader in a novel which, as often with Achebe, seems to offer itself as a straightforward tale told in the mode of realism.
- The novel begins in the present tense, normally signalling a shared dialogue, but here the present is controlled by the state president who dictates whose words he will ignore and whose he will reply to. Language is held back: "I say nothing" (3), "I was angrily but silently rebuffing his peace overtures" (9). Language is not directed directly: "His Excellency is probably meant to overhear this"; language is owned, through power: "He owns all the words in this country- newspapers, radio and television stations" (8). The possibility of true dialogue and communication is repressed and fractured in an atmosphere of fear and power, which contrasts sharply with Achebe's wish for a common ownership and free exchange of language -- a contrast between the dictatorship of language and the democratisation of language. The whole range of language and voices needs to be displayed in order to tell the narrative of a nation and to articulate its experiences. When language is owned, repressed and fractured, history seems to have stopped, to be unclear; the novel therefore argues for the right to make sense of history and experience through the use of a language not contorted in an atmosphere of fear, self-censorship and repression. For the self, history and experience to be reclaimed, language has to be reclaimed. This whole, unified, unrepressed and un-fractured language is symbolised through the language of myth, which unifies through reference and linkage the major themes and concerns of the novel.
- Myth, however, is not overtly apparent as a guiding or organising principle, yet it is subtly there, in place for the reader to pick up, and the various narrative lines and units are woven together through metonym and gesture by links forged through mythological reference and association. Through this narrative method Achebe locates an alternative to the narrative of the state, an alternative already within the society but needing to be activated. The reading process of registering the function of myth then acts as a correlative to articulating an oppositional discourse.
- This understated use of myth, within the novel, has its correspondence in the way such belief systems work in various African cultures, where the sacred and the profane are mixed and ever present. Masks are worn by ordinary, recognisable people and the work of the deities is evoked rather than stated through reference to the most mundane and everyday object. Achebe states this in his novel:
Man's best artifice to snare and hold the grandeur of divinity always crumbles in his hands, and the more ardently he strives the more paltry and incongruous the result. So it were better he did not try at all, far better to ritualise that incongruity and by invoking the mystery of metaphor to hint at the most unattainable glory by its very opposite, the most mundane starkness -- a mere stream, a tree, a stone, a mound of earth, a little clay bowl containing fingers of chalk. (31)
There then is no separation of myth, history and the everyday -- all are linked. The central myth of Idemili tells of the Almighty sending his daughter to temper masculine power by ritualising men's access to power, symbolised by entry to the powerful fourth and greatest hierarchy of ozo. In the novel the President has the support of three provinces but not of the fourth, he has three titles but lacks the fourth. - Any man wanting the ozo title must attend the shrine of Idemili with either his daughter or the daughter of a kinsman, who arranges seven sticks of chalk on the ground. The man must sit on these so lightly that none breaks. The humility and care needed already symbolises power tempered. Idemili does not immediately give any sign that she has accepted the attempt to gain the title; the only sign ever given is that the man is still alive after three years. In the novel the President dies, having overstepped the mark in the way he uses power, emphasising Achebe's point that problems lie with the quality of leadership. The narration of the myth is given status through the use of an omniscient narrator in contrast to the first-person narrator used elsewhere. As will be apparent, the myth is also central to Achebe's engagement with gender and the empowering of women, particularly organised around the figure of Beatrice.
- The myth is used as an alternative, dissenting language, in part by contrasting Judaic and Christian myths which often deny women or ritualise women as scapegoats: shortly before the reader is presented with the narration of the Idemili myth, Ikem and Beatrice discuss Eve, who in the Old Testament was blamed for Man's fall and marginalised as a result. In the New Testament women are not scapegoated but revered in the figure of the Mother of God. However, this re-figuring does not lead to any empowering; it is a compensatory representation which still marginalises women. Achebe's engagement with gender then symbolises a broadening out of power away from a single elite. The male voice/viewpoint grows less dominant as the novel progresses. At its end a celebratory naming ritual involves three women and it is Beatrice who grants the name, changing the ritual act usually carried out by a male. Beatrice earlier states to B.B. "that the story of this country, as far as you are concerned, is the story of the three of you" (p.66), referring to the three main male characters and emphasising the narrowness of power. The novel describes expanded possibilities for gaining access to power, symbolised by the ability to narrate a story, to give voice to an experience, to name.
- In the first half of the novel, men own words, and women are intuitive muses, symbolic Goddesses; at the end of the novel it is women who have the power of language, to name. There are problems with Achebe's engagement with gender. As symbolic of a new African nation somehow democratised, "woman is the ground of change or discursive displacement but not the subject of transformation," as Elleke Boehmer has stated (103). Stereotypical images of woman as inspirer and spiritual guide are problematically present within the novel. However, as the problems presented by nation/state power in postcolonial Africa can often appear insoluble, their resolution can only be at the symbolic level.
- Achebe does enact within the novel the function of the symbol as language of dissent, the negative articulation, the alternative. Although the novel states that the work and presence of the deities is best hinted at through the simplest object, it also contains highly written, almost deliberately overwritten passages.
The birds that sang the morning in had melted away even before the last butterfly fell roasted to the ground. And when songbirds disappeared, morning herself went into the seclusion of a widow's penance in soot and ashes, her ornaments and fineries taken from her -- velvets of soft elusive light and necklaces of pure sound lying coil upon coil down to her resplendent breasts: corals and blue chalcedonies, jaspers and agates veined like rainbows. So the songbirds left no void, no empty hour when they fled because the hour itself had died before them. Morning no longer existed. (p.31)
David Richards argues that this passage is one of many experiments with language contained in the novel as each narrator attempts to discover a language freed from the taint of oppression and expressive of a personal and communal autonomy (134). Attempts such as this result in a personal moment of escape from the simplistic and non-metaphorical language of power (the President states that he is a soldier and therefore speaks plainly), often in ironic ways through signifiers which signify nothing, or little. The energy used in the expression of such language is greater than the message actually transmitted. Richards' perceptions tie in with my earlier discussion of myth, which claimed that myths often have more function as a performance that works at a level beyond actually transmitting a message or a meaning. Myth encodes personal autonomy and self-expression through the overflow of the signifier. - The language of myth in the novel is other than a personal, or even communal, expression, more radical than the use of myth as the repository of cultural memory, as it condenses the historically various into a single narrative through metonymy. Without the historically specific, mythology is a reference without a referent: it is simply exotic decoration. Myth does incorporate every strand of the novel and therefore is not decoration merely or the vehicle through which the story is told or enabled. Instead, it provides the method wherein everybody's story can be told in a way that combines the personal and the communal and therefore symbolises a unified, expressive nation in which all voices are heard. It symbolises a unified, non-repressed language in common ownership and, in the tale it tells, is a site where social justice can be enacted at the imaginary level. Each of the novel's protagonists is linked symbolically to the Idemili myth but the myth is not a narrative which controls the characters. It is precisely in the way that myth is a unifying narrative which does not control that myth is a powerful symbolic force, symbolic of a social and political space where all dialogue in the same language. This language is not fractured and repressed through its dissemination and filtering through the institutions of nation state in the hands of a small minority.
- There is a contradiction in the way myth does symbolise a social space. I have argued that the novel enacts a process which broadens out power by giving more people the power to speak and to name, yet at the same time I argue that the various strands in the novel are narrowed down and can be explained through their association with the Idemili myth. The novel then enacts a broadening expansion as well as a narrowing contraction. It could be argued that the narrowing of all elements to a single narrative symbolically eradicates difference and marginalises other points of view, especially when it is realised that the Idemili myth is of Igbo origin. Problematic totalising narratives and metaphors are a strong presence in African writing, however, and are often motivated as imaginary solutions to the various fractures and splits found in the postcolonial state.
- To some extent Soyinka's The Interpreters represents the world view of the middle-class Nigerian African elite, an ideology which is unstable and fragmentary given that this elite is distinctly separate from the working class as a whole yet is without its own power base, given its dependence on foreign capital and investment. As this elite has no position from which to exert a campaign of hegemony, it does not feel any linkage to the working class in the classic sense in which we see the bourgeoisie having to necessarily link itself to the working class in its attempt to exert hegemony through the condensing of its ideology. The term 'condensing' refers to the way a class ideology is shared by various classes, a similarity and coincidence eliminating difference and the possibility of articulating conflict and dissent. Condensing is often achieved through the sharing of similar languages, narratives and symbols through which experience is organised.
- The elite class located in Soyinka's novel feels no links on the surface, friendly or antagonistic, with the working class. Hence there is a sense of autonomy, even a sense that this class does not even see itself as a class. Hence the novel suggests a sense of individual autonomy that creates fragmentation and detachment from society and other people. This picture is overdetermined and fed into by a sense of an "expert" elite, a specialist elite, which believes itself to be a force of clarity, whereas the "masses," and there are "masses" in Soyinka's work, are blind and directionless. This picture is also overdetermined by a view of the artist and artistic activity as specialist and involving an individual moment of clarity and truth. These various themes are filtered and the contradictions within them negotiated and symbolically resolved, at least partly, through the narrative of myth, which itself is linked to notions of identity, the process of becoming and memory.
- The Interpreters necessarily desires an alternative to the political impasse it satirises, since satire posits a negative stance towards its object. Myth becomes the location of this desire, almost unconsciously, since on the surface Soyinka seems to be doing other things with myth, such as associating and identifying mythological figures with characters of elite status. Myth as desire, as dissent, as negative articulation, and as disruption works through the symbol as Other to the stalemate of the state. Myth through metaphor and symbol always acts as a paradigm disrupting the syntagmatic narrative of the novel.
- Myth as metaphor cannot be paraphrased, but it can be activated and harnessed, if unstably, in both negative and positive ways. This unstable feature of myth as metaphor and paradigm both dissents against the impasse of the state and disrupts the surface of Soyinka's elitist deployment of myth. The above statements form an abstract of the novel's dynamics; they need to be unpacked by showing how they work themselves out through the engagements of class, identity and memory the text involves itself in.
- The novel has produced contradictory readings around the area of its dynamics of perception and, in an uneasy opposition, of action. Contradictions are further heightened around the use of The Interpreters as a title. In these readings the novel is seen to be asking questions about the nature of understanding and perception, or to put it another way, asking whether experiences are to be seen within the context of affirmation and action, of forging meanings, or of induction. Are experiences understood in terms of previous experiences which have themselves generated a framework and value-system for understanding future experiences?
- Put simply in terms of context this question deals with the assessment of the colonial moment, its influence and its place in the history of Africa. The colonial moment can be seen as a complete break, cutting off the present and future from the past -- in this assessment each experience is new or qualitatively different from previous experiences and each new experience transforms or creates new subjectivity since identity can no longer be monitored by its history, by its past experiences. Alternatively, precolonial history can still be linked to the present or the future. The past remains in a stronger form than mere residue; it maintains relevance, and its methods of organisation are still used despite colonial disruption. History is seen as a continuum despite the jagged form of colonial history, and identity can still be marked against some notion of the past. Obviously the notion of memory is altered in both these models of history, residual or irrelevant for the former, a strong index of individual and communal identity and organisation for the latter. These two models operate either directly or at a space removed from the preoccupations with memory, identity, perception and framework in the novel.
- Eldred Jones says of the main actants that they are "hammering out values and codes of conduct in a world which seems to have none ready made" (190). This position suggests that previous experiences provide no landmarks or clues through which the present can be perceived, organised or understood. Here a framework must be created for understanding experience; here also the notion of memory is redundant. In the context of colonialism, this dynamic could symbolise the imposition of a new value system which renders a previous value system, symbolised by myth, unavailable. Obi Maduakur, on the other hand, says that the "novel develops on a cyclic and almost static framework of revelation and reaffirmation" and that its "cyclic structure reinforces the theme of non-event, of the absence of human initiative" (49). Here there is no affirmative action, only what has been concealed is now revealed: a static framework filters experience; experience is understood against an already given framework. Jones' reading is existential and could be inflected to give it a political and cultural substance, whilst Maduakur's reading is non-conflict-based and functionalist.
- Looked at in terms of synchrony and diachrony, Maduakur's reading is synchronic since it can only allow for a constant present whilst Jones' reading is diachronic except that there is no past in his model -- there is a notion of action in the present and in the future but the past has withered away. For Maduakur there is no historical action, for Jones there is historical action but it has no pre-history. Any occurrence in the political for Jones would have to be put in the framework and language of colonial influence, of modernity, as the past and with it precolonial discourses have been terminated and cut off from the present. Maduakur could still discuss a political event in terms of precolonial discourse although he might have difficulty explaining how it came to happen except through his notion that a historical cycle is a Mobius strip with a kink and a chance for the new at each cyclical ending. These two readings reveal the contradictory nature of The Interpreters.
- To continue with this analysis of the ambivalent relationship between past and present, the text constructs an opposition between Joe Golder, the gay lecturer concerned that he is not black enough, and Sekoni, producer of the Wrestler sculpture and stammering prophet of the unity and continuity of "the dome of life." This opposition has the nexus of memory. It is said that Sekoni "would not laugh at the actual moment of an event" (17); he only laughs later as if the experience of a moment of humour is not immediate or rather a humorous moment is not interpreted as such immediately, only later, after the event. Joe Golder "has a habit of recollecting things as if they are just happening" (185). Memory is not the same for him, and perhaps is not memory at all but the complete repetition in all its senses and perceptions of a previous event. He is made to say of his habit of recollecting experience as immediate that "It is a bad habit. When I am in company and I remember something unpleasant, I try to take flight before it assumes control of me" (185). He cannot distance a previous event as of the past but experiences it as contemporaneous. Yet this is something we might expect of Sekoni, who believes in continuities and the inseparability of all spheres such as past, present, future and the dead and the living. Sekoni's memory works in fits and starts and makes him out of sync and out of step with other people; he does not react or experience with others but understands and interprets experience through a framework that does not include immediacy and the present.
- However, the dead weight of history and tradition cannot readily adapt to abrupt change and disruption. Stability and weight are displayed as ponderous through the need to assimilate an experience as humorous before laughter can be produced; hence the element of immediacy and spontaneity is missing. For Joe Golder there is no filtering of experience through a framework which can understand it, there is only the constant immediacy of experience. There is not enough past experience in order to formulate understanding. Joe Golder is synonymous with a historical model that sees colonialism as an abrupt break, Sekoni with a historical model incapable of adapting to the disruption the colonial model brings.
- This contradictory opposition can be seen as an encoded tactical exchange between contending social forces. Into this picture of Joe Golder we have to bring in the representation of his homosexuality as deviant, marginal and abhorrent. Soyinka represents homosexuality as a disgusting, filthy disease. Moreover, a close reading of the text reveals that Joe Golder, who doesn't fully understand or interpret experience, is used as a symbol or co-actant of the market crowd, the city's working class and lumpen-proletariat, for it is said of this crowd that they cannot understand, that they merely "experience." Hence the picture of Joe Golder's homosexuality as deviant and abhorrent is used to smuggle into the text's unconscious a view of the working class as subjects of raw experience without the capacity for self-understanding, a view that rules out any notion of class-consciousness. Therefore, the crowd can never become full acting subjects of history.
- This point adds to other textual instances which show us the negative portrayal of the working class in the market scenes per se and show us that the crowd, metonymically linked to Joe Golder, is therefore ideologically represented as deviant. The working class is linked to Joe Golder in several ways. The crowd chases Barbaras with the potential of killing him, and Joe Golder chases Noah to his death. Both the crowd (114) and Joe Golder (185) are given the attributes of carelessness, and both are linked by being narrated through Sagoe's eyes for several important passages. If the portrayal of Joe Golder blocks the way symbolically for working-class consciousness, then the cure for society's social ills presumably lies in the text's detached intellectuals. But the portrayal of Sekoni around the nexus of memory suggests that this is a hamstrung project because it necessitates working-class intervention, which the text has already ruled out, as I have shown.
- Sekoni is a symbol of a force that cannot react spontaneously or adapt to the colonial moment. Hence the intervention of a new class is desired but its metonymic link with Joe Golder shows this class displaying no self-consciousness. The intellectuals are isolated and do not even see themselves as a class; even within its small group there are differences in the way memory is deployed. Yet it is with this group of people that myth is most readily and consciously associated, almost as if the desire in myth and the desire for change through class is combined in the inappropriate class. Myth as desire links myth with class action and disruption, but Soyinka's political instincts lead to a combination of myth with a class that is a fractured aggregate of individuals.
- Sekoni's view of the dome of continuity paradoxically marginalises history as change, for it involves the assertion that all is inseparable, that as he states "a bridge also faces backwards" (9). He embodies Soyinka's idea of the cyclical nature of history, represented through the metaphor of the Mobius strip, which cannot encompass the idea of change. Whilst Sekoni represents one point where memory is important, this is contradictory as memory involves the evocation of the past, a concept ruled out in the idea of the dome: continuity without change and the connectedness of all aspects of life.
- Importantly this idea cannot encompass colonialism as an event or series of events that irrevocably converted and changed African history. Therefore Sekoni's dome of continuity and notions of memory symbolically eradicate the colonial presence. The attempts in the novel to either accommodate memory or reject it, or to accommodate colonial presence, are linked importantly to the ideas and narratives of myth. Joe Golder's portrayal as metonymic of the working class that cannot come to full awareness of experience finds a link with Sekoni. Sekoni's disgust with present social conditions necessarily demand some action and change, yet it demands appreciation and understanding of the social scene and then action. Historical subjectivity and action are ruled out in Sekoni's view of the seamless quality of experience. This seamlessness occludes any possibility of consciousness but, paradoxically, demands it. Again some form of class-consciousness and action is both desired and denied.
- As has already been mentioned, the main actants are isolated and feel no group bonding, an isolation very often narrated through the image of watching. Sagoe rejects an impulse to go and protect the thief and watches events from the balcony (117); Bandele says of the party, "don't you enjoy just watching people sometimes, especially when you know they can't stand the sight of you" (143). In two contrasting contexts, the working-class market and the ruling-class reception, the "interpreters" take up places on the sidelines, watching and commentating. Reflecting the powerlessness of their class position in the economic and political scene, each of them tries to connect with or construct something tangible at the personal level. Kola has his pantheon, Sagoe his philosophy of Voidancy, Bandele his Shrine, and Sekoni his engineering project.
- Throughout the novel, powerlessness is encoded and mediated through the problematic of memory and experience. For instance, after Egbo asked a question of his companions which made them uncomfortable and uneasy, he "[v]aguely . . . sensed a code of taboos, and with it returned a feeling of remoteness" (9). Freud's work on the Oedipus myth and the incest taboo tells us that taboos are social codes of acting, but also that it does not matter if the event which precipitated the taboo never took place, rather what happens is the consciousness of a desire, which, if given full rein, would disrupt society, and is therefore repressed through the invention of a taboo which forbids the acting out of desire. In this incident from The Interpreters, encountering a social code causes Egbo to feel isolated and withdrawn. At the level of abstraction it could be that Egbo articulates a desire that triggers the blocking taboo after which he does not regain a social order but withdraws into the self. This idea can be fleshed out through its context of a choice between taking up the Osa inheritance of power or carrying on with life as it is. This choice is between past and present. "If the dead are not strong enough to be ever-present in our being, should they not be as they are, dead?" [PAGE CITE?] asks Egbo. Elsewhere "[Egbo] surrendered the effort of unravelling blood skeins and was left only with their tyrannous energies," (12) and Dehinwa sees the unwanted advice and ties of relatives as "blood cruelty."
- Egbo's desire, then, is the desire to break with the past but the past's narratives in the residual form of mythology enact taboos that block this desire and block disruptions in the present. Egbo wants to break with the past, but myth as desire constantly returns to disrupt his conscious wishes; this return is contradictory. Egbo pushes the past away because it leads him to make a choice against the new Nigeria of colonial influence; myth as desire disrupts this rejection. The present acts as a taboo to block the past represented through myth as desire. 'The Interpreters' are isolated, without action, because the past they deny, along with that denial, does not offer any framework.
- The novel makes some attempt to resolve these contradictions through the realm of art. The Interpreters mimics and recreates myths in its portrayal of the birth of a nation, a process which involves processes of becoming, questions of identity and questions of where and how this process started, where this nation as an imagined community came from, how it narrates itself as a community. The novel narrates these processes and experiences as painful, as strata within the society are manoeuvred into identities they may dislike or be unsure of. Adjustments need to be made, a new present leading to a disorientation with the past that can be rejected but which also makes demands in the form of memory. For example, Egbo has to choose between taking up the Osa kingship inheritance or continuing as a clerk in the civil service, a stark choice between different types of Nigeria which exist side by side, sometimes at distance, the one older and perhaps residual, the other newer, dominant and emerging.
- Egbo feels the call of the past as uncomfortable, making demands; as is said elsewhere "habits must change when memory becomes unbearable" (159) or, as Egbo thought, "To cleanse . . . to really cleanse a human being, you must leave him like Noah, dead, devitalised, with no character of any sort, a blank white sheet for accidental scribbles" (251). This is how history is experienced for some: a life is changed through history jolting a person out of a previous lifestyle or narrative into another one. The subject is written on, identity becomes a process of narrative, and in the novel this is symbolised through the linking of myth, art and identity. When Kola paints a pantheon of Yoruba mythology using friends and acquaintances to sit for him rather than painting from imagination, he underlines the theme of roles and identities sitting uneasily within a changing subjectivity.
- At one point Kola thinks of himself and his friends:
Sekoni's death had left them all wet, bedraggled, the paint running down their acceptance of life where they thought the image was set, running down in ugly patches. They felt caught flat-footed and, Kola thought, not a bit like the finished work tonight, more like five figures from my Pantheon risen from a trough of turpentine. (158)
At this point, mmyth and memory have faded, have lost resonance and vibrancy, are unavailable or inappropriate as sites from where to take on a role or identity, but they do exert pressure as form for making sense. Kola says of his painting: "But at least I can record, my intimation of all these presences have been too momentary and they come in disjointed fragments" (228). Again is repeated the theme of experience, of a framework for making sense and organising experience, identity and memory. Art is used as a paradigm of myth in this framework, but none of the artists are writers. The main forms are visual, sculpting and painting. Instances of writing, such as the student's essay and a signature on a letter, are impenetrable and cannot be read -- further meditating on the process of becoming and adjusting in a new Nigeria, and on the dispersal of audience and community into new class identities. The novel's disparagement of writing and elevation of immediate and visual arts enact a nostalgia for a time when myth was an interactive creative force in a community, when oral literature involved narrator and audience interaction. The actual novel form too is emblematic of the change in identity and the loss and disorientation this involves.
- It appears, finally, that The Interpreters is a text which, through its interest in the previous mythologies of a political region, charts, narrates and negotiates the complex class relationships of a new historical break and departure, the arrival of the African proletariat and bourgeoisie on the world stage. It may be said in a very strong sense that The Interpreters is a myth in the previous sense given of myths as tales of origins, since its traces and scars tell the birth of a nation -- that is, industrial Nigeria -- and more particularly tell of the birth and contradictions of its bourgeoisie.
- In a classic process emphasising the nature of class conflict and compromise, this bourgeoisie needs to exert hegemony over the working class in order to negate the working class's own aspirations. Fear of the working class leads to its symbolic negation and its representation as a class that does not know itself. Given the complex nature of postcolonial class relations, the bourgeoisie is not a ruling bourgeoisie but is powerless in the face of the power of international capital. In order to make any headway against this force, the bourgeoisie could take the path of calling for the assistance of the working class. Nonetheless, industrial class relations in Nigeria have produced conflicting class identities and narratives in which the bourgeoisie attempts to control and hegemonise the working class it fears, whilst at the same time wooing the working class through calls of national unity against international capital. The Interpreters negates the working class by representing it as a vibrant, desiring throng that acts and experiences but never understands or comes to consciousness. We see the bourgeoisie as isolated and powerless but conscious of itself; it also needs the desires and action of the working class in a battle for industrial strength and unity. The isolated class discourse of the bourgeoisie involves the simultaneous negation and affirmation of working class discourse, desire and aspiration.
- Myth as disruption, symbol and paradigm against the realism of the state insists that the past is available as paradigm, not as static dead end, but as a force that can be activated as disruption and as Other. It is in motion, vibrates against the surface of the syntagmatic novel. Myth is present as desire in the unconscious of the novel and is therefore paradigmatic with the desire of the novel's deep structure for some kind of class action. This is contradicted by Soyinka consciously identifying myth with a group who only see themselves as an accidental aggregate of individuals. In the novel, however, myth is activated as desire and symbol, its presence rather than its message disrupting the syntagmatic form of the novel, disrupting its impasses of memory and identity, its impasses between two different models of history. Myth is there as a figure of dissent.
- Some conclusions can now be drawn. The use of myth is at once specific and diffuse: its use produces novels that encode through form a sense of alternatives, but myth is so nebulous that it can be articulated in a variety of ways. The main argument has been that it is not useful to reduce mythical texts to history, if this reduction merely narrates and rewrites myth in the form of realist narrative. Such a reduction ignores the fact that myth as a form is used to dissent against monologic narratives of the state. Myth in the texts discussed has already re-written history to encode, hold and suggest in the form of symbols alternatives to existing power formations. Pressures are exerted to use myth in the context of entrenched postcolonial repressive regimes, because forms of dissent must be different from those deployed in colonial contexts. There, dissent could be expressed as the difference between coloniser and colonised. The actual agents of dissent in postcolonial contexts are not so easy to locate, particularly where strong authoritarian rule and/or dominant class hegemony are firmly in place. Myth as a form of dissent, then, is used in the absence of other types, and where agents of dissent are not easily located. The absence of other discourses leaves myth to counter the discourses of the state, which does so through setting dialogic and symbolic forms against the state's monologism.
- Anthills of the Savannah and The Interpreters encode myth as a receptacle for potential communication because myth, through its narration of precolonial forms of organising, is an intersubjective form. Communication through myth is primary in Achebe in order to symbolise dissent, and his novel directly engages with communication in that myth in his novel symbolises communication through the free exchange of language. This is much more contradictory in The Interpreters which, at different but connected levels, both attempts to build and disavow class dialogue; an uncertain bourgeoisie both constructs and erases the working class as a subject with its own voice and one which can be communicated with.
- The argument that myth should not be reduced to history is therefore made precisely because the form of myth is where its greatest dissent lies. Its forms engage with power formations at the level of discourse to highlight potential alternative frameworks of organising and to counter the official narratives of the state.
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