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The Interpreters
is thus also very much a novel of place, of a specific
milieu. Concretely, and like the extended portraits of cities like Paris and
Dublin in canonical works of Western modernist fiction, Soyinka’s first
work of fiction is a novel of Lagos and, to a lesser extent, of Ibadan,
the city and the university, in the early
s. Not only are well-known
suburbs, streets and thoroughfares of Lagos named and evoked in a
manner that Soyinka would later reprise in writing of the city of his
birth, Abeokuta, in
Ak´e
, his autobiographical memoir, but
The Interpreters
also alludes to famous or notorious events and personalities of the pe-
riod. These include the infamous “Aladura” prelate who pronounced
himself the reincarnation of Christ, Odumosu, “Jesus of Oyingbo”; the
notorious Preventive Detention Act of the Balewa regime and its rabid
anti-communism; the emergent subculture of university students, with
its jejune, women-hating, scandal-mongering yellow journalism; and the
rise of “national” daily newspapers tied to bitterly fractious elite political
and business groups. There is also the narrator’s love-hate attitude to
Lagos: the filth and squalor of the cityscapes, as well as the casual bru-
talities of the city’s populace are registered with a scatological piquancy
only a few steps behind the scale of Ayi Kwei Armah’s depiction of Accra
and its environs in
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
. At the same time, the
novel also celebrates the vitality and vibrancy of the city’s street culture
and night life.
As a novel that is evocative of a particular place and time,
The Inter-
preters
is remarkable in the way that it eschews an event-driven plot and
an expository narrative technique. The most dramatic event that hap-
pens in the “recent” temporal sequence of the narrative is the death of
Noah at the unwitting hands of his would-be homosexual seducer, Joe
Golder. This is somewhat paralleled in the “past” temporal sequence
of the narrative by the death by drowning of the parents of Egbo, per-
haps the most prominent of the “interpreters.” Sekoni’s death in a road
crash, and the several emotional and psychic responses it provokes in
Wole Soyinka
the other protagonists of the novel, is of course equally dramatic and
tragic, but it is given far less narrative space than the death of Noah.
Apart from these deaths, no earth-shaking event happens in the novel
and we see no monstrous acts of duplicity or atrocity, as in
The Man Died
,
Season of Anomy
,
Ibadan
and, to a much lesser extent,
Isara
. Moreover, in
its manner of telling which constantly shifts between past and present
and “outer” and “inner” in the lives of the novel’s protagonists – with
the links thinly supplied by the echoes, traces and resonance of words
and phrases spoken, thought or remembered – the novel makes little
concession to culturally and ideologically conditioned expectations of
readers for narrative continuity, causality and coherence. However, for
all its relative “thinness” of action and event, and its radical disruption
of linearity and continuity,
The Interpreters
is remarkable in being a novel
that is highly evocative of “real” time, place and people. This particular
point compels us to explore carefully the maturity of artistic vision and
nuanced, progressive social criticism that mark this very youthful work.
Very early in the novel, Egbo contemplates the difficult choice he
faces between, on the one hand, accepting the throne of a small fishing
community that comes to him from the line of descent established by his
maternal grandfather and, on the other hand, his civil service job as a
top bureaucrat in the foreign office of his newly independent nation. The
former option binds him to the past, to ancestral heritage and indigenous
cultural matrices, while the latter, potentially at least, opens out to the
wider world and the external relations of the emergent nation. Egbo
ultimately sticks to his bureaucrat’s job, but according to the narrator
in a phrase which evokes the tragic fate of his parents, this choice is
“like a choice of drowning,” for Egbo “knew and despised the (new)
age which sought to mutilate his beginnings.” In other words, Egbo sees
clearly that he works to prop up the power structure and moral order of
an age that is gradually and inexorably mutilating what was good and
wholesome in the world of his ancestral heritage. The question then is,
if not much happens in the novel by way of truly heinous, evil events
and acts, how can the narrator of this novel give credible force to such
portentous, devastating negative commentary on this new age of black
elites replacing the departing white colonizers?
One answer to this question lies in the fact that though the novel does
not have great earth-shattering events, it does contain memorable pro-
files of aspects of the moral order of the new black pseudo-bourgeois
elite, with riveting passages on specific and general aspects of the social
malaise such as miasmic corruption in the ranks of the political and
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