Wole Soyinka
accepting the challenge that this poses of asserting and expanding a hu-
mane, life-affirming ethic. This pattern corresponds to what I shall call
the “heroic mythos” in Soyinka’s prose works, a mythos almost wholly
absent in his dramas and found, in the entire body of his poetic writings,
only in the long dramatic poem “Idanre” andOgun Abibiman. The other
pattern that is worthy of note in Soyinka’s prose works is the ubiquity
and pervasiveness of intertextual transfers between these works, whether
fictional or nonfictional. Against the background of these underlying or
“unifying” patterns, it is useful to explore the distinctiveness and particu-
larity, aesthetic and moral-ideological, of each of these works considered
singly or in clusters.
Perhaps more than any other full-length work of Soyinka,The Inter-
pretersis the work of a youthful writer writing about self and milieu with
the mixture of exultant panache and playful levity in the use of language
that most young, gifted writers display at the start of their careers. The
“drink lobes” of Biodun Sagoe, one of the eponymous “interpreters” of
the novel’s title, has entered the lore of Anglophone African critical dis-
course as one of the literature’s most bracingly ludic conceits. This conceit
comes from the very first sentence of the novel – “metal on concrete jars
my drink lobes” – which itself has become one of the most widely dis-
cussed opening sentences in the modern African novel, second in fame
perhaps only to the first sentence of Ken Saro-Wiwa’sSozaboy.Decoded
from its hermetic provenance in the in-group jokes and witticisms of the
“interpreters,” the sentence means, prosaically, “the sound of the cars
on the asphalt surfaces of the city streets is irksome to me, to my efforts
to drink up like a man.” Thus, with all its playful levity, the conceit is ac-
tually emblematic of the novel’s imaginative universe since much of the
“present tense” action ofInterpreters, as distinct from action set in the past,
actually takes place in bars and nightclubs. Readers in the know about
the social “watering holes” frequented by the circle of writers, artists and
intellectuals that Soyinka was closely associated with at the time of the
writing of the novel cannot miss the tremendous resonance of legends
of the socializing rituals of the then newly emergent national literati in
this conceit of the metaphoric, non-physiological organ of “drink lobes.”
The novel is indeed top heavy with such self-referential tropes and con-
ceits, from more general symbols and metaphors like Kola’s painting of
the entirety of the Yoruba mythological pantheon and Sagoe’s nonsense
philosophy of “voidancy,” to the minutiae of tropes which help to indi-
vidualize each of the “interpreters”: Egbo’s propensity for spiritualizing
his sexual liaisons; Sekoni’s stutter and “cobbles”; Sagoe’s recourse to