Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose He was nearly shouting. ‘Convert! I converted nothing. What you wrestle
with, what you fight and defeat, that is true conversion. To change the nature of
a real thief in a week, did you ever hear of that! I persisted only because it was the
time of floods and this is the time for our Revivalist Services. We needed Noah.
My true disciples are the thieves, the rejected of society. One of the apostles is
a forger who has spent five years in prison. Another was the only member who
escaped arrest when his gang was caught after a bank robbery. Urgent though
my need was, I could not break this rule. I had to find a sinner!
‘Any murderers?’ Kola asked.
‘One. He matcheted his wife in a village near Ughelli.’
Some minutes later, recovering his calm, he said, ‘I must try to see that Noah
does not return to the gutter.’ (TI,–)
Lazarus is perhaps the first in a long line of prophets or visionaries
in Soyinka’s works whose religious or secular “ministry” is with the
downtrodden, the lumpen, unemployed underclass of criminals as well
as d ́eclass ́e outcasts from “polite” society. This is a line that includes
Professor inThe Road, the Old Man inMadmen and Specialists, Maren,
Soyinka’s own assumed moniker in his autobiographical memoir,Ibadan,
and Dionysus inThe Bacchae of Euripides. Of all the individual incarnations
of this prototype, Lazarus seems the most genuine and unambiguous in
his solicitude for the “fallen” and the disenfranchised that he brings
under his tutelage.
Except for Sekoni, the “interpreters” as a whole do not, singly and
collectively, experience truly degrading, brutalizing suffering, but their
anguish, their great zest for life, together with their imperfections and
alienation, occupy the narrative foreground of the novel. For in general,
theirs is the terrible burden of “knowledge”, of seeing all and having
to bear witness and render an account to themselves. This is indeed
why they bear the collective designation indicated in the title of the
novel. As they live through, observe and talk about the encompassing
rot which has so swiftly overtaken their “new” nation, they are forced to
delve deep into a scrutiny of motives, causes and effects, of theirs’ and
others’ actions, behavior and attitudes. It is a stroke of artistic genius
that Soyinka makes one of them, Kola, the painter and art teacher, press
the others into service as models for the deities and spirits of the Yoruba
mythological pantheon that he is painting for an upcoming exhibition.
For the “interpreters” are models whose virtues and graces fall far below
the transcendental scale of moral perfection of divine idealities, even
if, in accordance with the paradoxical truths of the Yoruba pantheon,
the gods themselves, as etched in narratological profiles in the novel in