Wole Soyinka
he experienced in the psychic and spiritual extremity of solitary detention
in prison. That being said, it must be acknowledged that when linked
to other expressions in this book detailing the uniqueness of the author-
protagonist’s experiences and perceptions “among the fifty million” of
his countrymen and women, these words assume the Coriolanus-type
hauteurof the highly placed and highly gifted citizen who is superciliously
insistent on his superiority as a political being endowed with superhu-
man qualities. The following passage is only one of many others of this
expression in the book:
Ifhecould break and break so abjectly then anyone can break. This army is a
force that can break anyone. And will. (TMD,) (Emphasis in the text)
In the opinions of some critics, such flaws are not mere lapses but are con-
stitutive, and they considerably compromise, if not effectively neutralize
the value ofThe Man Diedas a searing moral indictment of dictatorship.
But this, in the opinion of this writer, is a misreading which ignores the
fact that for nearly every expression of self-absorption and self-inflation
in this work, there is an articulate and compelling act of self-questioning
and self-transcendence. This misreading also ignores the fact that any
critical engagement of this work which is sufficiently self-aware of its own
situatedness cannot but locate the ambiguities and fractures inThe Man
Diedin the recognition that it is not unusual for a powerful antifascist
document such asThe Man Diedto come from the kind of self-divided
egalitarian-elitist consciousness that the author-protagonist of this work
so pervasively embodies in this particular book and in Soyinka’s second
novel,Season of Anomy. This is indeed an appropriate note on which to
move to our discussion of this work.
The flaws that we have identified in parts ofThe Man Diedwhich some-
what compromise, but do not significantly diminish the aesthetic and
moral force of that book are magnified a hundredfold inSeason of Anomy.
Since, as we have seen, this novel has its gestative origins in Soyinka’s
incarceration, all the bile and vengeful anger contained and transfigured
by the humanity and grace of many parts ofThe Man Diedseem to have
found uninhibited release and little artistic mediation inSeason of Anomy.
For at the most general level, language, or more precisely, prose as a
vehicle of valuable moral and spiritual insights, consistently overreaches
itself in this novel in the manner in which narration, description or even
dialogue is inflated far beyond the incidents or events they relate to, or
the information available to the reader. And at an even more basic, ele-
mentary level, the plot – and the shifts and transitions which propel it – is