Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose often so implausible that any reader without knowledge or information
about the infamous events and personalities in the Nigerian crises of
–would be hard put to grasp, let alone make sense of what ex-
actly is going on at presumably crucial moments in the narrative. This
flaw is so pervasive, so stark inSeasonthat the only plausible explanation
for its occurrence in a work by a writer of Soyinka’s stature is the like-
lihood that the Nigerian author overrates his oranywriter’s capacity to
make highly wrought, evocative prose breathe vitality or even conviction
to the flimsiest and most implausible narrative imaginable, even if that
narrative is located within the framework of the pre-novelistic conven-
tions of the allegory as a mode of narration.Apparently, as indicated
by the second epigraph to this chapter – comments by Samuel Johnson
on Shakespeare’s excesses with language – this flaw is particularly “con-
genital” to the very qualities which make for greatness in writers whose
love of their medium of expression is compounded of excess.
There is sufficient critical commentary onSeason of Anomynow to en-
able readers of the novel to grasp the main outlines of its deployment
of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to tell an allegorical narrative of
good and evil in the terrible social and political turmoil in the western
and northern regions of Nigeria inandwhich ultimately led
to the civil war. Of these commentaries, Dan Izevbaye’s detailed exe-
gesis of correspondences with the Orpheus-Eurydice myth is especially
insightful.Ofeyi and Iriyise, hero and heroine of the novel, are given
names easily identifiable with Orpheus and Eurydice. Consistent with
the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, the captive abductee inSeason of Anomyis
Iriyise, substituting for Soyinka’s embodiment of that archetype in him-
self inThe Man Died. Indeed, inSeason, Iriyise is being held in a place called
Kuntua, a substitute name for Kaduna where Soyinka was held for most
of the period of his detention and where most of the accounts of the long
solitary phase of his incarceration inThe Man Diedare located. One of the
most bitter political criticisms made in that book of Soyinka’s prison ex-
perience is the continuum that the imprisoned writer perceives between
the repressive, degrading regimen of prison life and the fascist system
choking life outside the prison in crisis-ridden, war-torn Nigeria. The
quest of Ofeyi for Iriyise’s freedom inSeason of Anomyprovides Soyinka,
as author, the means to bear witness to the scope of the evil which that
fascist system consolidated as the basis of its grip on power and which
it apparently succeeded in reproducing in the beleaguered, traumatized
populace. Thus, anyone who has read the acts and scenes of mindless,
callous mass murder, bestiality and cynicism of the rulers and the ruled in