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Overview
The Interpreters is a novel by Wole Soyinka. It was first published in 1965. The story is set in Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria. The time of the plot is the early 1960s, soon after Nigerian independence. The novel, which follows a social realism style, focuses on a group of intellectuals struggling to find meaning and purpose in a rapidly changing society.
Plot Summary of The Interpreters
The Interpreters has no central plot; it is instead a sequence of dramatic scenes and lyric descriptions that follow a chronological line, interrupted by periodic flashbacks and recollections, during the rainy season in Nigeria from May through July. The action shifts from Lagos and the university city of Ibadan to the back country and lagoons outside populated areas. The main characters are university graduates, who have studied and traveled abroad and have just returned to Nigeria because of the country’s newly obtained independence. These intellectuals, interpreters of the new Nigeria, are trying to find their way within the new political structure, within a society dominated by confusion, insensitivity, social climbing, and corruption. One thing that holds the novel together is the gradual movement of the interpreters—Bandele, Egbo, Biodun Sagoe, Kola, Sekoni—toward an awareness of their situation.
The first story that Wole Soyinka introduces is that of Egbo, the grandson and heir of a tribal chief and warlord. His dilemma is whether he should return to the old village and assume his powers and privileges (including polygamy) or abandon them and adapt to the new Nigeria. By delaying his return (he does make one abortive trip toward his home country), he in effect chooses to remain in the present, though the alternatives plague him throughout the novel. The dilemma is compounded by another: Should he remain with his mistress, Simi, a nationally famous courtesan with whom he forms an intimate relationship early in the novel, or abandon her to commit himself to a university student, a feminist, who is pregnant with his child and who challenges the moral prudishness of the university elite? The old African society, which Egbo has forfeited, has a social structure permitting him to keep both. The new society demands that he make a choice and, at the same time, declares unacceptable the two women he would choose. The novel leaves him in a state of frustration.
The second story to take shape is that of Sagoe, a reporter for a Lagos newspaper and an amateur philosopher. In addition to his relationship with his fiancee, Komolola Dehinwa—a comic, romantic sparring of intellectual equals—Sagoe participates in a picaresque sequence of curious adventures: a visit to a cemetery where he watches two funeral processions; an encounter with an evangelical preacher, Lazarus; indecorous, even zany, confrontations with respectable society; and an accidental meeting with Joe Golder, which provides psychological material for an entire chapter. What holds these adventures together is not the development of plot or even of character but of common motifs.
A third story, which extends over a large portion of the novel, especially the second half, is that of Lazarus, who is not a main character but who attracts the attention of all the interpreters. Sagoe first sees Lazarus, an albino, in a battered hearse leading a bedraggled funeral procession to a cemetery. When Sagoe steals a wreath from a rich procession to place it on the poor one, Lazarus marks him as a moral man. They meet again while watching a market crowd chase a thief. Lazarus eventually transforms that thief into an acolyte and has plans for him to be his new apostle, replacing the one who has died. In hopes of winning Sagoe and his interpreter friends over to his religion, or perhaps simply to get publicity for it, Lazarus tracks Sagoe down. He informs him and the other interpreters of his history; he shows them newspaper clippings as evidence that he died and came back to life. Since the interpreters have recently lost their close friend, Sekoni, and are intrigued with notions of rebirth, they accept Lazarus’ invitation to a church service. There they see the marketplace thief, renamed Noah, apparently converted to the new faith. The interpreters are not convinced of Lazarus’ resurrection or of Noah’s conversion, but Kola is fascinated enough to ask both Noah and Lazarus to sit for his painting of the Yoruba pantheon. Lazarus’ story ends disastrously when the homosexual Joe Golder intimidates Noah into jumping off the balcony of his eighth-floor apartment.
Such incidents as these make up the novel. They bring together the various interpreters who interact and respond to contemporary situations, learning about themselves and exposing follies in contemporary Nigeria. They do not, in mere outline, do justice to the artistry of Soyinka. His is a sensitive portrayal, though difficult to follow, of a lost generation. None of the stories ends with any assuredness of success. In the final pages the characters seem suspended in time.
Characterisation in The Interpreters
Summary:
Bandele is a professor of history at the University of Nigeria at Ibadan.
Egbo is a clerk in the Foreign Office and the heir to a village chiefdom.
Biodun Sagoe is a newspaper reporter for the Independent Viewpoint in Lagos.
Kola is a painter and a lecturer in art.
Sekoni is an engineer who later becomes a sculptor.
Komolola Dehinwa is Sagoe’s fiancée and a clerk in the Civil Service.
Joe Golder is a homosexual, quadroon American singer and a lecturer in African history at the University of Nigeria at Ibadan.
Rather than develop one protagonist, Soyinka paints a picture of an entire society in a wide variety of settings, not only the professional class that receives primary attention but also a few people on the fringes of polite society—an evangelical preacher, a courtesan, and a thief. In a sense, Soyinka divides the characters into two groups, the observed and the observer, though the observers themselves, the interpreters, must submit to the closest scrutiny.
Among the observed are the colleagues of Bandele at the University of Nigeria and their professional acquaintances. Theirs is a superficial world that Soyinka describes in a comic mode. Were they the only subjects of the novel, it would be a comedy of manners. The observed, however, are not only those who insist on Victorian manners and morals, those who hypocritically lecture on the “merel terpitude” of the young, or who, like Dr. Lumoye, exchange abortion services for sexual favors, but also more appealing characters. Lazarus, though a misguided evangelist, is both dignified and sympathetic, one of the false prophets that the moral chaos of modern Nigeria has created. Joe Golder, far from being a comic figure, contains within himself the conflict between the old and new cultures. As a quadroon American, he is descended from Africa. He has rejected Western society but, looking more white than black and not having been reared in Africa, he is homeless there as well. As a homosexual, he is alienated from society and from himself. In his conversation with Sagoe, Golder goes through a series of self-revelations, obviously repeated numerous times to different men, which, along with the “fastidious air” of his apartment, expose his lack of depth. He is, as he says in his favorite song “a motherless child,” cut off from his roots. This void torments him and results in self-pity and, paradoxically, in an elevation of the self to a sense of superiority. He belongs nowhere, but for that reason, even though he is not one of the African interpreters, he represents a feeling that they all have. Their past, too, appears inaccessible and irrelevant to the modern situation.
Soyinka uses the interpreters to explore serious psychological and practical problems facing the honorable few in Nigerian society. Soyinka looks at them from the inside. Sekoni is a high-strung, withdrawn genius, thwarted by the authorities in his efforts as an engineer; turned sculptor, he is regarded by the others as an uncanny, though stuttering, medium of sacred truths. His death, while accidental, seems a tragic loss and changes the mood of the novel. As painter of the pantheon, Kola knows that Nigeria must return to its cultural heritage but seems to have confused Yoruba and Christian myths and is unsure of himself as an artist and as a man. His behavior toward Faseyi’s English wife, Monica, has false touches of a Western romantic love. Sagoe, as attractive as he is in his role as social rebel, is still a child in his continual conflicts with Dehinwa, in his antics at social gatherings, and in his final, comic plan to unite southern and northern Nigeria by exchanging Lagos “night soil” (human faeces as fertilizer) for Hausa donkeys and human labour. He is a frustrated writer without a subject or an audience. He promises, however, to abandon his Philosophy of Voidancy (a Platonic evacuation of the bowels) when he and Dehinwa get married. Egbo, according to Kola, has the hidden power to accomplish great things, but he does not have artistic talent. His success must be in the world of human affairs, yet his strength is dissipated by his dilemmas. He cannot go beyond his personal problems to achieve anything practical. In what looks like a Freudian analysis of character, Soyinka places all Egbo’s energy in the libido, not as yet sublimated into civilizing activities.
If anyone is the leader of the group of interpreters, it is Bandele; he speaks with the authority of the elders in ancient society, but the voice will not carry weight in modern Nigeria. Even at the end of the novel, when he finally decides to break with an increasingly unacceptable social hypocrisy, he cannot change anything; he can only shock by issuing a curse, accusing the elite of eating their own children to save themselves.
The comic presentation of character, which permeates much of the novel, has underlying it a satiric intent that darkens the mood. Among the observed, the figures of Joe Golder and Lazarus loom larger than the comic portraits; they belong to a serious or even tragic novel rather than a comic one. As for the observers, at the beginning they are a cohesive unit, enjoying life in one of many drunken get-togethers at a Lagos nightclub. By the end, they are a sober, somber assortment, drifting apart, at odds not only with society but also with one another.
Themes in The Interpreters
Summary: The major themes in The Interpreters include the conflict between tradition and modernity, the moral decay of post-independence Nigeria, and the search for identity. The novel explores corruption, societal hypocrisy, and the struggles of intellectuals trying to find their place in a changing nation. Soyinka portrays a lost generation, uncertain of their future and suspended between the past and present.
Everything in The Interpreters suggests that Nigeria in the early 1960’s is in transition: the comic but dangerous characters futilely holding on to the manners of Victorian England; the interpreters in suspension, seeking themselves and their roles in the body politic; the oppressive, seemingly interminable rainy season; the unsifted mixture of traditional and contemporary corruption; the death and rebirth motif that promises hope but is temporarily manifest in false forms; the open-endedness of the novel, which promises change rather than mere repetition.
Transition is a state of confusion and paralysis; no established code sanctions behavior. Egbo, for example, is lost because he is caught between two worlds, neither of them clearly offering a value system according to which he can function. He attempts to return to traditional Yoruba mythology, but it is a completely private process until he shares it with the stranger girl during one intimate night of love. During his childhood, his Christian guardians had beaten him for praying to heathen gods. Such worship was “apostasy”—a word repeated often enough in the novel to qualify as a key to the central theme. Kola describes it as “an absolute neutrality,” the hardest thing in the world to paint. Later, Egbo and Kola debate its meaning and determine that there are two types of apostates, Christ and Judas. The one heroically breaks new ground by declaring an old code defunct or by reinterpreting it; the other, merely for the sake of immediate gratification, betrays an accepted belief. The difficulty lies in knowing what the true codes are and hence who the heroes are.
Soyinka presents three artist-interpreters—the writer, Sagoe; the painter, Kola; and the sculptor, Sekoni—who face the task of discovery. Sagoe gets no further than an article on Sekoni that becomes a pawn in a cover-up, a proposed article on Lazarus that has little chance of uncovering any truth, and a Philosophy of Voidancy that he has sworn to abandon by the end of the novel. Kola attempts to re-create in one painting the entire Yoruba pantheon but encounters numerous difficulties, among which are his own inadequate talent and conceptions and the paucity of adequate models in contemporary society. At one point, he thinks that he has found the perfect model for Esumare, the rainbow that will complete his picture, in the acolyte-thief, Noah. Yet he eventually acknowledges that Noah is “simply negative,” an absolute neutrality, and an “unrelieved vacuity.”
Hence, he changes his mind; Noah becomes the apostate servant who rolls the stone down the back of Obatala, causing the original fragmentation of the world. His next model for Esumare, Lazarus, proves similarly inadequate, at least according to Egbo, who harshly criticizes the painting. Egbo objects to the rainbow itself as a resolution. It would seem that Kola has allowed his evangelist model to influence his composition, by imposing a Christian solution onto the problems of contemporary life. As Egbo says, “He has made the beginning itself a resurrection. This is an optimist’s delusion of continuity.” Egbo, with his close ties to traditional society and myth, prefers Ogun, the warrior-god in Yoruba myth, as the god of resolution. Hence, also, his objection to Kola’s representation of Ogun. After Ogun had built a bridge joining earth to the gods, he became drunk and slaughtered his own soldiers in a bloody massacre. Using Egbo as his model, Kola has chosen to depict this moment of Ogun’s ultimate shame. In fact, Kola has perhaps accurately reflected the contemporary scene but wrongly turns to the ambiguous symbol of the rainbow, instead of to Ogun’s victory, as a paradigm for recovery.
The artist that has best perceived the obligation facing the interpreters is Sekoni. His sculpture, The Wrestler, has its origin in a simple brawl in a nightclub during which Bandele had wrestled a waiter and bound him with a rope. The waiter seems to represent the treacherous servant who caused the original fragmentation of the world. In binding him, Bandele desperately tries to maintain wholeness. The sculpture reminds them of their Yoruba heritage, the original dissolution of order, and the struggle necessary to restore it. The novel may finally argue that apostasy is a blind obedience to alien codes and that the true “apostate” reinterprets the old tradition, essential African values, in the modern setting.
Critical Context
The novel, though a Western form, has proved to be a flexible medium for Soyinka and other African writers. In using it to reflect his perception of African life, Soyinka has created structures uniquely his own. Both The Interpreters and Season of Anomy (1973), his second novel, range from farce and social satire to psychological realism, romance, symbolism, and myth. In Soyinka’s case the range derives its justification not only from the complexity of African life but also from his specific cultural context, the Yoruba mythology in Western Africa, specifically the god Ogun, whose mythical story makes him both creator and destroyer, both protector of the weak and drunken murderer. Such contradictory, paradoxical qualities in one god suggest to Soyinka the complexity of the human makeup and of human actions, and hence the variety of modes appropriate within one unified work. One finds similar mixes in Soyinka’s drama.
One particular aim of Soyinka is to carry over into the novel what in his drama is a literary adaptation of communal ritual. Soyinka stresses its importance not only by its noticeable absence in The Interpreters and by its presence in Season of Anomy but also by the representations of the communal experience itself, insofar as that is possible in a narrative form. In The Interpreters, the five men who form the close-knit group of intellectuals are an unsuccessful substitute for what is lacking in the community at large. In Season of Anomy, Soyinka creates a whole community, Aiyero, that possesses the old communal spirit and practices its rites. Much of the difficulty in Soyinka’s style is its elusiveness, elliptical and imagistic qualities that convey a mysteriousness and a cultishness, a hidden presence that never quite reveals itself. To the Westerner encountering Soyinka’s world, the sensation of strangeness is not only unmistakable but also persistent, even after several readings.
That Soyinka has created literary works distinctively original and has furthermore succeeded in becoming an African voice of international significance, has been officially recognized by the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.
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