The Interpreters

1. This analysis proposes an examination of the function of myth in differing postcolonial contexts, and argues that particular contexts of class configuration and state hegemony define the way myths are developed in novels. The paradigmatic, resonant and symbolic quality of myths means that they cannot be easily contained and condensed, hence they encode resistance to the hegemonic drives found in the narratives of the state. State narratives interpellate the subject as intimately connected to it in an effort to ease out potential dissent from the social formation. Their monologic forms do not easily offer the subject any space to articulate dissent in the form of dialogue. Myth then offers a counter to this monologic form and encodes dissent particularly when located in novels produced in the context of entrenched power formations. Historical context then makes myth an appropriate form at specific times. It will be argued that myth acts out dissent in ways that go beyond gesturing to and providing evidence of precolonial cultures and methods of organising. It engages with dominant discourses through hollowing out potential alternatives. As Stephen Slemon states:

Such acts of post-colonial literary resistance function counter-discursively because they "read" the dominant colonialist discursive system as a whole in its possibilities and operations and force that discourse's synchronic or unitary account of the cultural situation toward the movement of the diachronic. (13)

The context of Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah (1987) is that of a stagnant political situation and entrenched repressive regimes in Nigeria. It uses various degrees of humour and irony as a set of negative knowledges, and reveals potential alternatives through transgressing the forms of dominant discourses and by countering, through myth, the monologic and hegemonic forms of the official discourses of the state through plural and dialogic styles. The deployment of myth in Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965), written about the time of Nigerian independence, is necessarily different: myth is articulated through a link with a class about to take power, but one which is fearful of the demands of other classes. The way myth is used in this novel, then, negates these classes, but the mythical form still manages to initiate an act of dissent precisely through the way it cuts across and creates ruptures in the surface of the text.

1. The study of myths is linked to exercises within literary theory which seek to push the author away from the centre of the text and to show him/her as the medium through which larger models speak; the text is a language the author never fully understands or organises. In part this is so because myths have no point of origin that can be located in the figure of the author. Whilst in literary theory this has been the project since the advent of structuralism, within the study of mythology this notion of decentring goes back at least as far as Freud, who locates myths within the unconscious and thinks it "extremely probable that myths are distorted vestiges of the wish-fulfilment of whole nations - the age long dreams of young humanity" (qtd. in Okpehwo, Myth in Africa 10). If we are to see mythopoeic literature in Africa as an inflection of dissent, then we are faced with the fundamental, and taxing, question of agency because myths have no authorial point of origin. Agency becomes problematical whenever we want to see phenomena within the sphere of decentring and dominant, residual and emergent narratives, whether within the sphere of revolution, of revolt, or of literary production. As Okpehwo says, "the premium placed on the unconscious by Freud and Jung removes myth-making from the sphere of creative awareness and skill" (Myth in Africa 13).

2. Okpehwo's statement concerning a juxtaposition of the unconscious and creative skill does pinpoint the problems faced when taking analyses of myth into areas of literature whose place in relation to the dominant order is by no means fixed. By this is meant that without some sense of composition and organisation, it is difficult to place the way myths in novels are set negatively against the social and political order, unless it is assumed that myths of themselves are set against the circumstances within which they are voiced. This cannot be assumed since the stories of myth are usually of a neutral nature, but once they are linked to some other element, at the level of plot, character or metaphor, they can be transformed into narratives of dissent. By the term neutral I suggest that myths are not of themselves political; they are in some senses inactive until motivated by context. As they are always motivated or set in motion by political context, neutral myths do not exist as such except theoretically.

3. Perhaps we ought not to be distracted by notions of creative skill for, despite much that is useful and insightful, Okpehwo's study is geared towards establishing myth-making within the autonomous free play and "fancy" of the imagination, a task that necessarily reinvents the completely self aware and centred author as producer of a work. Elsewhere Okpehwo has suggested that "we are free to call any narrative of the oral tradition a myth, so long as it gives due emphasis to fanciful play" and further suggests that myth is defined by a move away from real life experiences into fantasy as it "liberates itself from the bondage of historical time" ("Modern Fiction" 1). Here it will be argued that this sense of autonomy is important, as myth does clear a symbolic autonomous space where little actually exists, given the constraints of history, but it will also be argued that myth in the novels discussed is closely linked to history.

4. It should be noted that Okpehwo assumes complete coincidence between oral literature and tales of a mythical nature. This is a common assumption to make, and is made by JanMohamed, who writes that the fundamental factor involved in the development of African literature is literacy and that literacy leads to the development of a historical consciousness:

by allowing any (literate) individual to scrutinize the fixed past, to distinguish between truth and error, and consequently to cultivate a more conscious, critical and comparative attitude to the accepted world picture. Such an attitude eventually produces a sense of change, of the human past as an objective reality available to causal analysis, and of history as a broad attempt to determine reality on every (diachronic) area of human concern. This in turn permits a distinction between "history" and "myth." (280)

In giving assent to