Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters: The Literary Context

The Interpreters has been misread, and often castigated for its seeming lack of imaginative unity, since its publication in 1965. It was believed to be a brilliant but poorly focused satire criticizing Nigeria's leadership in politics, higher education, and the media for its failures of insight and sincerity. When it was demonstrated in the early 1970s that the novel was rooted in Yoruba creation legends, it moved up somewhat in critical attention and esteem but some fundamental structural questions were still unanswered. The present paper proposes a totally new reading of the novel in which the form deriving from Yoruba creation stories is firmly fused with the Joycean myth of Ulysses and the creative artist. In this revised interpretation, the novel springs into life with a new depth of meaning and organic unity of structure.