1 Introduction

The first beginnings of the Nigerian novel may be located in what has come to be known as Onitsha Market Literat ure. This outbreak of writing in the 1940s in the market town of Onitsha did not produce literary works of the type that usually exercise critic ism. It may have done so with time, but it ended too soon needed internal developme — before it had undergone, the nt. Its greatest achievement was in the field of the moral tale. But there was quite a deal of salacious low humour, as the readership comprised the swelling population of young migrants from the surrounding rural areas, who were mostly people with low lev els of formal education. But the first work of fiction to be recognized as a novel seems to have had nothing to do with the Onitsha tradition. A mos Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard, published in 1952, was that work. But its novel quest status m ay be put in ion, if the criterion used is the humanistic one, whereby the novel is said to be concerned with the relationship of the individual and society. Wherever the humanistic theory of literature is held as the objective view of literary art, as is the case in t he Nigerian institutions of literature, the notion that the novel is about the individual and society has usually been taken as selfevident tru th. But this is a claim that ought to be properly examined. As will be seen in this study, the novel's preoccupa tions are often with far other things than are covered by that formula. For instance, there are novels in which what is seen is the individual confronting the forces of chaos. If this is the case with some novels, then the novel is neither society, nor about about the indiv idual and the individual and the forces of chaos. The most we can say is that neither is excluded from the discourse of the n ovel. But then, neither holds the key to the understanding of the nature of the novel. The question of the indi vidual and society and the character in confrontation with chaos is connected to discursive Elements of this sort may help us in group formation. ing works together for discussion. The question of the nature of the novel is a more general one, and yet of th e first importance, as this is what makes possible the selection of texts for discussion, even if one wishes to approach them from the viewpoint of the discursive formations. The humanist approach to literature, obviously, has serious limitations. Its ide a of the business of the novel as centred on the interface between the individual and society is can be demonstrated in a re demonstrable. But it latively small number of novels: it covers only these, not all novels. Its claim that the novel is an instrumen . t of instruction which can humanize us is more difficult to demonstrate. In the case of the novel humanizing us, one may only work by speculation In that of the instrument of instruction, probably more than speculation is involved, as any accounting for t he authority of the poet to teach tends to implicate the oracular — hence superstition: the superstition of the oracle. In contrast this superstiti poet is the artist in Gabriel Okara's The Voice, ous regard of the who has that the protagonist t it, something raverses the space of the narration in search of, and all his energy to inculcate, finally to die in the effort. All the same, having this suprem e reality is unable to make the artist's 'inside sweet.' In any event, the attribution of instructional and hum anizing powers to the novel does not give us a clue as to how the novel differs from, say, the wellrespected newspapers. There are, however, ot her general statements about literary phenomena, which aim to apply to literature anyth ing else; and at the same time, to all — in contradistinction to of literature. Among these, some are more keenly aware of literature as an art strictest sensobject in the e, and therefore, subject only to the rules of art. For these theories, accordingly, the determination of the text as a work of art is the only viable starting point for the reading of it. Thus the question is not what is the novel about. In fact, if the q uestion should start with the novel, it is only to lead us to the more fundamental one, what is art; what is l iterary art? This postulates that the accounting for all the various subtypes of this art form, of which the novel is one, has to be based on a si ngle general statement. For instance, if, according to the humanists, the novel is about the 'individual and s ociety,' it must follow that this is what characterizes the novel. That is to say, it is taken that the novel is a special kind of literature chara cterized by a reflection on the individual's experiences in relation to the socius. This further entails that for the understanding of lyric poetry and dramatic literature we must seek another set of criteria altogether. In this case, the presupposition is that lyric and dramatic literature are systems which are totally different from the novel, and it matters li ttle that they have all been handed down by tradition as 'literary forms.' We would be saying, in other words, that in each, we are faced with an o bject all its own, that to move from one to another is to become aware of wholly new properties. The novel i s retrieved from social discourse if seen in line with the phenomenologists, who explain art, including literature, as a movement of thought or fan tasy coming into being as, and in one of the forms sanctioned and hallowed by tradition. By contrast, it is t reated under social discourse either as a weapon of reaction or a way of escape. On the one hand, it is harnessed by the politically disenfranchise d, in what Nietzsche calls 45ressentiment (Ecce 7), as a way of expressing opposition to a ruling and Homo, wealthy elite they dare not face in the open, outside metaphor and allegory. On the other hand, the literary work is taken by the unpacified and the emotionally disturbed as a place of refuge, where they can leave the world behind. For these, sociality its elf is oppression necessarily implies restrictions to the self. insofar as it As we have seen in regard to the discursive formation, the literary w ork may in fact reflect see an example in Ben Okri's ressentiment, or even escapism. We The Landscapes Withi n, where the protagonist, Omovo, chances upon the body of a murdered and mutilated young girl along the beach, in the company of his friend Keme. Th ey are told by the police who arrive the next day to investigate that there had been no body. Troubled by this 'disappearing act,' frustrated because of his inability to do anything about it, and overcome by feelings of humiliation, anger, and betrayal, Om ovo ends up eventually channelling all this into a painting of a tree, leafless and with all its branches sa wn off. In the background, there hover birds of prey, while in the foreground lies and faceless body of a young girl. This painting, th the mutilated erefore, carries the burden of Omovo's anger and frustration over a crime of which the author ought to be f ound and punished, but which he must now think of as a kind of hallucination. The other process, when Om ressentiment, we also see in the same work, ovo revenges mentally against his colleagues in the office with whom he is unable to get on: He brought ou t his notebook and started doing a sketch of nothing in particular; then the idea occurred to him that he should draw Simon, Chako and the supervisor huddled together in some sort of secret discussion about pay increases. He caricatured them; he drew Simon 's face like a broken calabash glued together, giving strangely geometric qualities and exaggerating the lines and veins on his face. He also gave hi m an expression of suspended torture, a harried, haggard look, his eyes supposedly staring at nothing. He d rew Chako as a series of lines, ordinary and listless, except that he carved for him an extraordinarily long nose, long and thick and ungainly; and i n an experimental mood he depicted the supervisor's head as a curled naira note and then made his smallish, curved coins. shrivelled ears into oddly When he had finished he stared at the drawing and burst out laughing (199). What we see in the first case is Omovo channelling emotion away from the world of action into that of art so as to stop himself being su ffocated by it, as he can find no one he can legitimately blame for the outrageous reality he is faced with. In the second, he deploys art for imagin ative vengeance, without running the risk of a retaliatory blow; having satisfied himself that he has hit b ack at his enemies, he puts away his sketch in his pocket. But, as with the discursive formations, it is entirely another matter to say that what Omovo does here is what art is all about. In Freud's account, art comes as the adult equivalent of infantile play. But whereas the infant keeps his play-world distinct from reality, the adult takes his play-world so seriously as to mistake it for reality. The paradigm of the work of art in this determination is the artefact which consciously enacts this fantasy world, and is constituted to do precisely this. Some of the earliest of the Nigerian novels are constructs based on fantasy. The first in our chronology, Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard, has no other underpinning than fantasy, which means that it is pure fiction. This is the kind of work which, far from conniving at the humanist reader's readiness to keep moving from the work to the outside world and back again, is itself reality. In time, it may even be retrojected beyond history, as the origin of the race itself or, more frequently, as a reference point in the derivation of the community's belief systems. From the beginning, therefore, the Nigerian novel has been traditional insofar as it has sought consciously to be art. It comes of age, that is, at the time it first impresses itself on the general consciousness, by taking place in a form which is also traditionally very important for a literary culture, the form of the heroic narrative in Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. On the one hand, it is as if the tradition wishes to leave no one in doubt that it is literary; on the other, the movement from fantasy to the heroic is a kind of sign-signal that this is indeed a tradition. Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard and Achebe's Things Fall Apart, to take the two in isolation, bear important, and perhaps surprising resemblances to the ancient Greek tradition, founded on Homer's two great works, the Odyssey, which is the primary and exemplary literary epic, and the Iliad, the proto-heroic narrative. Odysseus's encounters with Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, Proteus, Cyclops, and so on like each and every one of the episodes of The Palm Wine Drinkard, are all entirely fantastic, and have their basis in poetry (poiesis, 'a making') than in the world of human action. For its own part, Things Fall Apart, as a heroic narrative is Homeric, in that here 'the hero lives and dies for his own glory' (see Delasanta, 1967:22). This is quite unlike the Virgilian pattern in which the hero has a destiny that is social in character. Living and dying for one's own glory is therefore part and parcel of the form, as a received process, in what we may call the exemplary heroic narrative. Virgil's Aeneid, on the other hand, not only continues the Homeric tradition, and in this way supplies Roman culture, it also plunges the heroic form into a crisis, so that something new emerges. In whatever specification, however, literary epics and heroic narratives are usually to be found in a literary tradition as part of its inauguration (Delasanta18). In addition to their importance in the founding of a literary tradition, The Palm Wine Drinkard and Things Fall Apart also play the functional role of forming and shaping the tradition. In this regard, Things Fall Apart has been much more productive than The Palm Wine Drinkard. Some in fact think that in its triumph, Things Fall Apart had thrown out so thick a shadow as to have constrained most of the other, particularly later creative writers in its magic circle. As a result, their efforts amount to little more than the rewriting and recreating of images of the same sequence already familiar in Things Fall Apart. Others, however, would argue that the recurrence of elements which share resemblances with Things Fall Apart is because of the colonial experience, which was so profound a shock that the only way to come to terms with it and with oneself as a formerly colonized person was to talk about it and write about it. But people like Opoku-Agyemang (1996) have concluded that in that case, the issue to talk and write about is slavery, since the shock is more profound, and the demographic and economic impact more devastating and long lasting. More commonly, the view expressed in the West is that the recurrence of constructions with cultural material is owing to nostalgia and sentimentality. Given these hard and fixed positions, precious little of the movements of what may be called 'experimentation,' in Nigerian literature, as in Amadi's The Concubine, is noticed, in this story, human participants operating within the constraints of their environment and level of action are pairing up for marriage. But this perfectly conventional process becomes the captive of the magical world of fantasy, which redistributes the elements of that matchmaking sequence according to a law that is in human terms irrational. This mode of capture by the irrational is a feature shared by Omotoso's early work. In Akwanya's Orimili the functioning of fantasy is by pluralizing the protagonist into a composite of personalities, both human and divine, so that even though his actions are at the human level, they reverberate at the other levels where he has correspondences. Seen in this same light of experimentation, Mezu's Behind the Rising Sun is a purely poetic construction, insofar as its Utopia has no tangible props, and simply breaks out with no provocation or logic, out of the anomie of war. In these examples, we have fantasy in one form or another self-avowed. It is not so manifest in most literary works, and yet it is possible to say that fantasy is at the heart of all literature. The work may be logical at the level of the sequential ordering of events, but all this logic may be constructed upon a spot of darkness, or on what Paul Ricoeur calls an 'undiscoverable rationality.' This includes even such works as Achebe's A Man of the People, which places every participant, the narrator himself not excepted, under the lenses of rationality. For it produces the story of Chief Nanga as the story of the nation. Hence when the narrator offers an explanation for the overthrow of the government (143-144), we realize that this comprises the reason for the production of the history of Chief Nanga which we have been reading. Nanga turns out to be a bearer of meaning far in excess of his real worth. What is more, he is both a character and a sign: he is readable; and what we read has a surface and a depth—at the surface, the character's personal history, at the depth, the nation's history. This depth is what gives the signs at the surface, the signs of Nanga, that is, a semantic density. Quite a few of the novels we find in this tradition display no awareness of the necessity of fantasy in art, and are concerned to present totally convincing arguments and explanations. In this case, fiction becomes a way of doing something which may be equally accomplished in some other way. This kind of literature, not carrying in its body its distinctive form, will try to claim distinctness from whatever else may resemble it by reference to what Aristotle calls 'accidents,' in terms of what kind of words it employs, what kind of imagery, and so on. Its claims as art cannot be by reference to its essential nature, but to its embellishments, its clothing.

The novel, probably the strongest of all the lit Nigerian tradition, may have derived f erary forms in the rom its formative experiences, particularly the heroic form, a dependence upon provocations which pertain to the public sphere. Colonization was the first of these public events, at any rate the one the novel has been most keenly aware of. What follows col onization in the order of importance and therefore the rate at which it has exercised writing is selfrule and independence, followed by malpractice and the breakdown of the political process. The ma jor traumatic event of the later twentieth century was of course the civil war (19671970), and it has been correspondingly highly productive. Many new writers made their debut as novelists with narratives provoked by this war. It provoked Eddie Iroh to tr y his hand at novel writing: he produced a trilogy on i t . Others whose works are more central in the task we are dealing with here are Kole Omotoso, Festus Iyayi , I.N.C. Aniebo, and S.O. Mezu. That civil war has remained productive to the present, as in Ok Nkala's Drums and the Voice of Death onkwo (1996). But a complaint similar to the one we have mentioned in respect of the exercise of thought over the colonial experience is being voiced in recent times in respect of war experience as a discursive formatio n. The public events of the 1970s and 1980s were military rule, violent changes of government, corruption, political repression, and urban poverty. Criticism was becoming radical at the same time, and demanded of creative writing to be politically committ ed. As a resul t, the concrete historical event exercised thought less and less, and literary activity increasingly took the form of thought scrutinizing social and political practice in order to make out the intention behind it, in order to expose and deno unce it. In a portrayed by Russell Jacoby in his reverse process to that Social Amnesia, the Nigerian novel was moving into an era in which it was history that was consigned to forgetfulness, while all awareness focused on the objectionable in contemporary experience. Th e resultant capture of literature by social criticism led to sterility, as it tied the work irremediably to the time of its relevance. This meant that if the circumstances changed, new works were called for to provide the commentary, causing the ones which were previously relevant to go down several points a time on the chart, occasionally to be encountered in undergraduate essays, which can do no more than rehash what the social conditions of the writer's experience were, which must have bee n their object of reaction. By and by, the works themselves are lost altogether to consciousness. By thus becoming transitory, literature was ceasing to know itself as poetry — that which is made up, whose value is in its being made up, not in the wisdoms it utters or in t bringing about change in the sociocultura l heir effectiveness in environment. Literature as poetic art could little hope to make recovery, except by recreating itself, phoenix like, out of the ashes of social commentary and criticism. For m oraa long time during the 1990s, it was as if the Nigerian novel was a movement whose career had already come to an end. The signs of recovery in recent times are in the work of people like Jude Ogu, Adi Ezigbo, and Matthias Njoku.