Superman as Master Narrative

The Interpreted World’s Resistance to Perishing in Wole Soyinka’s Aké

Wole Soyinka’s works are not being read as much as one would expect of a Nobel laureate in his own country. The common complaint is that his works are difficult. His third novel Aké seems to have fared even worse than the two before it. In addition to the charge of difficulty, Aké is also said to be autobiography, as if the appearance of facts of personal history – or any kind of history – in a novel necessarily disqualifies the work for consideration as art. Careful reading of the work, however, reveals characteristic patterning of art. In this paper, some of the artistic patterns of the novel are discussed, but the focus is on the ways culture-based interpretations of reality resist perishing under the onslaught of new modes of being in the world which Christianity and colonization have made possible.