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Review [published March 2008]
Amos Tutuola: The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Jason Weaver
Aside from the transmogrified strangeness of folk and
fairy tales, Amos Tutuola’s 1952 novel The Palm-Wine
Drinkard is unlike almost anything else in print. Nebulous
comparisons might be made with Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
Kafka’s inconclusive parables or Alice In
Wonderland, but things behave very differently from
even these European gargoyles in Tutuola’s twilight
world. I know nothing about the author’s own relationship
to Nigerian culture. I would rather meet him as a
stranger on the road, enchanting and a little spooky.
What everyone knows is that David Byrne and Brian
Eno named their album of bricolage and technological
tribalism after Tutuola’s second novel My Life In The
Bush Of Ghosts. Both claimed they had never actually
read the book, but it would have been a wholly appropriate
influence on Byrne’s ‘stop making sense’ lyrics
and the circuit- breaking Eno.
Every novel simulates a compact universe. It sets the
rules by which that existence operates and, to be successful
on its own terms, it must adhere to these tacit
laws. As an exception, Thomas Pynchon’s V exploits
this by setting two wholly incompatible universes
BUY Amos Tutuola books online from and
against one another, disrupting the coherence of narrative
singularity through which most novels stage
their rhetorical arguments. Fantasy stories, on the
other hand, often unwittingly flout their own narrative
coherence. The Lord Of The Rings wants it both ways.
We are expected to surrender to the dramatic tension
of classic narrative logic, where everything is at stake,
where every act is terminal and can never be undone.
The logic of Oedipus Rex is inexorable, the “infernal
machine” as Cocteau called it. But when Frodo lies
dying in The Lord Of The Rings or as the Hobbits are
surrounded by malevolence, the emotional charge is
defused. A spell is invoked, time is reversed, the slate
is wiped clean. This is as incompatible with relentless
narrative as Pynchon’s and the fantasy story fails on
both counts.
What is so vital about The Palm-Wine Drinkard is
Tutuola’s absolute dedication to the fantastic. All laws
of the probable are flouted and everything is elastic.
Details are hasty and sketched and sentences often end
with a blunt “etc”. Things are most often described by
the elements that mark them out, make them what they
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