Abstract:
Thinking the present social tensions in Nigeria, there is a sense of a new chapter. There were earlier chapters, like the tensions over Sharia Law in the 1980s and the regional and ethnic rivalries that culminated in civil war in the 1960s. Newness here is as in mythopoiesis where the surface properties of a component of an old or received myth are substituted, without affecting the total significance of the myth. The result is that there is underlying sameness in the novelty. This is what occasions for this paper remembrance of Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy in the functionality of a proverb. Season of Anomy is a work in which a converging pattern of actions, some in pursuit of profit motive, some in the way of exercise of power and domination, still others in selfless community-building efforts culminate in a vast and lethal explosion. This is anomy, but it is coming in season. The time of the reign of this particular chaos will pass – till a full cycle; and then begins again. This paper will draw from Northrop Frye’s archetypes of literature and Michel Foucault’s theory of similitude to elucidate the capacity of a literary work to function as a proverb.
