The Palm-Wine Drinkard is not the sort of book I usually read, being considered more “literary” fiction, but the description suggests it is strongly rooted in African folktales, so I decided to stretch my literary horizons a bit and give Tutuola’s novel a try. In my head, I intended to compare it favorably with Laurus, but The Palm-Wine Drinkard is far closer to its folktale origins and inspirations. It reads like a folktale itself that just happens to be written in the first person.
It is not clear from the beginning, or at least it was not clear to me from the beginning, that the narrator and protagonist in the story is not precisely human. He is originally depicted as what the title describes him: a palm-wine drinkard. Only as the story progresses does it become apparent that he has some divinity, magic, and/or demigod status which enables him to perform supernatural feats and survive trials which would otherwise be deadly. This realization is less disruptive to the reader experience than it might seem it should be, thanks both to how Tutuola presents the tale, and the nature of the folktales he is echoing. In African folktales, like many other traditions around the world, the magical, the divine, and the mythological are not firmly separated from the mundane, mortal world, but rather the two bleed into each other to an extent where they become almost inseparable, and the division between them, such as there may be, is imperceptible to participant and reader alike. Rather than hidden worlds of magic or mythical creatures hidden away from humanity, all that wonder (and horror) is still right here, a part of the world, and you might stumble upon the path to the lands of the dead as readily as you might take the turn right out of your neighborhood instead of left.
Only by accepting this – and Tutuola does an excellent job of narrating and presenting the story in such a frank, matter-of-fact fashion that the reader almost doesn’t realize what she’s accepting until it’s already been accepted – can the basic premise of the story function. The journey to the afterlife to retrieve someone is one of the most pervasive stories in global mythology, and in that sense Tutuola’s plot is frankly unoriginal. With a few African twists, from a plot perspective this is a story that’s been told thousands of times by thousands of people in hundreds of cultures. Where a more traditional myth might elevate it to the heights of triumph and tragedy, making it a story of human perseverance or the deep passion of the mortal doom with which we are afflicted, The Palm-Wine Drinkard depicts a journey to the afterlife that is almost the antithesis of these more conventional approaches. The titular drinkard sets off on an ambling quest to the underworld to retrieve his deceased palm-wine tapster. Yes, he’s going to brave the lands of the dead and all the horrors along the way because he can’t find anyone else who can give him as much and as quality palm wine to drink as he would like. Before you take that to indicate the depths of his commitment to this key figure in his life, consider the number of times he first attempts to replace the tapster, and the number of years he takes to make his journey, spending time dancing, getting married, living in paradisical villages, and so forth. I hesitate even to refer to it as a quest, so casual and lackadaisical is the effort.
I do not highlight this as a flaw, but rather as a distinctive characteristic of the story in this presentation of the journey-to-the-afterlife archetype. Tutuola’s style uniquely abets the “casual quest” impression and the intimate integration of the mortal and supernatural. His prose is transparent, direct, and overtly unpretentious. It doesn’t disappear, per se, in the way that Sanderson’s notion of transparent prose attempts, but rather is a part of the story. This is an example of where author’s voice is absolutely integral to the story’s success, and demonstrates admirably how the show-don’t-tell axiom breaks down. The Palm-Wine Drinkard is Tutuola telling us this story, and he does not seek to disguise the fact through artificial notions of intimacy and realism in novelization. Even his seeming anachronisms contribute to this effect. The timeframe in which the story is set is somewhat indeterminate – one might assume it is prehistoric because of the mythological trappings, but that does not seem to be the case, and at some junction the protagonist acquires a firearm – so the effect is of a timeless tale being told to us by an author who is part of a time period. Thus, the use of occasional references to more modern terminology or understandings, like photography, which might in another context be disruptive to the immersivity of the work, instead enhance this sense of Tutuola sitting down and telling us this story. He tells us the story the way you can imagine he might if we were sitting around a campfire and swapping legends – I can build a whole scene in my head of myself being told the story as I read it, which is frankly a fascinating effect. I wish I could say how much it comes from my efforts to engage with notions of oral literature, and how much any reader might experience something similar because of Tutuola’s approach.
Whether or not a story like this one really exists in the African folktale tradition, after reading it I cannot imagine it not being a part of that tradition. It’s a strange story, with a strange writing style that seems like it shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Honestly, I’m not sure how to recommend it. I found it fascinating to read for all the reasons already discussed, and it’s a short book, but I’m not sure if I can say that I really enjoyed it. I certainly didn’t enjoy it in the way I can say I enjoyed something like Laurus. Like reading an actual folktale, I enjoyed it more on the intellectual level of fascination, intrigue, understanding, and exploration than on the “I sat down and enjoyed a book for three hours” level. In this particular case, I also found it intriguing from a writing perspective. If what I’ve described here intrigues you, I would be interested to know your thoughts on The Palm-Wine Drinkard.
IGC Publishing 