Transcript Amos Tutuola

Amos Tutuola
(1920-1997).
Nigerian writer
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Amos Tutuola
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Nigeria
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The Grotesque
The Mercator World Map
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The Grotesque
The Peters World Map
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The Grotesque
Three Contexts for
Understanding
Tutuola:
(1) Primitive/Folk Art
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Grandma Moses
{Anna Mary
Robertson} (18601961). American
primitive painter
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The Grotesque
Grandma Moses, Country Wedding
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The Grotesque
Grandma Moses, The Old Checkered House
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The Grotesque
Grandma Moses, Beautiful World
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The Grotesque
Howard Finster
(1916-2001).
American folk artist
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The Grotesque
Howard Finister,
Elvis Presley
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The Grotesque
Howard
Finster,
Resting
Souls Wait
for Jesus
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The Grotesque
Howard Finster
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The Grotesque
Howard Finster
Amos Tutuola
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The Grotesque
Three Contexts for
Understanding
Tutuola:
(2) Campbell’s
Monomyth
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Joseph Campbell
(1904-1987)
Campbell’s
Monomyth
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C. G. Jung (18751961)
Key Jungian Ideas:
The Collective
Unconscious
The Archetypes
Individuation
Anima/Animus
Projection
Authenticity
Shadow
Daimon
C. G. Jung
Campbell’s
Monomyth
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque
George Lucas
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque
Campbell’s Monomyth
Joseph Campbell
(1904-1987)
Campbell’s
Monomyth
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque
C. G. Jung (18751961)
Key Jungian Ideas:
The Collective
Unconscious
The Archetypes
Individuation
Anima/Animus
Projection
Authenticity
Shadow
Daimon
C. G. Jung
Campbell’s
Monomyth
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque
George Lucas
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque
Campbell’s Monomyth
Joseph Campbell
(above), Richard
Slotkin (top right),
Joss Whedon
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque
Campbell’s
Monomyth
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Hero’s Journey : Summary of Steps
Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction (MCLI)
Maricopa Community Colleges
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The Grotesque
Departure
The Call to Adventure
The call to adventure is the point in a person's life
when they are first given notice that everything is
going to change, whether they know it or not.
Hero’s Journey : Summary of Steps
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The Grotesque
Departure
Refusal of the Call
Often when the call is given, the future hero refuses
to heed it. This may be from a sense of duty or
obligation, fear, insecurity, a sense of inadequacy, or
any of a range of reasons that work to hold the
person in his or her current circumstances.
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The Grotesque
Departure
Supernatural Aid
Once the hero has committed to the quest,
consciously or unconsciously, his or her guide and
magical helper appears, or becomes known.
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The Grotesque
Departure
The Crossing of the First Threshold
This is the point where the person actually crosses
into the field of adventure, leaving the known limits
of his or her world and venturing into an unknown
and dangerous realm where the rules and limits are
not known.
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Departure
The Belly of the Whale
The belly of the whale represents the final separation from the hero's known
world and self. It is sometimes described as the person's lowest point, but it
is actually the point when the person is between or transitioning between
worlds and selves. The separation has been made, or is being made, or
being fully recognized between the old world and old self and the potential
for a new world/self. The experiences that will shape the new world and self
will begin shortly, or may be beginning with this experience which is often
symbolized by something dark, unknown and frightening. By entering this
stage, the person shows their willingness to undergo a metamorphosis, to
die to him or herself.
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ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Inititation
The Road of Trials
The road of trials is a series of tests, tasks, or
ordeals that the person must undergo to begin the
transformation. Often the person fails one or more
of these tests, which often occur in threes.
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ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Inititation
Hero’s Journey : Summary of Steps
Maricopa Center for Learning and
Instruction (MCLI)
Maricopa Community Colleges
The Meeting with the Goddess
The meeting with the goddess represents the point in the adventure
when the person experiences a love that has the power and
significance of the all-powerful, all encompassing, unconditional love
that a fortunate infant may experience with his or her mother. It is
also known as the "hieros gamos", or sacred marriage, the union of
opposites, and may take place entirely within the person. In other
words, the person begins to see him or herself in a non-dualistic
way. This is a very important step in the process and is often
represented by the person finding the other person that he or she
loves most completely. Although Campbell symbolizes this step as a
meeting with a goddess, unconditional love and /or self unification
does not have to be represented by a woman.
Initiation
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The Grotesque
Woman as the Temptress
At one level, this step is about those temptations
that may lead the hero to abandon or stray from his
or her quest, which as with the Meeting with the
Goddess does not necessarily have to be
represented by a woman. For Campbell, however,
this step is about the revulsion that the usually male
hero may feel about his own fleshy/earthy nature,
and the subsequent attachment or projection of that
revulsion to women. Woman is a metaphor for the
physical or material temptations of life, since the
hero-knight was often tempted by lust from his
spiritual journey.
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Return
Refusal of the Return
So why, when all has been achieved, the
ambrosia has been drunk, and we have
conversed with the gods, why come back to
normal life with all its cares and woes?
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Return
The Magic Flight
Sometimes the hero must escape with the boon, if it
is something that the gods have been jealously
guarding. It can be just as adventurous and
dangerous returning from the journey as it was to
go on it.
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The Grotesque
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Return
Rescue from Without
Just as the hero may need guides and assistants
to set out on the quest, often times he or she must
have powerful guides and rescuers to bring them
back to everyday life, especially if the person has
been wounded or weakened by the experience.
Or perhaps the person doesn't realize that it is
time to return, that they can return, or that others
need their boon.
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Return
The Crossing of the Return Threshold
The trick in returning is to retain the wisdom gained on
the quest, to integrate that wisdom into a human life,
and then maybe figure out how to share the wisdom
with the rest of the world. This is usually extremely
difficult.
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The Grotesque
Return
Master of the Two Worlds
In myth, this step is usually represented by a
transcendental hero like Jesus or Buddha. For a
human hero, it may mean achieving a balance
between the material and spiritual. The person has
become comfortable and competent in both the inner
and outer worlds.
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Return
Freedom to Live
Mastery leads to freedom from the fear of death, which
in turn is the freedom to live. This is sometimes referred
to as living in the moment, neither anticipating the future
nor regretting the past.
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The Grotesque
Hero’s Journey : Summary of Steps
Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction (MCLI)
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Three Contexts for
Understanding
Tutuola
(3) Magical Realism
Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Jorge Luis Borges
Guillermo Del Toro
Frida Kahlo
Six Feet Under
“It's Not Television, It's Magic
Realism: The Mundane, the
Grotesque, and the Fantastic in 6
Feet Under” by David Lavery
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Michael Swanwick on Amos Tutuola
One of the great fantasists has fallen, and most of us in
the field never even knew he existed. But Amos
Tutuola, a tribesman of the Yoruba people in Nigeria
and author of several books, most notably The PalmWine Drinkard, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and The
Brave African Huntress, was one of the best writers of
fantasy in world literature.
Tutuola's fictions were, in Dylan Thomas's words,
"thronged, grisley and bewitching," filled with strange
creatures, magic, horror, and humor. He wrote in an
oddly-cadenced and strangely-phrased English. For
added emphasis he wrote words LARGER, as if he were
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Michael Swanwick on Amos Tutuola
telling a story aloud and had suddenly raised his voice
to startle and alarm his listeners. For good reason:
Tutuola was first-generation literate, a man who grew
up in an oral culture and then managed to transplant
some of its power onto the written page.
I do not know if Amos Tutuola was a literary genius or
merely a conduit for the storytelling genius of his
people. But to read The Palm-Wine Drinkard is to be
transported back to one's first rapturous connection
with literature, to that initial visceral encounter with
Dickens or Nabokov or Austen that revealed what a
marvelous and admirable thing fiction could be.
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Michael Swanwick on Amos Tutuola
Stripped of all familiarity, lacking the critical
terminology that helps to explain and domesticate
great literature (for, make no mistake about it, the
underlying principles and conventions of his vastly
entertaining fictions are not those of literature derived
from European models), the story becomes strange
again, enigmatic, and beauteous. We lack the language
to explicate its appeal. But critical words are not
needed. His stories speak to the soul.
Amos Tutuola discovered his vocation shortly after
World War II, upon his release from military service as a
coppersmith with the British army. He chanced to buy a
magazine containing an advertisement for a collection
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Michael Swanwick on Amos Tutuola
of Yoruba tales. As he later recounted in an
autobiographical essay, his immediate reaction was,
"But Eh! By the way, when I was at school I was a good
taleteller! Why, could I not write my own? Ooh, I am
very good at this thing." The following day he started to
write The Palm-Wine Drinkard.
It was extraordinary luck that Tutuola was published at
all. As he explained:
Well, I wrote the script of Palm-Wine and kept it
in the house. I didn't know where to send it to.
Again, the following quarter I bought another
magazine of the same type. Fortunately when I
read it, I got to where it advertised "Manuscripts
Wanted" overseas. Well then!
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
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Michael Swanwick on Amos Tutuola
Immediately I sent my story to the advertiser.
When my script got to them they wrote in about
two weeks saying that they did not accept
manuscripts which were not concerned with
religion, Christian religion. But, they would not
return my manuscript. They would find
a publisher for me because the story was strange
to them that they would not be happy if they
returned it to me.
The book appeared quietly in 1952, and has been in
print ever since. It has been translated into at least
fifteen languages. Tutuola's work is now widely taught
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
Michael Swanwick on Amos Tutuola
throughout the world, and has had a strong influence
not just in literature, but in dance, the visual arts, and
music as well. Brian Eno and David Byrne's The Bush of
Ghosts is probably the most famous work inspired by
Tutuola's oeuvre, but there are many more.
Amos Tutuola was 77 when he died from hypertension
and diabetes. I shall always regret that I never had the
opportunity to meet the man. What excellent company
he must have been! What a fine laugh he must have
had.
© 1997 by Michael Swanwick; first appeared in Locus.
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The Grotesque
Chapter Titles
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque
 The Description of the Curious Creature
 “Do Not Follow Unknown Man’s Beauty”
 “Return the Parts of Body to the Owners, or Hired Parts of the Complete
Gentleman’s Body to Be Returned”
 “A Full-Bodied Gentleman Reduced to Head”
 “The Lady was not to be Blamed for Following the Skull as a Complete
Gentleman”
 “Three Good Creatures Took Over Our Trouble—They Were:--Drum, Song
and Dance”
 “On Our Way to the Unreturnable Heaven’s Town”
 “The Work of the Faithful-Mother in the White Tree”
 “We and the Wise King in the Wrong Town with the Prince Killer”
 “None of the Dead Too Young to Assault. Dead Babies on the Road-March
to the Deads’ Town”
 “Afraid of Touching Terrible Creatures in Bag”
 “Both Wife and Husband in the Hungry Creature’s Stomach”
 “An Egg Fed the Whole World”
 “Pay Me What You Owe Me and Vomit What You Ate”
ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture:
The Grotesque