Wole Soyinka
and a superb mythopoeist and even if these two essays do not seem to
contribute much to the elicitation of distinctively African expressive and
representational paradigms, they constitute the first extended attempt
in Soyinka’s critical and theoretical writings to elaborate the poetics of
culture and the tragic and sublime mythopoesis which stand at the center
of his aesthetic thought.
There is a broad critical consensus among students of Soyinka’s writ-
ings that this tragic mythopoesis is the central element of his aesthetic
thought. This consensus is established by the extensive scholarly com-
mentary on Soyinka’s theoretical writings on the relations between ritual
and drama, especially on his insistence in the essays of thes (par-
ticularly those collected inMyth, Literature and the African World) that the
myths and rituals associated with “theatrogenic” divinities of Yoruba re-
ligion like Obatala, Ogun and Shango whose cults have over the ages
fostered a vast legacy of artistic and performance traditions provide vital
sources for a tragic aesthetic profoundly different from, and probably
richer than classical and modern Western tragic forms and paradigms.
Our reflections here derive from the astonishing fact that virtually all
of the scholarly essays on Soyinka’s critical and theoretical writings are
almost exclusively based on his essays of thes ands, most of
which deal self-consciously and rather programmatically with the inter-
face between ritual and drama in the elucidation of the aesthetics and
metaphysics of tragic expression. Even critics and scholars who take up
this subject in quite recent scholarly interventions virtually ignore the
critical and theoretical writings of the lates ands, a period
which may be properly adjudged the period of Soyinka’s “maturity” as
a cultural theorist. Together with his most recent book of literary and
cultural analysis,The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness,Iwishinthe
present context to discuss briefly four of the essays of this “third phase,”
“The External Encounter: Ambivalence in African Arts and Literature”
(), “Climates of Art” (), “New Frontiers For Old” () and
“The Credo of Being and Nothingness” (). Because these essays are
not focused specifically on aesthetic problems but range across the rela-
tions between art, society and culture, they cast a powerful reconfiguring
light on the writings of thes, especially those collected inMyth,
Literature and the African World.
“The External Encounter” and “The Climates of Art” may be re-
garded as companion pieces, not only because they were written and
delivered in the same year but because they both constitute the first
attempt in Soyinka’s critical prose to explore exhaustively African liter-
ary and cultural modernity in the context of the forces and institutions