Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” thought in history in the face of the relentless weight of new forms
of consciousness: the shafts of sunlight dispel the spirits and gods be-
cause they are the fantasized creations of alienated consciousness, and
the petrol fumes – a pollutant, mark – irritate the forest beings because the
elements of a new mode of production rupture the ecological balance
and the material base which subsume and validate the alienated ani-
mist consciousness.Christopher Caudwell, in his brilliant but ignored
monograph,Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, has expressed the
social and epistemological basis of this conjunctural crisis:
The religious distortion of consciousness is produced by the structure of the
society in which it is generated. It is the outcome of an illusion, a flaw, an
infection, in that society. Thus the criticism of religion is also a criticism of
the society that produced it, and this does not mean a criticism of that society
in the abstract but of its concrete reality, a criticism of all the social relations
engendered by its level of economic production.
Inaway,A Danceshows the dialectic of artistic discipline and formal-
istic venturesomeness at its most fraught in Soyinka’s major plays. Given
the fact that the play was written and staged as part of Nigeria’s indepen-
dence celebrations, many critics have pondered the motivations which
encouraged Soyinka to crowd, or even overload the plot and dramatic
action of this play with a surfeit of incident and rather obscure metaphor
and symbolism, especially in the climactic scene of the masque-dance in
the forest. This is a play which, after all, is designed in its themes and con-
flicts to shock its expected middle-class audience out of amnesia about
the past and out of euphoria about the present, these being the pervasive
complacent spiritual and ideological attitudes of the elites of the then
newly independent African countries. What could be more subversive of
these attitudes than the play’s central theme that the “nation-building”
myths of a glorious past, of great, heroic ancestors, were dangerous ob-
fuscations of both that past and a present deeply compromised by cru-
elty, cowardice and venality? But then, why shroud this theme in layers
of “inscrutable” symbolism and metaphysics? This question leads us di-
rectly into the specific expressions of the “ritual problematic” in this play,
especially as rendered in the climactic scene of the trial of the humans
through a cultic ritual masque in the denouement of the play.
There are of course many extraordinarily insightful revelations of hu-
man character and motivation in this play. Among these are the rev-
elation of a cowering insecurity beneath Mata Kharibu’s blustering
tyranny and Demoke’s half-remorseful, half-unrepentant and boastful