Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” snare of sublimity” for enslaved or dominated groups. This is because
for him, “certain modes of social remembrance in which protracted fa-
miliarity with ineffable, sublime terror may lead to the deployment of a
political aesthetic” through which victims of a historical and social op-
pression on a monumental scale are “beatified” and consequently, their
suffering yields, not tough-minded, epistemologically complex under-
standing of the self and the historical process, but a quietism that Gilroy
calls “an alchemical moral magic.” It is this danger which gives rise to
Gilroy’s clamant warning: “There are dangers to both Jews and blacks
in accepting the historic and unsought association with sublimity.”
The plays discussed in this chapter attempt to have it both ways:
the way of the classical theorists of antiquity and their conception of
the sublime as the union of ideational high-mindedness with rhetori-
cal and expressive perfection; and the way of the nineteenth-century
German idealist-romantic identification of sublimity with extreme emo-
tions aroused by the encounter with chaos, agitation and even terror. In
general in these plays, the sublime of exquisitely crafted expression in
the service of ideas and conceits of extraordinarily suggestive power is
inextricable from the sublime of violent emotions and traumatic agita-
tion. Perhaps the single exception to this pattern can be found only in
those passages inDeath and the King’s Horsemanwhere Elesin, in the open-
ing scenes of the play, calmly and ecstatically embraces his destiny as
one who must die to preserve and enhance the spiritual health of his
people. In nearly all other instances of the sublime in this play – and in
all the others discussed in this chapter – when language, rhetoric and
non-verbal expressive idioms like music and dance combine and soar
to heights of great aesthetic effect, that effect almost always entails both
pleasure and harrowing disquiet. These are particularly pervasively ev-
ident inThe RoadandMadmen, but also deeply inflect the other plays
as well. The ubiquity of this structure in Soyinka’s greatest plays is per-
haps due to the fact that while the “sublime” of ineffable terror and
violence – as revealed in numbing acts of evil and corruption – impinges
itself so powerfully on his ethical and political sensibilities, the “sublime”
of words, language and rhetoric taken to their roots attempt a contain-
ment of the other matrix of terror-driven, psyche-numbing sublimity. In
virtually all the plays discussed in this chapter, the dramatic action entails
protagonists who engage in a decisive crossing of the line(s) of normality,
“decency,” respectability, prudence, complacency, or simple lack of imag-
ination into areas of the forbidden so as to think the unthinkable or enact
the incommensurable. They do this with the extremist logic of a resolve