Wole Soyinka
to doanythingthat it would take to set things aright, to make whole that
which has been befouled or damaged by great, all-encompassing evil.
And this nearly always entails nothing less than rending the entire fab-
ric of social life or shaking the very foundations of the prevailing moral
order, or indeed the underlying principle of the universe itself. In “The
Fourth Stage,” one of his few theoretical essays in which the notion of
the sublime receives considerable, if indirect and elliptical elaboration,
Soyinka describes the phenomenological and affective territory of the
sublime as
the numinous territory of transition into which the artist obtains fleeting glimpses
by ritual, sacrifice and a patient submission of rational awareness to the moment
when fingers and voice relate the symbolic language of the cosmos (ADO,)
Fortunately, the domains of experience and imagination explored as ter-
ritories of the sublime in Soyinka’s most ambitious plays that we have
discussed in this chapter are more varied, more multifaceted and contra-
dictory than the essentialist ritualism which this quote seeks to consecrate
as the rarefied idiom of sublimity.