Wole Soyinka
artistic versatility than this statement by Soyinka on his aversions toward
the novel as a literary form. But beyond this awareness of limits is the
related issue of working with and through limits. This factor may explain
why, following the critical debacle ofSeason of Anomy, Soyinka has increas-
ingly turned to other prose forms like fictionalized biography and the
autobiographical memoir to engage closely related aesthetic and moral
challenges and dilemmas that he had engaged in his dramas, poetry and
novels. The fact that two of these nonfiction works,Ak ́eandIsara,have
won huge critical acclaim on the scale of the successes of his most ac-
complished works of drama and poetry would seem to indicate that the
place of prose in the Nigerian author’s literary corpus ought to be far
more carefully explored than the term “novel,” with its tangled African
vocation and its more general problematic status in contemporary world
literature – a form whose “death” is perennially bruited and withdrawn –
would allow.
In this chapter then, the discussion of Soyinka’s prose works will not
be bound by formal, generic distinctions between fiction and nonfiction,
between the novel and its presumed “impure,” ancillary offshoots. For it is
manifestly clear in these prose works that Soyinka himself not only refuses
to be bound by such distinctions, he in fact transgresses them extensively.
For more than either poetry or drama, it is in his prose works that Soyinka
executes such a level of self-quotation and intertextual transfers between
fictional and nonfictional works that this pattern in itself assumes the
status of a central heuristic issue for analysis and interpretation. If, with
the possible exception of his agit-prop dramatic sketches – his “shotgun”
pieces as he calls them – prose provides Soyinka a greater latitude than
either poetry or drama for bringing closer his writing and his activism,
his private self and his public persona, it is because prose is the medium
on which, intriguingly, he has placed his greatest faith in the efficacy of
his project of self-constitution and self-presentation as a visionary artist
and a radical public intellectual.
Writing inMyth, Literature and the African Worldon the achievement of
Duro Ladipo’s classic Yoruba-language tragedy,Oba Koso, Soyinka at-
tributes the acclaim that the play received from audiences of varied lin-
guistic communities all over the world to the fact that the play “straddles
the modernist gulf between symbol and expository action and dialogue
with the essence of poetry” (MLAW,). It is a commonplace of modern
critical theory that a chasm typically exists between, on the one hand,
symbol, metaphor and sign and, on the other other hand, exposition
through a strong, linear narrative structure. But Duro Ladipo’s great