Visionary mythopoesis in fictional and nonfictional prose play,Oba Koso, is most definitely not a “modernist” work and while it
does have a richness of symbolism and allusiveness to the universe of
Yoruba mythic and esoteric lore, it is not strong in “expository action
and dialogue.” Thus, what Ladipo’s play shares with modernism is a
richness of figural, symbolic and allusive language acting as an eloquent
replacement for the realist reliance on expository modes of expression.
This leads us to the probability that this comment on Ladipo’s play is a
sort of metacommentary on Soyinka’s own writings, in the present case
his prose writings, with their strong affinities with modernist techniques
and idioms. For in varying degrees, these works eschew realist conven-
tions of narration and characterization, substituting these with a strong
aesthetic investment in sheer linguistic exuberance and, more pointedly,
widely ramifying metaphors and tropes. In other words, in these prose
works of Soyinka, it is language pressed into service and used repeatedly
to create an elaborate mythopoesis that serves to bridge the chasm be-
tween, on the one hand, symbol, metaphor and ritual archetype, and
on the other hand, “exposition.” Stated differently, these works, as a
crucial dimension of their composite aesthetic and ideational identity,
are freighted with a vast architecture of mythopoesis to a degree some-
what “excessive” of the scale deemed appropriate in realist works but
otherwise normative in modernist and avant-garde writing. This excess
of mythopoeic symbol and archetype achieved by the sheer force of lin-
guistic exuberance is perhaps the most general, unifying pattern among
the extremely varied works which make up the corpus of Soyinka’s prose
writings.
The foregoing observations provide an indispensable background for
the analysis and interpretation of the seven works of fictional and non-
fictional prose in this chapter. It will be argued that more than works of
poetry and drama, our author’s prose works show certain consistencies
or patterns of formal design and ethical and ideological investments.
We have already indicated one such pattern, at a level of considerable
generality, this being the great pressure that an often over-elaborate
mythopoesis places on Soyinka’sproseworks, a pressure characteristically
much more productively engaged in the dramas and the poetry. There
are two other patterns which are more concrete and more constitutive of
the collective ideological and aesthetic identity of Soyinka’s prose works
which ought to be noted here. One is the foregrounding in each narra-
tive of lone or plural protagonists whose identities and fates are explicitly
and intimately bound up with their coming to an acute consciousness
of a monstrously dehumanizing and alienating social environment and