The gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka particular critical stance that we can perceive an apparent discontinuity
between the aesthetic philosophy of the “early” Soyinka and the more
fully elaborated poetics of culture that he began to articulate vigorously
in the mid-s. Similarly, this insistence on gaps and dissonances in
Soyinka’s writings and career underwrites a basic contention of this study
that while Soyinka may insist thatallforms and domains of language use
and speech acts are equally important and integral to his sensibility, he
has in fact both in “writerly” practice and in his aesthetic philosophy,
tended to privilege certain domains and modes of expression and signi-
fication over others. Indeed, this study is fundamentally predicated on
attentiveness to this aspect of Soyinka’s creative sensibilities, an attentive-
ness to his obsession with the vast possibilities of non-mimetic, elaborately
mythopoeic and unconventional dimensions of language and significa-
tion, as captured in the following passage from the essay, “The Fourth
Stage”:
Language therefore is not a barrier to the profound universality of music but
a cohesive dimension and clarification of that wilfully independent art-form
which we label music. Language reverts in religious rites to its pristine exis-
tence, eschewing the sterile limits of particularization... and words are taken
back to their roots, to their original poetic sources when fusion was total and
the movement of words was the very passage of music and the dance of im-
ages. Language is still the embryo of thought and music where myth is daily
companion, for there language is constantly mythopoeic. (ADO,)
Some key ideas and tropes in this passage are worth noting: “myth (as)
daily companion”; language as “embryo of thought and music” in such a
cultural context; consequently, this enables us to accord a paradigmatic
status to the way that language “reverts in religious rites to its pristine ex-
istence, eschewing the sterile limits of particularization.” The aesthetic
and philosophical attitudes to language and signification expressed in
these formulations do not exhaust the range of Soyinka’s ideas and at-
titudes about artistic creation, but they abound in his writings and are
particularly central to his most ambitious, most experimental works. At-
tentiveness to this pervasive feature of his corpus provides the underlying
rationale for the organization of the chapters of this study around the
convention-stretching, genre-bending motive force that operates differ-
entially and with varying results in Soyinka’s writings in the genres of
drama, prose fiction and poetry. In other words, while on the surface
the study is organized around the traditional boundaries between the
genres, “genre” is conceived in this study as the site of great aesthetic,