Wole Soyinka
only a succinct illustration of this point, two early essays of our author,
“The Future of West African Writing” and “After the Narcissist?” are
not included in any of the three collected volumes; yet the former has the
significance of being the first ever published piece of Soyinka’s criticism,
and the latter contains a major metacritical reflection on the criticism of
African writings of the immediate post-independence period.
These facts and aspects of Soyinka’s critical and theoretical writings
make it possible to offer some general observations on his critical thought.
First, we may surmise that if it is the case that Soyinka is first and foremost
a poet and dramatist, his claims to consideration as a major theorist and
critic are nonetheless quite formidable. This point is demonstrated by
the growing body of scholarly work that this body of his writings has
attracted.Second, it ought to be noted that Soyinka’s theoretical and
critical writings have spanned the entire course of his literary career and
thus have a close, reciprocal but dialogical relationship to his imaginative
works. Third, and in relation to this previous observation, it is fortuitous
that there seems to be a sharp divide between the early critical writings
of Soyinka and his mature critical thought, a divide which seems, at first
glance, to be absent in the corpus of dramas, poetry, fictional prose and
biographical memoirs. Since this break did as a matter of fact extend to
both the imaginative writings and the theoretical and critical writings,
and since it has all but been ignored in Soyinka criticism, it may serve
as a point of entry into a critical review of the Nigerian author’s critical
and theoretical writings.
In the mid-s, Soyinka published a number of works that collec-
tively seemed to indicate a radical departure from the direction and tenor
of his previous imaginative works and, particularly, his critical writings.
At the most apparent level, this rupture between the Soyinka of the late
s through thes to the earlys, and the Soyinka who began to
emerge in the mid-s seems so fundamental as to invite comparisons
with the alleged radical discontinuity, thecoupure epistemologiquethat Al-
thusserians have urged between the early, “humanistic” Marx of say,The
German Ideologyand the mature, “scientific” Marx ofCapital.Analogi-
cally, it seems that while the “early” Soyinka of such works asA Dance of the
Forests(),The Strong Breed(),The Swamp Dwellers(), andThe
Interpreters(), as well as essays such as “The Future of West African
Writing” (), “Towards a True Theatre” (), “From a Common
Back Cloth: A Reassessment of the African Literary Image” (), “And
After the Narcissist?” (), and “The Writer in a Modern African
State” () had been vigorously anti-N ́egritudinist on the subject of