Wole Soyinka
in his critical thought. All the same, the notion is, I would suggest, more
of a poetic conceit than an objectively verifiable historical and cultural
referent, even though Soyinka intends it to be simultaneously both! I
suggest that the term operates like other similarly elaborate conceits or
concept- metaphors in Soyinka’s aesthetic philosophy like “the fourth
stage,” “the vortex of archetypes,” “the chthonic realm” and “the dark
whirlpool of energies.” The crucial importance of these concepts for
Soyinka’s aesthetic theory makes it necessary, if daunting, for the student
of his critical and theoretical writings to attempt an ordering of relations
among the disparate, often conflicting categories of his aesthetic philos-
ophy. This is all the more necessary because, with most scholars who
have so far applied their energies to the difficult and comprehensive na-
ture of Soyinka’s aesthetic ideas, it is as if after “The Fourth Stage” and
after the essays collected inMyth, Soyinka stopped writing. It is perhaps
indisputable that the kernel of his aesthetic philosophy is indeed to be
found in these essays, but as I hope to have demonstrated in this chap-
ter, Soyinka’s writings of thes ands considerably expanded
the scope and the intricacy of both his aesthetic theory and his critical
thought.
Let us conclude by observing that the tragic mythopoesis which stands
at the centre of Soyinka’s aesthetic philosophy is embedded in a poetics of
culture rooted in a metaphysics of nature, a “natural supernaturalism,”
to press the title of M.H. Abrams’ famous monograph on European
Romanticism into service here.Indeed, Soyinka’s deep affinities with
the Romantics, with both their revolutionary ideals and their relation-
ship to nature, has been explored by several critics.The fundamental
factor which separates Soyinka from the Romantics is less his efforts to
ground his aesthetic ideas in African expressive and ideational matrices,
as important as these are, than his acute sense of the radical nature of
evil. It takes the form of an insistence in his theoretical writings on the
terrifying, destructive urgings and promptings which are both forces of
nature and the roots of all that is creative in mankind. Soyinka’s notion
of action and will, indeed his over-valorization of the latter, is based on
the model of nature’s awesome powers and forces, both external nature
and the “nature” within us. Indeed, in Soyinka’s ideational system, it is
ultimately unproductive if not futile, to separate “external” from “inter-
nal” nature since the same life-force, the same secret tropism animates
all of nature and gives it its unity of Being. And what is more, the roots
of tragedy, in our author’s elaborate theorizations on the subject, lie
ultimately in the fragmentation – in one individual life, in communal