Wole Soyinka
and destroy each other and a man’s history can take him take him into many
communities.
This is as accurate as any account in Soyinka criticism of the underlying
ethico-ideological conception of the protagonist characters of Soyinka’s
writings and the frames of reference and enveloping horizons of their
agency and vision as prophets or would-be social reformers. To see this
is to see the tremendous, non-formulaic flexibility of Soyinka’s deploy-
ment of ritual idioms as a central axis of his aesthetic theory. Part of
this flexibility – and the suppleness of his use of ritual and the corol-
lary sacrificial motif – is the fact that he consistently subjects this ritual
matrix to sometimes savagely ironic inspection. These particular aspects
of Soyinka’s aesthetic theory are extensively explored in the following
two chapters of this study which examine the genre of the Nigerian
author’s greatest aesthetic and ideological investment and accom-
plishment – drama.