“Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write commentary afforded by Soyinka’s unqualified theoretical endorsement
of the “Ogunnian” archetype as paradigm of the artist in modern Africa
in his most important metacritical essays.
If the radical or revolutionary potential of Soyinka’s mythopoesis is
to be taken seriously, at least two qualifications about this mythopoeic
aesthetic has to be carefully engaged. First, it has to be admitted that the
“Ogunnian” archetype is at best a codification of radical subjectivity as
essentiallypatrician, and as we elaborated in Chapterof this study, as also
patriarchal. This does not automatically negate the radical or revolution-
ary potential in the archetype, it merely indicates the extremely limited
nature of that potential – limits of class inflections and a highly gendered
world-view indicating a “revolution” from the top down, from a van-
guard ofmalepatricians of spirit and will to the world of the degraded,
disenfranchised masses. Second and associatively, there is an overval-
orization of will in this archetype since all the “Ogunnian” protagonists
of Soyinka’s works are patterned on a divinity who is an embodiment of
Will as the primal instrument of self-fashioning and self-destination. In
the rigor and richness of artistic representation in some of Soyinka’s most
ambitious and successful works likeThe RoadandMadmen and Specialists,
Will is not presented as an independent, voluntaristic category standing
beyond and outside the limits and constraints of history, culture and the
material forces of social reproduction. To express this concretely, in these
works the force of volition or agency of a protagonist like Professor or the
Old Man is “contained” by supra-individual structures – of language,
“mind” or relations of production – which are experienced as the absent
or invisible causes of effects which can neither be adequately understood
nor controlled by even these Ogunnian heroic protagonists. But this is
not the case in Soyinka’s theoretical reflections in essays like “The Fourth
Stage” and “The Climates of Art” where “will” is admittedly presented
as paradoxical and contradictory, but only in the terms of its own primal
self-constitution.
Conjecturally, this last point seems to provide some explanation for the
great tension between, on the one hand, Soyinka’s tremendous aesthetic
resourcefulness, his artistic avant-gardism and, on the other hand, his po-
litical and ideological radicalism. At the most elementary level, Soyinka’s
works and career present us with a rather neat, congruent division of his
artistic labors, as far as their political ramifications are concerned, be-
tween those works which are addressed to specific issues and contexts
and are for this reason, direct and generally unambiguous and works
which are far more complex and presumably engage contradictions and