Wole Soyinka
crises deeper and more endemic than immediate realities and surface
symptoms. The best examples of the first category of works in Soyinka’s
corpus are perhaps the so-called “shotgun” agit-prop dramatic skits of
the “Before the Blackout” series and the “Rice Unlimited” series with
the “Guerrilla Unit” of the University of Ife Theatre during the years
of the Shagari civilian misrule. Others are plays likeOpera Wonyosi, and
The Beatification of An Area Boyand quite a number of poems in all five
of Soyinka’s volumes of poetry. In the second category of works are the
great dramas discussed in the fourth chapter of this study and virtually all
of the fictional and nonfictional prose works, with the possible exception
ofThe Man DiedandSeason of Anomy.
The great tension, the great conundrum in the interface between
Soyinka’s aesthetic and political radicalism lies in the fact that while he
is supremely impatient for change, supremely direct and unambiguous
about what needs to be done in the “direct-action” texts, he is equally
supremely ambiguous, to the point sometimes of nihilism, in his most am-
bitious works, works which address the prospects of long-term changes in
consciousness, in individual morality and in social relationships. Might
this conundrum be explained by the unexamined overvalorization and
reification of “will” in Soyinka’s theories? For it could be argued that in
the first category of texts identified above, “will” expresses itself directly
and efficiently in the immediacies of protest and direct-action inter-
vention; in the second category where there is rigorous fidelity to the
demands of complex and sophisticated artistic representation, the reifi-
cation of “will” as an independent, preexistent value does not prevent it
from meeting its limits in determinate institutional and socioeconomic
structures; consequently, sticking to the overvalorization of “will” in such
imaginative contexts cannot but produce pessimism and nihilism, even
where paradox and contradiction are admitted as valences of “will.”
Earlier in this chapter, we encountered a quotation from a book on re-
search projections on Soyinka’s works which place unqualified emphasis
on diversity, complexity and sheer range in the Soyinka corpus. I would
like to end this concluding chapter with a brief illustration of one expres-
sion of this fundamental aspect of Soyinka’s career as a writer and public
intellectual. This particular expression has a direct pertinence to future
critical and scholarly work on the Nigerian author because it in fact
deals with Soyinka as a theorist and critic. The expression is perceptible
only if we make a juxtaposition of his critical writings from all the three
phases of his critical thought that we identified in the second chapter of
this study. This juxtaposition allows us to see that the full complement