The gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka : Even before the bridge, I saw what was yet to happen.
.(Puts pen down, softly): You swear to that?
: It was a full load and it took some moments overtaking us, heavy it
was.
.(Writing furiously): It dragged alongside and after an eternity it pulled to
the front swaying from side to side, pregnant with stillborns. Underline –
with stillborns (CP,–)
Even the very first sentence that Professor writes from the verbal account
he is being given by Samson and Kotonu already strains away from a
bare, factual transcription, although he boasts that he can indeed write
a masterpiece of precise, factual reportage such as “would dignify the
archives of any traffic division.” The point of course is that for Professor
the “real” is not pre-given or easily recoverable by mere reportage, it
comes already semiotized with meaning by the mere act of describing it.
Thus, we can see from even this short exchange between Professor and
Samson and Kotonu that the verbal account of the two men is elaborately
embellished and figuratively transmuted by Professor; as the interaction
continues, the distance widens between the verbal narrative and the
written transcription of it. Thus, by the end of the scene, Professor is
indeed writing a version of the account of the accident narrated to him
by Samson and Kotonu that radically departs both from the men’s own
narrative and their notion of the “real” as literal and empirical; Professor
has indeed, inhisversion, moved from thephenomenalto thenuomenal, and
he has infused his transcription with a very private, terrifying vision of
the “meaning” of the accident:
.(Writing): Below that bridge a black rise of buttocks, two unyielding
thighs and that red trickle like a woman washing her monthly pain in a
thin river. So many lives rush in and out between her legs, and most of it
a waste.
(CP,)
There is in Professor’s radical departure from functional, utilitarian and
“effective” speech – those designated by J.L. Austin in his speech act
theory as “felicitous” – an excessive will to self-expression which, at least
on the surface, seems to derive from a perverse kind of self-absorption.
Indeed, there is an ethically questionable use of literacy here in the fact
that the “statement” desired by Samson and Kotonu never gets written,
or is written but not exactly astheywant it, and not as it could be of any
functional use to them. But at another level of the uses of literacy and
language – the level of visionary projection and even artistic creation – it