The gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka of the road accident has moved decisively from their expectation of an
objective transcription to a private, phantasmic vision of what actually
happened. This vision is very distant from an empiricist, functionalist
conception of the “real” because it is expressed through an excess of
signification which taps into vistas of imagined, counterfactual worlds
where Professor’s subjectivity, his being, finds itself again after its loss in
the degraded world, the alienated, intolerable reality of the daily lives
of the working class, lumpen and underclass characters with whom he
has taken up a precarious abode. And wherein may these counterfactual
worlds which “redeem” the violently destructive, “fallen” world around
him be found but in, and through language? This is why Professor’s quest
in this play is a search for the “word.” In a “fallen,” alienated world the
“word” is inevitably lost; only a recovery of the “word” can help set
things aright once again. This plays adroitly on one of the most impor-
tant of Yoruba aphorisms on language, signification and semantics. As
the Yoruba metaproverb puts it: “owe lesin oro; t’oro ba sonu, owe ni a
fi n wa.” (Proverbs or metaphors are the horses of speech; when words
are lost and speech lapses into an incommensurable chasm between Be-
ing and the event or the moment, proverbs or metaphors lead us back
to meaningful words and speeech). It is largely because of this crucial
dimension ofThe Roadand the philosophically idealist faith of its protag-
onist in the redemptive, sacramental power of words and language that
critics like Elaine Fido and Segun Adekoya, who are particularly respon-
sive to this aspect of the play, have linked its brilliant use of language to
issues of spirituality and metaphysics.And this particular structure ex-
plains and undergirds Soyinka’s reputation as a consistently inventive
wordsmith; it also accounts for the pervasiveness of extensive wordplay
and elaborate language games in his writings, as much in his nonfic-
tional works as in his plays, novels and poetry. Finally, it is at the root
of our author’s avantgardist approach to the received conventions of the
traditional genres, especially in drama and poetry.
The location of the self in an endless chain of linguistic signification –
such as we see in Professor’s flights into language and its limitless
resources – constitutes a mode of aestheticized self-fashioning as a free
spirit, an existential nomad, an ideological anarchist. Not surprising, the
“self ” of this particular mode of imagining can only intersect in irrec-
oncilable tension with the “self ” imagined through the Ogun archetype,
for even with that archetype’s considerable latitude for contradictory
attributes, its mode of construction does presuppose that the “endless”
chain of signification can, or should, be constantly “arrested” around