Wole Soyinka
a “sanctuary” in his “tower of words” through his considerable abil-
ity to manipulate signs and language. What is particularly important
here is that Professor’s underclass beneficiaries are themselves, in their
own ways, accomplished in deploying and manipulating the resources of
language – but only in the oral, non-scribal idioms.
Of a very different import are Professor’s verbal fireworks in pursuit of
“the word.” In this particular regard he operates as a “priest,” a mystic,
a shaman whose linguistic acts are rites of communion seeking to pen-
etrate the mysteries of life and existence, especially its banal but often
unanticipated and unexpected tragedies and absurdities. In this particu-
lar domain, Professor’s invitation to his “tower” of words draws a more
ambiguous response from his audience. And this seems logical and un-
exceptionable since linguistic communication and effectivity in practical
matters are more easily measurable, more commensurate with concrete
needs, desires and aspirations than with strivings that are eschatological
and metaphysical. Thus, Professor’s audience seems deeply apprecia-
tive of his services as “consultant” and as a forger of licenses; but while
they are dazzled by his torrential verbal disquisition on “the word,” they
feel confounded by what they see as the “blasphemy” in some of these
discourses, and for this reason, in their terror they ultimately slay him.
Reading this structure of responses to Professor’s language use(s) ana-
logically to Soyinka’s writings, one problem that immediately arises con-
cerns the fact that while Professor’s underclass auditors inThe Roadinsist
on making a distinction between language and speech acts which are util-
itarian and those which open up disturbing possibilities of (non)meaning,
Professor himself – and presumably his creator – in fact sees no such clear
and rigid division between the pragmatic, demotic aspects of language
use and the hieratic, ritual articulations of metaphysical yearnings. In
effect then, what this entails is an insistence that no particular domain
of expression and communication, through language and signification,
be privileged above others: the solace or “sanctuary” afforded by the
artist’s “towers of words” involves all genres, modes and forms of com-
munication. Moreover, there is an insistence here that the sensibility of
the artist-communicator remains essentially unchanged and indivisible
regardless of the genre, form or occasion of expression.
Like the enthralled but somewhat more detached auditors of
Professor’s profane, spellbinding discourses at the evening carousals in
the “Aksident Store,” some critics and scholars of Soyinka’s literary ca-
reer see in his vast corpus a variety of emphases, a lot of unevenness,
some gaps, and even dissonances and ruptures.It is in the light of this