Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings and particularizing criticisms in this essay that considerably relativizes
the undeniable universalism of the essay and reveals the sharp edge of
Soyinka’s uncompromisingly astute and courageous unmasking of the
reactionary philistinism that the influential ideological and intellectual
props of the “literature of discovery” were gradually but inexorably con-
solidating in the then newly emergent postcolonial African literature.
Who can deny the prescience of the contained, scrupulousr ́essentimentof
the following observations on the ideological and spiritual milieu which
produced that literature of “rediscovery”?
In new societies which begin the seductive experiment in authoritarianism, it
has become a familiar experience to watch society crush the writer under a
load of guilt for his daring to express a sensibility and an outlook apart from,
and independent of the mass direction. The revolutionary mood in society is
a particularly potent tyrant in this respect, and since the writer is, at the very
least sensitive to mood, he respects the demand of the moment and effaces his
definition as a writer by an act of choice. And in the modern African state es-
pecially, the position of the writer has been such that he is in fact the very prop
of state machinery. Independence in every instance has meant an emergency
pooling of every mental resource. The writer must, for the moment at least (he
persuades himself), postpone that unique reflection on experience and events
which is what makes a writer – and constitute himself into a part of that ma-
chinery that will actually shape events. Let this impulse be clearly understood
and valued for itself; the African writer found he could not deny his society; he
could however, temporarily at least, deny himself. He therefore took his place in
the new state as a privileged person, placed personally above the effects of the
narrowness of vision which usually accompanies the impatience of new nations,
African, European or Asian. (ADO,)
If this passage suggests a sort of coming to terms with the “revolution-
ary mood” which sacrifices the aesthetic autonomy of the artist as the
price of social progress in the new postcolonial nation, it should quickly be
added that Soyinka’s views and positions in the early essays were anything
but conformist to this “mood.” All the early critical essays consistently
upheld a critical, vigilant aesthetic individualism as the proper means of
self-distancing for the artist from both the statist, elitist apparatus of the
nation-state and the “mass direction” of the populace, and as the only
antidote to the traps of narcissistic self-absorption endemic to the “litera-
ture of rediscovery.” Soyinka’s astuteness in advancing this view such that
it did not constitute a defense of a reactionary aesthetic individualism is
one of the most remarkable achievements of his early critical prose. In-
deed, in these essays, our author makes such extensive and illuminating
commentaries on other African writers and their works that these early