Wole Soyinka
the writer is pushed deeper and deeper into self-insulation and with-
drawal; his commitment accepts its own hopelessness from the very be-
ginning” (ADO,). Soyinka calls this pessimism a “historic vision” and
there is no question that the pessimism of this essay has distinct over-
tones of the general pessimism of the intellectual currents of post-Second
World War Europe.The vision of the “The Fourth Stage” by contrast,
is relentlessly metaphysical and trans-historical, and the analogues which
Soyinka deploys in this essay for violence and social disjuncture are all
drawn from mythic and ritual archetypes:
The persistent search for the meaning of tragedy, for a redefinition in terms
of cultural or private experience is, at the least, man’s recognition of certain
areas of depth-experience which are not satisfactorily explained by general
aesthetic theories; and, of all the subjective unease that is aroused by man’s
creative insights, that wrench within the human psyche which we vaguely de-
fine as tragedy’ is the most insistent voice that bids us return to our own sources.
There, illusively, hovers the key to the human paradox, to man’s experience of
being and non-being, his dubiousness as essence and matter, intimations of tran-
sience and eternity, and the harrowing drives between uniqueness and Oneness
(ADO,)
While “The Writer in a Modern African State” has many concrete,
specific allusions to the manifestations of the rampant social and political
malaise of the immediate post-independence era in Africa, there is not
a single reference in “The Fourth Stage” to any contemporary event or
trend in the politics and culture of the continent – or of any other place in
the world for that matter. Only by the sheer contiguity of the publication
of these two essays are we enabled to see in both essays a common thread
of impassioned, vigorous and prescient response to the looming social
and political disasters in the affairs of the continent in that decade which
started with great euphoria and optimism.
This divergence and complementarity between the “historic vision”
of one essay and the relentless recourse to densely symbolic and mythic
idioms in the other essay enables us, in making an assessment of Soyinka’s
early essays, to broach the matter of the simultaneous closeness and
distance of Soyinka in these early essays to the Western literary and
cultural avant-garde, especially the Symbolists.
As many commentators on “The Fourth Stage” have observed, the
language of the essay is considerably difficult and even in many places
quite obscure. This derives, it seems, from the elaborately metaphorical
quality of the stock of words, images and archetypes deployed in the es-
say, as well as from the fact that language itself, as idiom andenunciation,is