Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse: critical writings thematized as an object of speculation in the essay. These two aspects dis-
tinctly recall the Symbolists’ categorical distancing of literary language as
much as possible from the more “mundane” representational and refer-
ential functions that people ordinarily associate with language and their
corollary insistence on the non-mimetic, metaphoric resonance of liter-
ary language. Moreover, Soyinka’s deployment of language to construct
what he calls, following the essay’s title, a “fourth stage” of experience
and phenomena which links the “worlds” of the ancestors and the dead
(the past), the living (the present) and the unborn (the future) also strongly
recalls the Symbolists’ use of densely and allusively metaphoric language
to construct bridges between ancient and modern myths thereby abro-
gating linear, positivist conceptions of temporality. But if in these aspects
Soyinka is solidly in the company of Western avant-garde presupposi-
tions and practices, he is also in this essay powerfully insistent on African
expressive matrices as the foundations of his deployment and themati-
zation of language:
Language in Yoruba tragic music therefore undergoes transformation through
myth into a secret (masonic) correspondence with the symbolism of tragedy,
a symbolic medium of spiritual emotions with the heart of choric union. It
transcends particularization (of meaning) to tap the tragic source whence spring
the familiar weird disruptive melodies. This masonic union of sign and melody,
the true tragic music, unearths cosmic uncertainties which pervade human
existence, reveals the magnitude and power of creation, but above all creates
a harrowing sense of omnidirectional vastness where the creative Intelligence
resides and prompts the soul to futile exploration. The senses do not at such
moments interpret myth in their particular concretions; we are left only with
the emotional and spiritual values, the essential experience of cosmic reality.
(ADO,)
As I have demonstrated elsewhere in my reading of both this particular
passage and the entire essay from which it is excerpted, the view of
tragic art elaborated in the passage is coextensive with all rigorously
anti-mimetic, antirealist and mythopoeic conceptions of literature and
art.But it is also abundantly clear that the inspiration for this approach
to literary language derives far less from the documents and practices of
the Symbolists in particularand the Western avant-garde in general
than from figurations of tragic art in cultic music and mythic ritual in
traditional Yoruba expressive idioms and philosophical principles:
It is no wonder therefore that the overt optimistic nature of the culture is the
quality attributed to the Yoruba himself, one which has begun to affect his
accommodation towards the modern world, a spiritual complacency with which