Poetics and the Mythic Imagination

Abstract

It would be no exaggeration to observe that Wole Soyinka is probably the most widely-known African intellectual of the contemporary period: Yet the observation would seem to require considerable explanation: for to inquire into the nature of his reputation is to begin to understand the quite specific manner in which the profession of 'art' can appropriately serve as the formal demonstration of that sensibility whose truest aspect is to be discovered more in social activity than in a merely aesthetic posture. When one thinks, for instance, of Achebe, one thinks of the self-effacing author of that inimitable work of creative genius, Things Fall Apart. But one does not usually think of Soyinka as the author of any specific work; it is not impossible that many of those who know him, particularly outside Africa, recognise him not simply as the author of Idanre or The Road, or even of that endlessly anthologised piece, 'Telephone Conversation', but more as a man whose 'renaissance' posture deeply impresses the twentieth century mind. In Soyinka's own mythic terms, the difference between his reputation and Achebe's is the difference between the mythic impulse of Ogun and of Obatala, between the heroic posture of 'tragic dare' and of 'harmonious resolution.' We shall return to the crucial significance of this distinction later. Here it is sufficient to suggest that it would probably be too limiting to see Soyinka merely in terms of a talented playwright of the theatre. He has, of course, experimented with just about every major literary form-with drama, with poetry and fiction, with the essay and the diary, and, we might as well add, with radio. One can hardly deny that his preference has been for drama and for the dramatic in poetry, yet it is a preference that would seem to be significant less for his interest in theatre (some of his plays are simply unstageable) than for his belief that it is through drama that he can most adequately convey his thematic preoccupations. And Soyinka's abiding concern has been with myth, with its significance for contemporary life in Africa. For him, 'history' has been not so much a record of human action as a demonstration of the manner in which social behaviour so often symbolises a sometimes voluntary, sometimes unwilling obedience to the subliminal impulse of the ancestral memory. If it is true, as Eliot once suggested, that there can be no culture without religion, we may be equally certain that there can be no history without myth. And to the extent that myth and history are complementary, it may be suggested that Soyinka's persistent meditation on myth is an attempt to reveal the primal foundations of African culture, and therefore of history. To say, then, that Soyinka is a dramatist is to say that he has chosen as his medium that literary form most appropriate for the communication of the hardly tangible anatomy of the ancestral memory. Soyinka is, first and foremost, a mythopoiest; his imagination is, in a quite fundamental sense, a mythic imagination. To recognise this basic interest in myth is to begin to discover the source of Soyinka's creative strengths, and of his weaknesses. Apart from his quite astringent social criticism, he has been particularly impressive on those occasions when he has sought to reveal the primeval psychic dilemmas of African man. What has sometimes seemed the cynical pessimism of his circular vision of history, in A Dance of the Forests, for instance, is, in fact, an index of his belief that it is impossible to divorce culture from its mythic origins. Yet what redeems this vision from total pessimism would seem to be the consideration that though Soyinka is not exactly enthusiastic over the possibility that human history is the history of 'progress' and perfection, he appears nevertheless certain that ineluctable though mythic compulsions are, man yet still does have a measure of choice, and therefore of responsibility for the state of things in his world. Unlike the Christian world, Soyinka's world is one in which one can hardly speak meaningfully of any doctrine of grace; it is a world in which absolution is never even remotely a