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ADO
,
)
Fortunately, the domains of experience and imagination explored as ter-
ritories of the sublime in Soyinka’s most ambitious plays that we have
discussed in this chapter are more varied, more multifaceted and contra-
dictory than the essentialist ritualism which this quote seeks to consecrate
as the rarefied idiom of sublimity.
The ambiguous freight of visionary mythopoesis:
fictional and nonfictional prose works
What I do see is a new voice coming out of Africa, speaking in
a worldwide language . . . The price a world language must be
prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The
African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out
his message best without altering the language to the extent that its
value as a medium of international exchange will be lost.
Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the
English Language”
In narration he affects a disproportionate pomp of diction, and a
wearisome train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imper-
fectly in many words, which might have been more plainly deliv-
ered in few. Narration in dramatic poetry is naturally tedious, as it is
unanimated and inactive, and obstructs the progress of the action;
it should therefore always be rapid, and enlivened by interruption.
Shakespeare found it an incumbrance, and instead of lightening it
by brevity, endeavoured to recommend it by dignity and splendour.
Samuel Johnson,
Preface to the Plays of William Shakespeare
Within the entire body of Soyinka’s writings, the fictional and non-
fictional prose works constitute the most uneven group of works. This
poses a formidable challenge for scholars and critics. In this chapter,
we explore the complex interplay between social vision and its artistic
mediation in the seven works of fiction and nonfiction that constitute
the complement of the Nigerian author’s prose writings, minus the three
volumes of collected critical and theoretical writings that we have earlier
discussed in this study. These seven titles are:
The Interpreters
(
),
The
Man Died
(
),
Season of Anomy
(
),
Ak´e: The Years of Childhood
(
),
Isara: A Voyage Around ‘Essay’
(
),
Ibadan: The ‘Penkelemes’ Years
(
),
and
The Open Sore of a Continent
(
). Nothing affords a better discursive
context for analyzing these works than a brief review of the controversies
and paradoxes surrounding the reception of Soyinka’s prose writings.
Wole Soyinka
As much in his prose as in his poetry and drama, Soyinka’s brilliance
as a wordsmith in language is consistently in evidence and perhaps on
display. This is a manifest and pervasive aspect of the texture of the
seven works discussed in this chapter. But while many of these works
have achieved considerable critical success and exerted significant intel-
lectual influence as prose writings, it is equally true that Soyinka’s use
of language within the medium of prose has generated both high and
equivocal praise and considerable hostility. This is largely on account of
the fact that irrespective of the matter or substance at hand in these prose
works, the use of language constantly draws attention to itself, becomes
indeed a percept on its own terms. To many critics, this facet of Soyinka’s
prose, by itself, seems a willful infringement of one of the most widely
accepted but generally unexamined regulative critical norms in African
‘Europhone’ writing in particular, and postcolonial literatures in general.
This is the tacit understanding – reflected in perhaps its most influential
articulation in the first epigraph to this chapter – that language should be
used by African writers using English (or French, Portuguese or Spanish)
as an effective medium or vehicle of expression which could, and per-
haps should, be stretched and bent to accommodate African realities and
sensibilities, but only to the extent that effectiveness of language as pri-
marily a medium of communication is not compromised, that language
usage does not draw attention to itself as
enonc´e
, or to its very processes of
enunciation.
Soyinka’s prose style is an affront to this norm, especially
given the fact that the visibility of his prose as
enonc´e
is, with regard to
matters of style, not that of the graceful, the compact, the lucidly and
beautifully crafted (though many passages can be found in Soyinka’s
nonfiction prose writings which correspond to these styles). Thus, the
adjectives and phrases which have been applied to Soyinka’s prose style
have been vociferous in their expression of either misgivings or serious
reservations: “opaque,” “convoluted,” “harsh inscrutableness,” “linguis-
tic anomy.” Some fundamental questions raised by this highly perceptible
and demanding prose style in Soyinka’s work in this genre have not been
seriously addressed by students of his writings: is it permissible or even
necessary for the African writer in English or French to use language
not only or merely as a medium over which she or he need demonstrate
just enough competence and creativity to embody a significant vision,
but assertively and self-consciously as an idiom to stretch, bend, play
with, draw attention to, and even willfully de-form? And given the fact
that literary style in Yoruba drama and, especially, prose – one of whose
classic texts Soyinka has in fact translated into English – normatively
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