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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 and
enunciation
, is
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 particular
and 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
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