Paton’s Discovery, Soyinka’s Invention

BERNTH LINDFORS

OLE SOYINKA is an eclectic reader and, like all the rest of us, some of what he reads rubs off on him. He has occasionally W admitted this, frankly acknowledging specific texts that have served as sources of inspiration for his own imaginative works. The Bacchae of Euripides is the most transparent example of this kind of indebtedness, carrying in its very title the name of the author whose drama sparked Soy- inka’s creative fires. Opera Wonyosi also clearly owes its operatic organiza- tional structure and underworld ambiance to Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, which was itself a reworking of John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beg- gars’ Opera. In Die Still, Reverend Godspeak, it was Jonathan Swift and Nigerian newspaper reportage on the profitable prophetic activities of Dr Godspower Oyewole that provided both the satirical form and the comic con- tent of his drama. A Play of Giants bears the imprint of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, and King Baabu carries the ancestral genes and genius of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. One could cite many other examples as well, ranging from the incidental – e.g., the borrowing of the subtitle of Isara, A Voyage Around “Essay” from John Mortimer’s play A Voyage Round My Father – to the in- cremental – e.g., the absurdist theatrical elements in such zany philosophical puzzlers as A Dance of the Forests, The Road, and Madmen and Specialists. Soyinka once said that Bale Baroka in The Lion and the Jewel was inspired by his reading of the marriage of the elderly Charlie Chaplin to his fourth wife, the eighteen-year-old Oona O’Neill,1 and he has even confessed to there

1 James Gibbs, “Soyinka in Zimbabwe: A Question and Answer Session,” Literary Half-Yearly (Mysore) 28.2 (July 1987): 67. 70 BERNTH LINDFORS  being Buddhist “reference points and mythologies” in his poetry.2 Clearly, Nigeria’s first Nobel laureate was a veritable super-sponge soaking up what- ever spirits – foreign and autochthonous – that he happened to come across, blending them together, and producing syncretic essences that drew their mis- cegenated vigour from the variety of disparate creative juices that spawned them. He squeezed out a whole host of these oddly begotten offspring. This was not an unprecedented bastard enterprise. All the best authors en- gage in adventurous affairs of this sort, entangling themselves with predeces- sors whose beguiling legacy of beautiful forms and elegant wordplay they most admire. The trick is not to replicate but to emulate that beauty, that ele- gance, that originality, so that one’s own mind-sprung progeny can withstand the test of time without being regarded primarily as an offshoot of somebody else’s literary DNA. One must absorb influences, not flaunt them. T.S. Eliot put it well when he said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”3 To this hypothesis we might add a small corollary: that the best thieves take only what is of most value and safest in their own set of circumstances. There is no point in stealing something that can too easily be traced. Soyinka is certainly aware of this. As a young man he once excoriated Camara Laye for having modelled The Radiance of the King too closely on Franz Kafka’s The Castle,4 for he believed that

most intelligent readers like their Kafka straight, not geographically trans- posed [...]. It is truly amazing that foreign critics have contented themselves with merely dropping an occasional ‘Kafkaesque’ – a feeble sop to integrity – since they cannot ignore the more obvious imitativeness of Camara Laye’s technique. (I think we can tell when the line of mere ‘influence’ has been crossed.)5

2 Interviews with 6 Nigerian Writers, ed. John Agetua (Benin City: the author, nd): 46. 3 T.S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger” (1920), in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975): 153. 4 Adele King, in Rereading Camara Laye (Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 2002): 5, has alleged that The Radiance of the King was written not by Laye but “is primarily the work of [Francis] Soulié, a Belgian with a passion for Africa and an unsuccessful literary career. Another Belgian, [Robert] Poulet, who had a reputation as an excellent literary critic and stylist who would help authors revise their manuscripts, gave advice on the manuscript.” 5 Wole Soyinka, “From a Common Back Cloth: A Reassessment of the African Literary Image,” American Scholar 32.3 (Summer 1963): 387–88.