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Ritual and Revolution: Soyinka^S Dramatic Theory

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Ritual and Revolution: Soyinka^S Dramatic Theory Ritual and Revolution: Soyinka^s Dramatic Theory DEREK WRIGHT IN A NOTE to the director of his adaptation of The Bacchae, quoted in his collected essays Art, Dialogue and Outrage, Wole Soyinka wrote: "Ritual equates the divine (superhuman) dimen• sion with the communal will, fusing the social with the spiritual" ( 71 ). These terms are, in fact, dramatically equitable only through the rather artificial link between religious ecstasy and political revolution in this particular play. Yet the idea of ritual (notably, the ritual of transition) as the meeting point of divine and human, spiritual and social, dominates Soyinka's metaphysical theory, his general view of man, and the concept of tragic drama which he extrapolates — a distillation of essences rather than a derivation of particulars — from the consecrated component of cultic "Mys• teries" of Ogun rites. Ogun, the pathfinder deity who bridged the abyss between gods and men, is himself the god of transition, the archetypal crosser of boundaries; and Soyinka, in his highly per• sonal reading of Yoruba myth and ritual in Myth, Literature and the African World, finds something of him in all dangerous, ex• ploratory passages, in all crises of change and confrontation, or wherever there is transition from one dimension of reality to another, whether of nations at the brink of creation or of indi• viduals at the edge of a personal unknown : "stripped of excrescen• ces," man is taken over by "transitional memory" and "intimations rack him of that intense parallel of his progress through the gulf of transition" (149). In extremis, he is again Ogun; his life, transition. In the process, Ogun becomes the embodiment of that principle of complementarity according to which, in the Yoruba universe, things generate the energy to embrace their opposites and, through the dynamic of the ritual process, carry them across the gaps in the continuum that separate the living and the unborn, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 23:1, January 1992 40 DEREK WRIGHT and the human and the spirit communities. Ogun represents "the complete cycle of destruction and creativity" ( Morell 121). Thus, even his own radical cycle-breaking activities are but a stage in a cosmic cyclic process of disruption and restitution, making him both challenger and part of the matrix of forces that he challenges, and Soyinka can claim that, in the Ogunian context, "acting is therefore a contradiction of the tragic spirit, yet it is also its com• plement" (Myth 146). Soyinka's special idiosyncratic input into Yoruba mythology's structure of complementarities, however, is his combination of his adopted deity with Obatala, the god who is "the embodiment of the suffering spirit of man . of the redemptive qualities of en• durance and martyrdom" (Myth 152). Soyinka conjoins the separate legends of Obatala's confinement and Ogun's wars and transitional crossings in such a way that Ogun's energy is made to issue out of Obatala's captive inertia and is then reabsorbed into his harmony (a pattern repeated in the release of Dionysos' energy from Pentheus's imprisonment in The Bacchae and of Olunde's from Elesin's in Death and the King's Horseman ). "With the former [Obatala] immobilised, Ogun comes into his own and enjoys full ascendancy" (Myth 19). Ogun's erratic dynamism is triggered by his opposite number's passivity and the harmony represented by Obatala can be achieved only after Ogun's task of combative will and the passage of the gods through the transi• tional gulf, which therefore become prerequisites for Obatala's serenity (Myth 145-46). "Passion" in the Ogun Mysteries, claims Soyinka, is "released into quietisi wisdom by a ritual exorcism of demonic energies" ( Myth 157). There are always further alternat• ing phases of hubristic infraction and reparation, disturbance and conciliation, for it is their antithetical interflow that provides the charge of transitional energy which keeps the Yoruba universe in motion, and consequently there is never any final, absolute affirma• tion of the confrontational impulse over the human tendency towards complacency and inertia. Rather, the prevailing pattern in Soyinka's ritual dramas is one of rebellious chaos and disintegra• tion, represented by Ogun, repeatedly accommodated by but never wholly resolved into the quiescent harmony and wisdom represen• ted by Obatala. Subsequently some critics, such as Ann B. Davis, SOYINKA'S DRAMATIC THEORY 41 have stressed the Ogun element and regarded Soyinka's dramatic ideas as stimulants of a revolutionary consciousness while others, notably Andrew Gurr, have favored the Obatalan complement and viewed them as registers of fatalistic acceptance and resigna• tion after the fashion of European tragedy. Refracted across the terrain of drama through the prism of ritual, Soyinka's metaphysics are prone to paradox. The Yoruba "tragic" form which he extrudes from ritual is, translated into Greek terms, Promethean rather than Olympian: it prefers re• lease from despair, through an act of will that overcomes the trauma of severance and reunites man with his divine essence, to passive endurance at the hands of remote and incomprehensible gods. Though Soyinka insists that his "epilogue of reassemblage does not nullify the tragic experience" ( qtd. in Katrak 19), Ogun's emergence from his own annihilations forms a post-tragic coda to the cosmic bridging act re-enacted in rituals of transitional cross• ing, and the fact that these rites are performed on behalf and for the benefit of the community makes for important ideological differences from Western tragic models. In the calamitous, event- ended Shakespearean tragic model the closing notes of communal restoration and redemption are often no more than perfunctory sops to the idea of social continuance and conventional notions of justice, howled out by the prevailing desolation, but pulling against these is a subtextual undertow of vegetation motifs, slain gods, resurrected nature, and other ritual trappings of a lost organic mythology. In Yoruba ritual drama, these sacrificial motifs are not subdued secondary resonances but powerful primary encod• ings: suffering must be ritually performed in order that prosperity be restored to the community, fertility to the earth, and the con• tinuum of life maintained, and it is what the community makes of the protagonist's martyrdom which immediately turns the defeated challenger and failed revolutionary into a tragic hero. Soyinka in a 1975 interview compressed both into the unitary concept of the sacrificial revolutionary, remarking that "inherent in all struggle on behalf of society is always the element of self-sacrifice" ( "Inter• view" 37). Thus it has been observed that if there are Western equivalents of the Ogun-Obatala paradigm, they are to be found in the tragic repertoire's more affirmative and progressive struc- 42 DEREK WRIGHT tures: notably, those unorthodox, open-ended "tragedies of re• conciliation," The Eumenides and Oedipus at Colonus, where the closing focus switches to the continuing community and the land blessed by the hero's death (Katrak 34-35). In the Yoruba model it matters less whether the protagonist's disintegration is followed by a self-willed reassemblage or by death, or whether he does or does not achieve self-knowledge (the Professor and Pentheus do not), than that his ordeal injects a new strength into the communal life-blood, either by engendering new levels of awareness in sudden acts of collective self-apprehension or by his continuing service as an exemplary or cautionary model (Katrak 19-20, 31-44). The ritual action does not end with the life of the hero but entails a beneficial follow-on effect for the community more pervasive than in the Western individualist tragic tradition. At the same time, however, the very fact that this post-tragic aftermath commonly takes the form of the hero's apotheosis into communal figurehead, abstract moral principle, legendary hero or mythic archetype has suggested to some that the real subject of Soyinka's ritual drama is religious salvation, conceived in terms of divine-comedy metaphysics, rather than the "social regeneration" and "revolutionary challenge" of which he speaks so much in his dramatic theory (Nkosi 190). There is nowhere, argue Soyinka's detractors, any analytic portrait of the social canvas on which the mythic aspiration is predicated (Amuta 111 ). The direct equation of the communal with the cosmic will through the medium of ritual allows for no midway sociopolitical dimension and no speci• fication of the social dynamic by which the Ogunian actor-cele• brant, in whom the social will in invested, breaches the chthonic realm and, by reconstituting his own psyche, strengthens that of the entire community. Moreover, the material benefits that accrue to society from protagonal trauma in Soyinka's plays are always left in some doubt and it is usually the suffering itself which is most powerfully conveyed. Indeed, the tendency of his holistic, irredu• cible metaphysic, as demonstrated by his comments on the genetic doom enshrouding Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, is to absorb the curative, changeful forces of history into the numen of fate, assimilating the remediable into the "tragic" realm of the irremediable instead of the other way round (Myth 46-49). SOYINKA'S DRAMATIC THEORY 43 The Ogun-Obatala cycle of Soyinka's informing metaphysic is a volatile, endlessly alternating continuum in which the joy of Obatalan resolution is always about to be plunged back into tur• moil by Ogun. Yet any cyclic order, even one that contains disturbance and is capable of self-violation, expresses a static world-view consistent with that required by tragedy and, as Gurr and others have noted, Soyinka has a theoretical tendency in "The Fourth Stage" to see Ogun's disruptions merely as a prelude to returning harmony and to find an ultimate resolution in Oba- tala's quietisi calm ( 142-44).
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