ABORTED HEROISM IN SOYINKA'S DRAMA

Abstract

Wole Soyinka's scripts have been interpreted and evaluated from various critical perspectives. For example, the effect of Yoruba cultural conventions on Soyinra's dramatic form has been copiously discussed by Oyin Ogunba Gerald Moore has concerned himself, among other things, with the dynamics of comedy and tragedy in Soyinka's drama while Eldred Jones has amply accounted for the playwright's satiric imagination. However, one aspect of Soyinka's dramaturgy that has not received adequate critical attention is the relationship between dramatic narrative structure and meaning or themes in his scripts. Hence, this oaoer will attempt to delineate the relationship between themes and method of composition in some of Soyinka's scripts. The guiding thesis for this short study is that literature-, in all its manifestations, is a form of analogic communication. The playwright, like the story-teller or novelist, employs wordage to provide his readers or audience with a pattern of interactions in a spatio-temporal fictive world. While there may be instances of recognizable actual events by some audience or readers of a literary work, the spatio-temporal event of the fictive world as a unit is essentially non-existent and thus unverifiable. While critical efforts at establishing one-to-one correlation between fictive characters or events and real individuals or institutions may have its own significance, a thorough understanding of a script or a novel is only possible through an understanding of its statement. Thus, the interpretation of any literary work, be it a poem or a script, inheres in a reader's recognition of structural similarities between the fictive world and any dimension of human conduct. The meaning or theme of any work of literary art then, is attributable only to whatever aspect of human behaviour that is' suggested by the pattern of events in the created world of the author.