Structural Coherence of Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, The

College Literature, Spring 2004 by McLuckie, Craig

In An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Bennett and Royle open by posing a number of questions about beginnings:

When will we have begun?

Where-or when-does a literary text begin?

. . . Does a text begin as the author puts his or her first mark on a piece of paper or keys in the first word on a word processor? Does it begin with the first idea about a story or poem, or in the childhood of the writer, for instance? Does the text begin with its title or with the first word of the so-called "body" of the text? (Bennett and Royle 1999,1)

In response to these questions, we might begin with literary critical pretexts. The body of criticism on Wole Soyinka's masterful tragedy Death and the King's Horseman is substantive, although it falls into fairly coherent groups: the early paraphrases, the Marxist critiques, the mythic criticism, performance analyses, and Soyinka's own commentary. The paraphrases are predominately a loose form of close textual and thematic reading, of which Eldred Jones and D. S. Izevbaye give examples (Jones 1983, 115-18; Izevbaye 1981, 116-25; Gibbs 1986). Indeed, Jones's reading is a less sophisticated precursor to Ketu Katrak's in its focus on "Elesin's response" (Katrak 1983, 115). The Marxist position is represented by the work of James Booth and Biodun Jeyifo.1 Booth draws attention to a newer trend in criticism of the play, "the metaphysics of sacrifice" (1993, 127) but goes on to "explore the relation between the literal, historical aspect of its action and the wider metaphorical or symbolic dimension" (130). Jeyifo enunciates a more fully theorized Marxist reading in his excellent The Truthful Lie: Essays in the Sociology of African Drama (1985). Jeyifo reformulates Soyinka's notion of transition when he summarizes: "The play presents a moment of negativity when the contradictions in our societies, at the level of psychic and spiritual disjuncture, are revealed and probed" (31). Myth criticism (what some critics refer to as explorations of the metaphysical dimension) is represented by Katrak's rebuttal to Jeyifo,

Soyinka's main concern in Death and the King's Horseman is to dramatize, through Elesin, the common fear of and unpleasantness of death, which brings people together irrespective of their socioeconomic status. . . . Soyinka's purpose in using mythic figures is not to evoke nostalgically a perfect past but rather to fashion them for the modern world and enable them to speak to present-day humanity. (Katrak 1986, 92, 94)2

Myth critics, then, read humanistically and draw upon the early tragic idea of apocalypticism. The result is usually positive, whereby "disintegration of a mythic figure, his rejuvenation followed by disintegration and so on" leads to "a celebration of life and a rejoicing in the fact of the living community" (95, 100).3

Returning to the text of Death and the King's Horseman, the reader notes that it appears to open with its title, though for most critics, its interpretation will have been through some of the preceding positions. Indeed, it announces the relationship of the finite nature of existence to a central character whose title "refers us back to other texts" (Bennett and Royle 1999, 2). Specifically those other texts include discourse on death and on the culture of regency. In the body of the play, the portrayal of culture is restricted to the Yoruba. Yet "one of the ways in which a literary text multiplies its beginning is through the deployment of peritexts-titles, subtitles, dedications, epigraphs, introductions, 'notices' and so on" (5). Soyinka's "peritexts"-the aforementioned title and cultural referents-also include a dedication of a personal nature ("In Affectionate Greeting/to/My Father, Ayodele/who lately danced, and joined the Ancestors"), and an "Author's Note" that calls for historical, albeit incorrect knowledge ("events which took place in Oyo . . . in 1946")4-an understanding of tragedy ("eliciting of the play's threnodic essence"), and a denial of a potential reading ("The Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely"[Soyinka 1975, 7]). I propose to examine Death and the King's Horseman in light of these peritexts, to show that "intertextuality (the displacement of origins to other texts . . .) is fundamental to" (Bennett and Royle 1999, 6) the play's structure as a consequence of its apparent mimicry of Shakespearean tragedy.

James Gibbs announces early in his brief introduction to Soyinka's dramaturgy that "re-acquaintance with the classics and with the European tradition represented by the work on Euripides affected Soyinka's next and most Shakespearean play, Death and the Kings Horseman" (1986, 35).The mixture of poetry and prose,5 with the former used to emphasize a character's position at the top of a social hierarchy, alongside the investigation of a tragic flaw, appeals to a Western (English) audience's sense of tragedy, as does its five act division. What appears as mimicry of an English canonical writer becomes a form of counter mimicry, while Olunde's death in place of his father marks a cultural change in Yoruba ritual practices, thus producing a hybrid text. Kenneth Harrow writes that "Ten years after publishing The Strong Breed Soyinka was to come back to the same themes, attempting to give them some sort of closure in Death and the King s Horseman" (1994, 238), thus offering a beginning to his work in his own earlier, prior, preoccupations: "Where in the earlier play the ritual is completed in questionable terms, now it is interrupted with equal certainty. Both end in death, but without the assurance of its meaning" (238). Suggestively, in a discussion of transition and origins, Harrow argues that males distance themselves from female characters (239):