3 - Tragic Comedies and Comic Tragedies

Summary

A number of Soyinka's texts cannot easily be categorized as either comedy or tragedy. These transgeneric, or in-between, texts exhibit a productive immanent tension between the two modes of representation, emphasizing the complexity not only of the post-colonial experience itself, but also of the writer's own attitude to it. This combination of the comic and the tragic is, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Femi Abodunrin point out, an important structural device in Soyinka's works. Kinkead- Weekes illuminatingly remarks that Soyinka has the knack, especially in his plays, of ‘using a two-part structure to transform our view of what we have been watching: a first part satiric, comic and done in human terms; a second part tragic, mythic, and aware of forces and perspectives beyond human terms’ (Gibbs 2, 229). Useful as Kinkead-Weekes’ observations are, they are not true of most of Soyinka's plays, particularly the ones examined in the previous chapter or those, such as The Strong Breed, which will be considered in the next. Moreover, it is the dual presence of identifiable conventional genres as well as mixed ones in Soyinka's creative corpus that testifies not only to his exceptional ability to recreate the literary tradition, but also to his superb mastery of it, so much so that his departures from the norm are recognizably those of someone who has learnt his trade well, rather than one who is propelled by ignorance of literary history or by its wilful disregard.

A text that marks a significant shift in Soyinka's approach to the question of generic identity is Kongi's Harvest, written in the mid-sixties and first directed by the author in 1966. It is conceivable that the 1965 military takeover of government in Nigeria, together with Soyinka's growing realization that the nationalist leadership had been engaged in elaborately eccentric forms of despotism and corruption, prompted him to seek a new representational mode. This new language is committed to a full and total revelation of the foundations as well as the surface manifestations of tyranny and greed, for, as Soyinka himself puts it, ‘when power is placed in the service of vicious reaction, a language must be called into being which does its best to appropriate such obscenity of power and fling its excesses back in its face,’ making ‘language … a part of resistance therapy’ (SCP 2, xiv).