Off-beat work of literary criticism

Yasif Ahmad Faysal observes Soyinka’s world view in Wole Soyinka’s plays

Literary criticism usually is a task practiced by experts, particularly for the more knowledgeable section of readers. But nowadays it’s mostly practised with such super-professionalism and zealous use of jargons and terms that it hardly has anything to do with common readers. But literature being a reflection of life, literary criticism shouldn’t be confined within limits imposed by profession and its conventions but should strive to connect convention with contingency, heighten consciousness of people and serve as moral correctives to individual and collective errors of society. The experience of reading Dr. Kajal Bandyopadhyay’s Tension and Synthesis in Wole Soyinka’s Plays is bound to evoke this urgent awareness within us. Written in a lively and accessible prose, free from the hot-air of a stubborn theorist, the book introduces us to the world view of Wole Soyinka’s famous plays and enables us to use Soyinkan worldview in drawing our own conclusion about ourselves, our time, our uncertain ideological and moral foundation in the troubled era of ours.
The book is a result of Dr. Bandyopadhyay’s PhD dissertation which came to be written at a time when he was doing some intense soul-searching “in the late nineteen eighties as to the reasons of big changes occurring worldwide in politics, economics…” that led him “to stop for a while” for some serious reflection and “bouts of some varied reading” (quoted from Preface). He found Wole Soyinka, the voice of Africa, to answer some of his questions. What is unique about Soyinka’s stature as a world-famous dramatist is his bold and uncompromising dramatization of the problematic issues of life. The philosophical standpoint of Soyinka’s plays is the inviolable truth that the essence of man is contradiction or tension for that matter. A true non-conformist, Soyinka had a different way of interpreting ideas, whatever it is, and he viewed reality as a multilayered texture full of contradictions. It is to this understanding of Soyinka’s that the writer turns and finds in the study of his plays a scope of enlarging our consciousness, a scope to understand what it means to be liberal, secular and pluralistic in a world that is so terminally sick with the germs of narrow-mindedness, bigotry, ideological chauvinism and most fatally, a paranoid division between ‘self’ and ‘other’
Though the title of the book–Tension and Synthesis in Wole Soyinka’s Plays has a Marxist overtone for readers, the book is as far from being symbolic of dogmatic propaganda. Bandyopadhyay adopts an approach which is historically considered to be the perfect one in analyzing human character and seeking higher truth from the days of Socrates all the way to Marx. This approach, known as ‘dialectics’, looks at reality as opposing tendencies while overcoming this opposition at a higher turn called synthesis. As a critical approach, this is an interesting one, since it allows a literary critic to bypass traditional views about a character and makes, instead, an invigoratingly fresh attempt in investigating that character in all its conflicting tendencies and impulses before arriving at anything decisive. Tension and synthesis is a testimony to Dr. Kajal Bandyopadhyay’s critical rigour and objectivity in a dialectical analysis of Soyinka’s characters. Characters like Igwezu-the village hero, Eman- the idealist, the Baroka- the bawdy village chief, the Professor-the mystic are all read three-dimensionally, inside out, taking nothing for granted and leaving no strand of their composition unconsidered. This is a gripping book that keeps its readers always on the edge, as they are made constantly aware of new and pulsating revelations on Soyinka’s characters, hitherto unheard of.
The writer emphatically tells us that Soyinka had no faith in those social and political isms that  hopelessly compartmentalize human reality into different blocks and then arbitrarily ascribe this and that value to this and that block of humanity. These indeed are false attempts by pseudo thinkers, politicians and prophets of human society. For, no matter how high the barrier is erected between East and West, or how precisely humanity is carved up between Black and White, we are no closer to the truth, in fact further than ever. Bandyopadhyay perfectly understands Soyinka when he informs us that man himself, according to Soyinka, is the greatest of all ciphers. An act can be either good or bad and it can be done either by a white man or black, but it is as much unjust to say that men of white complexion are by nature rational as to say that those of black complexion are barbarian. Goodness or evil are not peculiar to any particular race of people; they can be found in those places least expected. This is why, Soyinka, the writer comments, is categorically opposed to both Eurocentricism and Negritude, the movement of the Black culturalists. Besides, the writer’s detailed analysis of Soyinka’s plays leads us to the thumping conclusion that all his characters, irrespective of their color, creed, sex and origin are deeply motivated for power–a fact that shows that, black or white, a character is significant to Soyinka only for its intention, not for anything else. In summing up this and many other interesting aspects of Soyinka’s plays that form popular and scholarly debates, this book should prove itself to be of immense value to an academic scholar who may find in it incentive for further research, and to common readers who may have heard Soyinka, perhaps, for the first time.
In its scope, the book is very inclusive; it not only comments on Soyinka’s plays but his other writings as well; for example, it documents the passage of Soyinka’s coming of age as an artiste, his unique conception of dramatic art as a means to social metamorphosis, his fascination with socialism, his espousal of local-global cultural interaction, his thoughts on the relation between gender and power, the complicity of religion with power and, above all, his disgust with the Nigerian civil war that posed the threat of new, if not more rapacious, chaos. And throughout the book we are reminded how a historically dynamic view of myths and symbols accompanies every stage of Soyinka’s evolution into one of the leading dramatists as we know him to be today. Dr. Bandyopadhyay belongs to the exclusive group of critics who confidently affirm that Soyinka is not at all a pro-colonial writer, as some of his detractors claim, but a man of the soil, representing his land and people to the world.
The book gets an interesting dimension when the African context of Soyinka is compared with the sub-continental context of great men like Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar and Mahatma Gandhi and when points of convergence are drawn among them on their mutual emphasis on social and cultural transformation. This is an absorbing discussion where readers get to see for themselves why Soyinka enjoys his earned eminence as one of the best dramatists of his own generation and earlier ones also.
However, readers will miss a great deal of the book if they simply read it for a literary appreciation of Soyinka’s plays. In a deeper sense, the author exhorts us to look at our reality the way Soyinka did in the spirit of liberalism, humanism and dialectics. Soyinka knows that there is no shortcut to the resolution of some of the perennial problems of mankind, and he knows only too well that nothing absolutely is above criticism, whether it is Europe or Africa, Black or White, Capitalism or Marxism. In bringing to our knowledge this radical position of Soyinka’s, which otherwise has been largely misunderstood by many reactionary critics, Kajal Bandyopadhyay himself performs the bold task of a critic speaking truth to power, to use the famous Saidian phrase. For those who are really interested in the sociology of Africa as well as of our time, this is a must-read book.

Yasif Ahmad Faysal teaches at Barisal university
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