The structural coherence of Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman.

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)