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)

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 King's 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):

 
    For Olunde that distance is provided not by an act of the will nor 
    by the espousal of a higher purpose, nor even by fleeing the past, 
    but by colonialism. The attraction between Jane and Olunde is muted 
    by circumstance: their "natural" roles ... are reversed as in the 
    corrupted new cultural sphere the woman becomes the dominant: not 
    only does Jane dominate Simon, and hold Olunde against his will, but 
    even Iyaloja eventually berates and mystifies Elesin with her 
    elusive references to Olunde's corpse ... Elesin ... recognizes, "No 
    man beholds his mother's womb." (Harrow 1994, 241) 

And, thus, a biological peritext (beginning) is denied. As the father (Elesin) becomes the son (Olunde), the son becomes the father; oxymoronically, as Harrow would have it, the situation "insists on the permanence of both and the irreconcilability of the two terms and of their eventual confrontation with each other" (256). Old beginnings are transmuted into new beginnings, into a string of beginnings.

In his "Author's Note," Soyinka writes, "The factual account still exists in the archives of the British Colonial Administration. It has already inspired a fine play in Yoruba (Oba Waja) by Duro Ladipo. It has also misbegotten a film by some German television company" (1975, 6). Multiple texts (e.g., "a fine play") inform Soyinka's work. Given that the subject matter has already been written on, but that Soyinka is in his second exile period in England, and that he is writing it in English, then it may be assumed that the British are his primary audience. Here his strategy differs from that employed in The Bacchae and Opera because he wishes to place his culture front and center and to offer its (rather than the British audience's) reactions and responses as the mediating point. For this reason there will not be "potential equality in every given situation of the alien culture and the indigenous, on the actual soil of the latter" (6).

From the opening list of characters, it is abundantly clear that the text uses types to engender the key situation of "transition." Simon and Jane Pilkings represent, indeed typify, those who have no conception of culture and tradition. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "pill" as "to pillage, plunder." That Simon is the pill king underscores his negative role. Sergeant Amusa, a Muslim, works for the colonial police. His last name evokes characters like Sir John Falstaff, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in that his treatment at the hands of the market women and their daughters elicits a low form of sexual humor. Amusa then offers a respite from the tragic elements of the plot, while the laughter induced parallels with those scenes in Shakespeare on offer for the groundlings and the aristocracy. Other characters are either typified by title ("The Praise-Singer," "The Resident," "H.R.H.The Prince") or are of a more rounded nature, where their actions within the play flesh out their names and significance ("Elesin", "Iyaloja", "Olunde"). We should…