Abstract
Wole Soyinka has come to symbolise authority in Africa and world drama. His treatises and proclamations have attained such iconic reverence that his drama is often understood „only‟ by the wholesome acceptance of his „esteemed‟ authorial voice. Death and the King’s Horseman has been considered a masterpiece; Soyinka‟s iconic play, and studies of the text have also revealed such heavy dependence on the author‟s perceptive intentions of his own work in the search for meaning. Seen largely from the author‟s perspective, the play is largely interpreted as Soyinka‟s mythopoeic dramatization of African drama. Hence, there exists a lack of sustained reading of the text outside its threnodic essence. This study adopts a new historicist approach to reading the text by exploring the indeterminacy of meaning, the textualisation of history and myth in interpreting pretext, text and context while seeking meaning differently from the author‟s intention. It also deploys the receptionist paradigm, also known as reader response theory, in the search of meaning by drawing the audience into the process of interpretation and production of meaning. This is made possible by producing the playtext on stage in order to showcase the leit motif of clash of cultures as the major causative of conflict in the play while providing room for other meanings to display themselves, and for the audience to view. By also triangulating both qualitative and quantitative methods of research in the process of interpretation, a combination which proves highly rewarding and essential in theatre studies, the study made very insightful discoveries. One of the findings of this research is that drama, like other genres of literature, is a supertext; a pantheon of varied meanings. It also found that the mere reading of a play text limits its own true potentials and relying on the author‟s intention doubly chokes the already constraining form of the dramatic text in dispensing meaning. Play production is a viable means and process of interpretation and meaning making in theatre because it brings about the physicalization of characters, dialogue, music and other elements of semiotic appeal. As part of its findings, the study also discovers that interpretation is more enriching when it is a collective activity in reception than in conception. The study, however, debunks the allusion that Death and the King’s Horseman is not about the clash of cultures, because the „silences‟ in the text emphasise cultural assertions and differences as a major theme in the dramatic text and in its stage production. It is thus expected that interpretations of texts should not serve as foreclosures of meaning but as emergent voices and opinions subject to contexts of reading and meaning making which are contingent and arbitrary in themselves.
CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.0 Introduction
Nevertheless it is still true that the vast majority of play productions begin with the text. It is also true that after the performance is over, all that is left is the text (Leach 2008:18).
This study examines the interrelationship between pretext, text and context in the generation of meaning in drama, both in its literariness and in its stage production. This is of particular importance because dramatic writing and staging is largely an interplay of pretexts, texts and contexts. Pretexts and texts usually serve as sources for the drama while contexts implicate processes of interpretation.This intricate relationship points to the fact that drama draws from texts, is a text on its own and leads to a proliferation of other texts. Studying the dynamics of this interplay showcases how meaning is conceived, articulated and perceived in the ever shifting frames of reference abundant in the appreciation of a work of drama.
Whatever presents itself to be read assumes the status of a text. A text is anything that invites itself to be read. This could be a painting, a book, a song or even music. This view certainly tampers with the conventional notion of text as being characteristically written (Schechner 1973), especially in words. A text is not restricted to a written material, it refers to whatever human endeavor that is subject to interpretation, to a reading. Barker (2000:11) notes:
The concept of text suggests not simply the written word, though this is one of its senses, but all practices which signify. This includes the generation of meaning through images, sounds, objects (such as clothes) and activities (like dance and sport). The printed play is easily recognised as a text; hence its reference as a „playtext‟, „dramatic text‟. But in theatre discourse and performance studies there is also what is regarded as the „theatrical text‟ or „performance text‟ which refers to the product of production or performance. Wallis and Shepherd (2010:2) state that
The notion of the theatrical text is especially useful because it emphasises the fact that the stage is itself „read‟ by the audience. Both the page and the stage invite some sort of reading. The dramatic text is read on the page, the theatrical text is read by an audience from the stage”.
This indicates that there are two basic kinds of texts in the theatre; the written text (playtext) and
the performance text: the playwright‟s text and the director‟s or producer‟s text
Asides the obvious difference that one is written on a page and the other performed on stage, both texts share a marked relationship in the fact that the playtext serves as the
springboard from which the performance text originates and gains momentum. It is the playwright‟s text that usually conceives (inspires) the performance text.
The playwright then is perhaps the provider of starting-points. Her initial text is what makes the actor get up and begin work; what the actor does is to create a second text, related to the first, but different in kind (Leach 2008:19-20).
Not all performance texts, however, proceed from a dramatic text. Some of them are improvised; created from an unwritten circumstance, painting, music, poetry, orature or history. These may not be dramatic texts because dramatic texts have the peculiar characteristic of “the use of dialogue, the presence of stage directions (which give information about the appearance and movement of characters) or details of the stage set- that would seem to designate a text as being designed for stage performance” (Balme 2011:119). However, they are texts in their own right because they invite a reading that leads to a performance. Performance texts too are most times unwritten. They are created in the process of a production of texts, written and unwritten, acquiring the status of text in their own right:
Although such productions may produce a text, often they are not available for study; the text may only exist metaphorically in the sense that it is written into the corporeal memory of the performers (Balme 2011:119).
Leach (2008) as quoted above capsulizes the totality of the process of the text. Whatever informs a production is a text. A text is what the production showcases. After the production, all that is left is the text. This text then, potentially, becomes an inspiration for other texts to spring. Such is the continuum of text. It is upon this continuum that pretext, text and context become essential parameters in the creation, analysis and interpretation of drama and performance.
1.1 Pretext and Context in Drama
Pretext refers to something that preludes another, a thing that comes before something. In this sense, it could be said that the playtext is the pretext for the performance text. This also implies that the source material a playwright uses for telling his story is his pretext. Schechner (1973:6) simply refers to such materials as „script‟. He says script means “something that pre-exist (sic) any given enactment, which act (sic) as a blueprint for the enactment, and which persist (sic) from enactment to enactment”. The term „pretext‟, however, is more suitable for our purposes because it indicates a precursor without unnecessarily demanding strict adherence to a „blueprint‟.
Pretexts are readily adaptive to whatever contexts they are made to serve, or that they deem to create. Legends, historical chronicles, myths and, even, classical literature have served as pretexts for a lot of playwrights in creating their plays, for example Ola Rotimi‟s Gods are not to Blame, Femi Osofisan‟s The Women of Owu. These have been altered and modified to adopt new roles, functions and interpretations. It is important to remark that such sources are usually „texts‟ in their own rights, situated within specific contexts.
Context is the clime, milieu or setting in which a thing is situated. It is the interrelated condition in which something exists or occurs. Context implies an emphasis on the history, background, circumstances, cultural and political situations of the text and the processes that necessitated the creation of the text. Such „processes‟ could include, but not limited to, the purposes and intentions of the playwright especially in the choice of pretext.
When a playwright decides to use history or legend as pretext for a play, for instance, it is important that the context in which the pretext first existed be comprehended and acknowledged in creative re-making. This is “not a question of slavishly following the original; rather, responding to it in its own specificity enriches what we make” (Wallis and Shepherd 2010:2). Although Barthes (2001:146) has mentioned that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin”, there is residual meaning, or message, in the pretext that first interested the playwright in his selection. Pretext is that „point of origin‟ which serves as the causality for text and context.
As has been mentioned earlier, text is essentially read than written (in words), context becomes fluid by the very nature that texts are not confined to specific meanings and definitions. “It is possible, within text, to frame a question or assertion made in the text, by means of elements which are in the text” (Moynihan 1986:156). This possibility raises questions, however rhetorical:
Shall we merely retell the story and represent the characters on stage in our own way? Or shall we discover and enrich our own way by responding to the playtext in its own specificity– that is as a text that itself points forward to activities on a stage? What we come to make is entirely up to us. But we shall gain much if we are wise to the specificity of our pretext as we create(Wallis and Shepherd 2010: 3). Eagleton (1985: 64) sums it up, and provides a leeway when he states that:
The literary text is not the „expression‟ of ideology, nor is ideology the „expression‟ of social class. The text, rather, is a certain production of ideology, for which the analogy of a dramatic production is in some ways appropriate. A dramatic production does not „express‟, „reflect‟, or „reproduce‟ the dramatic text on which it is based; it „produces‟ the text, transforming it into a unique and irreducible entity. This is the process of meaning making. A reading or stage production of a text differs from the text itself because it has shifted in context. These activities of reading and stage production only articulate aspects of meaning which suit the reader/producer and once such activities occur, meaning is no longer dependent on the playwright but becomes a communion between the text and the reader/producer/audience.
1.2 Playwright and Subtext
Anything can be a pretext for drama. The subject of drama can spring from any discipline or matter:
The source of inspiration for a play cannot be foreseen. It may be a newspaper article, a personal experience, a criminal act for which the motives are unclear, or almost any other source, because the possibilities of drama are ever-present and because almost anything has the potential to stimulate a dramatist‟s imagination. Each writer has a view of the world or a range of interests that make some subjects more attractive than others (Brockett and Ball 2014:315) The playwright is that dramatist or writer who writes plays. Since the Greek era, the playwright has been central to dramatic composition and performance where playwrights are known to have staged performances of their own plays. Such performances in Greek theatre were largely transference of what had been written on the page to what was acted on stage. In other words,plays are staged to demonstrate the skill of the playwright in dramatic composition than in the directorial apprehension of the extrinsic qualities which the playtext could evoke in interpretation and performance. But this phenomenon did not affect the importance of the playwright in Greek theatre. He remained an important factor in theatrical conceptions and festivals. It was not until the eighteenth century that the „authority‟ of the playwright reached its peak, by which time, the playwright had risen to a status of being the custodian of meaning in a play. The intentions of the playwright determined the meaning of the text, and not what the text might suggest. Foucault (2001:186) had stated that “since the eighteenth century, the author has played the role of the regulator of the fictive, a role quite characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property”. Hence, any method of deducing significations, either apparent or coded, other than that which the playwright had stated as the message of “his” text was tantamount to trespassing.
To enshrine that „author-function‟ deeper, play analysis required a study of „peripheral texts‟ or what is regarded as peritext. Peritext refers to information which appear before the body of the play to hint at the meaning/intention of the play as determined by the playwright. Peritexts include titles, name of author, subtitles, dedications, epigraphs, introductions, prefaces and author‟s notes. Interviews and press releases also serve as peritexts. Under the supremacy of the author, peritexts were expected to provide the meaning and/or help guide the reading and staging of the text. The playwright was like a god who had created an unquestionable material, which cannot be interrogated beyond the purpose to which it was created. But there is hardly only one meaning residual in a text. There resides a “narrative surplus” (Linderman 1985:99) in every narrative. By narrative surplus it is meant that there are more beyond what the playwright points us to. This „more‟ is the subtext. The subtext is all that
the playwright does not seem to be saying, but is inadvertently communicating. Noting dialogue and stage directions as the major tools of communication for the playwright in the playtext, Downs, Wright and Ramsey (2013:131) define subtext as “the hidden meaning behind the words,
the real reason a character chooses to speak. In other words, dialogue is like an iceberg; only part of the meaning can be seen above the waterline”. Significantly, pretext is often used interchangeably as subtext, because it also implies an ostensible reason or false reason used to justify an action, a code (Soanes and Stevenson 2017). For the purposes of this research, however, pretext is conceptualised to operate as a precursor of texts; not only in the hyphenated sense (pre-text) of what comes before a text but also for the reason that it is a text on its own and possesses meanings which resound in the creation of whatever it inspires. This is why the term is deployed without the hyphen.Barthes (2001:148-149) interrogating the eighteenth century regard for the author submits that: The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with text, (he) is in no way equipped with a being preceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now… We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single „theological‟ meaning (the message of the Author God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.
A text therefore, is only an entrance to a world of complex significations which produce meanings beyond the tactile apprehensions of a playwright‟s limiting intentions. Foucault (2001:186) is also of the view that, if anything:
The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed… to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate indefinitely.
The truth is quite contrary; the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction…. The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.
The playwright is no longer the centre of meaning generation from a text; the text assumes a life of its own and does not require any peritexts to speak for itself. The primacy of the playwright had hitherto inhibited the vast potentials of the text in the proliferation of meaning and the multifariousness of contexts to which a single text could be analysed. With the „death of the author‟, the text comes alive with immeasurable subtexts in its wake. Tyson (2006:2) explains: “The death of the author” merely refers to the change of attitude toward the role of the author in our interpretation of literary works. In the early decades of the twentieth century, students of literature were taught that the author was our primary concern in reading a literary work: our task was to examine the author‟s life in order to discover what the author meant to communicate- his or her message, theme, or moral- which is called authorial intention. Our focus has changed over the years to the point that… the author is no longer considered a meaningful object of analysis. We focus, instead, on the reader; on the ideological, rhetorical, or aesthetic structure of the text; or on the culture in which the text was produced, usually without reference to the author.
This is precisely what the death of the author signifies; an interrogation of the text irrespective, or even in spite of the author.
1.3 Text in Performance: The Director and his Art
The „death of the author‟ and the rise of the text as an independent centre for the proliferation of meaning has significantly redefined the role and function of the theatre director. Although largely influenced by the European experience in the late nineteenth century that recorded great industrial, political, technological and economic shifts and advances which ultimately changed traditional and social perceptions and behaviours, “in theatre there arose the importance of the theatrical director as a source of interpretative intervention” (Krasner 2008:1). A child of the „modern‟ circumstance, the director has emerged to fill a gaping need that has before now created a void both in the art of theatre and in society. This is not to say that directing has not been taking place in the theatre throughout the ages. On the contrary, there has always existed a superintendence of creativity and artists by (mostly) playwrights, actors and teachers for theatrical productions. It should be noted in fact that after the passing of the author‟s primacy in the interpretation of texts, the actor reigned supreme. The actor was responsible for the interpretation of roles and texts before the necessary arrival of the director as the centre of interpretation and meaning generation. Booth (2001:329) had indicated that “the nineteenth- century actor was his or her own master. He or she…was responsible for the interpretation” of roles. He also realised that “What was missing was a director working with actors to develop character, the interpretation of a role, and the interpretation of the play itself” (332). So: When the director did finally appear toward the end of the nineteenth century, he filled so pressing a need that he quickly pre-empted the hegemony that had rested for centuries with playwrights and actors. Working behind the scenes, the director stamped his individuality on a rich and varied international stage. By blending diverse arts into a single organic image he gave form to the complex modern theatre, just as a poet had given shape to the Elizabethan stage by words and the actor had crystallized the theatrical idea of the eighteenth century by his personal magnetism. The appearance of the director ushered in a new and original theatrical epoch. His experiments, his failures, and his triumphs set and sustained the stage…. By his interpretation a director would weld a harmonious art and a cohesive audience out of the disturbing diversity increasingly apparent in our urban, industrial, mass society. By his multifarious activities the director would restore the artistic and social unity that has always been the central demand of the collective art of theatre (Chinoy 1976: 3-4). Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen (1826–1914) is regarded as the first director in the modern sense especially because he: exerted complete control over every aspect of production. He designed the scenery, costumes, and properties himself and insisted that they be constructed to his precise specifications both in materials and appearance…. In Saxe-Meningen‟s productions, the total stage picture was worked out carefully moment by moment, and the superior results were seen as convincing arguments for a strong director who can impose his authority and implement his vision… the need for unified production… soon became a basic tenet of theatrical production (Brockett and Ball 2014:154-155). Although he was largely celebrated because of his directorial practices than for any concern with a new repertory, experimentation or innovative design, Georg II had instituted an important role for the director in theatre practice even as the period spurred a rise in experimentation, questioning and intense creativity. Krasner (2008:2) captures the phenomena thus:
A cursory glance at the late nineteenth-century period reveals an elaborate picture of many aims and at times contradictory themes. Theorists had disdain for the ambitions of those preceding them, rejecting eighteenth-century Enlightenment rationalism as well as early nineteenth-century Romantic inwardness. The designation of modernism- a fluid term ranging from one late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century playwright or theatrical event to another- stems from the condition in which tradition was perceived as stifling creativity and the task of making sense of ourselves and the world lacked certainty and authority. Political, social and economic changes, scientific developments, and artistic inventiveness encouraged the questioning of tradition and validating the “new”. For modernists past models had collapsed, convention had inhibited creativity, and formulas were perceived to have thwarted innovation. Modernism… inclined towards the marginal and unorthodox…, intimacy, ambiguity, and fragmentation came into vogue. Inadvertently, “the emergence of the director as an independent theatre artist during the twentieth century made it clear that the staging itself was a complex artwork sui generis” (Balme 2011:78). The phenomenon of the director overhauled the old system that provided a cottage approach to play production and a simplistic notion of the meaning of texts. Booth (2001:332) notes that: The old system had to change under the impact of changing conceptions of character and dramatic writing and new ideas of psychology, where motivation was hidden or obscur where abnormal psychology and inner struggle were significant determinants of personality, and where text was complex and enigmatic. Carlson (1996:82) also avers that: Not until the rise of modern interest in performance was there much thought that a play might be presented in a different contextualization, not as a cousin of such literary forms as the poem or the novel, but of such performance forms as the circus, the sideshow, the parade, or even the wrestling match or the political convention. The liberty the period provided transformed the art of directing from a mere transfer of a playwright‟s revered and „self-complete‟ text unto the stage to a more dynamic interrogation of, and interaction with subtexts which faltered the notion of „authorship‟ as a repressive principle of interpretation and staging. This new status provides the director with a creative freedom of analysing and re-contextualizing playwrights‟ texts. Added to the traditional role of harmonising all other elements of performance into a unified production, the creation and articulation of new meaning situated in written texts also became the central purpose of directing. The director‟s art hence, is an engagement with text in order to investigate its pretext and determine, in theatrical production, the possibility of generating other and deeper meanings when and wherever the text is exposed to different contexts. This approach gives the director the power to translate the concerns of a playwright‟s text into indicators of other or greater and wider societal concerns. He interrogates a text and produces new texts in the process. By so doing, the director becomes an auteur. Brockett and Ball (2014:340) state that:
A director who treats the script as raw material to be reshaped for his or her own purposes is sometimes called an auteur (French for “author”) because the director is considered the principal creative force. Taken to its most extreme expression, this approach to directing virtually eliminates the playwright (or at least the distinctions between writer and director). In engaging Soyinka‟s Death and the King’s Horseman for production in this study, the director did not attempt to follow the „extreme‟ route of auteurism but he initiated the text into yielding meanings that have been hitherto either deemed non-existent or have been confined to the margins by authorial insistence and imposition. The authorial imposition in this study‟s case is the denial that the text is about „a clash of cultures‟. The task of the director here is to free the text into dispensing its own significations even as it is placed in contexts that suit his purposes, which specifically is the notion that the text is fundamentally about „a clash of cultures‟. This is essentially possible because: Director/ has become that sign we use to inscribe that connotational consistency and interpretational purpose we propose to glimpse within and behind a “weaving together” of the strands of the dramatic with those of the performance text (Rouse 1999:146).
Hence, the director‟s interpretation of the text does not in any way seek to „define‟ the text as all about the clash of cultures in a manner Mane (2010:89) considers to be the ultimate task of interpreting a text, which is “always the explanation of what the play “means”. Barthes (1974:5) had stated that “to interpret a text is not to give it a meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it”. This interpretation therefore intends to demonstrate the dispersing centrality („plurality‟) of clash of cultures as the leit motif of the text. This demonstration is quintessential because, even according to Barthes (1977:157) a text is “experienced only in an activity of production”.
It is however significant that an interrogation of the background of the text is done in order to put into proper perspective this study‟s context of articulating meaning within a justifiable paradigm. Such an interrogation also provides the nexus as to why this relevant in the purview of its chosen interpretation and the need for a stage production in the expression and reception of intended meaning.
1.4. Background to the Study
In the Humanities, as in social life, the search for meaning usually necessitates an interrogation of pretexts, texts and contexts. Interpretations and the apprehension of phenomena, in order to gain greater clarity, require an investigation of what precedes a happening, an analysis of the happening and the situation upon which such a happening is premised for investigation. It is on the basis of this notion that the myth making propensities of the Yoruba serves as the pivotal background to this study. It is from it also that the pretext to the text under study is derived. Nearly all aspects of Yoruba existence possess a mythical valuation. Myths are stories created to function as explanations to the worldview of a people. Such stories garner credibility, no matter their incongruity, among a people to a point that they are generally accepted as history, as truth. Soyinka (1990:xii) has admitted that “Man exists… in a comprehensive world of myth, history and mores”. Finding himself in a „world‟ where there are no readily available explanations for such „super‟-natural occurences as rain, thunder, lightning, creation (birth and death) and creativity, fire and wind, man created, and believed that there are, elemental forces which exist in a cosmic, supernatural realm, responsible for such awe and wonder. He also believed that these elemental forces interfere in his daily attempt at „making a life‟ for himself. The belief is that man (humanity) exists:
within a cosmic totality, did possess a consciousness in which his own earth being, his gravity-bound apprehension of self was inseparable from the entire cosmic phenomenon. (For let it always be recalled that myths arise from man‟s attempt to externalise and communicate his inner intuitions” (Soyinka 1990:3). To apprehend and explain phenomena beyond his logic, man created gods responsible for specific needs and attached logical validation to his fantastic creations, and creativity. The gods, of necessity, possess human and super-human characteristics, in order not to appear ordinary
while maintaining plausibility and commonality with what is essentially human to mankind.
They are orchestrated in a manner to inspire belief and an aura that transcend ordinary understanding, thus inspiring mysticism. In other words, “the desire to develop the gods as full people must conflict with the desire for neatness and simplicity of explanation” (Ogunbiyi 1981:89). The Yoruba believe in three worlds that are tied within a cyclical cosmic interdependence. It is this worldview that gives specific substance to the belief in, and proliferation of, myths. The three worlds include the worlds of the living, the (un)dead (to capture the notion that though dead, the dead are still alive as mediating spiritual forces) and the unborn:
The Yoruba world-view is multi-dimensional. It is not restrained to the physical, tangible plane of existence. Besides the earth which is the measure of the present, and the locus of mortals and where you and I, in the form of existence, dramatize our distinctive destinies, there are the realms of ancestors (the past), gods (the eternal) and the unborn (the future) (Ibitokun 1995:21-22).
It is within this matrix of being and existence that the Yoruba defines his conditions, social and otherwise, and life: Life within Yoruba cosmology is viewed from the world of the living, the dead and the unborn. The Yoruba share with other African ethnic nationalities the fundamental belief in the continuity of life after death. They acknowledge the contribution of the dead to the life of the living and the future generations… for the Yoruba, the gods are the final measure of eternity. Forces that are beyond man‟s power controls (sic) man. Thus… man maintains a close contact with nature and consequently, his life is guarded by codes of conduct that must be observed. It is only through constant communion with the supernatural forces that harmony can be guaranteed (Gbilekaa 2013:125). This tripartite perception of life shapes mankind‟s actions and relationships, both with their visible counterparts and their invisible benefactors. In fact, the very: life cycle of an individual constitutes only a segment in a larger ontological journey- a continuous, unending movement of the human spirit from the world to the otherworld and back again, to be reincarnated in the bodies of descendants (Drewal 1992:26). This back and forth journey is a round and round passage which necessitates a transition that sojourns through the three worlds. Soyinka in an interview with Appiah (2015:781) explains the Yoruba world-view thus:
We believe that there are various areas of existence, all of which interact, interlock in a pattern of continuity: the world of the ancestor, the world of the living, and the world of the unborn. The process of transition among these various worlds is a continuing one and one which is totally ameliorated. For instance, the function of ritual, of sacrifice- whether it‟s a ram or a chicken- the function of seasonal ceremonies, is in fact allied to the ease of transition among these various worlds. Inhabitants of each of the three worlds have an interconnected responsibility that is largely beneficial to the living. The living are expected to give supplications to the dead (ancestors) who in turn would bless their existence and ensure that the unborn are released to the living in a manner that guarantees the “continuation of the species”. In the land of the living, the collective, that is, the community has primacy over the individual and every member of the community knows this: Every living human individual is important to all the communities in the world, but in the Yoruba society, the community gets the primacy. It gives importance to the dead ancestors and unborn lives. The dead ancestors are worshipped as guides and companions. The Yoruba people believe that their blessings will save them from all evils. Moreover, they believe that life is a continuum. In fact, it is their fundamental belief. The transition from the physical world to the eternal world is a very important moment in the Yoruba idea of life cycle (Kumar 2015:378).
To sum it up, this is how the world works for the Yoruba: In Yoruba thought, the otherworldly domain (orun) coexists with the phenomenal world of people, animals, plants, and things (aye). Orun includes a pantheon of uncountable deities (Orisa), the ancestors (osi, egun), and the spirits both helpful and harmful. The world and the underworld are always in close proximity, and both human and other spirits travel back and forth between the two. The Yoruba adage “the world is a market, the otherworld is home” (aye l’oja, orun n’ile) conveys the idea of the journey between the two and the permanency of existence in the latter in contrast to the former, where people and spirits merely visit (Drewal 1992:26). Such a worldview provides for Soyinka a fertile ground, a pretext to cultivate texts rich in drama and meaning.For one who “sees the stage as a constant battleground for forces larger than the petty infractions of habitual communal norms or patterns of human relationships and expectations, beyond the actual twists and incidents of action and their resolutions” (Soyinka
1990:43), ritual and myth would not be surprising pretexts for drama Soyinka seizes on myth and ritual as the perfect paradigms for the artistic exploration of that which in human experience and natural phenomena is perennial, recurrent, unchanging, timeless, ineffable, imponderable and ultimately resistant to domination and control by man (Soyinka1990:xvii).
Myth, ritual and history are important elements for drama, both in its form and content.
They have not only informed its birth, but have been primordial pretexts for drama since its
inception. Several other playwrights, other than Soyinka, have deployed these in projecting their visions through drama. John Pepper Clark uses myth and ritual in Song of a Goat (1961), Ozidi
(1966). Femi Osofisan has also predicated his drama Morountodun (1982) on such materials. Emmy Idegu The Legendary Inikpi (1994), Omodoko (1998), Ata Igala the Great (2008), Ola
Rotimi Ovonranwem Nogbaisi (1971) Ahmed Yerima Ameh Oboni the Great (2006), Sanamo Lagwampa Makwada (2015). Their preoccupation with history, ritual and myth is not a mere „remembering‟ of early rural life and their people‟s tales (Ukala 2001:30) but a (re)definition of purpose, identity and “translation of culture” (Okpewho 2004:55). Idegu (2007:99) also mentions that “myth, legends and history and the like come handy in man‟s attempt to comprehend his immediate and remote environments”.
The interplay of pretext, text and context in Soyinka‟s Death and the King’s Horseman provides the spur for this research to further interrogate the text; for the text is a culmination of pretext and context, especially in order to reveal further contexts which would in turn make the text a pretext. It is a cyclical continuum like the Yoruba cosmology. It becomes quite confusing that a text based on such a rich background of intrinsic culture and pristine belief system would therefore not consider the presence of alien factors, in this case represented by colonial presence, as both incursive and contaminating. An African playwright‟s engagement with his culture and belief system goes beyond the aesthetics of dramaturgy. Idegu (2007:99) notes that:
There is probably no single subject which ethnographers, anthropologists and theatre scholars, concern themselves more than attempts to understand and interpret the belief systems of peoples of Africa and how these are reflected in their lives, (both here and hereafter) and in their works. Soyinka‟s text can, therefore, be seen to be concerned with the totality of the world it creates and the world that informs its creation. Beyond the dramatisation of the Yoruba world view lies the contestation of the effects of colonial contact embedded in the text; a culmination of which reveals Soyinka‟s “accounting for his cultural situation” (Appiah 1992:79). Soyinka had however denied and discouraged a pursuit of meaning from the perspective of clash of cultures in the authorial note to Death and the King’s Horseman. Such authorial insistence limits the potential broad spectrum of viewing life thereby inhibiting the richness and variety that various perspectives can bring to the apprehension and interpretation of texts and life in general. Sadly, so many researchers and directors have inclined to accept the playwright‟s opinion as „textual truth‟ and treated the text from a literal approach:
The literal approach stems from the belief that a play is a finished and self-disclosing artefact and that the director serves the playwright by transferring the play as literally as possible from page to stage. Directors who accept this notion of their function usually retain the time and place specified in the text and closely (though not necessarily slavishly) follow the playwright‟s prescriptions about staging (Brockett and Ball 2014:337).
It is against this context that this research intends to interrogate the text with the hope of unearthing cultural significations which bespeak „clash of cultures‟ as a major theme in Death and the King’s Horseman, both in the dramatic text, and in the form of a performance text. This is so as to portray that life is not unilineal in scope and that meaning is fluid, flexible and varied.
1.5 Statement of the Research Problem
Studies of Wole Soyinka‟s Death and the King’s Horseman have been disposed to predominantly view the play as a mythopoeic rendition of history and Yoruba tragedy (cosmology). The „iconic‟ play is not deeply analysed outside the parameters of myth hence the lack of sustained argument away from the threnodic essence of the text. This tendency, perhaps, stems from the playwright‟s disclaimer that his play has no deliberate inclination to dramatise a „clash of cultures‟. This study suggests that both the authorial pronouncement and the mythopoeic thrust deny the richness of the cultural fissures in both the text and the performance of Death and the King’s Horseman. Herein lies the problematic of this study.While it is true that mythopoeism is not only abundantly pervasive in Death and the King’s Horseman, but also constitutes the most dominant analytic concern among scholars of the text,the analytical reading and interpretations, which such a uniaxial treatment has ignored, is the wider interpretive meanings domiciled within the text.
This authorial disclaimer is both inhibitive and limiting to the potentials of meaning and textual power embedded within the play. In fact, Death and the King’s Horsemancaptures aspects of the colonial experience in Nigeria and the superimpositions of the Western culture on indigenous belief systems of the colonised people.Therefore, set within this context, the text is bound to yield more textual relevance and provide a polysemy of interpretations, and fresh insights. Questions therefore arise as to the extent authorial intentions could continue to determine the production of meaning in texts; how long could the theme of clash of cultures be ignored or dismissed to the margins of meaning making and interpretation in the analysis of Death and the King’s Horseman? This study, therefore, sets out to explore Death and the King’s Horseman, both as a text and in performance (drawing the audience into the search for meaning), from a perspective of clash of cultures.
This study operates on the claims that:
- Death and the King’s Horsemanprovides a more enriching space for interpretation when „read‟ from a perspective of clash of cultures than from a concern with its depiction of myth and threnody.
- In theatre, meaning is not limited to pretext, text and/or context but also incorporates the audience (reader) by giving him the liberty to „create‟ his own meaning.
- Stage production encourages the playtext to reveal its plethora of meaning than the mere reading of the words on the page.
1.6 Aim and Objectives
The aim of this research is to critically analyse Soyinka‟s Death and the King’s Horseman from the leit motif of „clash of cultures‟in order to depict the polysemous nature of the text. In pursuance of the claim that the theme of clash of cultures could serve as a major source of textual power, the study preoccupies itself with the objectives to;
- Explore how Death and the King’s Horseman is readily disposed to various contexts through different readings.
- Produce Death and the King’s Horseman on stage with the view to unearthing different layers of meaning especially between script and stage.
- Examine the cultural values embedded in the text in order to reveal the effects of clash of cultures on the dramatic (tragic) construct of the play.
1.7 Research Questions
- How does a text produce meaning differently from the intentions of its author?
- How does the interface between script and stage produce various layers of meanings?
- What cultural values exist in the world of the play and how do they trigger a clash of cultures?
1.8 Justification for the Study
Soyinka‟s works have been widely researched; his Death and the King’s Horseman even more so (Jeyifo 2004, Gibbs 1980, Katrak 1986). What appears missing, which this study provides, is the cultural richness and discourse which lends itself in the text. His blend of myth and history is rarely apprehended from the dynamics of cultural perspectives. Jeyifo (2004:121) notes that: Of all Soyinka‟s plays, Death and the King’s Horseman is perhaps the most event-specific in its derivation; it dramatizes the famous incident in 1946 when the British colonial authorities prevented the carrying out of a customary ritual suicide by an important chief, a ritual suicide intended to officially conclude the funerary ceremonies for one of the most important indigenous rulers in colonial Nigeria, the Alafin of Oyo. In Soyinka‟s dramatization of this event, the tragic and unanticipated reversals which result from this intervention are presented in the form of ritual festivity of great poetic elegance and performative sublimity which, nonetheless, undermine both the moral authority of the colonizers and the spiritual security of the colonized. Yet, hardly is there a research that interrogates the “clash of cultures” as a theme in Soyinka‟play. This is largely because Soyinka himself had denied such an occurrence in his intentions, but the text, which is treated in this study as an entity independent of its maker (the playwright) in communicating meaning, begs to differ. Hence, this research justifies itself as a study that considers that theme as the essential leit motif of the text. It would also enrich relevant literatures on the subject of Soyinka, text and context, Death and the King’s Horseman and the significance of audience (reception) in meaning making. Of fundamental import is the disposition of this study to implicate, via performance production, the views of the audience in interpretation and the search for meaning. Most theatre research and studies concern themselves with aspects of drama and theatre as literature rather than as a combination of page and stage activities. Or as Beckerman (1979:13) notes: Unfortunately, dramatic theory has not sufficiently addressed itself to a close analysis of theatrical activity, primarily because it has seen theatre as a composition of words rather than of activities…. This seems to be a serious error, because in failing to concern itself fully with activity before examining the concept of action, dramatic criticism and theory are ignoring the foundation of theatrical art. Though Beckerman‟s submission might hint at eurocentricism, since African theatre has been characteristically more inclined towards activities and action than on writing, the point that recent concerns with dramatic theory and criticism, as he notes, rarely considers the art from its mimetic roots and inclinations. This study, hence, becomes quite relevant as it takes into account the necessity of the nature of theatre as interplay of texts in the search and articulation of meaning; the dramatic text and the performance text.
1.9 The Scope of the Study
The focus of this study is to critically interrogate the intertextuality of meaning and intentions by subjecting Soyinka‟s Death and the King’s Horseman to an interpretation that depicts the play as about a clash of cultures. Soyinka‟s text is peculiarly significant not only because it covers the framework of myth, ritual and history as sources for drama, but essentially because it is hardly analysed as a play that significantly thrives on the theme and conflict of culture. A deconstructionist reading of the text encourages the text to yield its cultural elements in order to further project the aim of the study.
The gap between page (playtext) and stage (performance text) is also explored by producing the play on stage with the hope of going beyond literary analyses to a concrete demonstration of the interpretation the text is given in this study. The intention to stage is not unconnected to the fact that, “Drama interprets with greater immediacy than other genres and is accessible in performance to those who cannot or do not read” (Ukala 2001:29). The Ahmadu Bello University Studio Theatre (Drama Village) is venue for production because it is the stage for play production provided by the department where this study was carried out. Although primarily concerned with Death and the King’s Horseman, the study is not limited to its primary text, as it cross-examines and references other material sources relevant to its own case, and to the subject in question. Considering the fact that the pretext of Death and the King’s Horseman is situated in 1946 while the text was first published in 1975, this study also explores the temporal relevance of the play in contemporary times. This exploration aids the objective of drawing a premise of timelessness in texts, expecially those enriched with deconstructive reading. It provides a basis for analysing the text against current trends in society, especially those that have to do with morality and the identity question.
