Note publique d'information : Le titre anglais de cette thèse, Soyinka’s Language – calqué sur celui de l’ouvrage
de Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language – est traduit librement en français par Les
mots de Soyinka en mouvement pour évoquer la richesse poétique de ‘language’ dans
ce contexte littéraire. Cette étude adopte l’approche de Kermode pour analyser un
corpus d’oeuvres de Wole Soyinka (neuf pièces de théâtre et deux essais), dans la
tradition critique anglaise de ‘close reading’. Les mots nous pénètrent malgré nos
efforts pour nous tenir à l’écart de l’expérience (The Lion and the Jewel; le diptyque
Jero). Ils peuvent également rendre concret le passage d’un monde à un autre – par
exemple, à travers un vocabulaire pédagogique qui tombe rapidement en désuétude (The
Road; Madmen and Specialists). Comment exprimer, comment articuler sur scène la notion
ambivalente de la distance – d’un côté, la distance de la théorie, de l’objectivité;
de l’autre, l’absence d’empathie, de compréhension humaine – (The Strong Breed, A
Dance of the Forests, The Bacchae of Euripides, et The Burden of Memory)? Il s’agit
d’un problème rhétorique qui s’apparente à un risque d’autarcie ou de solipsisme.
Désamorcé dans la prose de The Man Died, ce risque sert de repoussoir, pour Soyinka
dans Myth, Literature and the African World, à l’articulation d’une conception (yoruba)
de l’existence, dont les tensions constitutives s’expriment à travers les ressources
rhétoriques de la poésie orale. Cette étude se termine par une lecture de Death and
the King’s Horseman, expression exemplaire de la tension entre l’affirmation de soi
et le retour à la communauté, entre l’être et le non-être.
Note publique d'information : The title of this thesis is an allusion to Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language.
There, Kermode directed his attentions to Shakespeare’s dramatic verse, its poetry,
demonstrating how the demands which words make on the ear might attune us to the insinuating
possibilities of language, if attended to by a patient reader. This thesis adopts
the same methodological principle, in approaching a number of Wole Soyinka’s dramatic
and prose works in English. Throughout, it is concerned with his intelligence as expressed
through literature. To this end, it does not hesitate to speculate, in the manner
of Shklovsky, as to schemata which Soyinka might have used in order to ‘make’ his
works. At the same time, it sees in formalism, for writer and would-be critic alike,
the danger of words’ being cut off from the common human constituency and experience
which assure their meaning. Words penetrate us, undermine our attempts to stand apart,
draw us into a realm of consequence (The Lion and the Jewel; the Jero plays). Consequence,
in turn, implies passage between two distinct moments, inviting us to reflect on how
language can become strange (The Road; Madmen and Specialists). What happens to words
in one who is content to look on from a distance, instead of participating? This is
the starting point for a discussion of Soyinka’s interrogations of justice in The
Strong Breed, A Dance of the Forests, The Bacchae of Euripides and The Burden of Memory.
Implicit in onlooking is the risk of self-sufficiency. Warded off in the prose of
The Man Died, self-sufficiency provides a foil to a Yoruba conception of being and
tragedy, as articulated in Myth, Literature and the African World. The study culminates
in Death and the King’s Horseman, which best enacts the tension between self-assertion
and commonality, departure and return, being and non-being, in and through poetic
language.
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