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"The World Adrift In Emptiness": Crossing The Abyss Of Transition In Four Tragedies By Wole Soyinka, Michael H. Lake
"The World Adrift In Emptiness": Crossing The Abyss Of Transition In Four Tragedies By Wole Soyinka, Michael H. Lake
Masters Theses
1986 Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, Nigerian dramatist, poet, essayist and novelist, names the Yoruba god, Ogun, as his tragic muse for ritual theatre in "The Fourth Stage," his early artistic manifesto. In this essay Soyinka maintains that in contrast to Dionysus, Nietzsche's hero in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Ogun balances within himself elements that could be described as Dionysian, Apollonian, and Promethean. Archetypally, Ogun thus constitutes a destructive-creative unity which overcomes the dyad of good-versus-evil of Europe's Christian civilization.
For this reason, Soyinka upholds Ogun not only as a natural patron of tragedy …