AN INDIVIDUAL AND HIS FOLKLORE: AN EXPLICATION ON SOYINKA'S APPROPRIATION OF OGUN MYTH AND SYMBOL

Abstract

This topic has an obvious Jungian implication, but I hasten 16 say that my approach is that of a folklorist and literary critic, rather than a psychologist. I wish to show how folk expressions are drawn into the literary ambiance in order to extend our aesthetic, and sometimes philosophical, understanding of text and its creator. Therefore, there is the need for caution by a would-be analyst of Soyinka's use of myth in several poems (Idanre. Ogun Abibiman) and play (The Road). From a reading of how myth is regarded in Anthropology, Religion, Folklore, Philosophy and Literature, I find that Soyinka's use of it is intimidating. It is hard to fix it either into Ernst Cassirer's or Stith Thompson's model. Soyinka shares thought processes with both Paul Radin and Claude Levi-Strauss and several other users and interpreters of myth in cultural studies. Whether we interpret myth in his work literally or allegorically, for aesthetic appeal or liberative intent, from a religious or political bondage, his use of Ogun myth and the concept of the road welds folklore, myth and religion together to enable a cross-disciplinary study like this to take place, in which horizons of interpretation (Ruland, 1975) could repay our full understanding of religion and literature as dimensions of one integral process of human experience. Hence, the choice of this topic demands explication, as it relies very much on Alan Dundes' illuminating views on folk ideas as a unit of world view...