WOLE SOYINKA'S POSTMODERNISM: THE POETICS OF IGBALE

Abstract

Between postmodernist and secular humanistic ethos:

Extinction is an asset of matter, which itself is a slave of change. Mythology observed this paradox in nature and divined it with the metaphor of the Phoenix that, every million years, ritually gets burnt and resurrects from the ashes of its own ruins, In time, movements and cultures are prone to nurse the fear of the transience of being. In acceptance of this challenge, they. then, instinctively develop and exert self-defensive mechanisms for protective purpose. This same phobia has mainly stimulated the ideology of cultural and doctrinal superiority, domination and control, thus upholding the dynamism and quest for continuity as yet other assets of matter. Enriching world intellectual vision and practice, the Phoenix's archetypal cyclicality offers postmodernism a template to emerge as the renaissance of antiquity.

Responding to the all-pervasive and affective dictate of the phobia of outright extinction, irrelevance or temporal docility, the Fall 1998 issue of Free Inquiry was entirely committed to combating a perceived eroding force of its doctrinal dignity. The journal - the Council for Secular Humanism's idea dissemination organ editorially describes postmodernism as an attack on truth, 'science. morality and common sense (1998: Front cover). Timothy J. Madigan's "Transcending Havel" is one of the most topically incisive feature-essays. Specifically reacting to the content of "The Power of the Powerless" (Civilization. April/May, 1998) by Vaclav Havel a playwright, actor and an anti-communist philosopher and revolutionary who later assumed the presidency of the Czech Republic having led the 1989 Velvet Revolution Madigan concludes:

It is appropriate that the literary school that most influenced Havel was the Theatre of the Absurd (10)