Language and Style in Soyinka: A Systemic Textlinguistic Study of a Literary Idiolect (review)

Language and Style in Soyinka: A Systemic Textlinguistic Study of a Literary Idiolect, by Oluwole Adejare. Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books (Nigeria) PLC, 1992.

Oluwole Adejare's examination of Soyinka's idiolect, while competent and industrious, lacks vitality. Adejare attempts to redress the general misconception that "Soyinka's literary language [is] a problem for both the scholar and the general reader" (1); as Adejare observes, an accessible approach rather than the language itself is at root of the problem.

Language and Style begins with a preface, where Adejare recounts the import of "textlinguistics": crudely, the study of linguistic contributions to plot. The systemic portion arises from M. A. K. Halliday's conception of grammar as "interrelated contrasts [. . .] used in the expression of meaning" (The Cambridge Companion to Language 408). "Chapter One: Theoretical Preliminaries" discounts previous stylistic methods as unscientific (3), readership as undefined. That truism to the side, sales figures (specifying price, region, and whether or not the book is part of a curriculum) will provide a solid basis for a profile of Soyinka's average reader, and commercial limitations on it. This approach is more "scientific" than Adejare's abdication of the attempt (5). Much of Soyinka's work is written for performance, yet Adejare does not discuss the language of theatrical praxis, nor difficulties it causes an audience. Like Ngara's stylistic criticism, Adejare's requires a social and historical siting of the text (9). While the approach has some merit, it will always be an educated, informed, and ultimately individual interpretation of the writer's message. As an example Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation" offers "[a] superb understanding of an aspect of English culture" (15). The generality of "an aspect," as yet unidentified, along with the presence of "Red booth. Red pillar-box. Red double-tiered / Omnibus . . ." does not assist the reader's understanding of English culture. The city of Victoria, Canada, operates double-decker tour buses of this color; Canada Post mail boxes are red, though not pillar-box in style; red booths abound in a variety of cultures, though the abbreviation as a signifier of a telephone kiosk is particularly British. These counterexamples show the ingrained nature of facets of British culture in former colonies. The poem is quite clearly about the landlady's racism, but racism is not solely an English preserve. Examining alternate locales, then, opens the message to a worldly rather than a regional truth and adds (rather than limits) the poem's sociolinguistic complexity.

Chapter two analyzes The Interpreters' structural impediments to reception and the "three orders" of message: primitive, prime, and second level. Scattergrams, Events Time Sequence, and other elaborate labels heighten the "scientific" nature of Adejare's method: to plot the action of the novel. Is such a lexical and grammatical description necessary to uncover a book's message? No. The examination of "extracts, which are concerned with the interpretation of man represented by the various character metaphors" (27) is observable in the "existential codes" and "experimental selves" Kundera employs (The Art of the Novel trans. 1988: 29-30, 31). Adejare's linguistic terminology is of limited use to linguists.

There are sound and interesting etymologies, examinations of the roots of coinages, additions to the nuance one takes to an ethnocentric passage, but the overall enterprise is not greater than these occasional parts. Grammar's role is scrutinized, with passages limited to the opening chapters of section one and section two of The Interpreters; this limits the scope of the method's application and value. The second order level of meaning examines "Nigerian Variety of English--Pidgin, Lexical Choice, Syntax, Phonology," "Interference Variety," and so on. The approach has a rhetorical deadness in the ubiquitous repetition of apostasy as a theme in these groupings. An imaginative, satiric, and rewarding novel dies under the overly structured technique, repetitious style, and "lumpy" prose.

The process begins anew in the...