Untitled - Memorial University of Newfoundland

into the realm of communal ritual . In his Introduction. Soyinka states why he changes
Euripides' ending and supports his reasons for the change throughout the drama. He
expresses dissatisfaction at the "petering off of ecstasy into a suggestion of a prelude
to another play· (x) . He is convinced that the Bacc:haL is not an episode in a historical
series, and this is not merely because Eurip ides did not live to wri te the next
instalment; it is because the drama is "too powerful a play of forces in the human
condition and too rounded a rite for the communal psyche:"
I have therefore sought a new resolution in the symbolic extension of
ritual powers, but oo1y such as we have already encountered with the
Baccban tes on the mountain- side. The disruptive challenges to Nature
that have been let loose in the action demand no less ... I see '1'he
Bacchae, finally, as a prodigious, barbaric banquet, an insightful
manifestation of the universal need of man to match himself against
nature (z).
By transforming Euripi des ' play into a Nature feast. a barbaric banquet and a
communion rite of liberation, Soyinka equates the traged y with the Yoruba rituals on
which the social and cultural stability depended before the intrusion of European
slavery and coloniza tion. He explains his idea of ritual in his interview with Gates:
The principle of it [ritual] is that a penon takes on himself the entire
burdens of society; very often it takes the symbolic fonn of a canoeshaped
object which is then takento the river or to the sea and floated
away .... In certain Yoruba areas the carrier takes the object and dives
into the water and disappears for quite a while; he goes down there to
bury the object right in the sea bed•••He [Eyo Adimu, a masquerade]
carries the evils of the year in his penon: all the diseases . the
unhappiness . the evil, all the curses which have hung around society .
He takes this away. disappears into a grove or bushes somewhere and
all the collective evils of society are takenin his ownperson and are
thrown away (40).
147