The
determination of the precise identity of its object, the preservation of the
methods and skills of this determination, and the effective passing on of these
to the student of the discipline, remain an anguished concern for literary
studies and criticism. And the fact of this object being art—literary art in
this specific instance—and as such not given in nature, but the productivity of
deliberate laborious enterprise, seems to heighten the complexity. For this
means minimally that the discipline cannot successfully come off before this
productivity has fully emerged, before it has been ‘born’ (Frye), that is
before this enterprise’s ‘crude improvisations [have given] birth to poetry’
(Aristotle); for then there would be no object for it to study and investigate,
to describe and explain. Then again is the matter of the variety of this object
when it eventually begins to appear, a direct correspondence to the
numerousness of the individual artistic geniuses, with the result that every
individual production bears inevitably the marking, sui generis, of the
individual craftsman. But if there is this discipline, it must be because,
regardless this numerousness, the particular works are seen in the last
analysis to share similar characterizing features, being members of a singular
species, or that at least this possibility is not far-fetched.
Only the effort of passing on this skill
for determining the literary object is chiefly being dissipated in the
pursuance of other non-central concern in the discipline, or else is concerted
towards what Lowry Pei has called ‘an amateur way of engaging another discipline.’
The consequence is that what is supposed to be the student’s training regime
runs out with him wondering expectedly what his specific specialization is; for
he has acquired no especial skill, a specialist being one skilled at a specific
field as opposed to and distinct from other fields. A common evidence of this
will be found in the student’s determining a work literature on the sheer
trivial basis that the author is Shakespeare or Blake, Achebe or Soyinka, or
even one of his own self-styled teachers who, most probably in good faith, has
only succeeded in effectively turning him out unskilled and, therefore,
incapable of at least wholly independently recognizing much less determining literature,
should it come from a non-established name, say, Nnaji. And this regardless
that the said student may have all the tool for work, often a theory, of which
Akwanya points out that its ‘fundamental task…is to specify the object it is
concerned with’ (‘Research Paper and Thesis Proposal’ 79).
But this can only needlessly complicate the
confusion, for then it will be undetermined if the identity of the work reposes
in the name of the artist or in itself. Yet there are range of works in the tradition
long determined as art whose authors are not definitely known; in fact it does
even appear that the disappearance of the craftsman, the swallowing up of the
creator by his own very craft whereby he ‘speak[s] as little as possible in his
own person’ (Aristotle 47), ‘lose[s] himself…in order to find himself in
supreme vision’ (Knight 1961:8), has always already been a requisite condition
for the emergence of this specific art form, so that where this
‘self-sacrifice,’ this ‘extinction of personality’ (Eliot) of the craftsman is
traceable, one can already begin exercising a suspicion of the presence of
literature. And there seems a touch of expediency if inevitability to this
self-loss of the artist in literary productivity to the extent that the name of
the author becomes ‘objective and impersonal—even inhuman’ (Carl Jung); for
there is something necessarily radically confrontational and revolutionary
about this artist’s engagement, since ‘the basic function of the art that uses
language alone…is to bring it up to notice, to renew it, to push back the
frontiers imposed by convention or tradition itself’ (Akwanya 267); or to put
the matter in Derrida’s own idiom, to keep vigil on language.
This sense of the fundamental function of
the art of language is precisely part of what is glimpsed in James Nnaji’s ‘I
Dip My Soul in Fire,’ where not only is language thrown up as that upon which
vigil must be kept, but also accustomed phenomenal experience too, in the
poem’s specific context, of the possibility of a ‘Smokeless’ fire, where the ‘fire’
that is encountered chastises without smoke:
I dip my soul
in fire,
Smokeless, I
blaze,
My mind
flaming hot,
Glowing stream
of burning gas,
Orange-red-colour
flare (lines 1-5).
And the
implication of material phenomena in this career of language can only be a
matter of course if ‘Man lives with his objects chiefly—in fact, since his
feeling and acting depend on his perceptions, one may say exclusively—as
language presents them to him’
(Cassirer). But, as often happens, just at the point where it seems most
radically revolutionary and irruptive, language, in its literary mode
especially, is seen to be really ‘a specific organization of mainly
recognizable features’ (Akwanya, ‘Reading, Text, and the Metaphors of
Perception’ 83), ‘a skilful handling of the traditional materials’ (Aristotle
25), and thus to be hopelessly incapable of attaining consummate disconnection
from its own history; for ‘In literary language, change does not involve the
loss of the old, when the new elements are added. Everything is retained, the
archaic in the novel forms’ (Verbal Structures 62). Accordingly this ‘fire’
in which the persona is not burned up but instead and perhaps for the very
reason ‘blazes’ forth radiantly ‘Smokeless’ is seen to not be after all
altogether unprecedented. In biblical poetry for instance it is precisely in
the guise of a similar ‘fire’ that ‘I Am’ courts the attention of the
flock-tending Moses: ‘And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of
fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning,
yet it was not consumed’ (Exodus 3:2); much like Casca’s own vision in Julius Caesar of ‘A common slave—you know him well by sight—/ [Who] Held
up his left hand, which did flame and burn/ Like twenty torches joined; and yet
his hand,/ Not sensible of fire, remained unscorched’ (I.iii.). Moses’s
response is to be ‘I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is
not burnt,’ whereupon the force behind the enthralling sight speaks up,
instructing him as to how he proposes to put him to use in the emancipation of
the Hebrews from the ‘fires’ of Egyptian bondage from which they are to emerge
‘Smokeless,’ as it were, unconsumed, ‘unscorched,’ like the burning bush of his
vision.
It seems a matter of just as much thrall
for Nnaji’s persona, the peculiarity of this ‘fire’ as that from which one
emerges ultimately ‘Smokeless,’ for it is significant that ‘I dip my soul in
[it]’ in the active voice, and though ‘I blaze,’ it is apparently sufficient
recompense that ‘I’ do this ‘Smokeless,’ a tenor not unlike that in Agostinho
Neto’s ‘African Poetry’ where it is the defiant if feeble auspiciousness of ‘the green
smell of burning palms’ (line 5,
emphasis mine) with all the optimism this, arguably, inspires—the ‘Bailundu
bearers,’ will not yield ‘under the weight of their load,’ the ‘mulatto
girl…colours her face,’ the ‘woman wriggles her hips,’ the insomniac
‘man…dreams of buying…’ (stanza 4), with something, as especially with the man,
of Wordsworth’s ‘hope…and forward-looking thoughts’(‘Michael’ line 148) dogged
nonetheless by ‘stirrings of inquietude’ (line 149)—is what like the promise of
blazing forth with ‘Smokeless…Glowing’ for Nnaji’s persona keeps ‘the beaters’
positively celebrative, and wholly unperturbed as, perhaps, the ‘Men, all in
fire, walk[ing] up and down the streets’ (Julius
Caesar, I.iii), ‘dancing’ and making
‘the hot music of marimbas’ (stanza 5), even when it is easily possible to read
the pervasive ‘burnings [that] consume/ consume/ the hot earth with horizons
afire’ as being at the dire price of their ‘burning palms’ as fuel for the fire, at their expense that is. By line
6 our persona’s attitude has gained in deliberateness as, arguably, now it is
his logical aspect, ‘my mind,’ that is being dipped in ‘fire,’ suggesting that
he is not convulsively but volitionally, ‘reasonably,’ making this move. And
‘fire’ too has gained in tangibility, being now ‘fire woods,’ to which a
specific function of ‘splinter[ing] the dark’ pertains:
I dip my mind
among fire woods
That splinter
the dark in the fireplace
Reddening my
memories
My wavering
emotions charred
Like piece of
yam roasted in a smithy (lines 6-10).
The sense here
of a poem’s incapacity to come off except it has come ‘full’ (Achebe), except
it has been ‘born’ (Frye), with all the vital requirement to lead a full
unencumbered life is strong. And it is precisely in this ability to exist alone
by being ‘emancipate[d]…[and]…let [to] make its way…unarmed’ (Derrida) that
Akwanya locates the poem’s ‘originality’ (230) ‘by reason of art taking place,
by reason of the integrity of its system, holding together all the elements and
features in unity’ (83). For if the speaker must blaze forth from this fire
‘Smokeless,’ it follows then that the specific singularity of this fire must be
the dispelling of ‘the dark around the fireplace,’ smoke being itself a darkness
of sorts—some others being in the poem’s economy uncrimsoned ‘memories,’
‘wavering emotions’—and readily associable with suchlike words as fog, mist,
soot, all evocative of ‘the dark’ and capable of vitiating brilliance, of
dulling brightness. These latter have cropped up by reason of the ‘plural
…signification’ of the former ‘whose character [being] fixed in the history of
thought and in the literary tradition…are able to evoke others with such a
history’ (43).
And it is apparent that it is these
evocations standing in stark uncompromised antagonism to ‘smoke,’ ‘dark,’ ‘misty
night’ (line 17), which lure the persona and drive him towards positively
initiating this self-purgatorial experience. For there is something purgatorial,
liberating, about the whole posture, much like that of Soyinka’s Noah, of whom
Lazarus says to Kola ‘I was looking for a youth, reckless, a youth with an
inner fire’ (The Interpreters 230). In Noah, though, this posture is perhaps rather
tinged with the traitorous also, the rebellious. What Lazarus does not know is
that Noah’s subservience to him has subsisted only so long as he is lacking
this ‘inner fire;’ that this ‘fire’ is what precisely is to engineer ‘the
enormous burden of his defeat’ (225). For when
[f]rom what had
been until a moment before total darkness, a sudden leap of flames [threw]
flickering reflections on the corn-mill presence of the church…[]Lazarus
stretched his hand and withdrew it instantly as the flames licked hungrily at
his sleeves. But Noah stood transfixed unable to withdraw his eyes from the
fire…. There was no word spoken, only waiting until Noah the apostate should
find his courage….
And still Noah would not take his eyes from
the flames (224-5).
We see then
again that with Noah the question of the fascination, and perhaps too
fearsomeness, of the fire is not in doubt. And when, arguably, he has looked
sufficiently long enough to absorb these flames within himself, to internalize
the hitherto external ‘fire,’ and so finds ‘his courage,’ ‘He began to run…as
the flames began to die…went slowly down, throwing a long shadow of Lazarus
against his church’ (225). Such, however, is the intense expediency of this
posture to know this purgatorial experience, this ‘charr[ing]/…in [the] smithy’
(lines9-10), this ‘hon[ing] teeth/ Of the whetstone,’ in our persona, that by
line 11 he has become himself the
‘fireplace,’ as it were, the very ‘sun’ whose ‘sexless rays’ ‘Sparks’ off this
self-chastising, this soul-quickening:
My being, the
sun over heard
Pouring
sexless rays
Teeming with
fires
Sparks of the
matchet
That rang
against the honed teeth
Of the
whetstone,
Swarms of
fireflies in a misty night
Your love,
pale and weak (lines 11-18).
This far, part
of what has remained the distinction of ‘I Dip My soul in Fire,’ at least in
relation to the lot of other works to which we have tried to parallel it, is
that here the persona has so long subsisted as both the one who is being dipped
in ‘fire,’ and the one doing the dipping. For, to take another biblical
parallel, it is the seraphim who flies to Isaiah ‘having in his hand a burning
coal which he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched [his] mouth’ (Isaiah
6) with it in the purging gesture which is so apparently craved. That is to say
the source of the fire and the agent of bringing it in a physical relation with
Isaiah are fully distinguishable from Isaiah himself. But the mode of ‘Your
love’ in line 18 begins to threaten dissolution for even this peculiarity of
the poem of our specific attention, as though to affirm its incapacity to
absolutely dissociate itself from the tradition, undermining its initial air of
absolute irruptiveness. For ‘Your love’ raises the existence of an other, ‘You,’
hitherto unsuspected, and takes the gaze back to reinvestigate ‘my soul,’ ‘my
mind,’ and suchlike personalized appurtenances of the Voice, whereby it begins
to appear not so much as the rightful heirloom of the Speaker as that of this
other, which the lyric-speaker has nonetheless so appropriated that the specifying
clarity of ownership becomes blurred.
But this is so far as the suggestiveness
goes, for there is nothing in the economy of the poem which precludes wholly
the probability of this Speaker being at once perceptible as ‘I’ and ‘You.’ For
it will be recalled that though it is ‘my soul’ which ‘I dip…in fire,’ it is
not ‘my soul’ but ‘I [who] blaze,’ so that from the poem’s very inauguration,
room has been made, an ‘expanding’ that is, for this ‘possibilit[y] of being’
(Akwanya), whereby an otherwise ‘difficult action[] and event[] become coherent
and, within the scope of [this] universe, natural’ (Knight 15), thus making it
always already likely for the persona to make this rather artificial distinction
between himself and ‘my soul.’ This does not of course stop ‘Your love’ from
blazing in turn in the last line. Yet, the fact of this room punctuates the
sense of the poem as an organic whole (Aristotle). Henceforth, ‘my mind,’ ‘my
soul,’ ‘your love’ rather than constitute a ‘cross-current…[become]…blended
into an amazing harmony’ (Head 644), cease to be rigidly distinguishable, and
share semblances with ‘dark,’ ‘smoke,’ ‘misty night,’ ‘wavering emotions,’
being now in this ‘literary universe’ in which they are ‘potentially identical’
(Frye 124) with these latter, with the result that all now alike can, does, pass through ‘fire’ which element
in turn ‘splinter[s]’ them, so that where hitherto they are ‘pale and weak’
they ‘Glow[]’ with ‘Orange-red-colour flare’ of brilliance and strength,
unsullied of course by any taint of smoke:
I dip my soul
in fire
I dip your
love in fire
Smokeless, it
blazes (lines 19-21).
Works Cited
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