Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T14:43:20.717Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Music and mythology in August Wilson’s plays

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2008

Christopher Bigsby
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Get access

Summary

August Wilson has often been described as a dramatic historian because of his quest to document the experiences of African Americans in the twentieth century. In truth, though, he is no more a historian than Shakespeare. Given that he chose to set each of his plays in a different decade of the twentieth century, history clearly constitutes the context in which his characters live their lives, but it is those lives that he places centre stage, not the public events which defined those decades. He had altogether a different version of history in mind, one which sank its roots in mythology. It is there that he looked for the symbols, metaphors and tales that embodied and expressed the hopes, fears, aspirations, and religious and civic yearnings of communities who laid down their true history in legends, poems, songs, prayers and, in Wilson's hands, plays.

Wilson was alive to, and tapped into, African myths, often codified in music. He was a storyteller recounting the history of his people but, as he was aware, he was not alone in that. In some senses he played the role performed by the griot in West Africa whose function it was and is to recount the history of his tribe and thereby to preserve and celebrate it. In an African context history is deeply implicated in storytelling, song and myth.

Wilson was in this tradition. Devoid of their mythological dimensions, his characters, Levee, Troy and Boy Willie, in their separate plays, are merely destructive forces at odds with their world instead of agents of change challenging the status quo and reordering their universe. Within the full context of their cultural ancestry, they are the warrior spirit reincarnations of self-empowered trickster deities, figures which recur in myths from the Yoruban Eshu to the Hindu Krishna, from Bamapana the Australian Aborigine, Prometheus in ancient Greece and Sun Wukong in Chinese lore, to Reynard the French fox, Coyote the Native American, Maui in Hawaii, Susanowo in Japan, Loki the Norse god and even Jacob of the Old Testament.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×