Expository and Analytical Structure

We begin with an exposition of the methodological framework that informs this essay. This methodology is based on particular conceptions of modes of interpreting traditional African systems of thought, as well as on points of convergence between one such system, the Ifa tradition and the interpretation of self and individual history represented by autobiography and the self portrait.

In applying the methodological imperatives we outline, we begin by demonstrating fundamental correlations between Ifa and autobiographical theory and practice and anchor these observations through an exposition of the autobiographical theory described by Nabokov in his autobiography Speak,Memory, which, even though articulated in relation to another mode of discourse, sums up most succinctly the significance of the hermeneutic strategies of the Ifa system for the study of autobiography7.

We then proceed to illustrate the specific correlation between Nabokov’s conception of autobiography and the Ifa system in terms of particular narratological images derived from the Ifa system. We define a narratological image as an image that emerges from a narrative to which it may act as a crystallisation of the symbolic or conceptual significance of the narrative. The images we choose are centred on the fragmentation and reconstitution of the self, or of its aspects, understood in both a concrete and an abstract sense.

In concrete terms, they symbolise the dismemberment and reconstitution of a subject. In abstract terms, they represent the relationship between chaos and order in the patterns that constitute a subject’s life, as well as an oscillation between the seeming dissolution and nascence represented by creative somnolence and the reintegration embodied by the re-emergence of hitherto submerged creative configurations. We then proceed to demonstrate the manner in which these images embody links between the metaphysical principles that underlie Ifa divination and the philosophical and aesthetic questions inspired by autobiography.

In the main body of the work we apply these narratological images, as the focus of the conceptions of autobiographical theory and practice we emphasise, to an analysis of selected paintings and letters of van Gogh. We demonstrate, in an organic manner, the correlations we make, at the level of deep structure, between the autobiographical orientation of van Gogh’s visual art as expressed in his paintings, the verbal art represented by the poetic form of his letters, and the hermeneutic, conceptual and imagistic centres of Ifa, which represent our analytical matrix. We anchor our analysis on our evaluation of the aesthetic values and their conceptual correlates realised through representative examples of van Gogh’s visual and verbal art.

7 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory : an Autobiography Revisited (London : Penguin, 2000)p.17.