Carnival Ambivalence in Ayi Kwei Armahs The Beautyful Ones Are
Not Yet BornJoseph Arko, PhD Department of English, University of
Cape Coast
Introduction
The excremental and other scatological imagery which Ayi Kwei
Armah employs in his first published novel, The Beautiful Ones Are
Not Yet Born, has never failed to fascinate and repel commentators.
Some of the most reputable earliest reactions came from Collins
(1971), Yankson (1971), Obiechina (1976), and Priebe (1976). Armahs
portrayal of post-colonial Ghana contains so much bleak symbolism
as to provoke many critics into a monologic concentration on the
novels pessimistic vision. There is no denying, however, of Armahs
talent in presenting a single man who is determined to live his
life with integrity. It should be admitted, therefore, that there
is a certain kind of interplay in the novel between an entropic
environment and an aesthetic vision of hope. Etsy (1999) makes a
note of some of the critics who have provided useful catalogues of
excremental images, and mentions Mbembes (1992) analysis of vulgar
images, which both represent and resist power, suggesting the
radical ambiguity of scatological imagery. In spite of all of that
there still remains a sustained attempt at theoretical explanation
of Armahs deployment of scatology in the novel. Lazarus (1990:46)
admits to the difficulty for critics to reconcile the apparently
unresolved binaries between the novels affirmative vision and
degraded reality. To address this situation Lazarus calls for a
projective capacity on the part of readers to focus not just on the
existing social order but on the texts inner gaze which seems to be
directed beneath and beyond the surface. In this paper I
demonstrate that Bakhtins theory of the carnival can provide
readers with that projective capacity to transcend the conflictual
dichotomies between the novels inner vision of hope, and its
decadent environmental images of despair.
Page 1 of 30
Armahs obvious link with the Martinican psychiatrist, Frantz
Fanon in The Beautiful Ones (see for instance Fraser (1980)),
underlines his concern for revolution and the resistance of the
underclass to neo-colonial hegemony. Bakhtins theory of the
carnival provides an analysis of how the underclass may enter into
a dialogic engagement with the hegemonising discourses of the
ruling classes. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin (1984) analyses
the social function of the carnivalesque and the role of grotesque
symbolism, imagery and language in the work of the 16th century
writer, Francois Rabelais. As Faulker (1999) points out, carnival
used such linguistic metaphors as abuse and cursing, death,
copulation, birth, renewal, dismemberment, and pregnancy to capture
the imagery of carnival Zeigeist. Carnival was the reaction of the
underprivileged against the life of the elite which to the medieval
people meant fear, humiliation and submission. Faulkner argues that
the aspiration of carnival is first of all to refuse to acquiesce
to the legitimacy of the present system. It functions to uncover,
undermine, even to destroy the hegemony of any ideology that seeks
to have a final word about the world, and also to renew, to shed
light upon life and the meanings it harbours. In The Beautyful Ones
Armah uses imagery that is clearly carnivalesque, and as it was in
the Rabelaisian world, the purpose of such imagery in the Armah
novel is to degrade those vertical structures that entrench social
differentiation. In this paper I argue that Armahs imagery has the
carnival dynamism that not only degrades the hegemonising
structures of society, but also provides for the regeneration of
life.
Bakhtinian Chronotopes
In a Bakhtinian reading of any novel it is always necessary to
keep his other theories within easy access. As Lee (1992) rightly
noted, Bakhtins theoretical concepts need to be understood
according to the logic of his entire theoretical field. It will
therefore not be enough to merely extract the notion of the
carnival and apply it ad-hoc to any historical period or range of
texts. Carnival itself needs to be productively understood in terms
of a
Page 2 of 30
dialogue with Bakhtins other theories. It is for this reason
that I will begin the analysis of the carnivalesque in The
Beautyful Ones with an account of the Chronotopes in the novel.
Cyss-Wittenstein (2000) notes that Bakhtins theory of the
Chronotope directs the readers attention to time-space dimensions
as they occur in a narrative. The Chronotope seeks to explore how
elements of time and space structure the plot, and what they imply
about the characters and the issues at hand. For Bakhtin a
Chronotope is the organising centre for the narrative events of the
novel. He defines the chronotope as
The intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial
relationships that are artistically expressed in literature In
literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are
fused into one completely thought out concrete whole. Time, as it
were thickens, takes on flesh, becomes charged and responsive to
the movements of time, plot and history. The intersection of axes
and the fusion of indicators characterises the artistic chronotope.
(quoted in Cys- Wittenstein 2000)
Bakhtin mentions a long list of chronotopes that can be found in
European literature; the chronotope of the road, of the castle, of
parlours and salons, of provincial towns, of town houses and
estates of the nobility, of nature, of the family idyll, of labour
idyll. While The Beautyful Ones can be analysed in terms of a
number of chronotopes, Armahs art will require the modification of
certain aspects of the theory.
The chronotope of the workplace: the labour idyll
One chronotope that may be identified in The Beautyful Ones is
the chronotope of the work place. Armahs protagonist, who is known
throughout the novel simply as the man, works at the Administration
Block of the railways and harbours. The spatial indicators in the
work place chronotope may not necessarily relate to any external
location but there is sufficient information to assume that the
railway office is at the southern terminal of the Ghanaian western
railway line running between Takoradi and Kumasi. But more
important than this are the internal spatial indicators which
situate this office in relation to other local features. The mans
way to the office takes him past the Post Office, along the row of
old commercial buildings - the U.T.C., the GNTC and the French
CFAO. Behind these commercial buildings is the Yensua Hill on which
stands the Atlantic
Page 3 of 30
Caprice Hotel. Down the road from the CFAO are the food stands,
opposite of which is the railway office. The spatial location of
the mans office is given with a lot of material detail. This
contrasts with the temporal indicators in this chronotope. There
are only vague references to the independence regime of Ghana and
to the overthrow of the Nkrumah government. Internal temporal
indicators are even vaguer. There is no mention of days or months
or season of the year. There is an atmosphere of timelessness
associated with this chronotope. As Cys-Wittenstein (2000) notes,
even though Bakhtin states that the chronotope permits the imaging
power of art to do its work, he never explains how this is done.
What Cys-Wittenstein does then is to adopt Paul Ricouers notion of
metaphorical truth to show how a texts chronotope may communicate
meaning beyond its significance as concretizing representation. For
Ricouer, the notion of metaphorical truth is at the core of the
redescriptive powers of language. Its essential quality is one of
tension between description and redescription, as it occurs in
metaphor and poetry; one of paradox between what is and what is not
yet. Ricouer (cited in CyssWittenstein 2000) argued that the
paradox consists in the fact that there is no other way to do
justice to the notion of metaphorical truth than to include the
literal incision of is not and the ontological vehemence of the
metaphorical is. To apply this understanding to Bakhtins chronotope
is to allow the element of time and space to acquire significance
beyond mere concretizing representation and to convey truth of a
metaphorical nature. The spatial indicators in the work place
chronotope represent a railway office which is in direct access to
the commercial powers. This understanding is reinforced by the fact
that it is the railway that conveys the Tarkwa gold and Aboso
manganese to the waiting Greek ships (p.20/21). Topography in this
chronotope is very significant. The eating shelters, patronized by
the lower rank workers of the railways is down the CFAO. The
vertical differentiation is obvious. But even more significant is
how the railway office and the commercial houses together relate to
the gleam of the Atlantic Caprice. Armahs behind may be a pun
exploring not only a spatial relation but also an ideological
relation in which the gleam gives support and vertical legitimacy
to the commercial houses,
Page 4 of 30
On the top of the hill commanding it just as it commanded the
scene below, its sheer flat multi-storied side an insulting white
in the concentrated gleam of the hotels spotlights, towered the
useless structure of the Atlantic Caprice (p.10) . (my italics)
What Armah does here is to foreground all those elements which
entrench vertical structures in society and present them as being
in accessible relationship with the mans railway office. Armahs
chronotope of the work place therefore does not have the normal
features of a Bakhtianian chronotope of the labour idyll. Armahs
work place is an essential part of the hegemonising structures put
up by the ruling bloc.
Central to the chronotope theory is the notion of metamorphosis,
which is the methodological sheath for the idea of development.
Metamorphosis comes at the merging of time and space when history
seems to have thickened and has become material. As Jasmine Rault
explains, the idea of metamorphosis originated in mythology and
religion, and is especially linked with the mysteries. It is
associated with change, focusing on sudden revolutions, crises,
where human life irreversibly changes its direction. In Armahs
chronotope of the work place, however, time forever fails to merge
with space to generate the massive events that may lead to change.
Time at his workplace is an artifice manipulated into a circular
movement denying any directedness into the future. The anguish of
the night clerk whom the man relieves is that nothing happened
throughout the night of his duty. The frightening sameness of the
lonely time is marked by dead nights pierced only by departing
sounds of goods trains, the distant beat of drums creating
happiness for some who can afford, the sudden blast of car horns
coming briefly and getting swallowed again forever and the mocking
rattle of the morse machine, the brief pay days and the perennial
Passion Weeks. The unending circularity of time may be represented
in the symbolism of the painted rusted fan, which traveled with
such tired slowness (p.20). Wright (1989) notes that
In the novel of contemporary setting as in the novel of
traditional society, time is marked by what happens in it and has
no existence apart from events, but in Armahs railway office
nothing is happening.
One would say that the Bakhtinian convergence of time and space,
which should bring about change, is endlessly deferred. Wright
argues that the mans work in the business of Page 5 of 30
Time Allocation provides time with the physical contours which
suit well the slow endless round of the poor for whom times
movement is repetitive in the horizontal round of non-achievement.
But the man did not come to the Railway office to be licked into a
synchronic embrace of time. He had a view to the future, whose
deferral seems now permanent.
The Railway office is a space that dissolves dreams. That is why
the man can reckon that the young night relief who takes over from
him, will be like all the rest who cannot fly from the unredeemed
cycle of impotence:
No doubt being only new, he was calculating in his
undisappointed mind that he will stay here only for a short while
and like a free man fly off to something closer to his soul. What
in his breeziness he has to know is this: that his dream was not
his alone, that everyone before him had crawled with hope along the
same unending path, dreaming of future days when they would crawl
no longer but run if they wanted to run, and fly if the spirit
moved them. But along the streets, those who can soon learn to
recognise in ordinary faces beings whom the spirit moved, but still
cannot follow where it beckons, so heavy are the small ordinary
days of the time. (p.33)
The cyclical deferral of historical materialisation is made
worse by the socio-economic gaps visible at the office. As a morse
operator, the man finds himself flung upon an architectonic of
extreme verticality which mirrors the situation in the world
outside the railway headquarters. The social differentiation at the
office space is seen in the order in which the day workers arrive.
First, there were the small boys, and the messengers, then the
other clerks, followed at 9.30 by the senior service men. Armahs
reaction to this verticalised space is to submit the entire work
place to horizontalising treatment of carnival besmirching. There
is grotesquerie in the senior service mens imitation of European
mannerisms,
Each with a left over British craziness. This one has a long
white hose, that one colonial white white. Another has spent two
months on what he still calls a study tour of Britain, and ever
since wore, in the heat of Ghana, waist-coats and coats. He would
have been made Obedient Boy of the British Empire (p.109) .
The senior staff are not alone in this grotesque imitation of
British behaviour. The overtime clerks aping of the Southern
English accent links the junior staff with the senior staff in
their common decadence. Armah uses the excremental grid and other
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scatological images to further remove the barriers between the
senior and the junior officers. Bakhtin points out that in
carnival, verbal mudslinging refers to the ancient gesture of
besmirching not with mud but with excrement. Zwart (2000) notes
that the function of scatological images and other forms of verbal
abuse is not merely a negative phenomenon. He insists that in the
case of Rabelais, the function of the defecation series, as Bakhtin
calls it, is crucial in the process of degradation. The defecation
series creates the most unexpected matrices of objects, phenomena
and ideas which are destructive of hierarchy and materialises the
picture of the world and of life. Armah degrades not only the staff
at the office but the railway building as well. The squat
Administrative Block is covered with layers of paint and distemper
mostly of the official murk-yellow and
Caressed thoroughly by the brown dust blowing off the roadside
together with the swirling grit of the coal and the gravel of the
railway yard within and behind p.10/11).
The banister, whose description occurs in an oft quoted passage,
not only symbolises the unconquerable power of decay but also as an
image of liminality, links all officials in the block in the common
process of decay. The effect of Armahs excremental and other
carnivalesque imagery is not only to pour scorn on the hegemony of
the ruling bloc, of which the railway office is an essential part,
it is also to degrade the powerful elite and all those who accede
to their hegemony to the bodily lower stratum.
The chronotope of the home: the family idyll
Another chronotope that may be identified situates the man in
his home and depicts him as a family man. The socio-economic status
of the mans family becomes clear only in terms of their relation
with the family of Koomson. As Wright (1989) notes, Armahs urban
sociology demonstrates how vertical divisions of the family,
kinship and ethnic groups cut asymmetrically across horizontal
class divisions so that the values of the big men in the family
infiltrate and compromise those of their poor relations. Along this
space is the influence of Koomsons family on the mans family. While
it is difficult to associate their respective homes with any
external location, there are internal indicators
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which project a topographical representation of their
socioeconomic classes. The man lives in a dormitory town, beyond
the stretch of free sea line (p.40). Koomson lives at the Upper
Residential Area on the hills beyond the new Esikafo Aba Estates
(p.140) (my italics). Koomsons plush neighbourhood is frequented
only by white men, old lawyers, bigger Party men and a few civil
servants.
The vertical gap between the two homes foregrounds the
socio-economic realities that differentiate them. To get to the
mans dormitory town, the bus goes past the musty railway loco yard,
over the iron bridge around the central rubbish heap, past the big
public lavatory and the public bath. The decay, stench and
putrescence along this route contrasts with the way to Koomsons
home:
Series of narrow twisting roads between rows of identical
houses, story apartments each with its detached servants quarters
(p.142)
The spatial indicators here affiliate Koomson with the powerful
social elite, while the man definitely is of the underclass. In the
world of the novel, it is the mans family that is far from being
idyllic. Fraser (1980:10) points out that the mans family is
frustrated by poverty and deferred expectations, are pinched and
resentful. Time, as it were, is at a stand still, preventing a
convergence with space to provide the leap which will regenerate
their life. It seems it is rather Koomson who has the demotic
energy required for this regeneration. The psychic pain of the
stasis in the mans home is exacerbated by the vertical gap that
exists between his family and Koomsons family. Even though the man,
in Bakhtinian sense, eats, drinks and defecates, it is Koomson who
does these on a grand scale. Food indeed is scarce in the mans home
and no wonder constipation is their natural affliction. There is an
inversion in Armahs art in which the oppressed other has no
ebullient carnivalesque expansion. What makes carnivalesque
expansion visible in the mans home is its absence. The mans cosmic
anguish is even more unbearable because it seems that unlike him,
time for Koomson has thickened and has become visible. Koomson, it
seems to the mans wife, has been able to take his life into his
hands and taken the risk of
Page 8 of 30
jumping over the chasm of time. It is for this reason that
Koomson is the one considered not only to have done well for
himself but also been able to relieve the burden of others. Armahs
art demonstrates how the elite may engage themselves in carnival
without providing access to regeneration for the masses. Koomson,
big and tall, raucous and irreverent, who can even bring the
awesome powers of officialdom to ridicule, has all the trappings of
a Rabelaisian great man. There is evidence here that the dominant
classes can create spaces for false carnivals, spaces that provide
the illusion of hybridity and blurred boundaries obscuring the
univocal and monologic quality of the dominant sign (see Lucas,
2000). In accepting to drink local beer and joking about the
drunkenness of the attorney general, Koomson attempts to evoke
laughter not to humanise the potent forces of government but to
limit the parameters for oppositional discourse and practice,
therefore diverting energy away from conceptualising the elite as a
monolithic entity.
Koomson in a way always maintains the formal gap between him and
the man. He reserves for himself the right to decide on when to
visit the man and to keep the visit within the constraints of his
own schedules. Koomsons refusal to use the lavatory in the mans
home is a stress on the vertical gap between them. The vertical gap
between the two is made clearer by the familial spaces where they
respectively dwell. I have already noted Koomsons relocation to the
Upper Residential Area on the hills beyond Esikafo Aba Estates. We
see the verticalisation, firstly, in relation with the degree of
cleanliness in the respective homes. Fraser (1980) affirms that
cleanliness is always seen as a release from the familiar squalor,
a glamorous escape from the cloying social circumstance. As such it
is the counterpoise to all those images of excrement and
putrefaction in which the novel is so rich. One can talk about the
mans mice infested room clogged with smug furniture and the
rottenness that resists cleaning. Koomsons living room on the other
hand has all the things of for a human being to spend the rest of
their life time desiring (p.144). The key words there are glint and
sparkle. As Fraser (1980) points out, talking of the extravagant
existence she so much envies in Estella, Oyo, the mans bitten wife,
puts the difference between them thus: It is
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clean, the life Estella is getting (p.44). Cleanliness in this
chronotope is the mark of modernity and elitism. It summarises for
Oyo what she has all the time desired for herself but which time
has never failed to defer. But the man carnivalises Esthers
cleanliness by flinging dung on it: Some of that cleanliness has
more rotteness than the bottom of the garbage dump (ibid). The
topographical reference in bottom dislodges Esther from her breezy
hill top residence to the cloying slime beneath the dung hill. The
term, cleanliness, in Armahs imagination is thus ambiguous. He so
merges the mans physical squalor and Koomsons aesthetic decay that
there seems to be no real difference between them. Of course the
mans rooms are not glinting with cleanliness, and his bathroom and
toilet reek with decay and putrescence. But cleanliness has also an
aesthetic value, which puts the man ahead of Koomson.
Another difference between the two homes has to do with
prevailing odours. It is in the nature of decaying things to exude
bad odour. The man has to hold his breath when he is in his
bathroom, and Koomson cannot use the mans toilet for the
unquenchable smell it exudes. Harkin (1998) writes about smell as a
semiotic sign. He reminds us that the smell of putrescence speaks
of death and the smell of bodily excretions warn people of health
risks. The smells that prevail in the mans home are in sharp
contrast with the perfumes on Estellas body. But there is an
ambivalence with odour as a semiotic sign, which can be well
accounted for by the use of Bakhtins theory of carnival. Harkin
notes the word carnival itself is redolent with smells: of burning
meat, intestinal gas, axillary and genital secretions. The nose
itself which smells is the focus of carnivaleque performances.
Harkin notes that the use of odour in humour is widespread. The
word humour itself is related to odour, since it refers to the four
humours or internal fluids the balance of which was to give people
distinctive personalities and organic essences (including odour).
The use of ordour in scatological images deals with the tension of
social distance in two ways: First they stress the commonality of
all humans. As every fart is an intimation of the decay of death,
the maintenance of social boundaries is seen to be futile. In the
medieval carnivals scatological humour and social movements were
based on liminality and
Page 10 of 30
communitas. Odour undermines all human projects along these
lines reminding us of our common mortality. The fetid smells in the
mans home dovetail into the general association of bad smells with
the lower classes. According to Harkin, this association goes back
to antiquity. Even though strong smells pervade the entire world of
The Beautyful Ones, the Koomsons, like the aristocrats of the past,
maintain their private home and persons with rich and beautiful
scents. Odour as a semiotic sign marks identity and alterity and
reflects the socioeconomic structure of the society. The use of
odour in The Beautyful Ones therefore is a sign marking class
distinctions of the perfumed elite and the smelly subaltern.
The ambivalence of smell as a semiotic sign however enables
Armah to demolish the verticalising structures between the powerful
Koomson and the powerless man. It seems that at the instance of the
coup, time, for the family chronotope, eventually comes merging
with space to provide the metamorphosis in change. The coup itself
may be part of the national chronotope, but it changes Koomsons
personal life beyond recognition. The man himself is surprised at
the change in Koomsons manner. He remembers the last time Koomson
visited and wonders at the great contrast with the super confidence
of the days gone by. The man is aware that in the nation itself
nothing actually will change with the coup,
But here was real change. The individual man of power now
shivering, his head filled with fear of vengeance of those he had
wronged. For him everything was going to change. (p.162)
Koomsons degradation is reflected in the kind of smells he
exudes:
The smell was something the man had not at all expected. It was
overpowering, as if some corrosive gas, already half liquid, filled
the whole room, irritating not only the nostrils, but also the
inside, of eyes, ears, mouth, throat. (p.161)
The foregrounding of carnival convexities here should be noted.
Koomson is now the one irradiating the smells of the lower bodily
stratum. In fact he has about him all the forgotten smells of the
earth, which Freud claims have been repressed since man became
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a biped and began to walk upright, removing himself from the
ground and the smells of that region, and therefore developing a
distaste for it (see Harkin, 1998):
He had the rich stench of rotten menstrual blood. The man held
his breath until the new smell had gone down with the liquid
atmosphere of the Party mans farts and filling the room. At the
same time Koomsons insides gave a growl longer than usual, the
inner fart of personal, corrupt thunder in its fullness sounded as
if it had rolled down all the way from the eating throat thundering
through the belly and the guts, to end further silent pollution of
the air already thick with flatulent fear (p.163).
The eating throat, the belly and the guts are well known sites
for carnival performances. Koomson is now the one exuding estrus
and all the fetid smells of the earth and the lower bodily stratum.
He is not only degraded to the smelly underclass, he has now about
him all the earthy primitive smells man stopped emitting since he
became a biped. Harkin has noted that the Ongee associated odour
with breath, which is viewed in many cultures as the soul. In fact
the Latin spiritus means breath. What Armah does with Koomson is to
metaphorically merge his material part with the immaterial, the
tangible with the intangible. At the merging of time and space in
the family chronotope, Koomsons spirit comes expressed in material
terms in the form of a most disgusting odour. The man finds the
stink unsupportable. This Koomson, whose previous visit had
provoked in the mans home such a flurry of spending, cleaning and
cooking can now only elicit acute discomfort and resentment.
The Chronotope of the nation: the national idyll
The chronotope of the nation space dominates and determines the
chronotopes of the family and the work place. The temporal
indicators characterise a previously colonial country, and the
scraps of images of the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial
times reveal the parameters under which the people live. The
frustrations and despair felt at home are the effects of a national
level stasis that make it impossible for time to merge with space
to provide the metamorphosis that will break into the future. The
shifts from the traditional society to the colonial society and to
a post-colonial society were mere repetitions and illusions of
change.
Page 12 of 30
Wright (1989:100) observes that in the Ghana of the novel, it is
the nature of things to heap up, of speed to ossify into mass, of
time to solidify into described objects. Wright notes that the
tired stand-still of the first part of the novel abound with images
of stopped flow: halted trains and uncollected refuse, showers
blocked with scum and streams with filth, pockets piled with old
tickets and coastal strips with junk. The mountains of consumer
waste which stretch back to the days of the slave chiefs become
metaphors for the recollected past still visible in the present.
Wright talks about a backward motion of time to a still visible
point of terminal stagnation, a storehouse of heaped up centuries
that have not gone out of existence. For Wright the idea is of a
slow accumulation of the debris of history into a visible
performance in which everything that has ever happened is
apprehended simultaneously as if it were happening at once and were
a perpetuating present. In Wrights view the novel is concerned with
independent Africas self repeating cycle of slavish dependence on
the white world and the treadmill lives of the victims. In fact,
the novel is about all the devourers who have decimated Africa,
since the time of the slave chiefs. The pain of the ordinary
subject in this novel is that, the agitation for independence and
the subsequent coup that comes at the end of the novel lead to no
change. In the person of Koomson it is possible to see both the
slave chiefs and the white colonisers. The man on a visit to
Koomsons home wonders if anything has changed from the days when
chiefs sold their people for trinkets. Teacher on his part compares
Komson to the white colonialists:
He lives in a way that is more painful to see than the way the
white men had always lived here There is no difference then. No
difference at all between the white men and their apes, the lawyers
and the merchants, and the apes of apes, our Party men. And after
their reign is over, there will be no difference ever. All new men
will be like the old. (p.89)
The whole idea of independence is a ruse to perpetuate white
domination by getting a few Africans to share in the privileged
life of the colonists. The pain of Teacher is that the promises of
independence did not blossom into the revolution, the waking of the
powerless. (p.85). The promised revolution has been in vain, and
not even the Nkrumaists are saviours:
Page 13 of 30
It should be easy to see there have never been people to save
anybody but themselves, never in the past, never now, and there
will never be any saviours if each will not save himself. No
saviours, only the hungry and the fed . Deceivers all. (p.90)
But indeed for the Party men, lawyers and the merchants,
Independence indeed brought change. They have acquired their
gleaming white bungalows, long heavy cars and their women. The
president himself has moved to the old slave castle, and the big
men can send their children to kindergartens in Europe. It is the
graft and the consumption of a recurring cycle of leaders that
provokes Armahs preoccupation with corruption. It should not be
assumed that Armah directs his scorn only at the elite who have
oppressed the people. In fact, in Armahs imagination the
distinctions between the oppressed and the oppressor are removed
and in the corrupt image of the nation, both the oppressed and the
oppressor have the same representation. The culpability of the bus
conductor and the empathy between the lowly railway workers and the
young corrupt politician changing cars and women, removes any such
barriers between the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the
poor in this process of decay.
Armah, furthermore, uses carnival elements to break down the
barriers of time: the present and the past; and the barriers of
class: the elite and the subaltern. Teacher wonders at the obscene
haste at which the nationalists have grown rotten. Armahs
vocabulary revolves round the excremental grid, arseholes,
prosperous looking bellies, young, juicy vaginas, paunches; such
language as reduces the object to the lower bodily stratum. He, for
example, refers to the burgeoning party ideologues as the shit of
the country. Armahs disgust is directed at the civil servant, the
poet and any such lackey
Serving power and waiting to fill their coming paunch with
crumbs. He will no doubt jump to go and fit his tongue into new
arses when new men spring to shit on us. (p.89)
There is punning here when Armah scorns the elite as apes and as
apes of apes. The degradation makes the lawyers, merchants and
Party men indistinguishable from the lower primates.
Page 14 of 30
Another carnival element Armah uses to degrade the elite is the
parody. The old lawyers desiring to supplant the white colonialists
are unable to deceive anybody as their antics are met with bouts of
carnival laughter. These agitators and their rallies were for the
people nothing serious; the only reason the people went there was
that it made their day less heavy and gave them something to laugh
about. Bakhtins project of the carnivalesque offers a way of
playing with the opposition between the elitist dictums and
concrete reality by mocking and parodying public pronouncements
that differ from the peoples own existential experiences and by
carnivalising the seriousness of their plans that are proclaimed as
scientific facts (see Heineken, 2000). While the ruling stratum
tries to posit a single discourse as exemplary, the subaltern
classes are inclined to subvert this monologic closure (see
Brandist, 2005). Teacher recounts how Este and his friends become
constituted into a laughing chorus and act out the ridiculous
performances of the politicians, as a way of coming to terms with
their alterity. Scott-Dixon (1998) notes that ironic parody is
associated with grotesquerie and is typical with carnival. Parody
is also linked with external public expression of disordered inner
state. By means of carnivalesque parody the masses gain a momentary
relief from the death dealing seriousness of the status-quo. As
Lindsey (1993) observes, in Bakhtin carnival does indeed mean
subversion; it means a great deal more than that: carnival is ludic
interchange that presupposes the existence of social spaces
inviting suppressed alterity to manifest itself in a way that will
affect the status quo. Yankson (2000:1) has recognised that Armahs
pre-occupation is with
How we Ghanaians and Africans in general live and how we ought
to live. In fact Armahs five published novels can in a sense be
regarded as studies in the African soul.
Yankson goes on to categorise the characters in the novel as (a)
diseased souls, and (b) healthy souls. Fraser (1980) throws some
light on this point in his attempt at diagnosing what he thinks
afflicts the diseased souls of Africa. According to Fraser, Africas
affliction
Page 15 of 30
Fundamentally appears to betray itself as almost obsessive
distrust, a determination to dismiss everything of local
inspiration while admiring everything which originates abroad.
Wright (1989) identifies Armah with Fanon, who saw the black man
as fighting from within the prison house of racial concepts,
political myths and national boundaries: no matter which way he
turned to divest his psychic geography of colonial structures, he
was led into deeper whiteness. Armah, therefore, in The Beautyful
Ones is concerned with the cultural dilemmas of Ghana as a
post-colonial country. Armahs scorn is indeed directed against
black men with white souls and names trying mightily to be white
(p.126).
Armah seems to be pre-occupied with the post-colonial assault on
African culture and way of life, in which to appear and behave like
a white man is thought to be modernity, elitist and desirable,
while Africaness is supposed to be associated with subalternity and
undesirable. The parody provides Armah with a form to direct his
disgust at the nationalist elite, who are straining all their
energies to be like the white man. Teacher says there is something
terrible watching a black man trying all point to become the dark
ghost of a European (p.81). The ordinary people subject the lawyers
to billingsgate, calling them yessir men, eunuch lawyers old
baboons. To the parodist the old lawyers have lost their manhood
trying to be white. Their campaign speeches were nothing but the
drooling tale of an idiot (p.82). It was carnival laughter that
helped the people to survive; and yet there comes the new lawyer,
who speaks with such sincerity that he, ironically, deprives the
parodists of the little joys they have in life:
Even Este could find nothing to joke about, though the thought
that everything was turning serious was killing him inside
(p.87).
Lazarus (1990) observes that the masses rejection of the
nationalist leadership in the decolonising years implies the
existence of a raw and precious level of political awareness on the
part of the masses. These, according to Lazarus, were times when
the masses were beginning to find and test their strength. They
were beginning to entertain thoughts about shaping their own
future. The old lawyers behaved as if they had a secret power
behind them, and that is why they were stunned by the peoples
unbelief. They tried to raise themselves above the people
forgetting that at the carnival square of the Page 16 of 30
political rally verticalising structures cannot stand. As
Stallybrass and White (quoted in Hutson, 2000:141) declare, the
history of political struggle has been the history of the attempts
to control significant sites of assembly and spaces of discourse.
What Armah does in the national chronotope is to deal with the
frightening seriousness of the peoples alterity within the cyclical
rounds of despair. Carnival laughter and imagery serve not only to
dispel their fear but also to confront the vertical structures the
elite have entrenched in society.
Carnival, degeneration and regeneration Some commentators have
taken issue with Armahs use of scatological images. Ama Atta Aidoo,
for instance, does not see the necessity for hammering the
excremental smells of Ghanaians and Ghana at every page of the
novel (see Collins 1992). Achebe (1975), on his part, finds the
scatological images foreign and unusable. It is those images,
Achebe argues, that create the novels aura of cosmic sorrow and
despair. Etsy (1999) claims that Armah uses excremental language to
perform an extended Freudian unmasking or desublimation. According
to Etsy, Armah reordorises money, converting it into shit and
forcing us to see wealth as polished waste, reducing the compradors
foreign cars, fancy hotels, and luxury goods to excremental status
and denouncing them as the cruellest form of excess. I have thus
far tried to demonstrate that the excremental grid and other
scatological images function to remove the disturbing vertical gaps
in society. I intend now to show that Armahs imagery serves to
provide a reading beyond the monologic discourse of despair to
offer a dialogic interaction between despair and hope. In this
reading, unlike in Wrights (1990) analysis, regenerative forces do
not only counter degenerative forces, the former dwell in the
latter. It is true that some commentators, like Yankson (2000),
have noted the mans recognition that out of dung comes forth the
flowering of new life. It remains, however, to demonstrate that it
is the carnival ambivalence of corruption and decay that compels
the reading that the novel is preoccupied not only with the cycles
of decay and death, but also with regeneration and birth. Teacher
talks of birth in terms of
Page 17 of 30
Helpless messes of soft flesh and unformed bone squeezing
through motherholes, trailing dung and exhausted blood (p.62).
What Armah does here is to blur the boundaries between death and
birth and to explore the middle spaces between them, bringing them
so close that one seems to resemble the other. Wright (1990) admits
that in The Beautyful Ones corruption is not seen as an absolute
evil but as part of natures on-going regenerative process;
it is part of the dynamic continuity out of which grow new
flowering from dung, newseed from rotten fruit, new life from death
and decomposition.
The novel foregrounds the idea that all life is fated to undergo
decay. In fact Armah mixes the words life/death, youth/aged, good
food/smelly shit, and puts them in a symbolic relation to each
other. Armah again merges together the human and the natural, the
animate and the inanimate to account for the lives not only of
individuals but also of the nation. Some commentators have
expressed reservations about Armahs merging of the natural and the
human and his use of physical processes to judge human
understanding, attempting through it to get moral issues in focus
(see Wright 1989:87). There is Armahs implicit use of physical
ripening and rotting as a yardstick to measure moral behaviour.
What is most difficult for these commentators to reconcile
themselves with is Armahs analogising human weakness to natural
processes and establishing corruption as an innate natural process
to which even the man cannot be exempted. Wright argues that if the
analogies were literalised into absolutes then the mans own moral
position will be unnatural. Wright claims that there is no evidence
of such absolutes established. In spite of Wrights forceful
analysis, the argument being pursued in this paper is that Bakhtins
theory of the carnival provides a form of analysis which recognises
and accounts for those absolutes which unite human weakness and
natural processes.
In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin explains that degradation and
debasement do not have a formal and relative character in the
grotesque realism. Upward and downward in Bakhtins analysis have an
absolute and strictly topographical meaning. Downward is
Page 18 of 30
the earth and upward is heaven. Earth is the element that
devours, swallows up (the grave, the womb), and at the same time
the element of birth and of renascence. In the Bakhtinian analysis,
to degrade is to bury, to sow and to kill simultaneously, in order
to bring forth something more and better. To degrade an object is
not merely hurling it into the void of non-existence, into absolute
destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum,
the zone in which conception takes place. It is here that despair
and hope may enter into a dialogic interpellation. Armahs
excremental imagery is therefore meant not only to express his
revulsion and despair but also to foreground his hope in the
regeneration of life that results from the natural processes of
decay.
Bakhtinian grotesque realism, for instance, throws light on the
rhetorical function of Armahs old man-child, the freakish oddity
which Aboliga the Frog brings to show his friends. It is correct,
as Wright does, to assume that the old man-child indeed symbolizes
the Ghanaian nation, which is projected as having passed through
childhood, maturity and old age at a shocking monstrous pace.
Priebe (1976) was among the first commentators to apply the idea of
liminality to Armahs imagery and the symbolic structure of his
work. Priebe sees the luminal figure as one surrounded by symbols
of death and decomposition, and not yet incorporated into a new
state, it is also surrounded by symbols of birth and
resurrection.
The emphasis in Armah is the element of the grotesque. The idea
that this monstrosity has its own nature brings into focus the
closeness of life and death. The man child is in immediate
proximity to both death and birth, to infancy and old age, for the
womb or for the grave, to the bosom that gives it life or to the
grave that swallows it up (Bakhtin 1984). Armahs oddity resembles
very much Kerchs figurines of old pregnant hags, which Bakhtin
comments about as very typical and strongly expressed grotesque.
They are monstrous, de-formed by pregnancy and by the decay of
aging. Inscribed in their bodies is the fatality of human life and
death and within it the growth of and yet unformed living matter
(Bakhtin 1984: 25-26). Armahs man-child has a body that is dying
yet is unfinished and it stands both at the threshold of the grave
and the crib. This liminal body therefore defies all set
boundaries, and in Bakhtinian analysis, it is blended with
Page 19 of 30
animals, with objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire
material bodily world in all its elements, the absolute lower
stratum that swallows up and generates. The grotesque is the image
of this becoming, the boundaries between person and person, person
and thing, are erased as the individual merges with the people and
the whole cosmos. As the individual body is transcended, the
biological body is negated and the body of historical, progressing
mankind moves to the centre of images. With the carnival focus on
death and rebirth, the individual body dies but the body of the
people lives and grows; biological life ends but historical life
continues (see Brandist, 2005). Armahs old man child therefore does
not merely evoke horror and disgust; the ambivalence of this
monstrosity makes the thought of regeneration and birth possible.
Armahs image of the rubbish heap has the same ambivalence. When he
talks about uncollected garbage, spiraling dung hills and junk,
which seem to clutter the entire space of the novel, it is at times
difficult to draw a line between the symbolic and the literal.
Pathological consumerism has produced all this rubbish and
corruption has diverted funds for their disposal. While it is the
poor who have to live with the mountains of refuse, the rich who
have joined the white colonialist on the white mans hill, are those
who are degraded by the symbolism of refuse, which their rapacious
consumption has generated. Additionally, as Stam (1998) argues,
like death and excrement, garbage is a great social leveller. It is
the lower stratum of the social collective, the symbolic bottom of
the body politic. Stam insists that the truth of a society is in
its detritus. According to Stam, in West and Central Africa, the
rubbish heap is a metaphor for the grave, a point of contact with
the world of the dead. Stam recounts that a vernacular philosopher
in the film Thread of Memory tells film makers that garbage is the
beginning and the end of the cyclical principle of birth and
rebirth. Garbage is shown as a stored energy containing in itself
the seed of its own transformation. The garbage dump becomes the
critical vantage point from which to view society as a whole. In
Bakhtins conception of the carnival, all that is low and connected
to the earth is creative; what is connected to death is life and
rebirth. The carnival world, therefore, is directed to the
underworld, the earthly and the bodily. In The Beautyful Ones the
greed and rapacity of the consumeristic society is
Page 20 of 30
revealed in the detritus it creates, but this decaying matter is
the same material that should regenerate the new nation.
Carnival ambivalence, revolution and the third space
My analysis of the chronotopes in The Beautyful Ones highlighted
the repetitiveness of time and the cyclical synchronicity rather
than movement into the future. The social circularity is merged
with another circularity, which has to do with nature or the
universe. This lack of movement into diachronic time seems to make
permanent the deferral of any massive change. However, Lazarus
(1990) notes that the brave new world of the beautyful ones is
implicit in the degradation of the real world in which the man
lives. Lazarus argues that the social environment of the man is
profoundly unrevolutionary but the spectre of revolution figures in
the margin all the same. Even though Ghana in The Beautyful Ones is
an independent country, indications are that it is still under
colonial control and is in need of liberation. A history of
cyclical and repetitive domination has served to severely polarise
the nation with vertical gaps growing frighteningly deeper. Armah,
however, does not merely indicate the necessity of revolution; his
symbolism makes revolution look like the imminent natural process.
Armahs narrative historicises the revolutionary struggle as having
started with the agitation for independence. Revolution is with the
masses. As Fanon noted, the cultural and political struggle can be
located in the zone of occult instability where the people dwell
(quoted in Perloff, 1998). Bakhtin (1984) explains that it is the
carnival of the people that works to disrupt the monologic,
tradition bound authority of the ruling classes. Therefore the
terms revolution and carnival may be used interchangeably. They are
both sourced from the same social sites and have the same effects
of demolishing the vertical structures that entrench social
differentiation. Carnival becomes imminent with the mobilisation of
the people. But in The Beautyful Ones the independence struggle was
led by the nationalist elite who were unable to win the support of
the masses because those men appeared at the carnival square of the
political rally
Page 21 of 30
putting a vertical gap between themselves and the people. They
seemed to the people not very much unlike the white oppressors,
Men who have risen to lead the hungry came in clothes they might
have been hoping to use at the Governors Ball on the birth-day of
the white peoples queen, carrying cuff links that shone insultingly
in the faces of men who have stolen pennies from their friends
(p.81).
The nationalists look very much like what Bhabha (1990) refers
to as the mimic men of colonialism. Having undergone the English
colonial education, they are Africans only in blood and colour, but
are English in taste, manners, attitude and intellect. Bhabha, like
many culturalists, has shifted interest from fixed binaries of
traditional/modern, colonist/coloniser, black/white,
oppressor/oppressed. He proposes a theory of the Third Space, which
explores the in-between spaces of those binaries. According to
Bhabha, it is at the faultlines on the boundary situations and
threshold sites that identities are performed and contested. In The
Beautyful Ones the nationalist elite may be parsed as inhabiting
the faultlines between the colonialist English and the colonised
African. Born African, they can speak in the accent of the English
gentleman. In Bhabhas terminology, they will be referred to as
almost English, but not quite. Bhabha has claimed that forms of
popular rebellion and mobilisation are often most subversive and
transgressive when they are created through oppositional cultural
practices. But Armahs nationalist hybrids were unable to mobilise
the masses for any contestation. They had no idea of and interest
in the needs and aspirations of the masses and the brutality in
their quest for power is revealed in the wanton exploitation of the
masses carnival drinking of akpeteshie to wrestle power from the
colonial authorities. The project of the nationalist elite was to
demonstrate how unlike the apketeshie drinking underclasses they
were and how much English they seemed. The nationalist elite failed
because they lacked popular legitimacy: the horizontalising
features that should link them with the masses. Being part of the
bourgeoisie, those lawyers tried to differentiate themselves from
the collectivity of the people (see Wills, 1989). They were part of
the dominant bloc that conspired with the colonial regime to
oppress the people, and their gestures during the independence
struggle were merely to deny their complicity to hegemony. As Lucas
(2000) would say,
Page 22 of 30
the third space of the nationalist elite was not simply a hybrid
space between disparate groups and the ruling class. It was a third
space between oppositional power blocs.
The pain in the cyclical nature of domination and oppression is
that Kwame Nkrumah, who captured the popular space of the
independence struggle, unlike the nationalist elite, affiliated
himself with the people. The fact that he was an educated elite did
not prevent him from entering into horizontal links with the
underclass. He, unlike the other agitators, was not born into power
or riches and therefore had never being in league with the colonial
oppressors. He was not ashamed of his poverty; in fact he exploited
it as a strength and used it to link himself with the people. It
was for this reason that Maanan and the others recognised their
thoughts in his voice. At the carnival space of the political
rally, Nkrumah declared his incompleteness and dependence upon the
people,
Alone, I am nothing. I have nothing. We have power. But we will
never know it; we will never see it work. Unless we choose to come
together (p.87).
Teacher saw this to be what held the promise of beautiful
things. It was this that made the revolution look imminent. Teacher
calls it the waking of the powerless (p.85). Lazarus (1990) notes
thatIn The Beautyful Ones the authenticity of Nkrumahs public
stance in the decolonizing years is repeatedly emphasised. His
campaign speeches are described as reflecting his private passions,
and their felicity is seen to have rested in the fact that they
tapped exactly the mood of the masses.
But that was not all; Nkrumah recruited his revolutionary cadres
from the ranks of the ordinary people, the verandah boys, like
Koomson, a dock worker, callused, haughty and raucous. It is for
this reason that the betrayal of the revolution inflicted such
cosmic pain on the people. In the words of Lazarus
Nkrumah and his party have taken Ghana through a full circle:
from hardship and disaffection, through promise and even beginning
of real change to hardship and disaffection once more.
Page 23 of 30
The Nkrumaists, once in power, began to erect vertical barriers
between themselves and the people by taking on more and more a
semblance of the nationalist leaders in their rapacity and
affiliation with the colonial authorities. Nkrumah himself
relinquished his revolutionary affiliation with the poor and moved
into the luxury of the old slave castle. His minions then got
obsessed with nothing but opprobrious acquisitiveness in the
pursuit of the gleam.
The image of the gleam combines within itself all that is alien
to the African in the life of the white colonists, and corruption
inherent in material aggrandisement. The gleam therefore is an
image of entropy and counter to revolution. The gleam is so
compelling that it dominates the lives of all the characters in the
novel and represents the hegemony of the ruling classes. If Ghana
in the novel is a neo-colonial country it is because the people
have abandoned themselves to the univocal discourse of the gleam.
The gleams opposition to revolution is that it forces even the
masses to assume that history has indeed materialised and that the
gleam has become the site enunciating their aspirations. It is for
this reason that the mans wife, Oyo, thinks life is unbearable for
her because she lacks the good things of the gleam. Also the gleam
has the effect of dissolving what Young refers to as a social group
into a social seriality (see Lucas, 2000), prevented from group
agency by various antagonisms. It is only in this light that the
hostility of Oyos mother towards the man makes sense. The gleam
dissolves the horizontal structures of revolution and replaces them
with vertical structures which entrench hegemony. It is for this
reason that Koomson can no longer come to his former colleagues,
neither can he join them in their carnival liberties of smoking wee
and heaping abuse on ignorant judges.
Perhaps the most telling effect of the gleam is its ability to
persuade people who in the past merged their aspirations with the
independence struggle, that revolution is impossible. That is the
reason for Teachers despair. But the discursive space of the gleam
is characterised by ambivalence and an individuals orientation to
revolution depends on whether their own response to the gleam is
monologic or dialogic. Teachers response to the gleam is monologic.
He takes the option of unremitting flight. The horrors
Page 24 of 30
of the dissipation of national hope and life drive him to the
margins of life. Teacher cuts himself from human contact, does not
marry nor go back to his family. He has nothing but contempt for
the gleam and those enamoured by its glitter. In his mind the
binary distinctions between the gleam and the promise of revolution
are clear. The people have become devoted to the gleam and the
revolution is forfeit. The paradox in Teachers position is that
even though he frees himself entirely from the enslavement of the
gleam, there is nothing he can do with that freedom. That is why he
tells the man,You see, I am free to do what I want, but there is
nothing happening that I want to join. There used to be something,
and you know what I mean (p.61) .
What Teacher urges is withdrawal; withdrawal from the people
devoted to darkness instead of the beauty of light. In the context
of gratuitous consumption that has occupied the entire nation,
Teachers response is to keep quiet and not get close to people
(p.93). Teachers decision is a univocal engagement with despair. He
sinks an unbridgeable gulf between words and action. The Nkrumaist
betrayal of revolution has dissipated entirely his verve for action
and he is only left with words. Teachers position amounts to a
separation of theory from politics, which indeed is an abandonment
of revolution.
The man, unlike Teacher, recognises a possibility of avoiding a
conflation of the gleam with the means of getting to the gleam.
According to him, the gleam itself could be a good thing. That is
why he does not blame his wife and children for desiring for
themselves the things of the gleam. But the man does not simply
neutralise the gleam as something harmless in itself; its enslaving
potential is all too clear to him, and yet its attraction to him is
very strong; for he cannot look at those beautiful things and feel
contempt for them. What rather brings him greater confusion is the
way to achieve those things of beauty. The position the man takes
in relation to the gleam and those who are devoted to the gleam is
always shifting; it is a flux. There seems to be several
contrasting voices simultaneously struggling for control within the
man. At one time he is disgusted by corruption, at another there is
no blame in his mind for those who have tried the rotten ways and
found them to be full of sweetness (p.145). Corruption itself
becomes ambivalent for him. He holds in his soul deep repugnance
for its rottenness, and yet at the
Page 25 of 30
same time realises it is the way of all flesh and that it will
be unnatural not to yield to the process of decay. Even though the
man persists in his struggle against corruption he is not entirely
free of the contamination of its imperatives. Etsy (1999)
identifies the man as the one who voices Armahs own doubts about
the self exempting intellectual in a disintegrating and corrupt
society. While the man indeed is full of doubt about his place in
this entropic environment, my analysis will rather support the
attribution of the self exempting intellectual to the mans friend
and mentor, Teacher. As the man comes to recognise, only Teacher
talks in a way that parted everything so clearly into light and
shadow, the great beautiful things that could be and the stark ugly
things that are (p.79) The man cannot maintain the binaries Teacher
keeps apart and in his thoughts darkness twin with the light
(ibid). The mans attitude towards corruption and to the gleam lacks
closure, and, as Lucas (2000) would say, he holds within himself
his opposite. The mans resistance against the gleam is also a
resistance against fixed positions. He is the true hybrid figure
that Bhabha (1990) talks about - embodying the flux, non-fixity and
ambivalence that provokes change. The man in practical terms is a
liminal figure bestriding the social space between the elite and
the underclass. It should be noted that as a morse controller he is
somewhere at the middle ranks of the railway hierarchy. In fact
there are some workers who address him sah and massa, forms of
deference the man would rather they did not use in reference to
him. Also, in spite of the squalor in the mans home, he does not,
like Koomsons boatman, live in a converted lavatory. There are
indeed some worse off than the man, and that is also part of his
anguish. The stairway and the banister are exact representations of
the man. The pain of the mans life is also that from the space he
occupies; it seems the luxury of the life associated with the elite
is within grasp. Life however does not fail to be an unremitting
struggle with despair. But the man, unlike Teacher does not live an
empty life filled only with words. The difficulty of his life, most
of all, has to do with the ability to keep the gleam in view
without getting contaminated with its attendant filth.
Page 26 of 30
Achebe (1975) observed the mans introspection and criticised
Armah for his protagonists passivity. Etsy (1999) argues that the
man cannot quite come to his own as a figure of political
resistance because he remains a tragically inert principle of
ethical nonalignment. According the Etsy, the mans reconsolidated
selfhood cannot serve as the basis for a dialectical or historical
transformation. Etsy goes on that a narrative that explores an
individuals existential suffering cannot suddenly convert itself
into an allegory of political hope. My analysis has, however, shown
that it is Teacher, rather than the man, who adopts the principle
of ethical non-alignment. The man does not insulate himself from
the environment; neither does he isolate himself from the struggle.
His life is a struggle between despair and hope, words and action.
He tells Teacher,
You know it is impossible for me to watch these things and say
nothing. I have my family. I am in the middle (p.93).
Additionally, as Bhabha (1994) says, resistance is not
necessarily an oppositional act of political intention. The mans
resistance is the recognition of the ambivalence of the dominating
discourses that affect his life: the awakening of the powerless and
the call of the gleam. It is this recognition that allows the man
not to enter into any simplistic commitment to despair, and to keep
the option of hope open. It is for this reason that the man can
believe that the beautiful ones will be born even if the
convergence of space with time will be deferred until after his
lease of life had ended. Juvan (1999) notes that Bakhtins
connection with post structuralism is partially through his
anti-systemic linguism, defending a relational, interactive and
inconclusive historical conception of truth. His preference is for
the subject which does not possess a stable identity but rather has
various types of semiotically represented consciousness interacting
and coexisting in it. For this reason a Bakhtinian reading of The
Beautyful Ones will accept the mans shifting and flux position as
the truth preferred in the novel instead of Teachers steady embrace
with despair, even though he enunciates it with clarity and
conviction.
Conclusion
Page 27 of 30
The focus of this paper has been to demonstrate that Bakhtins
theory of the carnival allows a reading of Armahs The Beautyful
Ones Are Not Yet Born as not merely a monologic engagement with
despair. My analysis has acknowledged the entropy of the novels
physical environment and has dealt with the deferral of hope that
pervades the entire novel. Even though Bakhtins theory of the
chronotope makes clear the vertical structures that entrench social
differentiation, the carnival idea restores a balance by
explicating the social functions of Armahs scatological imagery.
The main point here is that regeneration or birth is imminent in
the processes of decay and death. The mans heroism in his
resistance to the gleam is in his dialogic engagement with its
enunciations. Carnival energy is in its ambivalence and shifting
positions. It is at this site that the man explores an inner
potential against the hegemony of the gleam and despair.
Page 28 of 30
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trans Helene Iwolsky(2nd ed) Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1990). DissemiNation. In H.K.Bhabha (ed) Nation
and narration. London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The
Location of culture. London: Routlege. Brandist, C. 2005. The
Bakhtin Circle. The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
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