The Existential Fiction of Ayi Kwei Armah, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre (review)

The Existential Fiction of Ayi Kwei Armah, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, by Tommie L. Jackson. Lanham: University P of America, 1997. 174 pp. ISBN 0-7618-0376-9 cloth.

The project of tracking literary affinities is a most arduous undertaking that has been recognized as such by writers and their critics alike through the ages. Known under various labels--as debt or piracy, imitation or intertextuality, parody or dialogue, allusion or borrowing, and even plain plagiarism or stolen words--its complex manifestations, its ability to cross multifarious boundaries (generic, gender, class, race, geographical, and national) has added to the protean nature and the difficulty of wresting literary association, since it requires the most adept and perceptive of readers to trace its outlines, its contours, and its significance with a high level of discerning insight. No wonder that creative alliance has become a most important but slippery subject, one that few critics have been able to tackle successfully.

In The Existential Fiction of Ayi Kwei Armah, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Tommie L. Jackson joins the distinguished line of critics who have been able to transform the contentious issue of erudite company into a remarkable subject of scholarly research. Her book discusses with admirable detail the extant themes or motifs that give the early novels of the Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah and the theoretical and fictional works of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, his French counterparts, a common bond. Many have been foolhardy enough to level charges about what they consider to be the direct influence on Armah of such writers as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and others. But in her wise and shrewd study of belletristic fellowship, Jackson has been scrupulously careful, restricting her observations to matters empirically verifiable. These include the presence in Armah's early novels (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Fragments, and Why Are We So Blest?) of ideas that seem to correspond to the notion of the absurd, the feeling of entrapment or alienation or "divorce" that "reduces man's hopes to nothingness" (as elaborated in Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, 19), and the idea of the incriminating power of the gaze of the Other, which is so central to Sartre's works (Being and Nothingness, Existentialism and Humanism, The Age of Reason, Nausea, No Exit, and Look).

Throughout this gracefully written study Jackson keeps an eye on her three subjects, juxtaposing their performances alongside as well as against each other. The result is a most convincing argument. The review of the literature on Armah is particularly good, as it eclectically ranges over all of the major relevant views, correcting misreadings and misconceptions, and recognizing no sacred cows. Although Jackson notes the completely different sociopolitical and cultural contexts in which Armah, Camus, and Sartre have all situated their writings, she urges the reader to see each of the writers as a very gifted artist. All three, deeply sensitive to their milieu, acclaimed in their times, and hugely influential among their literary circles, have turned out to be highly polemical. Whereas the works of Camus and Sartre covertly express attitudes and feelings that grew out of the melancholy and emotional turmoil unleashed upon Europe by the two World Wars, Armah wrote specifically in agitated reaction to the frustrating postindependence experience of Africans, the disappointment that came with the realization by the people that they have merely exchanged the yoke of colonialism with that of neocolonialism. But the quality that unites the works of all three apart is that of revolt, for all evince sympathy toward the weak, the commoner, and in some way proclaim and extol revolution as the best way to restructure society.

One of the rare treatments of the absurd as a form of political commitment, The Existential Fiction is simply engrossing. It is probably the first major...