Pessimism, Autonomy, and Commodity Fetishism in Ayi Kwei Armahis The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Condemnation, coming from those who have never had, comes with a pathetic sound. Better get it all first, then if you still want to condemn, go ahead. But remember, getting takes the whole of life.

—The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (90)

A common critical focus in treatments of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born concerns the ontological status of the novel's vision of social reality in Ghana immediately preceding the February coup of 1966. Considerations of the work's depiction of a paralyzed, thoroughly corrupt social order range from those that perceive the work as an expression of profound philosophical pessimism to those that view the closing moments of the novel as an articulation of guarded optimism for the future. Writing from the optimistic school of thought, Neil Lazarus notes that "[c]ritics of the novel have not found it easy to describe [the] relationship between affirmative vision and degraded reality" (137) expressed throughout the work. This difficulty has led many critics to identify the dominant perspective of the novel as pessimistic. Furthermore, much of the criticism that views the novel as a work of uncompromising pessimism refuses to grant any critical substance to its representation of Ghanaian society.

In an essay that dismisses the possibility that the novel provides more than a superficial reading of the social and economic reality of Ghana at the moment of the February coup, Leonard Kibera suggests that The Beautyful Ones is "not part of that literature which probes below the obvious at critical moments of history [. . .] but rather the unyielding statement that the world remains static, unfeeling, and that the hopes of the early sixties have given way to pessimism—and death" (64). Viewing Armah as both a "cosmic pessimist" who understands the world as inherently evil and a "pejorist" who sees corruption and degeneration as inevitable natural processes, Charles Nnolim claims that Armah is "a writer whose philosophic pessimism is undisguised" (207) and Beautyful Ones a book that "refers to no real Africa but to some abstract human condition" (209). In two separate essays, Chidi Amuta notes that in the novel "the power of decay and despair rise to the level of being deified" ("Mythopoesis" 54) and suggests that the creation of characters who "do nothing physically about their decadent societies [. . .] makes Armah a pessimistic African novelist" ("Contemporary African Artist" 473). Similarly, Derek Wright suggests that "[t]he explosion of new births at the end of the book does not disguise the strong suggestion that the ritual of annulment has initiated only a new cycle of decay, a renewal of evil" ("Flux and Form" 76). This pervasive sense of the novel's pessimistic ontology even extends to criticism that overtly focuses on Armah's use of the metaphorical potential of ritual to suggest the possibility of social transformation. In his essay on the novel's figurative use of the Akan carrier rite, Wright notes that the "impersonal spirit of ritual formality" that attends the man's performance of the ritual makes it impossible to derive from it anything but "an apparently fatalistic acceptance of corruption as the total condition of reality" ("The Carrier Rite" 129). In these accounts of the novel, the ponderous, oppressive representation of social reality is taken as evidence for the novel's endorsement of a form of cosmic pessimism that views the social corruption and degeneration of Ghanaian society as the inevitable consequence of natural processes.

Given the pervasive presence of commodity consumption and the obsessive desire for material wealth represented in the novel, however, it is surprising that no critic (either from the pessimistic or optimistic school of criticism) has sought an explanation for the fixed, reified character of the social relations of Armah's Ghana in Marx's theory of commodity fetishism. Indeed, Marx's...