SOURCE: “Story and Narrative in the Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah,” in Critical Theory of African Literature Today, Vol. 19, 1994, pp. 53-63.

Readers of Ayi Kwei Armah's five novels invariably agree they are novels of great diversity. It is particularly between the first three and the last two where the change is most noticeable. One critic even goes so far as to talk about the early and the late Armah.¹ When other critics more acutely instead stress the homogeneity between the five novels, it is predominantly theme and imagery that is considered. Yet most readers would insist that the novels are remarkably dissimilar for a single author's works. I believe this largely has to do with a change of narrative strategy.

Narratology is the discipline with which we can study this change of narrative posture. With its roots in Russian formalism early this century, it was further developed and introduced to a larger audience during the seventies in France. Today, American universities are perhaps most productive on the subject. It is in other words a decidedly Western theoretical approach. This should not of course stop students of African literature from making full use of these theories. As in any science, the scholar of literature must under no circumstances discard theories before examining them. It would be uncommonly daft not to test the validity of narratology on the modern African novel, since the novel is the genre which essentially generated the theory. And just as the theory in this case is Western, so is the genre, the novel: ‘the only literary art form which has been totally imported’ to Africa.² I am certainly not suggesting a disregard for African poetics. But ‘there is no African society that, to my [Abiola Irele's] knowledge, has carried the judgment of texts and reflection upon literature to the same degree of elaboration which we are today used to in the western tradition.’³ There is no better practice than narratology when we are （which we are） interested in the narrative strategies of narrative texts.

Structural narratology, which is what is considered here, has been accused of only revealing the already obvious: ‘The few models that survived … became so second-nature as to make their very use in detailed analysis almost unnecessary, their codes and categories leaping to the naked eye in a sad, professional deformation of reading for pleasure.’⁴ If this judgement applies to some aspects of narratology, it is absolutely the position of this essay that a narrative close-reading of a novel reveals phenomena in a text which can be put into a larger literary or social context. It is a matter of ‘mobilizing narratological insights for other objects’.⁵ It may, for instance, be possible to recognise something of the supposedly progressive Africanisation of Armah's prose, by initially analysing the narrative strategy of the novels and then putting the result of each analysis into a larger perspective of the genre and African narratives of all kinds.

This essay will refer to results of a close reading of Armah's novels on a macro-rather than a micro-level, in which the theories of Gérard Genette, inter alia, have been used. A complete analysis according to Genette's model will indeed attend to some that are obvious on a first reading, but it also reveals features which are significant for a comparison with other literatures. It is some of these aspects that I wish to pay attention to here.

Genette's method essentially considers relationship between story, the narrative events, and narrative, the discourse that narrates these events.⁶ Of great interest then is the discrepancy between the order of the events in the story, and their order of appearance in the discourse. One of the distinctions of a narrative is that it, alone of all texts, has two time-orders. Rarely are the events of a story in narrative texts told in the order they occur in the story. Genette defines as anachrony ‘the various types of discordance between the two orderings of story and narrative.’⁷ A retrospective temporal movement he calls analepsis and the forward one prolepsis, in relation to the primary story-time of the narrative.⁸ Analepsis is by far the more common anachrony in narratives of all kinds and so also in Armah's novels, where prolepsis appears only parenthetically.

If we compare the analepses of Armah's five novels, we will find that Two Thousand Seasons has no analepses while the other novels are full of them. In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and The Healers the retrospective temporal anachronies stretch beyond the commencement of the primary story-time （external）, while in Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? the analepses essentially remain within that temporal zone （internal）. When Teacher in The Beautyful Ones remembers times before liberation he does so outside the scope of the primary story-time of the novel. The anachronies of The Healers are also dominated by external analepses, and just as in The Beautyful Ones they are huddled together in one part of the novel. Here it is Densu remembering the first time he met the healer Damfo, Araba Jesiwa and his sweetheart Ajoa during his walk through the forest. In both these novels analepsis is conventionally used to give, for the story, essential background information from outside the primary story-time.

Fragments and Why Are We So Blest?, however, are dominated by internal analepsis. The Outdooring is one example of an event in the former that is told much later in the narrative, in relation to when it happens in the story. And Why Are We So Blest? is a virtual temporal jigsaw puzzle. This kind of narrative, where the temporal order of the primary story-time is internally distorted, appears first with the modern novel after Madame Bovary and particularly with William Faulkner and the French nouveau roman. ‘With the coming of the twentieth century, plotting in narrative became dominated by time … plots began to be developed which were based on re-arranging time.’⁹ So if external analepsis is conventional and internal modern, we find that Armah's first and last novels in this respect are traditionally narrated, while Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? are in a modernistic tradition.

This should perhaps not mislead us to be too conclusive regarding the Africanness of these novels. Walter J. Ong claims that linear plot is incompatible with the oral tale, and recent speech-act theory insists that ‘conversational narratives and literary narratives share essentially the same characteristics’.¹⁰ An oral narrator, however, would never tell a tale as anachronistically as we read them in Why Are We So Blest? and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, where even the reader struggles with temporal entanglements. The listener, and I dare say even the raconteur, would be utterly lost. And when contemporary African writers recreate indigenous epics they narrate chronologically, if not linearly or for the novel conventionally, which Mazisi Kunene's epics, as well as Armah's last two novels, bear witness to.

To further investigate the rhythm of a narrative it is essential to compare story-time with page-space, or what Genette calls the pseudo-time of the reading. What is considered then is the speed of the narrative. He distinguishes between four narrative movements: pause, scene, summary and ellipsis. In pause the narrative halts, to either describe the space of the story, the diegesis, or reflect upon it without any story-time passing. Genette does not make this distinction between the two qualities of pause, as the result regarding the speed of the narrative is the same, it pauses. Yet I believe we can discover a significant aspect if we differentiate between a descriptive and a reflective pause in novels in general, and in the novels of Armah in particular.

The Beautyful Ones is the only novel of his which is generous with descriptive pause. It is during the first day of the story we find famous passages like this:

The banister had originally been a wooden one, and to this time it was possible to see, in the deepest of the cracks between the swellings of other matter, a dubious piece of deeply aged brown wood. And there were many cracks, though most of them did not reach all the way down to the wood underneath.¹¹

No story-time passes here in a passage which describes story-space, diegesis. And its symbolic significance links it to an allegorical modern tradition of Moby Dick and The Trial.

If we add descriptive pause to all the slow summaries, which only this of Armah's novels exhibits, we realise that the speed of this novel is slow, at least in parts. In a summary, story-time passes with various speeds. We find very fast summary in Two Thousand Seasons, for instance, when 20 kings and their reigns are accounted for in a few pages.¹² In The Beautyful Ones there is slow summary:

The driver climbed down onto the road from his seat, took a crumpled packet of Tuskers from his shirt pocket, stuck a bent cigarette in his mouth, and lit a match. The head refused to catch, however; there was only the humid orange glow as the driver resignedly threw away the stick and took out another.

（p. 1）

Slow summary and descriptive pause of this kind is found in plenty of prose, but in excess only in the nouveau roman of an Alain Robbe-Grillet text.

Armah's first novel is also abundant with reflective pause:

The wood underneath would win and win till the end of time … Of course it was in the nature of the wood to rot with age. The polish, it was supposed, would catch the rot. But of course in the end it was the rot which imprisoned everything in its effortless embrace. It did not really have to fight. Being was enough.

（p. 12）

No story-time passes when the narrator, as close to the protagonist as in Fragments, reflects upon the diegesis. In Why Are We So Blest? it is the characters themselves who meditate in their notebooks. While The Beautyful Ones is the only one of Armah's novels that is comparably rich in descriptive pause, the first three novels are all rich in reflective pause. Why Are We So Blest? is extreme in this regard, as the whole novel can be understood as a reflective pause; it is certainly the dominant narrative movement. This would ally these introspective characters with modern literary figures as Raskolnikov and Stephen Daedalus, and such an existential hero as Antoine Roquentin. In Armah's later histories there is little if any reflective pause. Consequently the heroes are more types than characters with diverse qualities. These two novels are instead typical of that ‘connective tissue par excellence of novelistic narrative, whose fundamental rhythm is defined by the alternation of summary and scene’.¹³

Later Genette expanded with a fifth narrative movement, reflexive digression, which accounts for something essential in oral narrating and found in Armah's last two novels.¹⁴ The reflective pause reflects inside the story （intradiegetic）, whereas the reflexive digression is a digression from that story, a reflection outside it （extra-diegetic）. But it does not have to be an oral phenomenon. This kind of digression is certainly found in Tristam Shandy and Jacques le fataliste, to mention two earlier novels where the reflexive digression seems to dominate the monumentally authorial narration. It is also abundant in the post-modernist novel, where the narrator, or rather the fictionalised author ‘is free, once again to break in upon the fictional world’ from another ontological level.¹⁵

In Armah's last two novels the narrator intrusions are, however, decidedly of an oral nature:

Ah, Fasseke, words fail the storyteller. Fasseke Belen Tigui, master of masters in the art of eloquence, lend me strength. Send me eloquence to finish what I have begun … Send me words Mokopu Mofolo. Send me words of eloquence. Words are mere wind, but wind too has always been part of our work, this work of sowers for the future, the work of the storyteller.¹⁶

Narrator intrusion of this nature is found in oral literature and that written close to it. The Homeric invocation of the muse is an early example of this kind of meta-narrative, narrative about the narrating, in Western literature. In traditional African tales we find it, for instance, in D. T. Niane's version of Sundiata and J. P. Clark's The Ozidi Saga.¹⁷

There is another kind of reflexive digression of a meta-narrative character found both in African traditional orature, like The Ozidi Saga and Armah's last two novels. I am here thinking of the narrator's rhetorical questions to the reader. In Two Thousand Seasons there is much of this: ‘Dovi had suffered, but who is it saying any of us have been alone in our suffering?’ （p. 180）. The story pauses here, but with Genette's terminology we can best define it as reflexive digression of a quality found amply in traditional African orature. Ruth Finnegan attests to this in her monumental book, and in W. M. Kabira's study of East African orature we are shown how one raconteur uses the audience ‘by asking rhetorical questions and making the audience fill in gaps in her story’.¹⁸ A tentative proposal would suggest that the occurrence of different kinds of pause in Armah's novels, links the latter two histories with the oral narrative and the earlier three with the modern novel.

Of the other narrative movements we shall briefly look at ellipsis, where story-time is unaccounted for. Genette distinguishes between the explicit, when the ellipsis is indicated in the text, and the implicit, when the reader must deduce the ellipsis from a lacuna of story-time in the narrative.

The former is a common narrative figure: ‘When [many] days had passed that his wives had remained pregnant, one day six of his wives pulled through; they gave birth merely to female children.’¹⁹ Here the explicit ellipsis functions as a strengthening adhesive. The opposite is the case when the implicit ellipsis rather breaks the continuum of story-time without indicating this in the discourse. This is the case in such novels as Light in August and La route des Flandres. In Armah's first two novels the implicit ellipses dominate. They are also indefinite in that they do not indicate the time ellipsed. In Why Are We So Blest? ellipses are explicit due to the notebook technique, and thanks to the occasional date also sometimes definite. As the narrative rarely in itself, however, reveals the ellipses, it is possible to regard this novel, too, as dominated by implicit narrating.

This is certainly not the case with his last two novels. Two Thousand Seasons has the greatest time span, which demands either very fast summary or ellipsis. There is plenty of both. The ellipses are always explicit and often definite: ‘A hundred seasons we spent in this slow flowering.’ （p. 50）. Even if temporally shorter than in Two Thousand Seasons the ellipses are of the same quality in The Healers. The narrating of the games in the first two parts is typical: ‘The last day, Saturday, came, the day when the champion for the entire games would be chosen.’ （p. 42）

The generalisation regarding the modernistic and conventional nature of implicit and explicit ellipsis, is just that, a generalisation. Yet it indicates one specific reason why readers find Armah's early novels modernistic and Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers closer to African traditional narratives.

Genette discusses the distance between the story and the narrative in terms of narrative of events and speech. I shall disregard both of these and instead observe the narrating of thoughts. For this we have to leave Genette's otherwise so elaborate model, as he does not acknowledge a narrating of consciousness, and turn to Dorrit Cohn in order to properly account for passages such as this from The Beautyful Ones:

The allocation clerk is in there with his boss for something like half an hour, and when they emerge he is closely followed by the supervisor and they are both smiling broad, very satisfied smiles. Let them smile. This place is kind to them, so let them smile. In another country they would be in jail. Here they are heroes.

（pp. 128–9）

The last three sentences seem to come directly from the consciousness of ‘the man’. Cohn calls this narrated monologue, when in a third-person context there is a reflection, as if in first person, from one of the story's characters.²⁰ Jane Austen is generally considered as the author who first successfully and extensively used this technique, which later was perfected by Gustave Flaubert. Ever since then it has become the most common method for presenting character's thoughts in a third-person context.

The Beautyful Ones and Fragments are dominated by narrated monologue. Both novels are predominantly third-person narratives with a narrator extremely close to the protagonists. Naana's chapters in Fragments, however, are of a different quality. With the exception of her account of Baako's departure in the first chapter （self-narration）, her chapters are best understood as autonomous monologue, which is ‘by definition, a discourse addressed to no one, a gratuitous verbal agitation without a communicative aim’.²¹ This is a good characterisation of Naana's narrative:

From the world and the life around me, nothing comes to me. My eyes are no longer windows through the wall of my flesh but a part of this blinding skin itself. Soon my ears too will be shut, and my soul within my body will be closed up, completely alone.²²

Even if not as radical as the Penelope chapter in Ulysses, it clearly belongs to the tradition of the modern novel. With yet another tentative generalisation this would suggest that Armah's first two novels, in their narrating of thoughts, are modern.

Armah's following novel is completely dominated by self-narration in its conventional notebook technique, which links it, both in form and introspective probing, with a tradition of epistolary and diary novels like Malte Laurids Brigge and La Nausée. Except for the narrator's peculiar plural self-narration, there is not much thought narrating in either Two Thousand Season or in The Healers. The little there is in the latter is in psycho-narration, when the narrator tells the reader what the character thinks: ‘He thought of the coming year he would have to spend at Esuano and tried to imagine it as time usefully spent.’ （p. 105）. Ever since writers dared to explore the mind of their characters, this has been the most common technique used in doing it. It is also the kind found in African traditional tales, as well as in old epics such as Gilgamesh and Beowulf. So while Armah's first three novels in their narrating of consciousness resemble the modern novel, his latter two are traditional bordering on oral form.

The concept which has attracted more commentary than any of Genette's innovations, is that of the focalisation of the narrative. He separates the notion of point-of-view into mood: through which character is the narrative perceived? who sees it? and voice: who is the narrator? who speaks? I shall for lack of space not consider voice here, but instead end the essay with a quick comparative glance at the mood of Armah's novels.

Genette differentiates between three kinds of perspectives he calls non-internal- and external-focalisation. Two Thousand Seasons is the only Armah novel with unshakeable non-focalisation. Its narrator knows and says more than any character in the story, which is the most conventional perspective of traditional tales. The Healers at first seems to be internally focalised through Densu, but there are passages where the narrator leaves Densu, and reveals a non-focalised perspective. And the narrator is quite explicit about it: ‘He [Asamoa Nkwanta] now searched the lines for signs of Densu, but could see no sign of him.’ （p. 286）. Densu soon appears, but he has then been absent from the narrative for some ten pages.

In his first three novels Armah uses internal focalisation. In The Beautyful Ones it is chiefly fixed to ‘the man’, with the exception of the first few pages and Teacher's narrative. Fragments and Why Are We So Blest? are both variably internal. With each chapter in the first and each notebook entry in the latter, the perspective of the narrative changes. While non-focalisation is typical of the oral tale and traditional novels like Le Père Goriot and Things Fall Apart, the variable internal is found in many since Madame Bovary, and characteristic of many novels we consider archetypes of the modernistic novel: To the Lighthouse and The Sound and Fury. So this is yet another narrative reason why readers and critics have found Armah's first three novels more modern than the later histories. Ever since Derek Wright's brilliant book on Armah's Africanness readers have had to reconsider their initial impression of Armah's fiction. Here Wright unearthed African subtexts in precisely those novels that had been considered modern and Western, and discarded the later histories as ‘mannered experimentation with simulated orality … and simplistic historical vision’.²³ My view here is rather methodological. A structural narrative reading complements an analysis such as his, where the text is put into a specific context. With a narratological approach it is possible to isolate certain features of a narrative and study these in a comparative light, and, if we want （which we do） place the result into the larger perspective of the whole genre.

It is this I have tried to indicate here; or rather to illustrate how useful a narratological analysis can be to an understanding of a writer's oeuvre. By way of close reading we realise how Ayi Kwei Armah's five novels are narratively structured. We compare them with one another, and then, rather presumptuously perhaps, with all the narratives of the world. This has, of course, only been suggested here. I nevertheless hope that I have managed to imply the value of at least these theories and methods in the study of the modern African novel. It would indeed be sad if we were to deny ourselves the pleasure of testing the rewards of modern theoretical thinking on African literary tales. There is possibly something here for everyone, including students of African literature, a literature which ‘is an amalgamation, a syncretism of past and present’.²⁴ It deserves the same tools or methods of criticism as other literatures.

Notes

1. Simon Gikandi, Reading the African Novel （London: James Currey, 1987） 73.

2. Dennis Dathorne, The Invisible Present （New York: Harper & Row 1975） 53. See also note 6 below regarding what was literally imported to Africa with the colonists.

3. Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology （London: Heinemann, 1981） 18.

4. Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Whatever Happened to Narratology?’, Poetics Today, 11, 2 （Summer 1990） 287.

5. Mieke Bal, ‘The Point of Narratology’, Poetics Today, 11, 4 （1990） 730. The interested reader may turn to this and the following two issues of Poetics Today for a valuable orientation of the present status of narratology: 11, 2 （1990）; 12, 3 （1991）.

6. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse （Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980） 27. It is a section, ‘Discourse du récit’, of Figures III （Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972）. Genette's distinction makes the obvious apparent; it was the novel as discourse which was imported to Africa, while the story, of course, has been present for thousands of years.

7. Genette, 36.

8. Genette calls the temporal level to which all anachronies are defined the first narrative, Genette, 48. But as that well can be confused with the first narrative in a discourse, as in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, where there is more than one narrative, I find Bal's term more suitable. See Mieke Bal, Narratology （Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985） 57. Originally in Dutch: De theorie van vertellen en verhalen （Muiderberg: Coutinho, 1980）.

9. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellog, The Nature of Narrative （New York: Oxford University Press） 235.

10. Joyce Tolliver, ‘Discourse Analysis and the Interpretation of Literary Narrative’, Style, 24, 2, 266; and Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy （London: Routledge, 1988 （1982）, chapter 6, but particularly p. 145.

11. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born （London: Heinemann, 1968） p. 12 of the reset edition of 1975.

12. Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons （London: Heinemann, 1979） 63–6.

13. Genette, 97.

14. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited （Ithaca: New York, and Cornell University Press, 1988） 36–7. Originally in the French: Nouveau discours du récit （Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983）.

15. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction （New York and London: Methuen, 1987） 199.

16. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers （London: Heinemann, 1979） 63.

17. See D. T. Niane, Sundiata （Harlow: Longman, 1965） 40–41; and J. P. Clark, The Ozidi Saga （Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1977） 321 and 326.

18. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa （London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970） 385.

19. Daniel Biebuyck, ed. &. trans., The Mwindo Epic （Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969） 53.

20. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds （Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978） 13. For a discussion of this particular technique of third-person thought narrating, which in English for long has been neglected, see also Brian McHale, ‘Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts’, PTL: Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, 3, 2 （April 1978）.

21. Cohn, 225.

22. Ayi Kwei Armah, Fragments （London: Heinemann, 1974） 278.

23. Derek Wright, Ayi Kwei Armah's Africa （London: Hans Zell, 1989） viii.

24. Solomon O. Iyasere, ‘Cultural Formalism and Criticism of Modern African Literature’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 14, 2 （1976） 328.