ROMANTIC IDEALISM AND
THE TRAVAILS OF THE ARTIST IN ESIABA IROBI’S THE OTHER SIDE
OF THE MASK By
Norbert Oyibo Eze
The above suggests that Elsie lacks the
basic requirement for the kind of marital relationship the
artist may wish to enter. At best Elsie can feed the flesh
and moisten the groin, but she ostensibly does not have
access to spiritual food, the type the artist needs “to
attain the infinite” (76), which is Jamike’s subject of
interest. A union with Elsie will produce defective
children, ones whose whole beings, as a matter of fact,
would be immersed in materiality. This is the reason he is
contented with his artistic children. In regarding his
sculptural pieces as children, Jamike gives up all
relationship to objective reality, making the subjective to
work at extreme cross-purposes with the world of facts.
According Georg Lukács:
This situation gives rise to a romantic lack of moderation
in all directions. The inner wealth of pure soul-experience
is seen immoderately as the only essential thing; the
futility of the soul’s existence in the totality of the
world is exposed with an unequal immoderate ruthlessness,
the soul’s loneliness, its lack of any support or tie, is
intensified until it becomes immeasurable, and, at the same
time, the cause of this situation is mercilessly revealed
(The Theory of the Novel 118).
Jamike’s personality underscores Irobi’s perception of human
nature as extremely evil. For him life follows dark path and
gazes more on the dark part of the orbit. If Jamike,
humiliated by life, drifts into the wilderness of lost souls
and eventually kills himself, it is because the society he
labours so much to illuminate merely sneers at him and his
artistic productions. He takes his life stoically because he
no longer feels secure that his knowledge of himself as an
excellent artist is countered by his experience of
rejection. He kills himself for he no longer wants to remain
in the labyrinth of what he is and what he wants to be. So
his death is a kind of coup de grace. In Romantic
perspective, his death according to Menhennet, is “a
permanent removal of the barrier to the enjoyment of the
ideal” (The Romantic Movement 68). For Jamike, earthly life
subsists on binary opposition between the self and the
other. The artist perception of who he is negated by the
subversive objective reality. Since what he thinks of
himself only exists in the world of the ideal, his death
simply annuls that gap between his subjective experience and
the objective world of hard facts that seek to submerge him.
Conclusion
The Other side of the mask is an arduous illumination of the
battle between subjective reality and the vulgarity of the
hard facts of objective life in which tension is resolved
through the Romantic mechanics of transcendence. The battle
is played out within the context of the travails of the
artist crystallized in the active artistic life of the
character, Jamike. It seems to me that this character is
Esiaba Irobi’s image of himself – his objectification of his
artistic vision and obsession. Anyone who knew Irobi when he
was in the country knew that he was a great mind, who had
laboured greatly in the farmland of creative soil, producing
enormous artistic dividends, without any form of
recognition. It may be the sense of lack of recognition that
led Irobi to denounce Nigerian citizenship and left the
country the time he did. However, numerous intellectual and
artistic laurels overseas indicate that Irobi was a superb
artist who might have been, for long, a victim of nepotism
and subterfuge.
As an illumination of the Romantic
tradition, the play is situated within the province of
individual consciousness. In the text, “the outward and the
inward, the public and the private, action and consciousness
… coexist in an uneasy, even contradictory, juxtaposition”
(Crow 148).
Works cited
Crow, Brian. “Soyinka and the Romantic Tradition” Before our
very Eyes: Tribute To Whole Soyinka. Ed. Dapo Adelugba.
Ibadan: Spectrum Books 1987.
Ezeji, Olisaemeka. “Politics and Numbers:
The Ascendancy of Modern African Despots”. Third Eye
Newspaper April 13, 1994.
Farrell, James “Literature and ideology”.
Retrieved from Marxist. Org, September, 2002
Irobi, Esiaha. The Other Side of the Mask
Enug: Abic publishers, 1989
Lester, Gideon. “The Jew on the Spot
Light”. The Lively Art Ed. Arthur Holmberg. Chicag: Ivan R.
Dee, 1999.
Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel.
Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: The M.I.T. press, 1971.
Menhennet, Alan. The Romantic Movement,
London: Croon Helm, 1981.
Obiechina, Emmanuel “The Writer and His
Commitment in Contemporary Nigeiran Society” Okike: An
African Journal of New Writing Nos 27/28 (1988): 1-9
Okoye, Chukwuma. “Literature and the
Spirit of Man”. Okike: An African Journal of New Writing No.
22 (1982): 9-14. Top | 4/4 |
