BEN OKRI'S The Famished Road: Leakages and Transpositions

This episode will focus on the ontological leakages and transpositions in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. To turn from What the Crow Said that we encountered in our previous episode The Famished Road is to be forced into a major readjustment regarding the primary sources for magical realism. From the Africanist perspective represented by the Nigerian Ben Okri, magical realism turns on forms of African orality and the techniques and devices that it provisions for the enchantment of the familiar. The enchantment of the familiar however does not merely denote the investment of the everyday with fantasy, but the assertion that “there is more to the ordinary than meets the eye” and that the phenomenal world has an important continuing impact on the way everyday reality unfolds. The world is believed to be inherently liminal and thus requires that people be prepared for dualities, contradictions and the essential changeablity of things. In traditional African societies, this implies a belief in animist materialism, or that the world is infused by the presence of the ancestors and the worlds of the yet-unborn in sometimes volatile proximity to reality. This is what we see encapsulated in the ontological leakages and transpositions of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.

Suggested Readings
• Ato Quayson, “Fecundities of the Unexpected: Magical Realism, Narrative, and History,” in The Novel vol 1: History, Geography, and Culture, Franco Moretti, ed., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
• Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (Bloomington, IN: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1997).
• Ato Quayson, “Magical Realism and African Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, Abiola Irele, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Christopher Warnes and Kim Anderson Sasser, eds., Magical Realism and Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
• Franz Roh, “Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism,” in Zamora and Faris.
• Theo D’haen, “Magical Realism: The European Trajectory,” The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, pp. 117-130.
• Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
• Stephen Slemon, “Magic as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Zanira ans Faris, pp. 407-426.
• Theo D’haen, “Magic Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers,” in Zamora and Faris, pp. 191-208.