Apprehending Global Civilisation in The Magic Lamp: Giving the World a New Literature

Abstract

The argument in this article is that Ben Okri’s ekphrastic The Magic Lamp: Dreams of Our Age (London: Apollo, 2017) reveals an ontopoietic or heightened awareness literature of the “imagiNation”, to borrow a neologism from Dieter Riemenschneider, the purpose of which is a Heideggerian transformation of our global intelligence through a mythic conjunction between poetic text by Okri and art images by Rosemary Clunie. In this new kind of literature, healing accrues from a creative rising above the unnatural boundaries that separate human beings from one another and from their globalised eco- phenomenological environments. Okri envisages a special brand of spatial- temporal coexistence to be found in the bordering of our state of consciousness with our subconscious mind, melding our past with our present. The article situates global civilisation within the notion of globalisation, terms that cover a whole range of distinct political, economic, and socio-cultural trends, embedded within which are ideological connotations that encompass regional, national, and international topographies as well as aesthetic, ethical, and psychological domains. Four excerpts from The Magic Lamp, in which Okri adopts a fabulist literary mode that invites comparison with the world of dreams—as suggested by the book’s subtitle, Dreams of Our Age—serve to illustrate an international literature that tends to transcend the borders between the realist or mimetic and the fantastic or magical, by blending, juxtaposing, interposing, or contrasting the cerebral with realism, as happens during dreamtime.