Of New Axioms from Alternate Time Zones: Exploring Notions of Another Time in Ben Okri’s Novels The Famished Road, Astonishing the Gods, and The Age of Magic

Abstract

An examination of a select number of Ben Okri’s works of fiction gives the impression that he is truly sui generis as a writer of fiction. His embrace of magical realism as a genre allows him to evoke a vision of the world in which the notion of time, rather than being seen in a linear fashion, is subject to multiple disruptions. Okri locates historical time, or temporality, in a liminal zone where it combines with space to yield identities which are indeterminate. In this article, I examine three of Ben Okri’s novels, namely The Famished Road (London: Johathan Cape, 1991), Astonishing the Gods (London: Head of Zeus, 1995), and The Age of Magic (London: Head of Zeus, 2014), in order to demonstrate the extent to which he destabilises all paradigms of temporality which present the notion of time as a self-evident and knowable presence or entity. I draw on narrative theory to demonstrate the extent to which Okri’s three works openly destabilise the paradigm of linear time, which is often seen as the definitive and ultimate approach to imagining and comprehending the notion of time, especially as it relates to works of fiction. Okri’s disruption of the Western, monadic notion of time is instructive in that it helps to move his readers into realms of alternative temporalities—in this case mystical time— where notions of spatialising historical time are interrogated. For Okri, time is not an objective phenomenon and, hence, he shows the extent to which there is always another time.