Specterless Spirits/Spiritless Specters: Magical Realism's Two Faces
2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10848770701396346
ISSN1470-1316
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean and African Literature and Culture
ResumoAbstract The paper proposes that the narrative functions of magical transformations and the characters' articulated beliefs in the ways of spirits and ghosts in Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World and Ben Okri's The Famished Road represent polar extremes in magical realist writing. In the former text, spirits serve as the main measure of responsibility and responsiveness, enabling social actors to plot the ordinarily unimaginable. Spectral bodies transform marvelously in furtherance of the work of freedom and enchanting events proliferate so that the spirit of independence set loose with physical struggles can flourish unhindered. The latter text blurs the borders of spirituality and literality; humans aspire to ghostliness and ghosts compete with humans. Nevertheless, human physical struggles for freedom long for a direction which the story's plentiful, flourishing spirits and ghosts seem unable to provide. The paper concludes that the different functions of spirits and ghosts in these novels reflect fundamental changes in the apprehension of historical progress in the postcolonial world since WWII. Notes NOTES 1. Angel Flores, "Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction," Hispania 38:2 (1955): 191. 2. Amaryll Chanady, "The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self-Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms," in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 125–44. 3. Parkinson Zamora (ibid.) collects an excellent representation of these viewpoints. See also Roberto G. Echevarria, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). 4. Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World, trans. Marriett de Onis (New York: Knopf, 1957); Ben Okri, The Famished Road (New York: Talese, 1991). Subsequent references to these novels are cited in the text. 5. Alejo Carpentier, "Prologue to The Kingdom of this World," Review: Latin American Literature and Arts 47 (Fall 1993): 28, 31. 6. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 42. 7. See Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 269. 8. For anti-theatricality, see Michael Fried, "Barthes's Punctum," Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005): 539–74. 9. This is an allusion to Ben Okri, The Landscapes Within (London: Longman, 1981). 10. For an introductory discussion on the half-human, half spirit children in West Africa, see Christie C. Achebe, "Literary Insights into the Ogbanje Phenomenon," Journal of African Studies 7 (1980): 31–38; Timothy Mobolade, "The Concept of Abiku," African Arts (Autumn 1973): 62–63; and Chidi T. Maduka, "African Religious Beliefs in Literary Imagination: Ogbanje and Abiku in Chinua Achebe, J. P. Clark and Wole Soyinka," Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22.1 (1987): 17–30. 11. Douglas MacCabe, "'Higher Realities': New Age Spirituality in Ben Okri's The Famished Road," Research in African Literatures 36.4 (Winter 2005): 12. 12. See Emmanuel Obiechina, Language and Theme: Essays in African Literature (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1990), 121–49. 13. See, for example, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Between the Living and the Unborn," New York Times Book Review 28 June 1992, pp. 3, 20; John C. Hawley, "Ben Okri's Spirit-Child: Abiku, Migration, and Postmodernity," Research in African Literatures 26.1 (Spring 1995): 30–39; Olatubosun Ogunsanwo, "Intertextuality and Postcoloniality in Ben Okri's The Famished Road, Research in African Literatures 16.1 (Spring 1995): 40–52. D. O Fagunwa, The Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1937), trans. Wole Soyinka. (London: Nelson, 1968); Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town (New York: Grove, 1953); Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). 14. See "Work and Play in Amos Tutuola," in Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1990). 15. Prominent among these are climate control, aviation, useful aesthetics, etc. See Adeleke Adeeko, "Rethinking Orality and Literacy in African Literary History: The Fiction of D. O. Fagunwa," Pretexts: Studies in Writing and Culture 6.1 (July 1997): 35–51. 16. Carpentier, "Prologue," 29; emphasis added. 17. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, intro. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 1994). 18. Ibid., 7. 19. For introduction to the workings of ifá divination, see William Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969); Wande Abimbola, Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus (Ibadan, Nigeria: Oxford University Press, 1976). 20. Wande Abimbola, Ìjìnlẹ̀ Ohun Ėnú Ifá Apá Kejì (Glasgow: Collins, 1969), 36. 21. "Time is not what you think it is," says an ageless white man on p. 484. 22. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 23. Azaro declared from the beginning: "How many times had I come and gone … . But this time, somewhere in the interspace between the spirit world and the Living, I chose to stay" (5). See similar words on 28, 31, 112, 228, 302, 323–29, 340, 422, 429, 444, 461, and 477. 24. See S. O. Babayemi, Egúngún among the [Odot]y⊙ Yoruba Ibadan ([Odot]y⊙ State Council for Arts and Culture, 1980). 25. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 25.
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