Complicating the Language of Conventional Nigerian Narratives: The Poetics of the Language of Ben Okri's Narratives

Abstract

Nigerian narratives, from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) to contemporary ones, have always resorted to the technique of realism by which they seek to make art correspond to life. These narratives were, therefore, metonymic, Roman Jakobson’s manner of describing language standing in for a state of reality. This circumstance persisted until Ben Okri’s mature novels deviated from it through being metaphoric and the deployment of unfamiliar characterisation, settings, action and language. By this deviation, Okri’s narratives seem to have ruptured the metonymic and the concretising literary language traditional to Nigerian narratives, an issue that has remained largely overlooked. Using Roman Jakobson’s linguistics and sundry descriptive methods (since Jakobson’s thought relevant to this study does not exceed metaphor and metonymy), this article teases out the variegated dimensions through which the literary language of Ben Okri’s latter works undermine and complicate the conventional literary language of Nigerian narratives. Focusing on this language, this article analyses, first, the metonymic – the tendency in the language of Nigerian literature and Okri’s earlier narratives to evoke a familiar reality; second, the metaphoric; third, the redefinition of human actions; fourth, the dissonance between the signifier and the signified in signs signifying institutional concepts; fifth, paradoxes; and last, parallelisms. It concludes that with the language of Okri’s later works so tied to his will- to-narrate in a way subversive of the technique of realism, while representing perceived resemblances through related poetic elements and features, he breathes fresh and rich energies into Nigeria’s existing realistic literature as well as flustering critics’ expectations.