Would it be possible at all for the novel to regain children and youths as readers? When I say this, I am conceiving of the novel not as mere verbalization of the visual media but as something that genuinely deserves its name. And I wish to regain the reader who will be reading this kind of novel with much wished-for intensity. Shall we ever succeed in doing this? It will not be very easy in this country. At the present moment the more ambitious publishers draw their attention to anything other than literature.
Still I wish to repeat that violence prevailing all over the world is a problem of modern history that we have inherited from the generation immediately before us. Are we allowed to bequeath it unsolved to the next generation? While knowing that we are exacerbating it, aren’t we standing on the verge of giving up our responsibilities? Under these circumstances I think it will be an urgent matter to address to adult readers.
Dear Nadine, please forgive me for having kept talking of grim subjects. I have been doing so, however, in the hope that, even concerning the difficult realities, you will be returning to us an essentially bright and encouraging message which I have always discovered in your admirable writings.
Yours sincerely
Kenzaburo
Johannesburg, 15th May 1998
Dear Kenzaburo,
I know so well your sense of helplessness before the banalisation of violence, the inability to feel the pain of others and the casual willingness to inflict it upon them, among which we are living. We are writers, not politicians, and as sometime political activists we are always among people better equipped for the role. Our writings are the ‘essential gesture’ (I quote Roland Barthes again, as I did for the title of one of my books) by which we reach out to grasp the hand of our society. But the vocation of literature seems so remote from violence; the hand we extend is struck aside by it. Yet violence is also a means of expression. That is what you and I have come to recognize. It is the way in which modern urban society expresses itself. If there is a means at all by which we can be effective, as writers, in striving to change this, it can only be to counter it by giving the alternative — in your words ‘expression adequate enough to evoke imagination about death, violence and pain’.
‘The imagination has been numbed.’ You are right. Our task, laid heavily upon us by whatever talent we possess, is to attempt to bring it back to life. We are the bearers of that invisible chalk ring round the eye that the great Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, says marks the creative mind of those who know the power of the imagination to enrich existence. If violence is a means of expression, there is an alternative means of expression to satisfy that urgent human need. Therein is the common ground of what seems to be the tragic no-man’s-land of the impoverished spirit, the wasteland between two irreconcilables, violence and the writer.
What then should we do, you ask? You raise on the eve of a new century a most chilling, foreboding aspect of mass media’s manipulative distortion of the imagination, where it uses it at all. You speak of the ‘representation of chaotic future society. . In images of a violent future world prevalent in the visual media are reflected. . the society common to the present world.’ In a word, the futuristic vision children and adults are being conditioned to is of a world where, expanded in space and continuing on earth, violence is normal, counter-violence is heroic. How do we go about bringing to our society awareness of the life-giving, life-enhancing alternative? Well, we have first to recognize the disagreeable fact that the grasp of mass media upon contemporary consciousness far exceeds our own engagement with it through serious literature. Writers, publishers, booksellers — our fraternity — cannot hope to challenge this head-on; what should be achievable is to infiltrate the media, in particular the aural and visual media. We shall have to lobby the culture ministries of our governments, the cultural administrators, the directors of TV and radio programmes, the advertisers whose money influences programme choices — all of these, to press for a phasing-out of the dominance of visual and aural pulp fiction and its replacement with the sight and sound of works that will revivify the capacities of the imagination in viewers/listeners who are stunned by the endless depiction of violence as an accepted means of expression in human relationships, whether between children or adults.
As novelists, you and I naturally think of the place of the novel in this context of imaginative literary forms. The novel is the most intellectually accessible to a general public, since it retains the advantage of the ancient roots of popular culture, story-telling. Would it be possible, you ask, for the novel to regain children and youths as its readers? And you make the important reservation: ‘I am conceiving of the novel not as mere verbalisation of the visual media. . I wish to regain the reader who will be reading this kind of novel with much wished-for intensity’.
It is true that the cultivation of imaginative power will not be attained by relying alone on introducing real literature in place of pulp fiction as the basis of television plays, or air-time, visual and oral, given to live readings instead of chat-shows. For a renaissance of the power of the imagination to bring the individual to re-examine his/her life, to restore the healing and humanising faculty of empathy — living beyond your own mind and flesh to feel with and identify with those of other people — we have to bring the individual back to the pleasures of what is written and printed between the covers of books. I emphasize ‘pleasure’ as what the reading of serious literature offers because ‘serious’ doesn’t mean ‘dull’. Humour is serious; playfulness is serious; satire is serious; all these are part of the means with which we equip ourselves to understand and deal with tragedy, love, anger, joy, disappointment, doubt. As novelists we have the whole range of human emotions and preoccupations in the abundance of the creative imagination. I am wary of any obligation to write ‘down’, to simplify these, as a supposed bait to attract children and youths. On the contrary, if we are both to infiltrate the media with literature and restore the unmatched experience of taking up a book and reading it oneself, we can do this only with integrity to the highest standards of our writing, the widest and deepest exploration of this life we share with our readers. We have to be equal to our aim of setting the imagination free through our own creative imagination, as great literature has always done, so that the reader, too, can visualize his/her own life beyond the bounds of publicity hype and the solution of violence.
To say goodbye, for the present; you hope for an encouraging word on the future, dear Kenzaburo. Am I a pessimist? A utopian? No; only a realistic optimist. So I’m putting together a modest book of some of the non-fiction pieces I’ve written, a reflection of how I’ve looked at this century I’ve lived in. The epigraph will reveal to you my conclusion of how it’s been. The quote comes from a poem by our fellow Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney:
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a life-time
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
May we see history fulfil rather than betray our hopes for restoration of the power of the imagination in the new millennium.
Sincerely,
Nadine