David Kaiza
19 October 2008
column
The novel is so much a part of our lives that to say it ever had a beginning is like considering what life was like before mankind started walking upright -- the period before it is beyond cultural memory.
Yet the novel as we know it is possibly 1,000 years old this year. When the Japanese noblewoman Shikibu Murasaki sat down to write her courtly story, The Tale of Genji, in 1008 AD, she could scarcely have thought there would be a world literary scene into which it would fit or that it would be pronounced one of the greatest novels written in any language; the first also having the last word.
The novel was once looked down upon (Oxford never taught it till the beginning of the 20th century).
But in the 19th and 20th centuries, the genre rose to the height of not only literature but for some time, was read as Thought itself, its writers feted as sages. At the extreme, the novel has come to be a substitute for nation and country:
You are as Irish as James Joyce says you are; as Kenyan as Ngugi wa Thiong'o's imagination can stretch you. There's a certain Okonkwo in the African male; and can you picture pre-revolutionary Russia without thinking Raskolnikov (the anti-hero of Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment)?
The Somali writer Nurrudin Farrah has remarked that once he understood Somalia was dead for him, another Somalia came alive in his novels.
Many of the great novels, in fact, take as their theme the alarming effects of reading novels on human imagination and happiness.
The Spaniard Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote, a contender with The Tale of Genji for title of first novel (and arguably the most enjoyable of them all) is the story of an elderly man who reads romances (but should know better) and consequently goes mad.
The 19th century French novel, Madame Bovary, is the archetypical story of what novel-reading does to the morality of young women, and landed its author, Gustave Flaubert, in fairly hot water.
True to the fortunes of this rebellious form, both Don Quixote and Madame Bovary went on to become two of the biggest bestsellers in world literature.
Over the ages, the novel has seduced generations into literacy. If anything "serious" can be said in its defence, it's that the genre is also generally the place where you first learnt to think deeply and humanely.
If defined as an extended narrative, the novel, in scholarly opinion, has been around since ancient Egypt, 4,000 years ago; one example, Sinuhe, translated from the hieroglyphics, tells the story of a shipwrecked man.
Second, the genre developed simultaneously in so many places that it would be stretching it to say The Tale of Genji was central in the development of the form generally.
While it certainly had its impact on the Japanese novel, its rue value is that it is the earliest example of what we now have.
The comprehensive guide, Novels and Novelists, edited by Martin Seymour-Smith, argues that Chinese printing made it possible to circulate novels as early as the 6th century and that although they had "early examples of delicate love stories, and tales of the supernatural, they produced nothing of the quality of The Tale of Genji."
This quality, which prompted Unesco among others to call it the world's first true novel, is evident in the book's use of narrative techniques now taken for granted. The story develops through the perspectives of different characters, and the author is detached enough to contend with contradictions.
Ten centuries later, you get goose pimples from Murasaki's prescience -- the book's psychological insights remain that sharp. It was "modern" before the term entered culture-speak, anticipating the great European novels by 800 years.
What should it mean to East Africa and Africa? Few people in this region and around continent think novels - or great literature generally -- come from Asia. First, they are surprised. Then, they ask: "They don't make only Toyotas?"
That we remain obvious of Eastern literature is largely the legacy of imperialism.
Just as colonialism forced us to buy European goods at inflated prices, so we were inducted, at highly inflated values, into the works of English, French and Portuguese writers.
But it was worse than that.
You studied only Charles Dickens or Shakespeare or the Bronte sisters and not Cervantes or Maupassant or Jose Maria de Eca de Queiros (generally considered to be the greatest Portuguese writer in the realist style) if you lived in a English colony.
The peculiarity of imperialism means that few people in our region know that Germany too produces novels (not just Mercedes Benzes and BMWs).
Russian literature remains a territory for specialists. One suspects, though that those of us force-fed on Western European books were set a bar too low to enable us to appreciate Tolstoy and Chekhov.
Or Murasaki and company, for that matter, for the creative competence of Japanese novelists, given their command of the genre, their penetrative insight, and their freedom from totalitarian, confining visions puts them at the very top of the craft alongside the great Russians.
To not have read Murasaki or Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata (1968 Nobel Laureate), Kenzaburo Oe (1994 Nobel), Tanizaki Junichiro or Osamu Dezai, is to have missed something of life itself:
Tanizaki and Mishima's prose or Masuji Ibuse and Kenzaburo's command of narrative have the quality of a force of nature, carrying the tale with the steady purpose of a sumo wrestler -- all of that heft is solid muscle. Little stylistic fat pads the body. Also the most noiselessly realised novels, they deliver solid blows.
To read Japanese writing at its best is to see humanity with a sharpness that makes you think literature can't get finer.
Few writers anywhere have rendered characters with the penetrative mercilessness of Mishima and of the many creatures in world literature his Count Kaburagi (in Forbidden Colours) is one of those most worth meeting.
Murasaki's novel is said, among others by Kenzaburo Oe (author of A Personal Matter), to be the greatest Japanese novel.
For the non-Japanese reader, translation blocks it its nuances. But this is true also for the latter-day Japanese reader, for whom it is said the original language requires expert knowledge of the Fujiwara period from which it comes.
As a historical text, Genji's sheer sweep gives a brilliant insight into the formal cultural framework of the Fujiwara age.
The 1935 translation by Arthur Waley is said to be the more majestic for English readers, although an equally authoritative one, offering a more nuanced reading, was completed by the American Edward Seidensticker in 1976.
Set in the Heian period, which lasted from 794 AD to 1191, and which scholars say was the classical age of Japanese culture, the book is about the amorous exploits of Prince Genji.
But it is Prince Genji's sensitivity to his women, rather than his sex drive, that makes his character enthralling.
It is Murasaki's empiricism and that powerful sensory immediacy so characteristic of Japanese novels, poetry and films combined with that irreducible sense you get that the story is taking place here and now, rather than centuries ago or elsewhere, that powers the book.
In the heat of a conversation in the novel, one of Genji's friends says "...women with no merits are as rare as women with no faults..."
That kind of tone caught instant fire with Murasaki's readers.
She writes with a searching, exacting eye novelists have rarely achieved: "The other woman, a model of demureness, kept her face hidden," she writes in Chapter Two (can be read on www.globusz.com).
"Gazing at her, Genji was able to make out the details of the profile. The eyelids seemed a trifle swollen, the lines of the nose were somewhat erratic, and there was a weariness, a want of lustre, about the face. It was, one had to admit, a little on the plain side. Yet she clearly paid attention to her appearance, and there were details likely to draw the eye to a subtler sensibility..."
Such are the subtle sensibilities of a culture our colonial heritage denied us access to. What is taught at our schools creates the false sense that the world divides evenly between Africa and Europe.
In this arrangement, African writers write to repudiate Europe. It's as if narrative possibilities cannot be found outside of history -- like in flying kites or getting trapped with a tiger in a raft. But it is the central effect of our colonial legacy that we fail to see the world on our own terms.
It is fine to still read Dickens (there are those who stake their reputation on calling him the greatest novelist), but there are schools in the region who continue to read the same books as if no new ones had been published.
You have to get out of school - and sometimes out of country and continent -- to meet Senor Gabriel Garcia Marquez. You are unlikely to come across Gunter Grass in a bookshop in any African capital.
Yet who is to dispute the sense that Gabriel Garcia Marquez's family saga (levitating virgins and all in A Hundred Years of Solitude) or The Tin Drum probably describe today's fractured world far better than Hard Times possibly can?
It maybe a legacy of imperialism, but who today is stopping us reading widely?
While Don Quixote's primacy in the European tradition places Spain at the continent's foundation, and the genre found fine development in France, reached fullness in England and became great in Russia, the novel's frontline is widely thought now to be in India. But how many people are buying Indian novels in this region?
Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy and Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things showed that new narratives were possible in former colonies above and beyond lamentation and identity (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children).
There is much talk now that Africa could be the next to pick up the mantle. But there are a number of issues to sort out first:
First, African writers have to realise characters (and books) that are free enough to see the world for the first time. Recent books that have raised interest still have characters with a cultural chip on their shoulders.
They invariably create "strong" Africans, imperious females mostly. A shortcoming, because infallibly "strong" characters, even if you are creating them to shore up a continent's confidence, not only ruin narratives but are also unrealistic, even cheap.
They over-express their freedom. Created to prove their own intellectual separateness, they confirm the very unease the writers labour under.
The central problem seems to be how to re-establish the primacy of the continent's people - to produce "characters" rather than "African characters."
A much larger difficult is how to realise a philosophic framework that can hold a small moment in a narrative (breaking Kola nuts) while also answering larger moral-categorical questions (ethnicity, art and mortality), all within an African world-view without a surreptitious glance at the Judeo-Christian (and Greek) answer sheet.
The failure of the African novel to propose a large narrative (the destiny of mankind, for instance) is defeated by role-confusion.
As it has developed, the African novel is so far a contradiction. It sees its task as confirming the African's humanity, a silly, counterproductive undertaking.
Yet how does it do what it shouldn't do in the first place? By repudiating the Judeo-Christian West! With what tools does it do it? - Judeo-Christian tools! What's worse than failing an irrelevant test?
Yes, the Caine Prize has raised expectations that a new type of writer will bring us a new type of vision; the expectation awaits benediction.
So far, one of those prize-winners, the Nigerian Helon Habila, has published two novels. But while ranging outside the 1960s territory and considering big issues (Measuring Time), his fiction already shows signs of overreach.
There is a much larger world outside of the West's frequently stifling spirituality and incipient philosophical totalitarianism -- one such world being Africa itself. But seeing it needs hard work and its individuality can only become clear once you consider all of world literature and read without rank, whether it is Hegel, Achebe, Natsume Soseki or R.K. Narayan.
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