The novel, the traditional novel, she goes on to say, is an attempt to understand human fate one case at a time, to understand how it comes about that some fellow being, having started at point A and having undergone experiences and and D, ends up at point Z. Like history, the novel is thus an exercise in making the past coherent. Like history, it explores the respective contributions of character and circumstance to forming the present. By doing so, the novel suggests how we may explore the power of the present to produce the future. That is why we have this thing, this institution, this medium called the novel.
She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying. Ideas like these must have had some grip on her when years ago she wrote them down, but after so many repetitions they have taken on a worn, unconvincing air. On the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief. Things can be true, she now thinks, even if one does not believe in them, and conversely. Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.
If she has trouble believing in her argument, she has even greater trouble in preventing that absence of conviction from emerging in her voice. Despite the fact that she is the noted author of, as Mikael says,
For Emmanuel's talk she sits inconspicuously in the back row. They have in the meantime had a good lunch; they are sailing south on what are still placid seas; there is every chance that some of the good folk in the audience – numbering, she would guess, about fifty – are going to nod off. In fact, who knows, she might nod off herself; in which case it would be best to do so unnoticed.
'You will be wondering why I have chosen as my topic the novel in Africa,' Emmanuel begins, in his effortlessly booming voice. 'What is so special about the novel in Africa? What makes it different, different enough to demand our attention today?
'Well, let us see. We all know, to begin with, that the alphabet, the idea of the alphabet, did not grow up in Africa. Many things grew up in Africa, more than you might think, but not the alphabet. The alphabet had to be brought in, first by Arabs, then again by Westerners. In Africa writing itself, to say nothing of novel-writing, is a recent affair.
'Is the novel possible without novel-writing, you may ask? Did we in Africa have a novel before our friends the colonizers appeared on our doorstep? For the time being, let me merely propose the question. Later I may return to it.
'A second remark: reading is not a typically African recreation. Music, yes; dancing, yes; eating, yes; talking, yes – lots of talking. But reading, no, and particularly not reading fat novels. Reading has always struck us Africans as a strangely solitary business. It makes us uneasy. When we Africans visit great European cities like Paris and London, we notice how people on trains take books out of their bags or their pockets and retreat into solitary worlds. Each time the book comes out it is like a sign held up.
'Well, we are not like that in Africa. We do not like to cut ourselves off from other people and retreat into private worlds. Nor are we used to our neighbours retreating into private worlds. Africa is a continent where people share. Reading a book by yourself is not sharing. It is like eating alone or talking alone. It is not our way. We find it a bit crazy.'
She has visited Africa: the highlands of Kenya, Zimbabwe, the Okavango swamps. She has seen Africans reading, ordinary Africans, at bus stops, in trains. They were not reading novels, admittedly, they were reading newspapers. But is a newspaper not as much an avenue to a private world as a novel?
