Living in Hope and History (13 page)

Kenzaburo, you did not know how much you were speaking for the end of our millennium when you once used these words:
Teach us to outgrow our madness
.

Sincerely,
Nadine

10 May 1998

Dear Nadine (please allow me to reciprocate using each other's given names)

Thank you very much indeed for your welcome reply. It has served to rescue me from the sense of helpless isolation from the whole world as well as from the Japanese society, to which I have recently been susceptible. Your letter reminds me of the same kind of encouragement that I experienced in watching on television the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics held in Nagano, Japan, last February. The keynote of the ceremony was basically one of age-old nationalism. The ceremony reached its climax, however, when my friend Seiji Ozawa conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the provincial town of Nagano with its orchestra while simultaneously the singers sang in unison at a number of places—in Africa, China, etc., with the
Song of Joy
resounding all over the world.

Seiji did his best to conduct whole mankind on this planet to
unity by overcoming the time-lag that would normally be unavoidable in satellite transmission. I was deeply struck by the determined conviction which I detected in his face. By determined conviction I mean his act of praying—he once told me that while engaged in the performance of music he would attain the feeling that he was praying.

Dear Nadine it was thoughtful of you to remind yourself of my
O Teach us to Outgrow our Madness
. I am grateful to you and alive to the poignancy attached to the phrase. For the title of my work I borrowed the phrase from W. H. Auden's poem. It constitutes a part of the ‘voice of Man' uttered in the middle of the battle between the Japanese army and the Chinese guerrillas. This universal voice concludes as follows: ‘Till, as the contribution of our star, we follow/The clear instructions of that justice, in the shadow/Of whose uplifting, loving and constraining power/All human reasons do rejoice and operate.'

Along with this prayer, which has not been fulfilled, I cannot but think of the sufferings that Seiji Ozawa himself experienced during the post-war period. A contemporary of mine, Seiji as a boy was brought up on the Chinese mainland.

As for the background of urban violence in the newly-born South Africa, you have traced it in the whole modern history that began with apartheid. Dear Nadine, I admire your insight and courage, in contrast to the inadequacy of the Japanese media searching ineffectively for the origin of juvenile violence in this country.

Many people here say that the present juvenile violence is the product of the post-war democracy, the family system based on it, and the educational system as an extension of these. Notably enough, nobody speaks of the historical process by which, from the beginning of modernisation, Japan perpetrated violence to the utmost in other parts of Asia for the sake
of self-aggrandisement until the end of World War II, when the massive violence of nuclear weapons burnt down the two Japanese cities. It seems that people have failed to reflect upon how ‘the violence in the air', in your words, has been engendered. People are failing to do what we soon did after the end of the War.

An objection will be readily raised that there is little bearing of the Nanking incident on the Japanese children of today. This is the situation which I find myself in. I, for one, assert that it would be an effective way of anti-violence education to think, together with children, how Japanese citizens as a whole could make up for the irredeemable violence committed by the state in the past. Adults will have to change before children; adults thereby will restore confidence that they
can
change—these could be the concrete plans to be put into practice both at home and at school.

When I, an undergraduate student of foreign literature, started my career as a writer, I embraced the following two fundamental principles. One was to recapture afresh what custom had bedimmed: all the lustre of either consciousness or sensibility. On looking back I realize that this was nothing but ‘defamiliarisation' as defined by the Russian formalists. Not only the novelists but also the media have the obligation to show to adults as well as to children the heavy and weary weight of death, violence and pain that comes home to human existence.

Another of my principles was to attach primary importance to imagination. In those days my contention was that there was in ordinary Japanese no equivalent to ‘imagination' either in English or French. It is urgently needed to investigate whether serious literature and writings in the mass media give expression adequate enough to evoke imagination about death, violence and pain.

You are particularly concerned about the colossal mass media targeting children as their audience and instead of making them feel the images of death and violence as reality, represent these images as something with which they could not be directly involved. As a result death, violence and pain become something commonplace in the consciousness and sensibility of children. Their imagination has been numbed.

Such a trend is explicitly evident in the representation of chaotic future society by means of the visual media and cartoons (accompanied by words) produced under its influence. However, the masterpieces in Utopian literature, from Thomas Moore through Zamiatin to George Orwell, were invariably concerned with the present in which they lived, suffered and entertained their hopes. In the images of a violent future world prevalent in the visual media are reflected the men and society common to the present world, as you have agreed with me, ‘overshadowed by massive violence'.

In my first letter I also wrote that ‘all the children of the world, in their perception and consciousness of their era, are mirrors upon which the massive universal violence is reflected or are its miniature models.' Children perceive ‘the violence in the air' overshadowing the present age and are familiarised to representations of violence by the visual and various other media. Under the circumstances, how vulnerable they are! As regards their vulnerability I may put it another way by saying that they can easily be victimised and incite those who are willing to victimise them. They can at once be weaklings who are victims of violence and bullies who exert violence—against other children, against their family members, or even against themselves by means of suicide, as Dante depicts in Canto XIII
of Inferno
.

What then should we do? I know from experience, painstaking
though it may be, that I could not avoid thinking of what I should do as a novelist. As I am sure that you will never misunderstand me, I do not in the least regard the writing profession as something of a privilege. I simply wish to restore confidence that, in this age of the endless expansion of the visual media, television, computer games, etc., the novel's apparently old-fashioned methods of representations have the power of ‘defamiliarising' death, violence and pain and could play the role of revitalizing and developing imagination for that purpose.

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: