J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

No, responds Egudu, Tutuola has not been translated any further, in fact he has not been translated at all, at least not into English. Why not? Because he did not need to be translated. Because he had written in English all along. 'Which is the root of the problem that the questioner raises. The language of Amos Tutuola is English, but not standard English, not the English that Nigerians of the 1950s went to school and college to learn. It is the language of a semi-educated clerk, a man with no more than elementary schooling, barely comprehensible to an outsider, fixed up for publication by British editors. Where Tutuola's writing was frankly illiterate they corrected it; what they refrained from correcting was what seemed authentically Nigerian to them, that is to say, what to their ears sounded picturesque, exotic, folkloric.

'From what I have just been saying,' Egudu continues, 'you may imagine that I too disapprove of Tutuola or the Tutuola phenomenon. Far from it. Tutuola was repudiated by so-called educated Nigerians because they were embarrassed by him – embarrassed that they might be lumped with him as natives who did not know how to write proper English. As for me, I am happy to be a native, a Nigerian native, a native Nigerian. In this battle I am on Tutuola's side. Tutuola is or was a gifted storyteller. I am glad you like him. Several more books penned by him were put out in England, though none, I would say, as good as The Palm Wine Drinkard. And, yes, he is the kind of writer I was referring to, an oral writer.

'I have responded to you at length because the case ofTutuola is so instructive. What makes Tutuola stand out is that he did not adjust his language to the expectations – or to what he might have thought, had he been less naive, would be the expectations – of the foreigners who would read and judge him. Not knowing better, he wrote as he spoke. He therefore had to yield in a particularly helpless way to being packaged, for the West, as an African exotic.

'But, ladies and gentlemen, who among African writers is not exotic? The truth is, to the West we Africans are all exotic, when we are not simply savage. That is our fate. Even here, on this ship sailing towards the continent that ought to be the most exotic of all, and the most savage, the continent with no human standards at all, I can sense I am exotic.'

There is a ripple of laughter. Egudu smiles his big smile, engaging, to all appearances spontaneous. But she cannot believe it is a true smile, cannot believe it comes from the heart, if that is where smiles come from. If being an exotic is the fate Egudu has embraced for himself, then it is a terrible fate. She cannot believe he does not know that, know it and in his heart revolt against it. The one black face in this sea of white.

'But let me return to your question,' Egudu continues. 'You have read Tutuola, now read my countryman Ben Okri. Amos Tutuola's is a very simple, very stark case. Okri's is not. Okri is an heir of Tutuola's, or they are the heirs of common ancestors. But Okri negotiates the contradictions of being himself for other people (excuse the jargon, it is just a native showing off) in a much more complex way. Read Okri. You will find the experience instructive.'

'The Novel in Africa ' was intended, like all the shipboard talks, to be a light affair. Nothing on the shipboard programme is intended to be a heavy affair. Egudu, unfortunately, is threatening to be heavy. With a discreet nod, the entertainment director, the tall Swedish boy in his light blue uniform, signals from the wings; and gracefully, easily, Egudu obeys, bringing his show to an end.

The crew of the Northern Lights is Russian, as are the stewards. In fact, everyone but the officers and the corps of guides and managers is Russian. Music on board is furnished by a balalaika orchestra – five men, five women. The accompaniment they provide at the dinner hour is too schmaltzy for her taste; after dinner, in the ballroom, the music they play becomes livelier.

The leader of the orchestra, and occasional singer, is a blonde in her early thirties. She has a smattering of English, enough to make the announcements. 'We play piece that is called in Russian My Little Dove. My Little Dove.' Her dove rhymes with stove rather than love. With its trills and swoops, the piece sounds Hungarian, sounds gypsy, sounds Jewish, sounds everything but Russian; but who is she, Elizabeth Costello, country girl, to say?

She is there with a couple from her table, having a drink. They are from Manchester, they inform her. They are looking forward to her course on the novel, in which they have both enrolled. The man is long-bodied, sleek, silvery: she thinks of him as a gannet. How he has made his money he does not say and she does not enquire. The woman is petite, sensual. Not at all her idea of Manchester. Steve and Shirley. She guesses they are not married.

To her relief, the conversation soon turns from her and the books she has written to the subject of ocean currents, about which Steve appears to know all there is to know, and to the tiny beings, tons of them to the square mile, whose life consists in being swept in serene fashion through these icy waters, eating and being eaten, multiplying and dying, ignored by history. Ecological tourists, that is what Steve and Shirley call themselves. Last year the Amazon, this year the Southern Ocean.

Egudu is standing at the entranceway looking around. She gives a wave and he comes over. 'Join us,' she says. 'Emmanuel. Shirley. Steve.'

They compliment Emmanuel on his lecture. 'Very interesting,' says Steve. 'A completely new perspective you gave me.'

'I was thinking, as you spoke,' says Shirley more reflectively, 'I don't know your books, I'm sorry to say, but for you as a writer, as the kind of oral writer you described, maybe the printed book is not the right medium. Have you ever thought about composing straight on to tape? Why make the detour through print? Why even make a detour through writing? Speak your story direct to your listener.'

'What a clever idea!' says Emmanuel. 'It won't solve all the problems of the African writer, but it's worth thinking about.'

'Why won't it solve your problems?'

'Because, I regret to say, Africans will want more than just to sit in silence listening to a disc spinning in a little machine. That would be too much like idolatry. Africans need the living presence, the living voice.'

The living voice. There is silence as the three of them contemplate the living voice.

'Are you sure about that?' she says, interposing for the first time. 'Africans don't object to listening to the radio. A radio is a voice but not a living voice, a living presence. What you are demanding, I think, Emmanuel, is not just a voice but a performance: a living actor performing the text for you. If that is so, if that is what the African demands, then I agree, a recording cannot take its place. But the novel was never intended to be the script of a performance. From the beginning the novel has made a virtue of not depending on being performed. You can't have both live performance and cheap, handy distribution. It's the one or the other. If that is indeed what you want the novel to be – a pocket-sized block of paper that is at the same time a living being – then I agree, the novel has no future in Africa.'

'No future,' says Egudu reflectively. 'That sounds very bleak, Elizabeth. Do you have a way out to offer us?'

'A way out? It's not for me to offer you a way out. What I do have to offer is a question. Why are there so many African novelists around and yet no African novel worth speaking of? That seems to me the real question. And you yourself gave a clue to the answer in your talk. Exoticism. Exoticism and its seductions.'

'Exoticism and its seductions? You intrigue us, Elizabeth. Tell us what you mean.'