The African novel exhibits formal innovations that could not have been predicted by considering its difference from the European novel or its continuity with oral verbal cultural traditions. Those innovations reveal something important about the nature of the literary imagination in Africa and the nature of the genre of the novel. This article considers three such innovations: the parental point of view, the elevation of narrative focus to take in the head of state, and the fictive state.

Achebe, Soyinka, and Naipaul all write about a period before they were born in order to account for the presence of writing in their worlds and thus for their own existence as writers. The vantage point from which they look back implies writing's triumph. The story that novels tell of the coming of writing is teleological, even if, as in Achebe, the end is regarded with ambivalence and the beginning, the predominantly oral culture before literacy, is highly valued.

The Jamaican author Erna Brodber, however, retells the story of the coming of literacy from the point of view of an orality that is not eclipsed. Her 1988 novel Myal, set in a village outside Morant Bay in St Thomas Parish in the second decade of the twentieth century, depicts a great struggle between the spirit guardians of the community's health, associated with orality, and the demonic forces that threaten it, associated with print literacy. As so often, one of the terms in the pair orality and literacy supplies the frame that contains them both, but in Brodber's novel, orality is able to see around and know literacy as thoroughly as literacy always claims to know orality.

THE LETTER KILLS BUT THE SPIRIT SAVES

The second chapter of Myal begins with four stanzas from Kipling's poem ‘Big Steamers’, in which the ocean-going ships of the title explain to a child that they travel the world to bring him ‘beef, pork, and mutton, apples and cheese’.

In an almost archetypal scene in Chinua Achebe's 1964 novel Arrow of God, a mother and her three children gather in her house in her husband's compound after dinner. The novel is set in Southeastern Nigeria in 1922, when British colonization and Christian evangelization were first penetrating every level of Igbo society. Half in darkness, Ugoye tells two of her children a story. She and her listeners sit in a ‘close group near the cooking place’, enjoying a communion that complements the completed communal acts of preparing and eating food. Sitting apart from the others, beside the palm-oil taper that is the single source of light, is the eldest brother, Oduche, absorbed in his new school reader, the first book ever to enter the family's compound. He sits near ‘the entrance to the one sleeping-room’: reading, like sleeping and dreaming, opens a door to a separate, interior world that each person enters alone.

After negotiating with her listeners, Ugoye embarks upon a story about a man with two wives, one ‘wicked and envious’ and the other good and long-suffering (191). That story arises from and returns to the lived context of the teller and her listeners as Ugoye expresses her own feelings as the younger of two wives in a polygynous household. The children attend eagerly to a story they already know but have not heard ‘too often’ (190). The tale narrates the differing fates of two sons by two mothers who travel to the land of spirits.

When V. S. Naipaul writes his life story, a subject to which he compulsively returns, that story always has two cornerstones: how he came to be a writer and his father. The two are intimately related: Naipaul, looking back, marvels at how far the boy in colonial Trinidad had to travel in order to become the published writer, and he considers his literary ambition to be his greatest legacy from his father, Seepersad, who had been a journalist and had published a collection of short stories. The son even received his original subject matter from his father, who had urged him to take his, Seepersad's, life as the theme for a novel. That novel became A House for Mr Biswas (1961), which tells how a man utterly without a story nevertheless fashioned his life into a story by making his son into the writer who could write it.

Naipaul's novel, like Soyinka's, is a son's fictional portrait of his father. The two fathers are almost exact contemporaries: in 1938 Mr Biswas is 33, Akinyode Soditan 32, and both have infant children. Both live their entire lives in a British colony, receive a colonial education, and are defined by their relation to the world on paper. Their experience of the world of writing is that, as it widens their horizons, it threatens them with a sense of personal irrelevance.

Doris Lessing, who grew up in Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe), recalls how she became a reader and eventually a writer. Although her family lived in a mud hut on a remote farm, she was exposed to books from a young age and had little to do but to read:

The texts in this study were chosen for the range of attitudes they display to literacy. If the chronological structure of the study suggests a history of literacy in Africa and the West Indies or a history of postcolonial literature, that history is necessarily incomplete and potentially misleading. It may be that the relation of African and Caribbean writers to reading and writing has worsened over the generations, but that trend has not been consistent. Ìsarà, the most optimistic of the novels discussed here, is also the most recent in terms of publication. It is also not the case that West Africans or West Indians are all more favourably disposed to writing than Southern Africans like Marechera. Certainly literary dystopias, an African speciality, are remarkably evenly distributed across the continent.

One conclusion this study does invite is that African and West Indian novels set in the present are more likely to be pessimistic about literacy than are novels set in the past. And the reason for that is not (just) that there was more reason for hope in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second. The reason is that African and West Indian writers are most suspicious of writing when they consider its capacity to reach contemporary readers and most grateful to writing for its power to preserve memory and even restore the dead.

In Chinua Achebe's novel No Longer at Ease, set in the late 1950s, Isaac Okonkwo, the aged father of the protagonist, has a room ‘full of old books and papers – from Blackie's Arithmetic which he used in 1908 to (his son) Obi's Durrell, from obsolete cockroach-eaten translations of the Bible into the Onitsha dialect to yellowed Scripture Union Cards of 1920 and earlier’. In the first half of the twentieth century, newly literate Africans often collected and saved all kinds of written material, including printed paper and their own notes and letters, investing these samples of writing with all their hopes for participation in the new field of the modern. Karin Barber has labelled this phenomenon ‘tin-trunk literacy’. Oduche's wooden box imprisons the natural, the sacred, and the indigenous, but a tin trunk filled with papers could be a ‘repository of values, the crystallized tokens and products of “civilization”, “progress”, “enlightenment”, and “modernity”’.

Isaac's adult son, Obi, looks with bemusement amounting to disdain on his father's collection, which time and insects have damaged and whose contents time has rendered ‘obsolete’. He sees in the yellowed pages an image of the older generation's outmoded, almost superstitious respect for the missionaries and the products of the colonizer. The title ‘Blackie's Arithmetic’ refers to the British publisher, but probably strikes the son as colonial condescension that his father had shamefully tolerated.