노벨문학상 레싱 “꿈·신화 만드는 작가는 불사조”

노벨문학상 레싱 “꿈·신화 만드는 작가는 불사조”

경향신문|기사입력 2007-12-09 18:18 |최종수정2007-12-09 18:39

 

올해 노벨문학상을 수상한 영국 작가 Doris Lessing 도리스 레싱(88)은 7일 수상 연설문을 발표하고 문학과 독서의 중요함을 강조했다.

레싱은 연설문에서 “우리는 이집트와 그리스, 로마로 거슬러 올라가는 문학의 보고를 가지고 있다”며 “문학이 존재하지 않았다면 우리는 얼마나 가난하고 공허했겠는가”라고 반문했다.

레싱은 “교육받은 젊은이들이 세계에 대해 아무 것도 모르고 아무 것도 읽지 않으며 단지 몇 가지, 예를 들면 일부 컴퓨터 같은 것들에 대해서만 아는 게 일상이 되어버렸다”고 지적했다.

레싱은 반면 아프리카에서는 “케냐부터 희망봉까지 어디서든 책에 대한 갈망을 목격할 수 있다”면서 제3세계의 열악한 독서 환경에 안타까움을 표시했다. 그러면서 레싱은 “작가는 우리 내면의 깊은 곳에 존재한다”며 문학이 우리 삶과 멀지 않음을 강조했다. 그는 “우리를 형성하고 지켜주고 창조하는 것은 우리의 상상력”이라며 “작가는 꿈을 만들고 신화를 만드는 우리의 불사조”라고 말했다. 노벨문학상 시상식은 10일 스웨덴 스톡홀름에서 개최되지만 레싱은 노환으로 참석하지 못한다. 이날 연설문은 레싱의 편집자인 니컬러스 피어슨이 대독했다. 〈최희진기자〉

 

 

시대의 반항아` 도리스 레싱의 삶과 문학 [연합]

`19-20세기 모든 문예사조를 아우르는 작가`
올해 노벨문학상 수상자로 선정된 영국 출신 여류작가 도리스 레싱(88)은 "20세기 영어로 소설을 쓰도록 선택받은 몇 안되는 가장 흥미진진한 지성인 중 하나"라는 찬사를 받는 현대 영국 문학계의 중심에 있는 인물이다.

페르시아에서 태어나 짐바브웨에서 성장기를 보낸 레싱은 젊은 시절 공산당에 참여하는 등 일찍부터 다양한 세계를 경험해왔다. 또 열네 살에 학교를 떠나 다시는 어떤 학교도 다니지 않았다. 사회주의에 전도되면서는 이혼의 아픔까지 경험했던 작가다.

그런 이채로운 경험들은 작가로 하여금 언제나 주류에서 벗어나 '시대의 반항아' 역할을 자처해오도록 만들었다. 기성의 가치, 제도, 체제, 이념에 대한 철저한 비판이 레싱이 평생 견지해온 일관된 태도였다.

◆힘들었던 어린 시절=레싱은 1919년 이란의 커만샤에서 태어났다. 24년, 다섯 살 나이로 가족을 따라 아프리카 로디지아(지금의 짐바브웨)의 농장으로 이주했다. 정부 지원금과 융자를 받은 이주였기 때문에 그의 가족은 진흙으로 손수 집을 지어야 했을 정도로 힘들게 살았다. 열세 살에 학교를 그만두고 독학으로 공부했고, 열다섯 살엔 집을 떠나 타이피스트, 전화 교환원 등으로 일했다.

　 38년 공무원과 결혼해 두 자녀를 낳고 이혼한 레싱은 재혼했다가 다시 이혼한다. 레싱은 둘째 남편의 성(姓)이다. 49년 재혼에서 얻은 아들만 데리고 소설가를 꿈꾸며 영국 런던으로 향한다. 그때 그의 수중엔 단돈 20파운드가 전부였다. 이듬해 그는 자전적 소설 『풀잎은 노래한다 (The Grass is Singing)』를 발표해 런던에서 큰 반향을 끌어낸다.

백인 농부의 아내와 흑인 하인 사이의 관계를 통해 인종 간 갈등을 비판한 <풀잎은 노래한다>에서 보듯 초기의 레싱은 자신의 경험을 바탕으로 백인들의 아프리카 식민 통치와 흑인에 대한 억압을 신랄하게 비판했다. 이 때문에 그는 1956년부터 남아공 입국이 거부되었다가 아파르트헤이트(인종분리) 정책이 무너지고 흑인 정부가 들어선 1995년에야 입국이 허용되었다. 또한 그는 1952년에 영국 공산당에 입당했다가 1956년 헝가리 봉기를 계기로 탈당한 바 있는데, 이 무렵 그의 소설들은 진한 사회주의적 경향과 강렬한 반핵 메시지를 담고 있다.

전북대 왕철(영문학) 교수는 “레싱은 영국인이지만 제3세계 작가라 할 수도 있을 만큼 아프리카를 배경으로 한 작품이나 백인의 이중성을 다룬 작품이 많다”고 설명했다.

레싱이 천착해온 주제는 그녀가 성장한 아프리카. 영국인 부모 사이에서 태어나 일찍부터 인종 간 불화, 착취, 문명 간 충돌과 갈등, 제국과 자본주의의 모순 등을 목격해야 했던 레싱으로서는 당연한 일이었다.

척박한 아프리카에서 살았던 자기 부모의 삶을 근간으로 한 첫 작품 '풀잎은 노래한다'(1949)가 바로 그같은 작품이다. 이 소설에서 작가는 백인 식민주의자들에게 착취당하는 아프리카인들의 삶과 자연, 그 과정에서 황폐해가는 백인들의 심리적, 도덕적 공황 상태를 매우 사실적으로 그렸다.

그러나 레싱 문학의 트레이드마크는 역시 페미니즘이라 할 수 있다. 스웨덴 한림원은 그의 대표작으로 꼽히는 <황금 노트북>(1962)이 “초창기 페미니즘 운동의 선구적 업적이며 남녀 관계에 관한 20세기적 관점에 중요한 시사점을 주는 책에 속한다”고 평가했다. 그러나 정작 레싱은 자신을 페미니스트라 규정하는 데에 부정적이다. 페미니즘이 “지나치게 이념적이고 남녀 관계를 과도하게 단순화하기 때문”이라는 것이 그의 해명이다. <황금 노트북>은 자서전적 (논)픽션과 노트, 수기, 일기 등이 다양하게 오가는가 하면 메타소설적 구성을 짜는 등 현란한 형식 실험이 돋보이는 작품이다. 이 작품은 국내에서도 평민사에서 한때 출간되었다가 절판되었으며, 도서출판 ‘뿔’에서 이달 중에 다시 나올 예정이다.

◆다양한 작품세계=레싱의 대표작이라면 『황금 노트북 (The Golden Notebook·1962) 』이다. 세계 페미니즘 운동에 본격적으로 불을 지른 소설로 평가되는 작품이다. 한 여류작가가 예술을 통해 자신의 인생을 터득하는 과정을 담은 소설로 모두 5부로 구성됐다. 작가는 서문에서 “이 소설은 내게 여전히 가장 교훈적인 경험으로 남아 있다”고 적었다.

　 이 소설은 2002년 세계 100대 작품에 선정됐다. 노르웨이의 노벨연구소와 북 클럽스가 세계 50여 개국 출신 유명 작가 100명에게 설문조사한 결과다. 설문에 참가한 작가는 살만 루슈디(이란), 노먼 메일러(미국), 밀란 쿤데라(체코), 카를로스 푸엔테스(멕시코) 등 당대의 거장이다. 2005년엔 미 시사주간지 ‘타임’에 의해 ‘세계 100대 작’으로 선정됐고, 90년대 중반 중국에선 재판 8만 권이 하루 만에 매진되기도 했다.
레싱은 특히 페미니즘 문학의 선구자적 인물로 꼽힌다. 개인의 다양한 욕망의 충돌과 갈등을 그려낸 '황금노트북'(1962)은 그의 가장 잘 알려진 대표작이자 현대 페미니즘 문학의 정전으로 꼽힌다.

혁명이나 전쟁, 비극적인 사건이 아닌 여성들의 일상을 통해 인종, 계급, 성, 제도적인 문제를 성찰하고 있는 이 작품에서 작가는 여성들의 자아를 괴롭히는 가치관의 혼돈, 여기에서 비롯되는 정서적 무력감의 실체를 밝히고자 했다.

스웨덴 한림원도 11일 레싱의 수상 사실을 발표하며 "회의와 통찰력으로 분열된 문명을 응시한, 여성으로서의 경험을 그린 서사 시인"이라며 특히 '황금 노트북'이 가장 두드러졌다고 밝혔다.

유제분 부산대 영어교육과 교수는 이 작품에 대해 "미국의 페미니스트들에게도 이데올로기적으로 엄청난 영향을 줬을 뿐 아니라 여성의 일상이 바로 소설이 될 수 있음을 확인시켜준 작품"이라고 평가했다.

또 다른 대표작은 1988년 발표한 '다섯째 아이'. 해외에서는 이미 고전으로 꼽히는 이 작품에서 작가는 전통적 의미의 가정을 추구해나가는 두 부부의 가정이 비정상적인 아이가 태어남으로써 괴멸해가는 과정을 추적하며 인간의 근원과 가치에 대해 고민했다.

그러나 그녀가 일관되게 주장해온 것은 페미니즘도 식민주의에 대한 비판도 아니었다. 수없이 변화하는 주제들을 통해 드러내고자 했던 것은 "개인의 자유와 해방이 곧 사회적 해방 또는 정의와 연결된다는 신념"이었다.

레싱의 페미니즘은 기존의 페미니즘 운동과 달랐다. 여기엔 사연이 있다. 영국에 거주하던 레싱이 짐바브웨를 방문했을 때 그곳에서 그는 미국인 페미니스트들을 보고 크게 실망한다. 한 달에 고작 70∼80달러로 연명해야 하는 아프리카의 현실은 무시하고 그들은 서양식 교육방법 따위나 가르치고 있었다. 레싱은 그건 “문화제국주의에 불과하다”고 판단했다. 이어 그는 다음과 같이 주장한다.

“백인이나 중산층 여성들의 삶은 크게 변한 것이 사실이지만 진정 변해야 할 소외계층의 삶은 예전과 다름없다.”-자서전 『나의 속마음』(원제 Under My Skin, 1994)

1950년대 '앵그리 영맨'을 대표하는 작가 중 하나인 레싱은 페미니즘과 정치에 대한 강력한 견해로 잘 알려져 있다. 1962년 작품 '황금 노트북'은 페미니스트 작가들에게 영감을 불어넣은 페미니즘 소설의 고전으로 꼽힌다.

그러나 레싱은 페미니스트 운동과 거리를 두고 살았으며, 여성들만 사는 세상에 살기를 원치는 않는다고 말했다. 레싱은 두 번 결혼했으나 곧 이혼했고, 레싱은 두 번째 남편의 성을 아직도 쓰고있다.

레싱은 여든이 넘어서도 창작 활동의 끊을 놓지 않은 타고난 작가로 꼽힌다. 두 권의 자서전 '내 피부 아래'와 '그림자 속을 걷다'는 자서전의 전범을 제시했다는 평가를 받아왔으며 82세였던 2002년 소설 '가장 달콤한 꿈'을 출간하기도 했다.

영국 최고의 문학상으로 꼽히는 서머싯 몸 상(1956)을 비롯해 메디치 상(1976), 유럽 문학상(1982), 아스투리아스 왕세자 상(2001) 등을 수상했으며 그 같은 문학적 성과를 인정받아 1991년부터 매년 노벨문학상 후보로 꼽혀왔다

유 교수는 "레싱이 상을 받는 것은 당연하다. 여성이라는 한계 때문에 늦게 수상한 감이 없잖아 있다"며 "사실주의, 모더니즘, 포스트모더니즘에 이르기까지 19-20세기 문예사조를 아우르고 있는 대단한 작가"라고 평가했다.

'런던 스케치'를 국내 번역해 소개한 서숙 이화여대 영문과 교수도 "레싱은 세계문학의 거목과 같은 작가며 강력한 작가"라며 "백인으로 식민지에 살며 지켜본 인종차별, 식민주의자들과 원주민들의 관계를 지켜보며 느낀 인간에 대한 비판 의식이 작품에 잘 반영돼 있다"고 말했다.

용인대 영어과 강의교수인 정소영씨도 "처음에는 사회주의 운동에 참여하며 소설에서 사실주의적 작품에 천착했던 작가"라며 "특히 '골든노트북'에는 인간의 무력함과 세계의 폭력성 등이 잘 반영돼 있다"고 설명했다.

분명 20세기 최고의 작가 중 한 명이지만 일반 독자들 사이에서는 다소 생소한 작가로 꼽혀왔다. 현재 국내 소개된 작품으로는 '마사 퀘스트', '황금 노트북', '다섯째 아이', '풀잎은 노래한다' 등이 있다. (서울=연합뉴스)

레싱의 대표적 작품들

　◆황금노트북(The Golden Notebook)

　도리스 레싱의 자전적 요소가 강한 소설이다. ‘자유로운 여자들’이라는 테두리 소설과 주인공이 쓰는 4권의 일기가 교대로 전개되며, ‘소설 속에서 소설 쓰기’라는 메타픽션적 구성을 취한다. 주인공인 여성작가 안나는 자신의 여러 역할(사회주의자·이혼녀·어머니·연인…)사이에서 갈등을 겪다 일기를 쓰기 시작한다. 1997년 평민사에서 출간한 한국어판은 현재 절판상태. 출판사 뿔에서 새로 번역, 10월 중 출간할 계획이다.

　◆다섯째 아이(The Fifth Child)

　아주 정상적인 두 남녀가 만나 전통적 의미의 행복한 가정을 만들어 간다. 하지만 그들의 ‘다섯째 아이’로 이상한 유전자의 지배를 받고 있는 비정상적인 아이가 태어난다. 그 아이가 ‘이상적인’ 가정을 파괴해가는 과정을 간결하고 긴박한 문체로 그리면서 레싱은 전통적인 가치관이 하나의 허상에 불과하다는 것을 보여준다. 1999년 민음사 출간.

　◆런던스케치(London Observed: Stories & Sketches)

　런던의 구석구석을 배경으로 그린 열 여덟 편의 단편집. 좁은 도로에서 마주 선 채 한 치의 양보도 하지 않는 두 대의 자동차와 그 때문에 오도 가도 못하는 다른 자동차들을 그린 ‘원칙’등을 비롯해 현대 도시인의 자화상이 담겨있다. 2003년 민음사 출간

 

다음은 레싱에 대한  영문 소개서이다.

Photo by Miriam Berkley

Biography
From the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin,
HarperPerennial, 1995

Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris's mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a civilized, Edwardian life among savages; but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth. Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen; and it was the end of her formal education. But like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. "Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn't apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn't thinking in terms of being a writer then - I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time." The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into. Lessing's early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Kipling; later she discovered D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth: her mother told them to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales. Doris's early years were also spent absorbing her fathers bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of "poison." "We are all of us made by war," Lessing has written, "twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it." In flight from her mother, Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written, "in a fever of erotic longing." Frustrated by her backward suitor, she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories, and sold two to magazines in South Africa. Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. "There is a whole generation of women," she has said, speaking of her mother's era, "and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them." Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of "setting at a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general." In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son. During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer. Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individuals own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing's courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the nineteenth century - their "climate of ethical judgement" - to the demands of twentieth-century ideas about consciousness and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1951-1959), a formally conventional bildungsroman (novel of education) about the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962), a daring narrative experiment, in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wulf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness, and hypocrisy afflicting her generation. Attacked for being "unfeminine" in her depiction of female anger and aggression, Lessing responded, "Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise." As at least one early critic noticed, Anna Wulf "tries to live with the freedom of a man" - a point Lessing seems to confirm: "These attitudes in male writers were taken for granted, accepted as sound philosophical bases, as quite normal, certainly not as woman-hating, aggressive, or neurotic." In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her "inner-space fiction" deals with cosmic fantasies (Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society. Lessing's other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbour, 1983 and If the Old Could..., 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. Under My Skin: Volume one of My Autobiography, to 1949 appeared in 1995 and received the James Tait Black Prize for best biography. Addenda (by Jan Hanford) In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago. She collaborated with illustrator Charlie Adlard to create the unique and unusual graphic novel, Playing the Game. After being out of print in the U.S. for more than 30 years, Going Home and In Pursuit of the English were republished by HarperCollins in 1996. These two fascinating and important books give rare insight into Mrs. Lessing's personality, life and views. In 1996, her first novel in 7 years, Love Again, was published by HarperCollins. She did not make any personal appearances to promote the book. In an interview she describes the frustration she felt during a 14-week worldwide tour to promote her autobiography: "I told my publishers it would be far more useful for everyone if I stayed at home, writing another book. But they wouldn't listen. This time round I stamped my little foot and said I would not move from my house and would do only one interview." And the honors keep on coming: she was on the list of nominees for the Nobel Prize for Literature and Britain's Writer's Guild Award for Fiction in 1996. Late in the year, HarperCollins published Play with A Tiger and Other Plays, a compilation of 3 of her plays: Play with a Tiger, The Singing Door and Each His Own Wilderness. In an unexplained move, HarperCollins only published this volume in the U.K. and it is not available in the U.S., to the disappointment of her North American readers. In 1997 she collaborated with Philip Glass for the second time, providing the libretto for the opera "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five" which premiered in Heidelberg, Germany in May. Walking in the Shade, the anxiously awaited second volume of her autobiography, was published in October and was nominated for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in the biography/autobiography category. This volume documents her arrival in England in 1949 and takes us up to the publication of The Golden Notebook. This is the final volume of her autobiography, she will not be writing a third volume. Her new novel, titled "Mara and Dann", was been published in the U.S in January 1999 and in the U.K. in April 1999. In an interview in the London Daily Telegraph she said, "I adore writing it. I'll be so sad when it's finished. It's freed my mind." 1999 also saw her first experience on-line, with a chat at Barnes & Noble (transcript). In May 1999 she will be presented with the XI Annual International Catalunya Award, an award by the government of Catalunya. December 31 1999: In the U.K.'s last Honours List before the new Millennium, Doris Lessing was appointed a Companion of Honour, an exclusive order for those who have done "conspicuous national service." She revealed she had turned down the offer of becoming a Dame of the British Empire because there is no British Empire. Being a Companion of Honour, she explained, means "you're not called anything - and it's not demanding. I like that". Being a Dame was "a bit pantomimey". The list was selected by the Labor Party government to honor people in all walks of life for their contributions to their professions and to charity. It was officially bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II. In January, 2000 the National Portrait Gallery in London unveiled Leonard McComb's portrait of Doris Lessing. Ben, in the World, the sequel to The Fifth Child was published in Spring 2000 (U.K.) and Summer 2000 (U.S.). In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize. In 2005 she was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize. In 2007 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel is The Cleft.

 

Nobel Lecture

December 7, 2007

 

On not winning the Nobel Prize

 

I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where in '56 was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.

This is north west Zimbabwe early in the eighties, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here "to help Africa" as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found here in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This school is like all the schools built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas, or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books, or biros, in the library are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read: they are tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, detective stories, or with titles like 'Weekend in Paris' or 'Felicity Finds Love'.

There is a goat trying to find sustenance in some aged grass. The headmaster has embezzled the school funds and is suspended, arousing the question familiar to all of us but usually in more auguest contexts: How is it these people behave like this when they must know everyone is watching them?

My friend doesn't have any money because everyone, pupils and teachers, borrow from him when he is paid and will probably never pay it back. The pupils range from six to twenty-six, because some who did not get schooling earlier are here to make it up. Some pupils walk every morning many miles, rain or shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can't study easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook when they get home from school and before they set off for school.

As I sit with my friend in his room, people drop shyly in, and all, everyone begs for books. "Please send us books when you get back to London". one man said, "They taught us to read but we have no books". Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books.

I was there some days. The dust blew past, water was short because the pumps had broken and the women were getting water from the river again.

Another idealistic teacher from England was rather ill after seeing what this "school" was like.
On the last day, it was end of term and they slaughtered the goat, and it was cut into mounds of bits and cooked in a great tin. This was the much looked forward to end of term feast, boiled goat and porridge. I drove away while it was going on, back through the charred remains and stumps of the forest.

I do not think many of the pupils of this school will get prizes.

Next day I am at a school in North London, a very good school, whose name we all know. It is a school for boys. Good buildings, and gardens.

These pupils have a visit from some well known person every week, and it is in the nature of things that these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils. A visit from a celebrity is no big deal for them.

The school in the blowing dust of northwest Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at those mildly expectant faces and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without text books, or an atlas, or even a map pinned up on a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only eighteen or nineteen themselves, they beg for books. I tell these boys that everybody, everyone begs for books: "Please send us books". I am sure that everyone here, making a speech will know that moment when the faces you are looking at are blank. Your listeners cannot hear what you are saying: there are no images in their minds to match what you are telling them. In this case, of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where, at the end of term, a just killed goat cooked in a great pot is the end of term treat.

Is it really so impossible for them to imagine such bare poverty?

I do my best. They are polite.

I'm pretty sure of this lot there will be some who will win prizes.
Then, it is over, and I with the teachers, ask as always, how the library is, and if the pupils read. And here, in this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to schools and even universities.

"You know how it is. A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used."
"You know how it is." Yes, we indeed do know how it is. All of us.

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education, and owe respect to our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning, but it is on record that working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the working men's libraries, institutes, colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Reading, books, used to be part of a general education.

Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education it was, reading, because the young ones know so much less. And if children cannot read, it is because they have not read.

But we all know this sad story.

But we do not know the end of it.

We think of the old adage, "Reading maketh a full man" – and forgetting about jokes to do with over-eating – reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.

But we are not the only people in the world. Not long ago I was telephoned by a friend who said she had been in Zimbabwe, in a village where they had not eaten for three days, but they were talking about books and how to get them, about education.

I belong to a little organisation which started out with the intention of getting books into the villages. There was a group of people who in another connection had travelled Zimbabwe at its grass roots. They reported that the villages, unlike what people reported, are full of intelligent people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old people. I myself paid for a little survey, of what people wanted to read, and found the results were the same as a Swedish survey, that I had not known about. People wanted to read what people in Europe want to read, if they read at all – novels of all kinds, science fiction, poetry, detective fiction, plays, Shakespeare, and the do-it-yourself books, like how to open a bank account, were low in the list. All of Shakespeare: they knew the name. A problem with finding books for villagers is that they don't know what is available, so a school set book, like the Mayor of Casterbridge, becomes popular because they know it is there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons is the most popular of all novels.

Our little organisation got books from where we could, but remember that a good paperback from England cost a months wages: that was before Mugabe's reign of terror. Now with inflation, it would cost several years wages. But having taken a box of books out to a village – and remember there is a terrible shortage of petrol, the box will be greeted with tears. The library may be a plank under a tree on bricks. And within a week there will be literacy classes – people who can read teaching those who can't, citizenship class – and in one remote village, since there were no novels in Tonga, a couple of lads sat down to write novels in Tonga. There are six or so main languages in Zimbabwe and there are novels in all of them, violent, incestuous, full of crime and murder.

Our little organisation was supported from the very start by Norway, and then by Sweden. But without this kind of support our supplies of books would have dried up. Novels published in Zimbabwe, and, too, do-it-yourself books are sent out to people who thirst for them.

It is said that a people gets the government it deserves, but I do not think it is true of Zimbabwe. And we must remember that this respect and hunger for books comes, not from Mugabe's regime, but from the one before it, the whites. It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope.

This links up improbably with a fact: I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This house has been built always, everywhere, where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls. Saxon England for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, not one, and, the point is, it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books from England for her children, books in great brown paper parcels which were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.

And sometimes I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or running water (just like our family in our elongated mud hut), "I shall be a writer too, because I've the same kind of house you were in."

But here is the difficulty. No.

Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.

There is the gap. There is the difficulty.

I have been looking at the speeches by some of your recent prizewinners. Take the magnificent Pamuk. He said his father had 1 500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition.

Take V.S. Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write. And when he got to England by right he used the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition.

Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes: taught by that wonderfully brave bold mind.

In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the Tradition.

I have a friend from Zimbabwe. A writer. Black – and that is to the point. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the good cared-for huts of the better off. A school – but like one I have described. He found a discarded children's encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and learned from it.

On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe, truly a nest of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia, under the whites – the mission schools, the better schools. Writers are not made in Zimbabwe. Not easily, not under Mugabe.

All the writers had a difficult road to literacy, let alone being writers. I would say print on jam tins and discarded encyclopaedias were not uncommon. And we are talking about people hungering for standards of education they were a long way from. A hut or huts with many children – an overworked mother, a fight for food and clothing.

Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being, and there is another thing we should remember. This was Zimbabwe, physically conquered less than a hundred years before. The grandfathers and grandmothers of these people might have been storytellers for their clan. The oral tradition. In one generation – two, the transition from stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books. What an achievement.

Books, literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world. But you may have a sheaf of paper (not typescript – that is a book – but it has to find a publisher, who will then pay you, remain solvent, distribute the books. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene for Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, with its different tradition, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.

Here I am talking about books never written, writers that could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential. But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.

Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.

If this writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

When writers talk to each other, what they ask each other is always to do with this space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

Let us jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We, cynically enquire, How are her boobs? Is she good-looking? If this is a man, Charismatic? Handsome? We joke but it is not a joke.

This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of paparazzi begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening.

He, she is flattered, pleased.

But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking: I've heard them: "This is the worst thing that could have happened to me.

Some much publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they wanted to, meant to.

And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears. "Have you still got your space? Your sole, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don't let it go."

There must be some kind of education.

My mind is full of splendid memories of Africa which I can revive and look at when I want. How about those sunsets, gold and purple and orange, spreading across the sky at evening. How about butterflies and moths and bees on the aromatic bushes of the Kalahari? Or, sitting on the banks of the Zambesi, where it rolls between pale grassy banks, it being the dry season, dark-green and glossy, with all the birds of Africa around its banks. Yes, elephants, giraffes, lions and the rest, there were plenty of those, but how about the sky at night, still unpolluted, black and wonderful, full of restless stars.

But there are other memories. A young man, eighteen perhaps, is in tears, standing in his "library." A visiting American seeing a library without books, sent a crate, but this young man took each one out, reverently, and wrapped them in plastic. "But," we say, "these books were sent to be read, surely?" and he replied, "No, they will get dirty, and where will I get anymore?"

He wants us to send him books from England to teach him to teach. "I only did four years in the senior school" he begs, "But they never taught me to teach."

I have seen a Teacher in a school where there was no textbooks, not even a bit of chalk for the blackboard – it was stolen – teach his class of six to eighteen year olds by moving stones in the dust, chanting "Two times two is....." and so on. I have seen a girl, perhaps not more than twenty, similarly lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros – anything, teach the A, B, C in the dust with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.

We are seeing here that great hunger for education in Africa, anywhere in the Third World, or whatever we call parts of the world where parents long to get an education for their children which will take them from poverty, to the advantage of an education.

Our education which is so threatened now.

I would like you to imagine yourselves, somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of water every afternoon from the town and the people are waiting for this precious water.

The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has been torn out of a book. She is reading Anna Karenin.

She is reading slowly, mouthing the words. It looks a difficult book. This is a young woman with two little children clutching at her legs. She is pregnant. The Indian is distressed, because the young woman's headscarf, which should be white, is yellow with dust. Dust lies between her breasts and on her arms. This man is distressed because of the lines of people, all thirsty, but he doesn't have enough water for them. He is angry because he knows there are people dying out there, beyond the dust clouds. His brother, older, had been here holding the fort, but he had said he needed a break, had gone into town, really rather ill, because of the drought.

This man is curious. He says to the young woman. "What are you reading?"

"It is about Russia," says the girl.

"Do you know where Russia is?" He hardly knows himself.

The young woman looks straight at him, full of dignity though her eyes are red from dust, "I was best in the class. My teacher said, I was best."

The young woman resumes her reading: she wants to get to the end of the paragraph.

The Indian looks at the two little children and reaches for some Fanta, but the mother says "Fanta makes them thirsty."

The Indian knows he shouldn't do this but he reaches down to a great plastic container beside him, behind the counter and pours out two plastic mugs of water, which he hands to the children. He watches while the girl looks at her children drinking, her mouth moving. He gives her a mug of water. It hurts him to see her drinking it, so painfully thirsty is she.

Now she hands over to him a plastic water container, which he fills. The young woman and the children, watch him closely so that he doesn't spill any.

She is bending again over the book. She reads slowly but the paragraph fascinates her and she reads it again.

"Varenka, with her white kerchief over her black hair, surrounded by the children and gaily and good-humouredly busy with them, and at the same visibly excited at the possibility of an offer of marriage from a man she cared for, looked very attractive. Koznyshev walked by her side and kept casting admiring glances at her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something rare, something he had felt but once before, long, long ago, in his early youth. The joy of being near her increased step by step, and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge birch mushroom with a slender stalk and up-curling top into her basket, he looked into her eyes and, noting the flush of glad and frightened agitation that suffused her face, he was confused himself, and in silence gave her a smile that said too much."

This lump of print is lying on the counter, together with some old copies of magazines, some pages of newspapers, girls in bikinis.

It is time for her to leave the haven of the Indian store, and set off back along the four miles to her village. It is time... outside the lines of waiting women clamour and complain. But still the Indian lingers. He knows what it will cost this girl – going back home, with the two clinging children. He would give her the piece of prose that so fascinates her, but he cannot really believe this splinter of a girl with her great belly can really understand it.

Why is perhaps a third of Anna Karenin stuck here on this counter in a remote Indian store? It is like this.

A certain high official, United Nations, as it happens, bought a copy of this novel in the bookshop when he set out on his journeys to cross several oceans and seas. on the plane, settled in his business class seat, he tore the book into three parts. He looks around at his fellow passengers as he does this, knowing he will see looks of shock, curiosity, but some of amusement. When he was settled, his seat belt tight, he said aloud to whoever could hear, "I always do this when I've a long trip. You don't want to have to hold up some heavy great book." The novel was a paperback, but, true, it is a long book. This man is well used to people listening when he spoke. "I always do this, travelling," he confided. "Travelling at all these days, is hard enough." And as soon as people were settling down, he opened his part of Anna Karenin, and read. When people looked his way, curiously or not, he confided in them. "No, it is really the only way to travel." He knew the novel, liked it, and this original mode of reading did add spice to what was after all a well known book.

When he reached the end of a section of the book, he called the airhostess, and sent it back to his secretary, travelling in the cheaper seats. This caused much interest, condemnation, certainly curiosity, every time a section of the great Russian novel arrived, mutilated, but readable, in the back part of the plane. Altogether, this clever way of reading Anna Karenin makes an impression, and probably no one there would forget it.

Meanwhile down in the Indian store, the young woman is holding onto the counter, her little children clinging to her skirts. She wears jeans, since she is a modern woman, but over them she had put on the heavy woollen skirt, part of traditional garb of her people: her children can easily cling onto it, the thick folds.

She sent a thankful look at the Indian, whom she knew liked her and was sorry for her, and she stepped out into the blowing clouds.

The children had gone past crying, and their throats were full of dust anyway.

This was hard, oh yes, it was hard, this stepping, one foot after another, through the dust that lay in soft deceiving mounds under her feet. Hard, hard – but she was used to hardship, was she not? Her mind was on the story she had been reading. She was thinking, "She is just like me, in her white headscarf, and she is looking after children, too. I could be her, that Russian girl. And the man there, he loves her and will ask her to marry him. (She had not finished more than that one paragraph) Yes, and a man will come for me, and take me away from all this, take me and the children, yes, he will love me and look after me."

She steps on. The can of water is heavy on her shoulders. on she goes. The children can hear the water slop in the can. Half way she stops, sets down the can. Her children are whimpering and touching the can. She thinks that she cannot open it, because dust would blow in. There is no way she can open the can until she gets home.

"Wait" she tells her children, "Wait"

She has to pull herself together and go on.

She thinks. My teacher said there was a library there, bigger than the supermarket, a big building and it is full of books. The young woman is smiling as she moves on, the dust blowing in her face. I am clever, she thinks. Teacher said I am clever. The cleverest in the school – she said I was. My children will be clever, like me. I will take them to the library, the place full of books, and they will go to school, and they will be teachers – my teacher told me I could be a teacher. They will be far from here, earning money. They will live near the big library and live a good life.

You may ask how that piece of the Russian novel ever ended up on that counter in the Indian store?

It would make a pretty story. Perhaps someone will tell it.

On goes that poor girl, held upright by thoughts of the water she would give her children once home, and drink a little herself. on she goes ... through the dreaded dusts of an African drought.

We are a jaded lot, we in our world – our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

We have a treasure-house – a treasure – of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come on it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.

We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.

We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

Ask any modern storyteller, and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, fire, ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise ... but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.

That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is – we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?

I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.