kagablog

I am investigating fiction as a research method and a means of communication for social change, with South Africa and Argentina as case studies. Fiction’s Truth is a three-year project of ‘artistic research’, supported by the Swedish Research Council4. I have completed the first year, gathering my South African material, and I am now turning my attention towards Argentina.

The subject of my investigation could be formulated more simply, as two questions: What can fiction tell us about the world, that journalism and science cannot? And to what purpose?

As a fiction writer myself, I find those questions more and more compelling. Why do I write at all? Why do I prefer fiction to journalism? And why do I write novels, rather than educational soap operas? Whenever I attempt to articulate an answer, I inevitably come across the notion of ‘truth’. Fiction’s truth may seem like a contradiction, since the very word ‘fiction’ usually is understood as opposed to ‘fact’. It is obvious that any definition of literary truth must be different from, yet of course overlapping with, the definitions of journalistic or academic truth.

My intention is precisely to discuss fiction and its claim on truth in relation to these other two practices - journalism and academic writing. I am particularly interested in literary and fictional strategies that consciously transgress the genre boundaries, in a deliberate attempt to achieve and communicate a deeper understanding of reality.

Premises

The Writer’s Perspective

I am developing the investigation primarily from the perspective of a fiction writer. I am not a researcher in comparative literature, and I don’t consider myself to be a critic although I have written quite a few literary reviews during more than twenty years profession as an arts journalist5.

It is quite rare that writers investigate their own profession, although self-reflective literature is abundant. Meta-literary reflection has always been a constitutive part of modernism, and the post-modern debate of the 1980s has made it hard, not to say impossible, for any serious writer to ignore fundamental questions such as who is narrating and from where. Writers reflecting on their own writing are also easily found; it is almost a genre on its own. But those reflections are mostly surprisingly shallow and often coquettish: The great writer (usually a man) reveals his eccentric routines to the humble reader (usually a woman) or gives paternalistic advice to presumptive young followers. There are of course important exceptions - J M Coetzee, Annie Dillard and Jan Kjærstad, to name three diverse examples that I will refer to in my study - but generally I dare state that the often unreflecting romantic view on writing as an inspirational gift prevails among fiction writers in Western societies.

Interpolation

A second point of departure is the vast and complex area of post-colonial experience, which has found one of its most accurate expressions in literature6. In fact, post-colonial theory is intimately connected to post-colonial literary practice. Bill Ashcroft (2001) introduces the concept interpolation to describe the transformative energy of post-colonial discourse.

*[T]he most effective post-colonial resistance has always been the wresting, from imperial hands, of some measure of political control over such things as language, writing and various kinds of cultural discourse, the entry into the ’scene’ of colonization to reveal frictions of cultural difference, to actually make use of aspects of the colonizing culture so as to generate transformative cultural production. In this way the colonized subject ‘interpolates’ the dominant discourse …. (47)

Moreover, this interpolating resistance, as opposed to resistance as (violent) counter-force, “involves the capacity to interpose, to intervene, to interject a wide range of counter-discursive tactics into the dominant discourse without asserting a unified anti-imperial intention, or a separate oppositional purity”. And this very act of interpolation is, according to Ashcroft, “the initial (and essential) movement in the process of post-colonial transformation” (48).

Re-reading Freire

Paolo Freire’s work on literacy and ‘the pedagogy of the oppressed’ dates primarily from the late 1960s and early ’70s. In that sense, it is contemporary with the emerging post-colonial thinking and moreover both have a common source of inspiration in Frantz Fanon, whose widely influential Les Damnés de la Terre (1961) strongly emphasized the need for simultaneously modern and anti-colonial education as a key to (post-colonial) liberation.

Although Freire did not specifically speak about fiction, I believe that a re-reading of his work in the light of post-colonial perspectives, particularly Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of “the role of imagination in social life”, may provide a productive theoretical framework for a deeper study on the relation between fiction and social change.

Hypothesis

The role of fiction is, as I see it, primarily as a transgressive means of investigation and innovation, and secondly as a vehicle for cultural identification and social empowerment. There isn’t necessarily a conflict between these two objectives - fiction as investigation and social analysis on the one hand and as strategic communication on the other - but I strongly believe that the second must always be subordinated to the first.

Just as truth, if not justice, comes before reconciliation - not the other way around.

Lasting social change requires a number of concurrent factors, some of which may be incidental and difficult to predict. But a prerequisite for any work of fiction with claims to really transform the world, in a Freirean sense, is that it is capable of saying something different, by consciously or subconsciously transcending the polarities and limitations of its time and place. Fiction’s truth is almost by definition unpredictable. It defies not only the market logic, but often also communication strategies.

Why South Africa and Argentina?

South Africa and Latin America (Argentina in particular) are two literary worlds to which I have a long-time relationship, as a fiction writer and as a journalist. They are both extraordinarily rich in literary imagination and moreover share a common experience of dealing with a traumatic near past; in South Africa the brutal apartheid system and the violent last years of liberation struggle; in Latin America the military dictatorships and the ‘dirty war’ on the militant left. The latter was especially brutal in Argentina, where up to 30.000 people were murdered or “disappeared”.

A transition period is interesting from the perspective of literary and cultural production, since the dialectic between culture and society comes in the open - literature’s ability of looking back and looking forward simultaneously, reinterpreting the past and forecasting the future.

The entire world is in a process of transition - this is the deeper meaning of globalization7 - but some places are focal points of these transformational processes more than others. South Africa is no doubt such a focal point, where globalization has happened to coincide with late decolonialization and a (virtual) qualitative leap from racial supremacism to equity and democracy.

In the case of Argentina, the transition from military dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s and ’90s had more character of reinstallation, since there existed a tradition of democracy, albeit weak and partial and at the mercy of the powers that be (and subsequently interspersed by a parallel tradition of military coups ).

In many ways, South Africa and Latin America may seem like diametrical opposites. As an eager advocate of Latin American culture, I have myself often juxtaposed South Africa’s apartheid (which still prevails in the minds of South Africans) with Latin American ‘creolization’ and ’syncretism’. This seeming opposition is of course an excellent reason for comparative analysis8. I believe that South Africa’s and Argentina’s different yet related experiences of modernity may shed light on one another in an interesting and even innovative way.

Initial findings in South Africa

What I have found in South Africa is, on the one hand, in mainstream culture, an urge for reconciliation and even redemption, sometimes at the expense of the quest for truth. But on the other hand there has emerged a striking new hybrid genre combining autobiography, fiction, reportage, essay etc. in the deliberate attempt to reveal the truth of the near past and the on-going transition. The constitutive “unresolved difference”, as literary critic Leon De Kock (2004) puts it, seems to be artistically very productive.

The search in Argentina

What I fill find in Argentina, I don’t know. The premises are quite different from my research in South Africa, where I returned only in 2006, fifteen years after my first journey in 1991. I have been to Argentina several times since my primordial visit in 19749. As a journalist and literary critic, I have written quite extensively about Borges, Sábato and Cortázar.10

My main area of interest on my visit in April and May 2008 will be the reflections and repercussions of the dictatorship in contemporary literature and other forms of mediated fiction (such as e.g. feature films or TV series) and, precisely, to which extent fiction has been or can be a means of investigation.

As in South Africa, memories of the still non-reconciled past are being more or less heavily disputed. It occurs to me that the kind of fusing of genres that is so evident as a literary strategy in South Africa would be more controversial in Argentina, in spite of its tradition of fantastic literature. This notion remains to be proved, of course, but I believe it to be significant that Argentina, where the systematic persecution of leftist activists during the dictatorship achieved the character and proportions of a holocaust and few survived the “centres of detention” to testify, has not had a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’ even remotely resembling the South African TRC (1995-97), chaired by archbishop Desmond Tutu. Still, more than 25 years after the end of the dictatorship, It would be very difficult to imagine a correspondent call for ‘forgiveness’ between perpetrators and victims in Argentina.

These are the sensitive and crucial questions that I intend to explore, and I believe that the time is ripe to look at this equally romanticized and demonized period in our shared modern history in a new light. By way of hypothesis I also assume that literature (fiction) is a medium with an unsurpassed ability to reveal a deeper truth - or, rather, truths in the plural - that go beyond the factual events.

Oscar Hemer

References

Ashcroft, Bill (2001) Post-Colonial Transformation. London: Routledge

De Kock, Leon (2004) “South Africa in the Global Imaginary : An Introduction”, in De Kock, Leon, Louise Bethlehem and Sonja Laden (eds.) South Africa in the Global Imaginary. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press.