Fiction’s response

Abstract

If it is fair to claim that nonfiction writing has garnered attention to the point where it seems to have eclipsed fictive forms, one cannot but wonder what the retort of fiction might be to such a situation. As noted in Chapter 1, Antjie Krog has stated, ‘I want to suggest that at this stage imagination for me is overrated’ (Twidle, ‘Literary Non-Fiction’ 5), while Marlene van Niekerk has been quoted as saying that Altbeker's Fruit of a Poisoned Tree ‘ almost convinces one that fiction has become redundant in this country’. What underlies assertions such as theirs is the sense that the sheer scale of postapartheid's failure to deliver on its promises – and the need to document this perceived condition – has edged out imaginative or fictive writing as the country's leading form of literary intermediation. For a long period in South Africa's literary history, fictive forms prevailed as the locus of ultimate literary value, as suggested by the Nobel awards achieved by Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee. Many authors have, in their own way, imagined a brave new future, but in the face of a ‘neocolonial outcome of an anticolonial struggle’ (O'Brien 3; Pechey 153), and a postapartheid public sphere widely perceived to be pathologised and felonious, where does ‘invention’ go? The imperative for writers, as we have observed, is more often found to be the exploration of actual, material conditions, and in so doing to establish the veracity of perceptions that emerge under conditions in which South Africans, according to Rian Malan, continue to occupy separate ‘kingdoms of consciousness’ (Twidle, ‘Literary Non-fiction’ 16). Recall, also, Steinberg's metaphor of ‘coordinating between deaf people’. In the face of an event such as Marikana, for example, what is more urgent – ‘reimagining’ the event, or finding out the deliberately obscured facts behind this catastrophe? What, indeed, is left for the imagination? And yet, despite the sense that one simply cannot ‘make this shit up’, as Twidle subtitles his essay on nonfiction, it is precisely because this ‘shit’ is so egregious that a crucial question begs to be asked: how might fiction respond to such conditions, and what form might this response take?