Making a prison narrative personal: Jonny Steinberg, the gangster and the reader

Abstract

In his second book, The Number, literary journalist Jonny Steinberg examines prison gangs in a bid to understand the violence which has engulfed post-apartheid South Africa. Steinberg seldom conducts a straightforward relationship with his primary sources/characters and in this book he repeatedly lays on the page a doubtfulness that is personal and professional – narrative acts which, in a genre fundamentally about relationships between people, incur ethical consequences. This article seeks to tease out some of the issues raised by Steinberg’s construction of himself as a reliable narrator in The Number, a work of literary journalism in book form but which features a confessional mode made familiar more recently by digital platforms. This has a particularly South African resonance: the dominant post-apartheid understanding of personal narrative harks back to testimony offered and received at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As such, it becomes difficult to locate the subject of the narrative.