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Fiction's Truth and Memories of Modernity

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Fiction's Truth and Memories of Modernity FICTION’S TRUTH AND MEMORIES OF MODERNITY Oscar Hemer I am about to embark on a research project which I have called Fiction’s Truth – an investigation of fiction as research method and means of social change. Its core subject could be formulated more simply, as a question: 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’. When I write fiction I feel less inhibited by the constraints of convention; the format and codes of a journalistic text, or of an academic presentation as this one – even if it tries to transgress those limits. I do not – at least not consciously – imagine what the publisher may think. I may have other persons’ judgements in mind, but first and last I am my own judge and the main criterion – maybe the only necessary criterion – is that what I write is true. 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 investigate 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. Since I will use South Africa as one of my main cases – the other being South America – I will seize this opportunity to try some preliminary reflections on the specificity of the South African experience with regard to the general theme of this project and this seminar: Memories of Modernity. Most of all I will raise some questions for discussion. First, a few words on the very notion of Modernity. It’s obvious that the declaration of death of modernity in the 1980’s was both premature – and a particular phenomenon of the so called west. Modernity is very much alive and kicking, in China and India – the two giant challengers of Western economic and political supremacy. The ferocious modernization process going on in China today resembles in many ways the modern projects of post WWII Europe (on both sides of the Iron Curtain) – but in a much larger scale and at a much faster pace. Usually ‘modernization’ and ‘globalization’ are seen as more or less equivalent, and globalization is even defined as the global fulfillment of ‘the modern project’. The liberal interpretation of ‘the end of History’ – which, for sure, has been overshadowed by the 2 backlash of (alleged and real) fundamentalist reactions and the ongoing global ‘war on terrorism’. But much of the globalization discourse – and, not least, the whole discourse on the Digital revolution and informatization - is a rerun of the modernization rhetoric: a reconstructed Grand Narrative, not necessarily more sophisticated than its predecessors. But, according to Jan Nederveen Pieterse, the definition of Globalization as a form of Hyper-Modernity is purely Eurocentric. Globalization goes much further back than the 18th or even the 16th century – Enlightenment or Columbus, the two common symbolic beginnings of Modernity as an historic era – an era that, which ever time frame you choose, happens to coincide with that of Western expansion and world domination. In Nederveen Pieterse’s view the fundamental feature of Globalization is hybridization – which to some extent is interrupted by and even radically opposed to the modern experience. A seeming paradox: Globalization is the term used to describe the current global transformational processes. But in order to fully understand these processes we must realize that there is more to Globalization than what immediately meets the eye. (To me this is really an eye-opening suggestion.) Back to the post-modernity debate of the ‘80s. The post-modern defined as the modern coming of age and becoming aware of its own historicity. Maybe it is only now that we start to realize the full meaning of that – not only the modern becoming aware of its historicity, but also the west becoming aware of its particularity. Simultaneously with the revival of a naive and unreflected modernization paradigm we are now clearly experiencing what could be described as the pluralization and de-westernization of modernity 3 So, what does this imply for the particular South African experience? I think actually that South Africa is an exemplary illustration, not only of the duality of globalization, but also of the contradictions of modernity – of its very ambivalence. Apartheid was one of the most elaborate projects of social engineering – in its repressive brutality comparable only to the grand modern projects of fascism and communism, yet related to other more modest modernization policies, such as Sweden’s social democratic welfare society (albeit an exclusive welfare state, for whites only – for the boers/afrikaners in particular. Apartheid – a project of affirmative action for the afrikaner). But at the same time, Apartheid was explicitely a reaction against modernity – in rhetoric, if not in practice, an attempt at preserving cultural differences from the devastating influences of modern culture. This duality has led to many paradoxes. After the release of Mandela and the transition to democracy the former pariah of the world community suddenly was turned into the great example – a sort of pilot project for “diversity management”, for the challenges facing the world as a whole. But in South Africa the very notion of cultural difference has been compromised – if not for ever at least for a very long time – through its intrinsic associations with apartheid. In the introduction to a quite recent anthology on ‘South Africa in the Global Imaginary’ Leon de Kock makes the observation that …cultural heterogeneity is nothing new or surprising in a context of globalization, but the South African case is peculiar because it remains to this day a scene of largely unresolved difference. (de Kock et al. 2004, p. 1) 4 South Africa as an entity, he explains, has come into being by virtue of tumultuously clashing modalities, the modernity of a globally expanding Western culture intermeshing with an irreconcilable heterogeneity of cultures and epistemologies (17) Thus, Memories of Modernity in South Africa connote two parallel tendencies in literature and other forms of mediated fiction – probably in the arts in general. On the one hand an attempt to link back to an idealized pre-apartheid past. A past often depicted and interpreted as an early form of modernity which is brutally interrupted. Let’s call it ‘the Myth of Sophiatown’ – the famous black township of Johannesburg that all through the 1950s defied the Group Areas Act and other apartheid legislation, until it was finally evacuated and leveled to the ground in 1963. There are equivalents in almost all major cities: District Six in Cape Town, Cato Manor here in Durban. But Sophiatown has the strongest presence in the public imaginary, not least internationally. Zola Maseko’s film Drum tells the story of Henry Nxumalo and the other legendary writers of Drum magazine in Sophiatown and reinforces the romantic vision of the swinging multicultural enclave of jazz, gangsters and political radicalism where the ruling motto was “Live fast, die young and get a good-looking corpse”. One of my strongest memories, from my first journey to South Africa in ‘91, was my visit with writer and former gangster Don Mattera to Triomf, the white working-class suburb that was literally built on the ruins of Sophiatown. It is the most brutal and obscene memorial of racist South Africa. You could still see the crushed swimming pool by the former Anglican Church, which was desecrated by the white mob and turned into a boxing hall, before it was reinstated as Pinkster Protestante Kerk. And the brutal irony of 5 the very name Triomf, the ruling National Party’s pyrrhic victory over urban modernity. (Triomf is also the title of a novel by Marlene van Niekerke from 1994 - English translation 1999 – one of the most acclaimed Afrikaans novels of the transition period.) The Myth of Sophiatown imagines a South Africa that never was – it is a projected dream of what South Africa could have been, if it weren’t for apartheid, and of course a kind of nostalgic utopian vision of what it may one day become. The second tendency, closely connected to the first, is the attempt to come to grips with this alleged parenthesis: the investigation of the recent past with its first momentum coinciding with the TRC. The most obvious example, which I have discussed at some length before (Hemer 2005), is journalist/poet Antjie Krog’s personal account of the TRC in Country of My Skull (1999)1. Krog, herself an Afrikaner, had covered the Commission’s work for the South African radio. But when she regarded her reporting in retrospect she realized that there was something missing, something which journalism (alone) could not cover. So she went back to the records and told the story all over again, but in a semi-fictitious way, which could also be described as a kind of meta-journalism. To Krog, re-examining the records and focusing on the different layers of the narratives, the key question is whether truth can be pursued at all, at any level beyond indisputable facts? Even though we may always be stuck with a patchwork of diverging stories, having to make more or less random selections and interpretations, she seems inclined to say yes, and she suggests fiction as a means to ‘distill’ reality.
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