Koringa and the Professor: Beating some ‘fictive’ bounds in Finuala Dowling’s The Man Who Loved Crocodile Tamers

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Notes

1. Dorrit Cohen notes that “narratologists … have, to an astonishing degree, ignored the question of demarcation between fiction and nonfiction” (775).

2. Sidney writes in his Defense of Poetry, “Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth” (66). C.S. Lewis remarks of the Defense that “What is in question is not man’s right to sing but his right to feign, to ‘make things up’” (318).

3. Karoo Morning: An Autobiography 1918–1935 (1977); Bursting World: An Autobiography 1936–45, (1983); A Local Habitation: An Autobiography 1945–90 (1991).

4. This cluster of terms is characterized by more than family resemblance. To all intents they are identical in referent. Each could accommodate The Man Who Loved Crocodile Tamers, except for the ‘novelistic documentary’. Visser’s notion is useful in that it directs attention to a ‘limit possibility’ embracing strictly factual novelization of material: Like the documentary film, the novelistic documentary precludes fictionalization; the claim for both is that they are true – not just in the sense of “truth to life” or of probability, but literally, factually true in detail. Like the documentary film, the novelistic documentary precludes fictionalization; the claim for both is that they are true – not just in the sense of “truth to life” or of probability, but literally, factually true in detail. (24)

5. The claim is repeated widely, but I have been unable to locate a convincing source for it.

6. F.D. makes much of ‘Jantjies’, Captain Dugmore’s batman, for reasons which also have to do with Butler’s poetry. He wrote a much-anthologized poem, “Cape-Coloured Batman” (Collected Poems, 47-49), creating a dissolute character called ‘Nelson’. Butler’s actual batman was a man called Van Niekerk, having none of the traits of ‘Nelson’, but another individual whom Butler calls ‘Bonny’, batman-driver to the Brigade Major, was later court-marshalled for smuggling rough red wine in a spare cannister meant to provide much-needed water. Butler writes “I was genuinely fond of steady, sober Van Niekerk and of engaging rogues like Bonny”, implying that Bonny may have influenced the creation of ‘Nelson’. Butler regretted the “white paternalism” which later times saw in the poem: “I could not write a poem like that today” (252).

7. Unpublished at the time (1950), an early version of the Ode appeared in 1968, with expansions and revisions in 1960, 1964 and 1968, the latter gracing the Collected Poems (1999).

8. To reinforce the historicity of a later episode, in which his brother was severely wounded, Butler’s memoir is sufficiently conscientious as to include a substantial footnote providing an historical overview of military action on that day, taken from Neil Orpen’s Victory in Italy (1975) (240-41). F.D.’s novel could make no gestures of this kind without gravely disturbing the fictive surface of her narrative. Her only extra-narratorial venture is the authorial postscript, which gestures towards sources and influences, not factual foundations.