“What can you do with a Story Like This[?]”: The Expectations and Explicitations of South African Fiction

Abstract

The question – “how does fiction respond to nonfiction?” – implies several others. One has to do with a special kind of mimesis and asks whether formal aspects of the ‘documentary’ mode are directive for fictional modes. Another question pertains to motives. This article addresses the latter, but with an eye on criticism itself. It argues against instrumental readings that promote aesthetic values on the basis of ethical values, not because this is inherently problematic, but because such an approach risks neglecting the degree to which fiction and nonfiction alike partake in mimetic strategies that promote a ‘truth-effect’ with compelling and sometimes troubling immediacy. Without positioning it as representative of “fiction’s response”, Damon Galgut’s In A Strange Room is considered here as exemplary in its ability to disrupt the charms of mimesis through its estranging use of punctuation, self-representation, and intertextuality.

Keywords:

• mimesis
• nonfiction
• fiction
• punctuation
• estrangement
• Galgut

Notes on Contributor

Rick de Villiers is a lecturer in English at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He completed his PhD at Durham University in 2018, and has published articles on TS Eliot, Samuel Beckett and JM Coetzee. He is currently writing a monograph on humility and humiliation in modernist writing.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I re-use Trotsky’s term, “psychological inertia”, with due caution. There is an obvious danger in conflating the Russian situation of a century ago with South Africa today. That said, Trotsky’s critique of the Formalism’s aesthetic inwardness has historical relevance for the current debate.

2. De Kock dedicates an entire chapter to the same issue in which he explores the South African “cult of commiseration” and argues that creative nonfiction can function as a “prosthesis” within this wounded imaginary (2016: 142). Boehmer takes a more sceptical view, suggesting that this self-inwoven writing (whether fictional or not) reinforces the view that the past and future alike are rendered as “dark horizons” (2018: 94–7).

3. “Aura” being the operative word, given that Krog’s acknowledgements in Country of My Skull did not, according to Stephen Watson, declare its dues to Ted Hughes. However, the arguments of that infamous episode are not of concern here.

4. See Galgut’s Paris Review interview with Anderson Tepper: “ … it was the people at The Paris Review who decided to call it fiction. I was very happy with that choice, because it points up what I consider to be the real subject of the book, namely memory” (in Tepper 2010: n.p).

5. Galgut’s original title for the work, made up of just the first two parts, was “Free Fall or Flight.”

6. See, for instance, Cook (1998: 100) on the difference between an allusion and a source.

7. See Galgut’s Paris Review comments on the centrality of memory in the novel: “It’s the voice of memory, in short, which is also the voice of fiction” (in Tepper 2010: n.p.).

8. For an excellent discussion situating this passage within Galgut’s broader concern with the border motif, see JU Jacobs (2011: 102–4).