Fact Bordering Fiction and the Honesty of “I”

Fact Bordering Fiction and the Honesty of “I” Antjie Krog (bio) I am often asked theoretical questions about my work and always find that my answers come from somewhere else, some place not theoretical, some place underground where I was burrowing like a mole. I want, therefore, to begin an underground exploration of fact bordering fiction and then try to link that exploration to some theoretical thinking. Writers have to have clarity about whether they are busy writing fiction or nonfiction. Are they using so-called facts, or do they make up the story as they go along? This decision seems important because publishers market books under ISBN numbers classifying them as fiction or nonfiction. Cookbooks, religion books, poetry are all nonfiction—therefore the truth. Novels and drama are imagined and therefore not fact. During a radio interview about Country of My Skull, a BBC reporter asked me: "Before the state visit of the queen, you wrote: 'The red carpet is bleeding down the steps of parliament.' Bleeding? Isn't this the realm of fiction?" Was a carpet "bleeding" for the queen fiction, and a carpet "rolled out" for the queen fact? But I was bothered. I had to change names to protect people in the book. I invented conversations to mask the people of real conversations. Was I now into this unhelpful hybrid word "faction," or are we onto something yet to be named? And indeed, it suddenly seemed many South African writers were working on the borders of fact and fiction. Why would J. M. Coetzee want Boyhood first published as nonfiction, later to be published as fiction, after Youth came out as fiction? Why would Njabulo Ndebele write a philosophical assessment on the real life of Winnie Mandela and call it a novel? Why would Jonny Steinberg claim to tell a true story, yet change the names of places and characters? It was only when my A Change of Tongue was marketed in Holland as creative nonfiction that I realized there was a larger phenomenon happening. [End Page 34] One of the directors of the famous Knopf publishing house said at a conference in Berlin last year that while the readership of the novel was fast declining, the readership for nonfiction and real life stories was rapidly growing. "Why?" I asked her afterwards. She said her guess was that a global postmodern world could no longer be expressed through the former genres and that she finds writers slowly working towards a completely new form—as yet without name. This is confirmed by two leading scholars in the field of narrative, Mark Freeman and Jens Brockmeier. They say that the new types of conflicts, dilemmas, predicaments of the postmodern world can no longer be emplotted within the traditional genres of tragedy, Bildungsroman, adventure story, triumphalist narrative and so on. As we move into the heart of the postmodern condition, the challenge of achieving some measure of narrative integrity, far from being obviated, may in fact become intensified. Moreover the very attempt to move away from the self may in fact lead toward it. How, in the face of such multiplicitous array of possible selves, is one to find direction about how best to live? And how, in the face of so voluminous a library of possible narratives, is one to determine how best to tell one's story? At times the "path inward" (as in autobiographical writing) may appear to be the only one to take. (92) My mother's guess some years back, as a writer and a reader, was that the global world was so overwhelmingly present that the reader wanted to escape from the terrifyingly generic to the uniquely personal. She stopped reading and writing fiction. But as she has just turned eighty, I see that she has returned to reading fiction and she says: "it takes me out of my narrow world like it did when I was young." In South Africa, however, this blurring of the borders might have a somewhat more complex undercurrent. At times I wonder whether we would not have loved to write facts, presented the world with accurate and correct information about our country, our societies, our neighborhoods, our...