Experiments with Truth
Narrative non-fiction and the coming of democracy in South Africa.
Published in the African Articulations series from James Currey / Boydell & Brewer, 2019.
Over the last decades, South Africa has seen an outpouring of life-writing and narrative non-fiction. Authors like Jacob Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Antjie Krog, Sisonke Msimang, Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavić have produced a compelling and often controversial body of work, exploring the country’s ongoing transition with great ambition, texture and risk.
Experiments with Truth is the first book-length account of the new non-fiction in South Africa. It reads the transition as refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journalism and reportage; experiments in oral history, microhistory and archival reconstruction; life-writing, memoir and the personal essay. The case studies here trace the strange and ethically complex process by which actual people, places and events are shuffled, patterned and plotted in long-form prose narrative.
While holding in mind the imperatives of testimony and witness so important to the struggle for liberation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the book is increasingly drawn to a post-TRC aesthetic: to works that engage with difficult, inappropriate or unusable elements of the past, and with the unfinished project of social reconstruction in South Africa. The case studies place southern African materials in a global context, and in dialogue with other important non-fictional traditions that have emerged at moments of social rupture and transition.
Publisher’s home page and press materials.
Africa paperback edition available via The Book Lounge, Clarke’s, Love Books and all good book stores.
“In this wise and elegant book, one of South Africa’s prominent writers of non- fiction turns his academic eye on the field. The result is a superb volume by a scholar-craftsman that remaps the genealogies of southern African literature.”
“In a series of carefully crafted chapters, Hedley Twidle explores the full range of South African narrative non-fiction. It is the first serious, sustained intellectual engagement with this expanding corpus of texts. Twidle’s refusal to be trapped within the binary categories of fact and fiction leads to a cross-reading approach that enriches our understanding of the aesthetic and historical work that these texts perform. As the book’s final chapter shows, the major appeal of Experiments with Truth may lie in its own experimentation with the truths of the closure-driven academic monograph.”
“Quite simply the best account we have of the complicated strategies of ‘truth’-speaking and position-taking at play – and at stake – in recent South African non-fiction. With verve and nuance, Twidle models how we ought to be writing about South African literature and culture now, showing what the payoffs might be for wider critical debates about authority, ethics, and representation.”
“Hedley Twidle’s lucid and sparkling book unsettles our thinking about the relationship between literature and democracy. Among the first serious studies of South African non-fictional forms, it roams through archives, memoirs, journalism and biography to make a decisive case for their literary qualities. But even more strikingly, it shows how literature animates the anti-colonial democratic process as much as democracy does literature.”
‘A seminal step in the right direction’: ‘an academic but highly readable reflection on modern SA that eschews jargon’. Sunday Times, 14 July 2019.
Reviews in African Historical Review, Journal of the African Literature Association, Literary Journalism Studies, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Enquiry, South African Historical Journal and a review essay in the Journal of Southern African Studies.
“Animating Coetzee’s and Twidle’s studies is thus a question of how one crafts ethical relationships to reading the present, the past and memory. Should the past and the present be linked? How should you do this and what happens when you do? How do you understand the present through the past? How is memory transmitted across generations? What roles does the archive play? How can the ‘master narratives of the new South African order’ be understood and challenged? What roles do the forms and tools of culture and text play in transmitting memory, viewpoints and versions of history? How do the factual and the fictional intermingle? How do we understand contested narratives of the past and the present? How do we ethically and culturally engage with ‘unusable pasts’ in the heightened present?”
Load shedding in Johannesburg, 2007: an account of the origin of the project.
Excerpt: ‘In short, there are problems’: Literary journalism in the postcolony. Prison writing, ‘history from below’ and unreliable narrators in Jonny Steinberg, Herman Charles Bosman, Dugmore Boetie and Breyten Breytenbach.
An A-Z of deleted scenes, outtakes, fragments.
A literary con: Rereading Dugmore Boetie’s Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost. Excerpt in the Johannesburg Review of Books, 1 April 2019.
Re: Visions of Tsafendas: Reading Harris Dousemetzis’s The Man Who Killed Apartheid (2018).
On the diary form and environmental writing in South African literature:
A minor form: the notebooks of Stephen Watson and Athol Fugard.
An early piece on literary non-fiction in South Africa. Safundi, Special Issue: Beyond Rivalry: Fact | Fiction, Literature | History (2012).
A condensed version of / excerpt from the introduction. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 31:2 (2019).
‘Unusable Pasts’: an article on literary and artistic responses to Demetrios Tsafendas, assassin of Hendrik Verwoerd. Research in African Literatures, 46:3 (2015). See also Visions of Tsafendas: Literary Biography and the Limits of ‘Research’. Safundi, 16:4 (2015), about the challenges and limits of biographical method.
‘A Very Strange Relationship’: an account of a controversial, ‘deauthorised’ biography of Nadine Gordimer. Biography, 41:1 (2018). A response to my article by biographer Ronald Suresh Roberts.
Special issue on ‘Awkward biography’ in post-apartheid South Africa. African Studies, 78:2 (2019), with several links to my research.
“The whole literary enterprise was a compromise between several desperate drives and urges, something even more profound than what is often referred to as ‘writing your way out of a situation’.”