Oscar Hemer’s dissertation on fiction’s truth

Ørecomm co-director Oscar Hemer has successfully defended his dissertation for the Dr.Phil. degree at the University of Oslo. The defense took place on 1 September 2011, in a 6 hour long presentation and discussion of Hemer’s work, manifested in the 500+ page volume “Writing Transition: Fiction and Truth in South Africa and Argentina”.

Can fiction tell us something which journalism and science cannot?

South Africa and Argentina have in common that they have had a traumatic recent history. They also have in common that following the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa and the dictatorship in Argentina a large literary production has developed, treating the experiences of those times of hardship. Can it be that fiction may sometimes bring us closer to truth than other activities or methods that have as their declared mission to do this?

The very concept of “truth” has been controversial in the two case countries. Through literary study, observations of media production, interviews with authors, etc. Hemer shows how fiction indeed contributes to “truth”. In many cases, due to the exclusivity of much literature, such truth may remain hidden to most people. In other cases it is less so, e.g. when Nobel laureate Coetzee publishes a new volume. Even then, however, the social change factor of literature remains difficult to establish with any precision.

Still, as stated in the last of the many citations in Hemer’s volume: “Literature can make known even that which it does not fully know.”