The work of South African writer Ezekiel Mphahlele has confounded literary critics, especially those who feel compelled to draw a sharp distinction between autobiography and fiction. These critics point to Mphahlele's best-known works—his 1959 autobiography Down Second Avenue and his 1971 novel The Wanderers—to illustrate the problem of categorizing his work. While that Mphahlele manipulates different prose forms purely in the service of the social message he advances.
Even where critics give him a favorable reading, all too often their reviews carry a negative subtext. For example, one critic said of The Wanderers that if anger, firsthand experiences, compassion, and topicality were the sole requirements for great literature, the novel might well be one of the masterpieces of this declining balk at this vision because Mphahlele provides no road maps for bringing such a future about.
Mphahlele himself shows little interest in establishing guidelines to distinguish autobiography from fiction. Though he does refer to Down Second Avenue as an autobiography and The Wanderers as a novel, he asserts that no novelist can write complete fiction or absolute fact. It is the nature of writing, at least the writing social criticism of one kind or another. If you don't, you are completely irrelevant—you don't count."
What this question is testing
Topic
The author is defending the South African writer Ezekiel Mphahlele against critics who get hung up on labels.
Framework
Highlight Noteworthy.
Main Point
The simpler version: critics keep arguing about whether Mphahlele's books are "really" autobiography or "really" fiction. Mphahlele thinks that's a silly question. For him, every piece of writing draws on experience (so it's in some sense factual) and shapes that experience to carry a message (so it's in some sense fiction). The point of writing, he says, is the social criticism — not the genre label.
P1: The labeling problem
Critics complain that his autobiography reads too fictional and his novel reads too autobiographical. The author says they're missing the point — Mphahlele is using whatever prose form fits his social message.
P2: Even nice reviews damn him
One critic basically said: Others write off the novel completely because it has real people in it. Critics also balk at Mphahlele's social vision because it's a vision, not a how-to guide.
P3: How Mphahlele actually thinks about it
He doesn't care about the labels. No writer can produce pure fact or pure fiction. Writing draws from your life and shapes that life into messages. The whole point of writing is the social criticism, not the classification. He puts it bluntly: if you're not writing some kind of social criticism, you don't count.
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