Building new selves: identity, “Passing,” and intertextuality in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Abstract

This article examines Zoë Wicomb’s wide-ranging use of intertextuality in the novel Playing in the Light to explore the links between identity construction and postcolonial authorship. Focusing on the characters as intertextual agents, I argue that the three coloured women on whom the novel focuses – Helen, Marion, and Brenda – use texts in distinctive ways that illuminate their struggles to position themselves in South Africa’s complex and changing racial landscape. Racial “passing” is one form of a larger pattern in the novel of the use of citation and imitation to achieve specific ends. By embedding the citations of Helen and Marion within the citation-rich narrative of Brenda, Wicomb lays bare the mechanisms of identity construction within a work that stages and highlights its own intertextual practices.

Keywords:

• Zoë Wicomb
• Playing in the Light
• intertextuality
• race
• passing
• origins
• coloured
• identity
• bricolage
• South Africa

Acknowledgment

I wish to thank Robert Rebein for his valuable advice and mentorship in the preparation of this essay.

Notes

¹ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 131.

² Erasmus, Coloured by History, 16.

³ Ibid., 6.

⁴ Ibid., 16.

⁵ Wicomb, “Shame and Identity,” 95.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid., 94.

⁸ Wicomb, “Tracing the Path,” 250.

⁹ Wicomb, “Setting, Intertextuality,” 146.

¹⁰ The distinction between passive and active forms of imitation runs throughout Wicomb’s critical writing. In “Shame and Identity” Wicomb cites with approval Frederic Jameson’s distinction between pastiche and parody as different modes of repetition or re-use. In “Culture Beyond Color?” she calls for a “radical pedagogy” that will help to create “an interracial culture of readers and writers who are not passive consumers of culture, but rather who interrogate received views” (32).

¹¹ Wicomb, “Setting, Intertextuality,” 150.

¹² Ibid., 147, 150.

¹³ McCann, “Revisiting the Past,” 70.

¹⁴ Van der Vlies, “The Archive,” 595.

¹⁵ Ibid., 596–7.

¹⁶ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 128.

¹⁷ In the passage from Acts 8:33 quoted in the novel (page 118), the word “generation” translates the Greek term, genean, which derives from genea, meaning race, family, generation, or kind.

¹⁸ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 127.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid., 128.

²² Ibid., 128, 130, 131.

²³ Ibid., 125, 139.

²⁴ Ibid., 132, 134.

²⁵ Ibid., 133.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Ibid., 131.

²⁸ Ibid., 139.

²⁹ Compare Robinson, “It Takes One,” 716, on passing as an encounter between two ways of reading.

³⁰ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 127, 144.

³¹ Ibid., 141.

³² Ibid., 144.

³³ Acts 2:6; King James Version.

³⁴ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 144.

³⁵ Ibid., 145.

³⁶ Ibid., 159.

³⁷ Huddleston, Naught for Your Comfort, 75.

³⁸ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 160.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Ibid., 147, 161.

⁴³ Ibid., 119.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 118, 140.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 117.

⁴⁷ Compare Wicomb’s “Five Afrikaner Texts,” in which she discusses a reverse version of such a mismatch between image and text. See also her essay “To Hear the Variety of Discourses”: “contradictory relations between image and text demand that the image be re-read, and re-assessment of the visual information involves a change in the underlying presuppositions” (43–4). See Daymond, “Shadow Stories,” for an alternate reading of this card and its relation to Helen.

⁴⁸ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 152.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 124.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 125.

⁵¹ See Samuelson, “Oceanic Histories,” 552–6, for a detailed reading of the mermaid figure in relation to Marion.

⁵² Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 131–2, 68, 124.

⁵³ Ibid., 2.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 35.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 49.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 54.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 54–5.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 55.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 58.

⁶¹ Ibid., 62.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ Ibid., 89.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 87, 90.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 88–9.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 88, 89, 86–7.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 96.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 97.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 95, 167.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 101, 102.

⁷¹ Ibid., 186.

⁷² Ibid., 189.

⁷³ Robolin (“Properties of Whiteness,” 364–8) offers a detailed analysis of the Gordimer and Coetzee novels Marion reads as examples of the anti-pastoral tradition in South African literature.

⁷⁴ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 190.

⁷⁵ Ibid.

⁷⁶ Ibid.

⁷⁷ Ibid.

⁷⁸ Gordimer, The Conservationist, 262.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 261–2.

⁸⁰ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 193.

⁸¹ Ibid., 194.

⁸² Ibid., 195.

⁸³ See Gordimer, The Conservationist, 264.

⁸⁴ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 217. In a 1990 interview, Wicomb had complained that “black women are supposed to write autobiography – whether they write in the third person or not, they’re always received as if it’s autobiographical, almost as if we’re incapable of artifice, incapable of fictionalizing. That irritates me intensely” (Wicomb and Hunter, 93).

⁸⁵ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 19, 20.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 20.

⁸⁷ Ibid.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 81.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 65.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 19.

⁹¹ Ibid.

⁹² Ibid.

⁹³ Ibid.

⁹⁴ Ibid.

⁹⁵ Ibid., 73, 81.

⁹⁶ Brenda’s literary itinerary on this journey follows a plan T. S. Eliot had laid out in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and adapts it to the South African context. Eliot writes that “the mind of Europe … is a mind which changes” and “this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draftsmen.” Eliot, “Tradition,” 51.

⁹⁷ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 85.

⁹⁸ Ibid., 86.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 97, 99.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 100.

¹⁰¹ Dante, Inferno, 317.

¹⁰² Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 130–5.

¹⁰³ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 102.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 102. Brenda here rejects the notion of a separate “coloured nationhood” that Wicomb herself had critiqued in her essay “Shame and Identity.” “Shame,” 105.

¹⁰⁶ Stanley Sultan (“Tradition and the Individual Talent in ‘Prufrock,’” 78) dates the composition of the poem to 1911, three years before Eliot’s move to England and four years before the poem’s first publication in Poetry magazine.

¹⁰⁷ Notice in this regard that poor table manners had been Helen’s alibi for one of her most pain-inflicting actions: the exclusion of John’s sister Elsie from her home on grounds of race. As John later explains the exclusion to Elsie, “It was something to do, he mumbled, with tea and cake and spitting on the Irish-linen cloth” (Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 168).

¹⁰⁸ Ibid.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 217.

¹¹⁰ Van der Vlies, “The Archive,” 595.

¹¹¹ Ibid., 597.

¹¹² Ibid., 597–8.

¹¹³ In this light, it is significant that the root verb of “geleentheid,” the Afrikaans word “leen,” means both “to borrow” and “to lend.”.

¹¹⁴ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 217.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 218.

¹¹⁶ Van der Vlies, “The Archive,” 594.

¹¹⁷ Critics who mention this connection include Olaussen and Herrero.

¹¹⁸ See Catenaccio, “Oedipus Tyrannus: The Riddle of the Feet,” for a recent discussion of this well-known theme in Sophocles’s play.

¹¹⁹ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 102.

¹²⁰ Ibid., 99, 100.

¹²¹ I wish to thank my colleague Simon Lewis for providing this translation; there is no published English translation of this poem.

¹²² See Banerjee, “The Dantean Overview,” for a further discussion of Eliot’s choice of epigraph.

¹²³ Wicomb, Playing in the Light, 102.

¹²⁴ Wicomb, “Setting, Intertextuality,” 146.