Zoë Wicomb's Ghosts: Uncanny Translocations in David's Story and The One That Got Away

Abstract

This essay analyses Zoë Wicomb's novel David's Story and her latest collection of short stories, The One That Got Away, through the lense of cosmopolitanism and Jacques Derrida's concept of ‘hauntology’. Wicomb is a cosmopolitan author in a very precise sense: an author who embeds locally specific stories in a complex intertextual, historical and transnational web of cross-references. As settings, characters and objects move between Scotland and South Africa, it appears that the histories of these countries are mutually haunted by each other. Uncanny encounters with the past, and with memorials and art objects that take on a spectral quality, evoke an increasing sense of disorientation on the part of protagonists and readers alike. Assumptions about place, history and identity are thus constantly undermined and reconfigured.

Keywords:

• cosmopolitanism
• hauntology
• spectre/ghost
• displacement/dislocation
• topography
• setting
• intertextuality

Notes

¹ For an example of the latter, see Appiah, Cosmopolitanism; for a trenchant critique of the concept, see Brennan, At Home in the World.

² Wicomb, David's Story, 34.

³ Pollock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 4.

⁴ Wicomb, David's Story, 188; see Attridge, “Zoë Wicomb's Home Truths,” 158; Coetzee, ‘“The One That Got Away,”’ 565.

⁵ See Chakrabarty, “Universalism and Belonging” and Provincializing Europe.

⁶ Driver, “The Struggle Over the Sign,” 536.

⁷ Wicomb, “Setting,” 146.

⁸ Ibid., 152.

⁹ Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 18; see Wicomb, “Shame and Identity,” 101–2, and “Setting,” 152.

¹⁰ Attridge, “Zoë Wicomb's Home Truths,” 158.

¹¹ See Driver, “Afterword;” Graham, South African Literature; Marais, “Bastards and Bodies;” and Samuelson, “The Disfigured Body” and Remembering the Nation.

¹² Anderson, The Way We Argue Now, 70.

¹³ Attridge, “Zoë Wicomb's Home Truths,” 158.

¹⁴ Driver, “The Struggle Over the Sign,” 538.

¹⁵ Coetzee, ‘“The One That Got Away,”’ 564.

¹⁶ Wicomb, David's Story, 1.

¹⁷ Attridge, “Zoë Wicomb's Home Truths,” 161; Samuelson, “The Disfigured Body,” 835.

¹⁸ Driver, “The Struggle Over the Sign,” 532.

¹⁹ Ibid., 531.

²⁰ See Wicomb, David's Story, 192, 194, and below.

²¹ Graham, South African Literature, 151.

²² Davis, “État présent,” 373.

²³ Derrida, The Specters of Marx, 6.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing, 2.

²⁶ O’Brien, Against Normalization, 78.

²⁷ Derrida, The Specters of Marx, xviii.

²⁸ Bethlehem, Skin Tight, 78.

²⁹ Derrida, The Specters of Marx, xix; see Bethlehem, Skin Tight, 77.

³⁰ Graham, South African Literature, 53.

³¹ Wicomb, “Shame and Identity,” 91–93; see also Kai Easton's reading of Baartman and Krotoa-Eva as “slippery icons” of anti-colonial and theoretical discourse: “Travelling through History,” 237 and passim.

³² See Samuelson, “The Disfigured Body,” 839–41.

³³ Davis, “État présent,” 377.

³⁴ Wicomb, David's Story, 2–3.

³⁵ Ibid., 3.

³⁶ Ibid., 213. Shakespeare's Prospero, about to abjure his magical powers, by contrast accepts the source of unrest and insurgence: Caliban, “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (The Tempest, 5.1.275–6).

³⁷ David's death, or disappearance, is introduced obliquely on pp. 210–11, a mere three pages before the end of the novel.

³⁸ See, for example, Marais, “Bastards and Bodies,”30; Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, 109; and Graham, South African Literature, 153.

³⁹ This is also true for Wicomb's novel Playing in the Light (2006), which, for reasons of space, cannot be discussed here. For an analysis of spectrality in Playing in the Light, see Van der Vlies, “The Archive, the Spectral, and Narrative Responsibility.”

⁴⁰ Wicomb, David's Story, 188.

⁴¹ Incidentally, not all of these plants are indigenous to South Africa. The poinsettia, for example, originally comes from Mexico and Central America, the begonia from the Hawaiian Islands. The names of both plants bear witness to colonial appropriation: the former (Euphorbia pulcherrima) was named after Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first United States Minister to Mexico, the latter after Michel Bégon, a governor of the French colony of Haiti. What David perceives as “familiar” Cape flora are thus plants imported in the course of global bio-prospecting and trade during the colonial period, and reimported to Europe to form an unspecific “exotic” in its botanic gardens and private balconies. Again, the binary division between the familiar and the strange is subtly undermined.

⁴² Hiebert, “Cosmopolitanism at the Local Level,” 212.

⁴³ Ibid., 210.

⁴⁴ Wicomb, “Neighbours,” in The One That Got Away, 84.

⁴⁵ Derrida, On Hospitality, 77. In Derrida's meditation on hospitality, the newly arrived stranger (arrivant) corresponds to the revenant, the ghost: a figure of indeterminacy that is to be welcomed (ibid.). See also Bonnie Honig's response to Seyla Benhabib, in which she draws on Derrida to analyse the mutual implication of hospitality and hostility (Honig, “Another Cosmopolitanism?”).

⁴⁶ Driver, “The Struggle Over the Sign,” 536.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 537.

⁴⁸ Wicomb, “Boy in a Jute-sack Hood,” in The One That Got Away, 10–11.

⁴⁹ The honeymoon is described from the husband's perspective in the earlier story, “The One That Got Away.” The husband, Drew, pursues his own artistic project: he wants to return a book he stole from Cape Town City Library and subsequently painted over, a novel entitled The One That Got Away, to the place from which it originated, Dennistoun Public Library in Glasgow.

⁵⁰ Wicomb, “There's the Bird That Never Flew,” in The One That Got Away, 70.

⁵¹ Wicomb, “In the Botanic Gardens,” 170.