Mirroring Nostalgia in Fractured Coherence: The ‘Home Visit’ in Zoë Wicomb’s October

Abstract

With a focus on Zoë Wicomb’s novel, October (2014) – the title signalling an ‘aesthetic’ elevation of the events of a journey home – I explore the trope of the ‘home visit’ as a catalytic moment of insight into the protagonist’s dislocated life. In October, the syntagmatic chain of events (the plot) yields a paradigmatic resonance: the transitional month of the year embodying the tenuousness of a temporary homecoming.

I draw on the concept of ‘home visit’ from the fields of mobility and destination studies, where it indicates a recently established research niche, variously referred to as “personal memory tourism” (Marschall 2017) or “visiting home and familiar places” (Pearce 2012). The object of such investigation concerns the temporary home visit by first-generation migrants, as triggered by both sensory experiences and cognitive processes of searching for personal redefinitions of what it means to be at home in a place. I draw also on Heidegger’s reflections on the concept of home beyond conventional understanding: home as conceptual “dwelling” and as a process of “home-making” (2001 [1954]).

Keywords:

• Wicomb
• October
• ‘home visit’
• fiction’s response
• nostalgia
• metaphoric coherence

Notes on Contributor

Ileana Dimitriu is a professor of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. She has published widely on postcolonial and South African literature from a comparative and intercultural perspective. Her publications include large editorial projects, novels in translation, and the monograph, Art of Conscience: Rereading Nadine Gordimer.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this article, I shall make use of the term “migration” in the sense suggested by Sabine Marschall, in her recent Memory, Migration and Travel (2018), and as based on the contrast with the concept of “diaspora”. While the latter connotes “durability and long-time sedimentation” (6) – as well as a loss “of material relationship to the territory of origin” (4) – the term “migration” suggests first-generation mobilities, whether the result of forced or voluntary displacement. Once migrants decide or are able to settle permanently, they become “immigrants” (6) from the perspective of the host country.

2. In his research on the migrants’ motivation for repeat visits to previous homes and familiar places, Seaton (2013: 19–27) made use of the culturally charged term of “metempsychosis”, as borrowed from the language of mythology. In several religious traditions, the term refers to the transmigration of the soul through processes of successive “re-incarnations”. In literature, it has come to suggest the various stages of the self’s symbolic evolution over time, with emphases on juxtapositions between past and present, and shifts in story-telling modes, as well as the reenacting of older social roles. Writers who made use of, or mention, “metempsychosis” as rhetorical construct in their works include, inter alia, James Joyce (Ulysses), Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time), Thomas Pynchon (V) and Don DeLillo (The Names).