Metafictions of development: The Enigma of Arrival,You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town,and the place of the world in world literature

Abstract

This article examines two works of fiction: V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Although these are works by authors who write out of different cultural formations, both link their narrator’s development to his or her success at becoming a published author. To be fully mature, the narrator must recognize his or her own experiences as a disenfranchised subject from the colonial hinterland as the appropriate subject for literature. In conjunction with this particular form of character development, both Naipaul and Wicomb use metafiction to reflect on the complex and unequal structures that shape world literary markets. They integrate their protagonists into global markets by strategically deploying the Bildungsroman. These formal features allow these works to serve as a critique of world literature even as they participate in world literary culture and markets. Taking the impetus from these works of fiction, this article proposes a redefinition of world literature as literary works that develop strategies of representation that respond to fundamental global inequalities.

In V.S. Naipaul’s novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987), the narrator reflects on his first journey to England and his aspiration to become a published author, a desire so intense that he cannot see his own life as a colonial subject and migrant as a suitable subject for literature. For Frieda Shenton, the narrator of Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), her desire to escape the daily horrors of apartheid South Africa pushes her out of her Afrikaans-speaking “coloured” community into the English language, literature, and eventually a career as a writer in England. These two works are similar in that they link the narrator’s development to his or her success in becoming a published author. To be fully mature, the narrator must recognize his or her own experiences as an individual from the colonial hinterland as the appropriate subject for literature. Success occurs when, at each work’s conclusion, the narrator describes producing a work of publishable literature, in the form of draft pages or stories in literary magazines. This appearance of a copy of the work within the text foregrounds its material history and forecasts its potential circulation and reception in transnational literary markets. In this way, the narrators use metafiction to propel themselves into world literary circulation. In what follows, I look at self-reflexive development as an active engagement on the part of Naipaul and Wicomb with the literary fields through which their texts move. I argue that despite the different cultural contexts that inform these two works, both authors use the same strategies, including the coming-of-age plot and metafiction, to theorize their own production, publication, and potential reception in a global literary market. In so doing, these works reveal the complex and unequal structures that shape world literature. Naipaul and Wicomb use these inequalities as creative forces in the production of their texts. Attending to the theories of world literature embedded in these novels redefines world literature as literature in which the “world”, with all its materiality and inequality, continually interrupts the “literary”.

Their authors’ different reputations and generic choices obscure the similar form and style of The Enigma of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. On the one hand, Naipaul’s critics cast him as an apologist for European chauvinism (see, for example, Said, 1986: 53). This criticism of Naipaul’s politics coincides with his perceived antagonism towards postmodernism, and by extension, metafiction (King, 2003: 5), though recent work has pushed back against these depictions (Krishnan, 2012: 434). Wicomb, on the other hand, is strongly associated with postmodernism, albeit a postmodernism inflected with Black Consciousness and feminism (Wicomb, 1993: 88). Her fiction focuses on its own strategies of representation; consequently, a good deal of the scholarship on Wicomb focuses on her use of metafiction (see, for example, Robolin, 2006; Marais, 1995: 32). In addition to the differences in their authors’ reputations, the books differ generically: The Enigma of Arrival is ostensibly a novel, while You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town is typically classified as a book of short stories. On closer inspection, however, both books track the narrator’s development from childhood through adulthood through a series of formative episodes. Therefore, while the labels attached to them suggest that they are formally dissimilar, both function as semi-autobiographical and episodic narratives of development.

Although Naipaul and Wicomb come from parts of the world with unique histories of settlement, colonization, and exploitation, both travelled to Great Britain where they studied and eventually became published authors. Naipaul is originally from Trinidad and moved to England in 1950 where he did a degree at Oxford and pursued a writing career. By the time The Enigma of Arrival was published in the late 1980s, Naipaul was already considered one of the greatest novelists of his generation, known for works such as A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and the Booker-prize winning In a Free State (1971). You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town was Wicomb’s first published book, and although her work has garnered critical acclaim, it is still not very well-known. Wicomb is originally from South Africa, but like Naipaul she moved to England for higher education. She completed graduate studies at Reading University and currently divides her time between Scotland, where she is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Strathclyde, and Cape Town.

Naipaul and Wicomb are world authors in the sense that, as migrants, they cannot be easily assigned to a single national tradition, but they are also world authors because their texts theorize the relationship between global histories of power and literary culture. Accordingly, their works are fruitfully read under the rubric of world literature and as critiques of that rubric. David Damrosch defines world literature as the body of works that “circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (2003: 4). Of Damrosch’s three modes of becoming world literature — circulation, translation, and production — the final mode best describes The Enigma of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Works of this nature are world literature because they are written “for an international market” and rely on a “cultural double vision” (2003: 212; 213). That is to say, because of their positions between multiple cultures as well as the restrictions and underdevelopment of local markets, world authors of this type write for readers from throughout the world, not just those in the places where they were born or currently live.

But Naipaul and Wicomb go even farther than writing for international markets: they theorize those international markets through their plots, characters, and formal structures. Even as they write for international markets, both authors are ambivalent about them. As Timothy Brennan writes about other cosmopolitan intellectuals from the so-called “Third World”, “with the aid of their global awareness [they] stated in clear accents that the world is one (not three) and that it is unequal” (1989: ix–x). Both The Enigma of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town address the world’s interconnections and inequalities as well as the effects of these on individuals. At the same time, they consider how the fact that the world is “one but unequal” shapes an individual’s self-presentation in literary markets. Both books launch a critique of inequality (at least of literary institutions) by audaciously inserting themselves into transnational literary markets.

In this way, Naipaul and Wicomb insist on the “worldliness” of world literature in the sense Edward Said develops in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983). The Enigma of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town resonate with Aamir Mufti’s critique of contemporary accounts of world literature, in which he argues that “we cannot ignore the global relations of force that the concept simultaneously puts in play and hides from view” (2010: 465). A frequently lamented shortcoming of the study and teaching of world literature is that it fails to sufficiently address “worldliness” in Said’s usage. “Worldliness” requires us to attend to “the connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life, politics, societies, and events. The realities of power and authority […] are the realities that make texts possible” (1983: 5). If our study of world literature is to be meaningful, we must address the limitations that the world — in all of its brute inequality — places on literature. The Enigma of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town refuse readings that do not attend to the “realities of power and authority”. Instead, by thematizing their own conditions of production these works insist upon the worldliness of world literature.

One route towards understanding the unequal power relations that structure the production and reception of world literature is through book history. Such a method has been advocated by scholars of both South African and Caribbean writing in English. In his essay on Wicomb’s depiction of authorship and responsibility, Andrew van der Vlies (2013) advocates such a method, drawing together a formal analysis and a book history of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Gail Low (2002; 2011) also encourages the inclusion of book history in postcolonial literary studies as a way to better understand how Caribbean and West African works have been produced, published, read, and valued in both metropolitan and local spheres. While her work focuses on the immediate post-Second World War period and on Naipaul’s first few publications, the difficult journey of his early books to publication illuminates the disparities inherent in English literary culture in the 1950s. My readings are meant to complement these important book histories by analysing how Naipaul and Wicomb address world literary markets thematically and formally as another way of considering their worldliness.

Naipaul and Wicomb register the impact of unequal power relations though a potent combination of metafiction, realism, and the Bildungsroman. Consequently, this project does not ask if metafiction is inherently political or apolitical, progressive or regressive, amenable or resistant to capitalist imperialism. Instead, I focus on how these authors use metafiction to point to the real-world literary and educational systems that have shaped them. The debate about the politics and political efficacy of postmodernism in general and metafiction in particular was hotly contested in the 1980s when Naipaul and Wicomb were composing these works. Linda Hutcheon argued that postmodern art was not simply inward-looking but rather through self-awareness and parody engaged with ideology and history (1986/1987: 179–180). She contrasted her claim to Fredric Jameson’s argument that postmodern art showed a weakening of historicity (Hutcheon, 1986/1987: 182; see Jameson, 1984: 58; 67). However, these critics of postmodernism shared a common position that forms one of the baseline assumptions of my argument. Both argued that a properly political art would require forms of self-reference as to the conditions of its production. For Hutcheon, this means drawing attention to the discursive construction of history and politics. For Jameson, mimetic art demands the revelation of its conditions of production within global capitalist systems (1984: 88). My analysis takes on both the discursive — in this case formal and generic — and the material — in this case the international Anglophone literary market — in an attempt to understand how they relate to each other. In this respect, I follow Sarah Brouillette, who claims that

talk of saving literature from “reduction” to commodity status is now scarcely possible. As a niche developed in tandem with general market expansion in the publishing industry, postcolonial literature is especially compromised […] While [its] authorship is by all means irrevocably implicated in the expanding global market for English-language literary texts, it is not threatened in any straightforward way by association with commercial expansion and mass production. (2007: 3)

Consequently, I examine the formal and generic strategies Naipaul and Wicomb use to document that publishing industry even as they seek entry to it.

Metafiction enables these authors to collapse the fictional world into the real world of publishing, reception, and circulation. By creating protagonists who are aspiring authors, Naipaul and Wicomb illuminate the formation of a world author who is tied to particular colonial and postcolonial locations but must perform his or her role of world author on a global stage. My analysis thereby extends Graham Huggan’s discussion of “strategic exoticism” and Sarah Brouillette’s revision of the concept to include the production of authorial autonomy. Naipaul and Wicomb offer narratives of authorial self-fashioning and reflections on the psychic and ethical disturbances such self-fashioning engenders.

The goal of my analysis is to elucidate how these authors use formal strategies to register the impact of real-world power dynamics on works of world literature. I analyse how these authors use form and genre to shed light on the material inequalities inherent in the aesthetics and institutions of world literature. In this way, my investigation is similar to recent work on peripheral realism that reads with an eye not towards the unrepresentability of global capitalism but rather towards realistic modes of representation that “approach the world-system as partially, potentially describable in its concrete reality” (Esty and Lye, 2012: 285). Naipaul and Wicomb use metafiction and the Bildungsroman to narrate their protagonists’ struggle to enter into the world literary system, a struggle that is marked by that system’s inequalities. While they cannot show the totality of the system’s power dynamics, their works provide a stark vision of how it is experienced by authors from the periphery struggling to find a place for themselves within it.

My analysis of these metafictions of development leads me to argue for a revision of the term world literature. These works suggest that to be considered under the rubric of world literature, a text must register how it has been marked by global histories of power and authority. For contemporary world literature, that means that a text must signal in some way the literary system that both enables and limits it. The Enigma of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town insist that world literature is not only in the world — circulating through it, appearing at different times and places in various editions and translations — but that it is of the world. By making the elements of the world literary system (from bookstores to college English classrooms to ideas about what qualifies as art and who can produce it) not only visible but central to the developmental plot, The Enigma of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town demand a revised definition of world literature. World literature, these novels show, encodes its own worldly conditions on the level of form.

Characters into authors

A central feature of the protagonists’ development in The Enigma of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town is the effort to transform a life into a narrative. Both protagonists struggle, more or less visibly, to make their lives into stories. This is a typical feature of many coming-of-age narratives, but what sets the work of Naipaul and Wicomb apart is their protagonists’ careful attention to difficulties that peripheral authors experience in creating fictions according to the demands of the international literary marketplace. Like other authors who come from historically marginalized communities, the content of the protagonists’ lives seems to resist metropolitan literary forms. But, through a series of experiments with language, writing, and the shaping of lived experience into stories, the protagonists become authors. ¹ It is thus not life and experience that enables the protagonists’ maturation, but the struggle to transform life and experience into narratives that can circulate as world literature.

The Enigma of Arrival begins in the 1970s when the narrator–protagonist, who is virtually identical to Naipaul himself, has already achieved a reputation as a writer. ² However, in the second part of the book, entitled “The Journey”, he narrates his first trip from Trinidad to England in the 1950s, describing his material and intellectual struggle to become a writer whose work is appropriately “metropolitan” (Naipaul, 1987: 122). ³ “The Journey” is structured by a split between the adult author who narrates and his adolescent self who wants to become a writer but who cannot seem to fit his rural Hindu–Trinidadian life into an authorial persona and literary style. As the adult narrator points out, the eighteen-year-old boy frequently fails to recognize the events and emotions he experiences as the stuff of literature. Although he writes constantly in a diary, the narrator remarks that he “left out many of the things that were worth noting down, many of the things which, some years later, I would have thought much more important than the things I did note down” (107). His most powerful omission is that although he “witnesses” a change in his personality as he travels from Trinidad to New York, he cannot recognize it as a “theme” worth recording and transforming into literature (110). The adult narrator recognizes that his eighteen-year-old self’s crisis of identity, belonging, and displacement is indeed the stuff of literature. He also posits writing as the method for discovering his own psychological anxiety and learning the lesson that it is, in fact, his great theme: “Man and writer were the same person. But that is a writer’s greatest discovery. It took time — and how much writing! — to arrive at that synthesis” (110). Writing is a mode of achieving maturity, both as man and writer, but it is also proof of that maturity since it eventually produces the novel The Enigma of Arrival itself. As Simon Beecroft puts it, “the writer is ‘made’ by his experiences of ‘worlds and cultures’ but he is also ‘made’ in books and out of texts” and specifically, this text of which he is both “producer and product” (2000: 74; 84). Writing enables him to produce an authorial persona that can accommodate this anxious adolescent boy and reintegrate his divided self.

The narrator’s psychological struggle to unify the man and the writer is embedded within the material and economic world of book publishing. He feels his split most intensely, realizing the implications it might have for his life as a writer, when he enters a New York bookstore for the first time during his twenty-four-hour stopover in the city. Although he has announced his desire to become a writer and cultivated a reputation as a reader at home, he feels utterly out of place in the bookshop. He confesses that he only knows the books he studied for school examinations and knows nothing of contemporary writers or the modern publishing industry. Yet he is very aware of the physical objects and institutional structures that comprise the publishing industry, even if he views them in romantic terms. He decides on his purchase — South Wind, the 1917 novel by Norman Douglas — in part because it is part of the “Modern Library series” (118). He never reads the book, finding it too “alien” and too “far from anything in [his] experience” to be comprehensible (119). Yet, largely because of the glamour of the bookshop with all the trappings of metropolitan literary culture, he is still enticed by it. At the same time, however, he also fears that this world of bookshops and publishers will remain inaccessible to him. This renders his trip to New York, a centre of the literary world in the mid-twentieth century, depressing and humiliating, marked by the “split” in his personality and by doubts that he will ever be able to overcome it. It is in this worldly context, shaped by the US’s growing neocolonial reach, that he must struggle to become an author.

The protagonist’s fear sets in motion his first attempt at writing in what he considers to be an appropriately “metropolitan” style, one that would belong in the New York bookshop that so unnerved him. He sets out to narrate the final night of the voyage in a piece called “Gala Night” believing that the dance held on a transatlantic crossing suggests his worldliness. He uses his best writerly tools, both material (his mauve indelible pencil and used typewriter) and technical (slangy film-speak for the watchman’s dialogue) to produce many drafts, obsessively recycling his material, jealously guarding what he sees as his only adequately sophisticated experience. But, as the mature narrator reveals, he actively blocks out the moments and themes that are both compelling and true. He scrupulously avoids recording any experience involving race because it is part of that “fracture” that he felt in the New York bookstore:

But the topic of race — though it was good, familiar material, and could prove my knowledge of the world — formed no part of “Gala Night.” It was too close to my disturbance, my vulnerability, the separation of my two selves. That was not the kind of personality the writer wished to assume; that was not the material he dealt in. (124)

This statement reflects both a desire to become a writer whose work can circulate in Western cultural centres but also a total failure to grasp what would be successful, both for himself as an artist and in that milieu as a cultural product.

The young narrator reveals himself to be out of touch with the literary demands of the mid-twentieth-century, a period during which decolonization was reshaping the markets in newly independent countries and the interests of Anglo-American readers. For the former, there was demand for books that could form the curricula at new national universities; for the latter, geopolitical and social changes were sources of topical literature, both nonfictional and fictional. As Naipaul’s editor Diana Athill explains, her firm André Deutsch Ltd actively responded to those demands in an era in which, she suggests, “it was probably easier for a black writer to get his book accepted by a London publisher, and kindly reviewed thereafter, than it was for a young white person” (2000: 103). Racial identity has been both a topical and an emotive force for post-Second World War writers; at the same time, Naipaul’s narrator refuses merely to parade his racial difference as an exotic object for metropolitan consumption. He must instead narrate the “separation of his two selves”. His third-person observations (“That was not the kind of personality the writer wished to assume”) reflect this split, but more importantly his capacity to describe and narrate the experience reveals hard-won knowledge about the psychological effects of migration and attempts to integrate into world literary markets. The narrator’s self-knowledge and the novel that he was capable of producing as a result of it mark the final stage in that maturation process. Not only does he realize his theme, but he can also reflect critically upon it and comment on his entry into the metropolitan world of literary publishing.

As Athill’s comments suggest, part of the protagonist’s maturation also requires an improved understanding of how to market his experiences to the consumers of world literature. For Naipaul’s protagonist, this includes discussing damaging experiences of racism along with other psychological injuries caused by his marginal, “exotic” location. Huggan has described this type of authorial self-presentation as “strategic exoticism”, a practice by which postcolonial writers “have recognized their own complicity with exoticist aesthetics while choosing to manipulate the conventions of the exotic to their own political ends” (2001: 32). Huggan argues of The Enigma of Arrival that Naipaul stages his marginal position by locating the protagonist’s cottage on the edge of a decaying English estate, representing his culturally marginal position. The protagonist’s physical location is a wink at his performance of his own highly marketable difference from traditional English culture (2001: 87–8). I argue that the novel does far more than simply stage the protagonist’s marginal status; it also narrates the process by which he moves from a marginality that is alienating and disempowering to one that is highly marketable and psychologically whole. This narration is self-conscious in order to cast light on the narrator’s, and by extension Naipaul’s, strategies for making himself into a marketable author. Brouillette, in her revision of Huggan’s concept of strategic exoticism, notices a similar self-consciousness in highly successful world authors. As Brouillette points out, for these writers strategic exoticism “is a trope knowingly acknowledged by the participants in the literary field who make up” the audience for world literature (2007: 42). The angst of producing the work becomes the subject of the work itself. In The Enigma of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, that process of developing into an author and, in addition, recognizing that process as the stuff of literature, is narrated as a metafiction of development.

Frieda’s development into a published author is not quite as visible and anguished in the opening of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, though it becomes more so as the collection progresses. The linked stories trace how one girl, willingly or unwillingly, moves into the world of English language and literature, eventually gaining both the ability and desire to write and publish her own stories. The first story in the collection, which focuses on her family’s acquisition and use of English, begins a process of development out of a local language and into a powerful global literary language. “Bowl Like Hole” sets up the uneasy relationship between “Coloured” South Africans and the English language. Despite the fact that the book itself is in English, Wicomb immediately foregrounds the strangeness and the privilege that goes with the language in the narrator’s Afrikaans-speaking family and community.

The narrator in the story is not identified as “Frieda”, the name of the narrator in the stories that follow, but she is clearly a version of Frieda Shenton, the book’s “coloured” South African protagonist. “Bowl Like Hole” centres around an interaction between Mr Weedon, a white English man who owns a gypsum mine near Frieda’s home, and her father. Frieda’s father is the schoolteacher in the town and the only person who can interpret Afrikaans into English when Mr Weedon goes to speak to his workers. English is the language of privilege, and Frieda and her family have a small degree of privilege in the community due to their ability to speak it. When her father returns home after a trip to the mine and her mother asks for an account of the events, he replies only: “Funny. . . Mr. Weedon said that the mine was like a bowl in the earth. Bowl like hole, not bowl like howl. Do you think that’s right?” (Wicomb, 1987: 9). ⁴ Her mother decides that since Mr Weedon is English, he must be right, but the revelation leaves her wondering: “She muttered. ‘Fowl, howl, scowl and not bowl.’ She would check the pronunciation of every word she had taken for granted” (9). But Frieda, the awkward daughter who has spent most of the story curled up under the kitchen table, reflects that her mother will immediately be able to say “bowl like hole, smoothly, without stuttering” (9). The reader is left to assume that such a transition will not be so easy for Frieda. By beginning her collection with a struggle over language, Wicomb foregrounds the relationships between language and power. While Frieda and her family gain privilege in their community through their ability to speak English, they are still outside the main circuits of power; they are neither white nor English, and they will never have the same type of access to language and power as Mr Weedon.

Frieda begins to write as the collection progresses, so it is possible to read “Bowl Like Hole” as the adult narrator giving form to a childhood memory, inventing the moments she did not observe or understand as a child. As in Naipaul’s novel, there is a split between the character Frieda, a little girl cowering under the table with limited access to English, and the speaker, an adult who can not only speak but write expertly in English. The acquisition of English is not a simple positive or negative in the linguistic landscape of South Africa, a country that currently has eleven official languages (during apartheid, it had only two, English and Afrikaans). It is a colonial language that arrived in the early nineteenth century with Britain’s colonization of the Cape; however, as Constance Richards points out, it was also embraced by the Black liberation movement as an alternative to Afrikaans, the first language of most of the “coloured” population in the Cape, which was imposed by the apartheid government across South Africa. But, as Richards notes, “this politicization of [the] English language, however, is not the Shentons’ motivation; mastery of the King’s English is the goal” (2005: 23). However mundane and economically motivated the Shentons’ use of English is, it is Frieda’s initial step towards entry into the world of elite English literary publishing.

Of course, the young girl living in the hinterland of Cape Town is still far from those circuits of global culture. But as the linked stories progress, Frieda moves closer to cultural centres and acquires the linguistic and literary knowledge that will enable her, and her writing, to move within those centres. In the third story, Frieda is leaving for Cape Town to attend a privileged Anglican school that, as the result of a lawsuit, has just begun to accept students classified as “coloured”. This, like her family’s effort to learn English, inches Frieda towards a global version of English culture. Later, she attends the University of Western Cape, a school established to serve the “coloured” population. She becomes a student of English literature — in one story, she spends the morning writing an essay about Tess of the D’Urbervilles — but Wicomb punctuates Frieda’s growing knowledge of literary culture with the apartheid politics that restrict her access to textual authority.

The first six stories in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town track Frieda’s development up to the point when she leaves South Africa for England. By her departure, she is clearly thinking about how she might become, if not a professional writer, at least brave enough to tell her own stories. At the same time, she is ambivalent about the efficacy and ethics of storytelling in general. In a vivid image, she relates that her family’s stories, “whole as the watermelon that grows out of this arid earth, have come to replace the world” (87). She imagines smashing that watermelon but reflects ironically that “they will not like my stories”, forecasting her mother’s disgust at her success in becoming a published author at the end of the collection (88). But before she departs for England Frieda does not explicitly discuss her desire to become a writer. Rather, it seems to be seething inside her alongside doubts about the political efficacy of stories and her knowledge that they are also deployed repressively. When she returns to South Africa, however, she is clearly working to become a published author. Whereas Naipaul’s narrator moves to the imperial and global capital to find his material, Frieda returns to the periphery to find hers. In “A Fair Exchange”, Frieda seeks out material in rural Namaqualand. Her material is not only the tale an elderly man tells her about the failure of his marriage years before Frieda was born, but it is also a narrative about acquiring this material. She is “uneasy” about taking his story from him and he is reluctant to give it up (136). She justifies herself by insisting that “the original has long since ceased to exist for him; only here is the story given its coherence” (136). She begins to imagine herself as an author who modifies South African stories so that they can circulate, taking an oral Afrikaans story and transforming it into a written English one. Both Wicomb and Frieda are aware of the difficulties involved — as Judith Raiskin argues, the text “unravels both Frieda’s and Wicomb’s attempts to represent South African culture” (1996: 228). Yet at the same time, Frieda has clearly decided, albeit in a much more circumspect way than Naipaul’s narrator, that she will become an author nonetheless. Wicomb’s narration does not let her reader forget, however, that Frieda exists in a literary context that valorizes certain forms of storytelling — written, Anglophone — over others.

Frieda’s process of becoming an author requires that, like Naipaul’s narrator, she not only understand the expectations of metropolitan readers but can also effectively work against them. Wicomb’s narration perhaps provides an even more straightforward deployment of strategic exoticism because she is more explicit about her flirtations with various stereotypes of so-called exotic writing that both domesticate and exoticize their subjects. This echoes the focus in her critical writings “not on the documentary or mimetic representations in a literary text but on the new discursive formations taking place”, partly as a response to the frequent move by critics to read fiction by black South African women as purely documentary and autobiographical (Driver, 1996: 46). She plays with the stereotype that black women’s writing is always an autobiographical and ethnographic record of experience, luring her audience into that stance and then pushing against it by refocusing on the discursive formations in which she is participating. ⁵ She also simultaneously invokes and rejects the idea that one woman’s experience can be seen as representative of women’s experiences by juxtaposing Frieda’s narration of attending university with that of a cafeteria worker at the university. As these examples suggest, Wicomb’s more deliberate production and then rejection of stereotypes of exotic reading and writing practices is informed by anti-racism and feminism. Frieda’s authorial maturity derives in part from her capacity to work within while reacting against the racialized and gendered codes of exotic writing and reading.

Self-reference and circulation

As these narrators develop, they describe their increasing ability to fit their experiences into literary form. When they are successful in producing work that will be published, that work, which resembles the ones we readers hold in our hands, appears within the pages of the fictional text. This description of a book within a book is a form of metafiction. Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality”. According to Waugh, this allows texts not only to “examine the structures of narrative fiction” but also to “explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text” (1984: 2). I would like to turn that last phrase on its head, suggesting that in addition to focusing on the “fictionality” of the real world, metafiction can also draw attention to the materiality of the book that will circulate within and interact with the material world. Metafictional texts, in their frame breaking, reveal the contiguity of the textual world with the material world. In The Enigma of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, metafiction is not inward-looking: it looks out towards the material world in which these works will circulate, asking questions like who speaks, who listens, and what mediating institutions control that speech. The texts use self-reference to comment on the publishing houses, literary magazines, and other institutions that will control how their works are circulated and received. These institutional structures reflect the uneven development that marks political, economic, and social systems. Self-reference paradoxically allows for a deeper involvement with those worldly realms.

In The Enigma of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, metafiction establishes the closeness between the fictional protagonist’s development and the real world of book publication, distribution, and reception. These works constantly draw attention to their own strategies and techniques for world-making. At the same time, they remain realist works because the fictional worlds that they make resemble our own. This resemblance is so close that at times the fictional world and our real world collapse into each other. This collapse relies partly on the tendency of both books towards autobiography: the worlds of the unnamed narrator of The Enigma of Arrival easily collapse into the real world inhabited by V.S. Naipaul because the narrator is to a large extent Naipaul. Wicomb creates a similar type of collapse in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town even as she simultaneously frustrates it.

Naipaul’s protagonist repeatedly attempts to write a novel called The Enigma of Arrival. The book we readers hold in our hands emerges through the narrator’s continual efforts. The idea for the novel first presents itself to the narrator when he moves to Wiltshire in 1969 after one of his books fails to please the publisher. At this point the narrator is in his late thirties, nineteen years older than the boy who writes “Gala Night”. He is already successful, but makes it clear that he has not yet come to terms with that psychically damaged boy. In his rented cottage, he stumbles upon a book of paintings by the metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico. One painting, entitled The Enigma of Arrival, catches his attention and suggests the idea for a story. The narrator describes the plot, genre, and sources for the story, which would be a release from the twinned pressures of the emotional and artistic challenges of writing and the business of writing. Although at first the story he will call The Enigma of Arrival seems like a release from these pressures, it eventually comes to be much closer to his own life. He first imagines that it will be “a free ride of the imagination” (99) about a traveller in a classical city, but he eventually finds “how much of his life, how many aspects of his life, that remote story (still the idea for a story) carried” (103). In this phrase Naipaul evokes the novel that was eventually published as The Enigma of Arrival, which is all about “his life”. The fictional world that Naipaul creates in the novel collapses into the real world in which the novel circulates as a material object.

On the final pages of the novel, the narrator explains more clearly how he came to write this particular book, how this, of all the “versions”, made it to press. The narrator is now fifty and the year is 1984:

I had thought for many years about a book like The Enigma of Arrival. The Mediterranean fantasy that had come to me a day or so after I had arrived in the valley — the story of the traveler, the strange city, the spent life — had been modified over the years. The fantasy and the ancient-world setting had been dropped. The story had become more personal: my journey, the writer’s journey, the writer defined by his writing discoveries, his way of seeing, rather than by his personal adventures, writer and man separating at the beginning of the journey and then coming together again in a second life just before the end. (343–4)

The final, successful attempt at writing The Enigma of Arrival is prompted by the death of his sister. He not only reflects on her life and his own, but also decides to focus his story by starting with Jack, the character whose story makes up the first hundred pages of the novel. The final line of the novel is “And that was when, faced with a real death, and with this new wonder about men, I laid aside my drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast about Jack and his garden”, which readers instantly recognize as the first pages of the book they have just read (354). When the narrator sits down to write on this occasion, he produces the novel The Enigma of Arrival. Thus the final line consolidates its circular structure and propels the book into existence. This is not, as some of metafiction’s detractors would suggest, merely a game Naipaul is playing with his reader. The book’s presence as an object and commodity harkens back to that bookstore where the man and the writer were split. As readers, we cannot simply buy and then consume the book without facing the damage that the expectations of world literary markets and colonial power dynamics have placed on the narrator.

The most striking moment of reflexivity in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town mirrors the world-text collapse in The Enigma of Arrival. Frieda returns to visit family in Cape Town, but in this story, unlike earlier ones, her mother is not dead; rather, her father has just died. Frieda has missed the funeral and her mother refuses to see her. Eventually Frieda goes to her mother’s home where an echo of the first story replays in the negative. Her mother laments that Frieda and her generation have taken their education and gone “political”, joining anti-apartheid movements (an unpopular move with the older generation). She rues her decision to raise her daughter as an English-speaker. Her mother’s reproach brings about Frieda’s revelation that she will soon publish her first book. Her mother’s reaction is unequivocally negative. More interestingly, it reveals that the stories that we have just read will eventually make up this book:

“Stories”, she shouts, “you call them stories? I wouldn’t spend a second gossiping about things like that. Dreary little things in which nothing happens except . . . except . . .” and it is the unspeakable which makes her shut her eyes for a moment. Then more calmly, “Cheryl sent me the magazine from Joburg, two, three of them. A disgrace. I’m only grateful that it’s not a Cape Town book”. […]

“But they’re only stories. Made up. Everyone knows it’s not real, not the truth”.

“But you’ve used the real. If I can recognize places and people, so can others, and if you want to play around like that why don’t you have the courage to tell the whole truth? Ask me for stories with neat endings and you won’t have to invent my death”. (171–2)

This final remark refers to “When The Train Comes” and other stories from You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town in which Frieda mentions her mother’s death. So, when she tells her mother “my stories are going to be published next month. As a book I mean”, those stories must be the stories we have just read and the book must be this one, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Frieda’s mother’s phrase “a Cape Town book”, which reflects Wicomb’s title, is an in-joke shared by the reader, Wicomb, and (possibly) Frieda.

Dorothy Driver argues that this self-reference produces a “paradoxical textuality” that “places these characters in the real, prior to the text, although it maintains them as fictional characters produced by that very text” (Driver, 2010: 529). In Driver’s analysis, this paradox also has a temporal dimension: “the book we are reading is already written, and it is still yet to be written” (2010: 529). Andrew van der Vlies calls this feature “proleptic […] in that Wicomb’s text foresees its own (possible) future material states” (2013: 18). I read Frieda’s fictional announcement that a book that resembles You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town will be published as a bold move that propels her work (and therefore Wicomb’s work, too) into the world literary market. This is the book’s audacious self-insertion into world literature. Like the end of Naipaul’s novel, this moment of self-reference propels her works into the institutions of world literature and prompts a reconsideration of what works of world literature do.

Worldliness and world literature

Naipaul and Wicomb borrow from the conventions of the classical Bildungsroman to guarantee their narrators’ improbable success as authors of world literature. As Tobias Boes and others make clear, the concept of organic and teleological subject formation inherent in the concept of Bildung has been central to theories of the Bildungsroman (2012: 4; see also Castle, 2006). While this does not assure the protagonist’s success, it does guarantee that the protagonist becomes what he or she is meant to be. My point is not that all Bildungsromane function in this way — indeed almost every Bildungsroman seems to deviate from the classic form, especially when the protagonist is not male, heterosexual, middle-class, and/or metropolitan — but rather to suggest that Naipaul and Wicomb deploy the genre’s conventions in order to guarantee their non-normative protagonists’ eventual success. When they define their protagonists’ telos as successful authorship and build their narratives around the Bildungsroman, they are in effect forecasting their protagonists’ eventual incorporation into the worlds of authorship and literary authority to which they aspire.

Naipaul and Wicomb use their protagonists’ teleological subject formation in a way that sheds light on their characters’, and by extension their own, intermediate position between the local and national communities they were born into and the metropolitan centres in which they choose to live and to write. Joseph R. Slaughter’s analysis of the connections between the Bildungsroman and discourses of human rights sees the genre as an “enabling fiction” that incorporates subjects into social and public spheres (2007: 4). While in the formative period of the Bildungsroman, and to a good extent today, the social and public sphere is typically national, it is not necessarily so. In many contemporary novels, one sphere is international human rights; another is international literary markets that are dominated by European and American literary elites and universities. It is “the location of their publication, circulation, and consumption — activities that on a global scale remain differentially inflected by North–South power relations that belie the egalitarian self-image of the cosmopolitan reading public as a ‘world republic of letters’” (Slaughter, 2007: 33). The Bildungsroman form brings historically marginalized writers onto the international stage and incorporates them into the cosmopolitan reading public. To be sure, authors from the postcolony often integrate themselves into global markets by adopting well-established European forms. But the Bildungsroman does an especially good job describing the nature of that integration. To this argument, I add that in the works I address, the authors use metafiction to ground their Bildungsromane historically and geographically. In effect, they point to those international literary markets to remind readers of those unequal power relations that shape the literary sphere.

Wicomb’s and Naipaul’s protagonists live in a literary culture that exceeds the local, national, or regional; like the authors themselves, their young protagonists come from places where even local literature is always already transnational. There is a long history of literary and cultural exchange throughout the Caribbean, and London’s importance as a Caribbean literary capital has been well-documented (King, 2004: 13–72; Low, 2011). For South Africa, the repressive culture under apartheid pushed literary publication abroad; Wicomb explains that it was not until she left South Africa for England that she knew black South African writing existed (Wicomb, 1993: 82). But at the same time, the mere fact of arriving in England did not, and does not, secure access to literary prestige and power. Although Wicomb discovered black South African writing in England, she also recalls that “subtle British racism made [her] feel that it would be presumptuous of [her] to write and even to speak” (Wicomb, 1993: 83). This is why Frieda’s experiences in England are notably absent from the narrative. When she leaves for England, she is considering becoming an author; when she returns, she has already started that process. But England appears only as literary clichés rather than a place in its own right. As a university student in Cape Town, she spends her visits to her family in rural Namaqualand indoors “steeped in the bright green meadows of Hardy’s England, a landscape anyone could love” (90). Upon her return to South Africa, she recalls her inability to escape from her generic role while alone and lonely in England, crying merely because “heroines must cry” even though she had “lost interest in crying” (112). England represents the literary capital from which literature is exported and evaluated; at the same time, all of dominant literary culture is suspect for its support of power. As Frieda recalls her English experiences after returning to South Africa, she thinks: “A parched soul will be nourished by literature, say the moral arbiters. And I have become their willing slave” (111). The migrant experience not only reveals to Frieda a new understanding of the possibilities of literature, enabling her to become a writer, but also further demonstrates the repressive power of literature to domesticate and exploit marginal subjects. Any desire readers might have to see literary culture as a world republic of equals is sharply critiqued as Wicomb shows Frieda’s awareness of moralistic and romantic clichés alongside her inability to fully escape from them.

Like Wicomb, Naipaul registers the distance between his experience and his clichéd understanding of literature. In an essay entitled “Reading and Writing”, he reflects “I had wished to be a writer. But together with the wish there had come the knowledge that the literature that had given me the wish came from another world, far away from our own” (Naipaul, 2000: 9–10). This reflection is dramatized in The Enigma of Arrival, revealing the pressures metropolitan literary culture places on both the author and the work; these pressures are embedded in histories of exploitation. The narrator reflects that his romantic notions about writing derive from modernist ideas about art and the artist that are then transmitted through the colonial education system. Through this system, he reflects,

the ideas of the aesthetic movement of the end of the nineteenth century and the ideas of Bloomsbury, ideas bred essentially out of empire, wealth and imperial security, had been transmitted to me in Trinidad. To be that kind of writer (as I interpreted it) I had to be false; I had to pretend to be other than I was, other than what a man of my background could be. Concealing the colonial-Hindu self below the writing personality, I did both my material and myself much damage. (146)

Sanjay Krishnan reads this damage as the consequence of a colonial modernity that achieved its supremacy through brute force without the institutions or peasant consciousness that supported European modernity. He argues that beginning in the 1980s, Naipaul’s fiction responds formally to this “constitutive derangement” (2012: 437). A set of ideas about literature that are exported from the metropolis, here represented as Bloomsbury, are responsible for the split in the protagonist’s personality and the damage to himself and his material. This reflection thus encapsulates one of the novel’s central claims: that the peripheral author enters the world stage with significant disadvantages resulting from colonial and neocolonial force, and that these disadvantages have serious material, aesthetic, and psychic ramifications.

Both Naipaul’s and Wicomb’s writing registers the deep connection between world literary markets and histories of power and exploitation in part because of their own experiences as authors operating within transnational literary markets. A scan of the landscape of restricted possibility for black South African women reveals the difficulty of becoming an author either in South Africa or elsewhere. Dorothy Driver has summed up the total publication as follows: within South Africa, there were three fictional works by black women writers in the 1980s, while outside of the country only five works of fiction by black South African women appeared, of which You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town is one. ⁶ The case is not as dire for Naipaul who was already a remarkably successful writer when he wrote The Enigma of Arrival. However, his career began in a 1950s Anglo–Caribbean literary landscape that was heavily mediated by its relationship to London. This is clearly illustrated by Caribbean Voices, the BBC programme that broadcast literature by Caribbean writers living both in the Caribbean and in England, for which Naipaul worked in the 1950s. At the same time, Caribbean Voices and the entire Anglo–Caribbean milieu restricted him from full participation in literary culture, isolating him, as he saw it, in a racialized ghetto. ⁷ So while Naipaul has become a success, that success was far from guaranteed early on in his career. Further, success in the 1950s required transnational networks that were shaped by colonial and neo-colonial power structures. These circumstances are not incidental to The Enigma of Arrival or You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Rather, as I have argued, they are registered at the level of style and form.

Naipaul and Wicomb’s self-referential narration, which foregrounds the material, psychological, ethical, and aesthetic obstacles world authors from peripheral locations face, suggests a revision to the concept of world literature. The Enigma of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town draw attention to the colonial and neocolonial structures of power and authority that both enable and restrict their entry into world literary markets. They register these obstacles in the structure of their fictions, since their plots require entry into world literary markets for resolution. Their narrators describe the process of inventing authorial personae and aesthetics that can make them successful authors while still maintaining their own ethics and psyche. Further, they use metafiction to draw attention to that process of transforming from a child located on the peripheries of literary culture to a published author whose work circulates in international markets. They thereby foreground the ways in which literary form necessarily responds to global histories of power translated to peripheral authors through the institutions of literary culture. They reveal that these histories are embedded within the form and narrative structure of works of world literature.

The Engima of Arrival and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town show that to be genuinely worldly, literature must register the “realities of power and authority” because these are “the realities that make texts possible”. Our definition of world literature must respond to that mandate as well. To be considered a work of world literature, a text must develop strategies of representation that are capable of recording worldly realities of power and authority. World literature is shot through with those realities, registering them at the level of form and style, plot and character, theme and genre. The critic’s task is therefore to understand how a work negotiates and challenges the literary institutions that shape it and to elucidate the connections it makes between those institutions and the realities of power and authority that define our world.