Eveline,Elsie,and the politics of paralysis: Echoes of Dubliners in Zoë Wicomb’s “Nothing Like the Wind”

Abstract

This article discusses the presence of a covert but substantial Joycean intertext in Zoë Wicomb’s short story “Nothing Like the Wind”, namely “Eveline” in Dubliners. The two texts tackle similarly the felt experience of their female protagonists, Elsie and Eveline, two colonial or colonized subjects suffering equally because of their physical location, gender, and social class. Apart from the parallels at the level of both content and form, the short stories perform a dialogue centred around the staple thematic concerns of patriarchal family, home, and emigration — over which the paralytic legacy of colonialism hovers. Wicomb’s engagement with these issues finds a ready counterpart in Joyce’s own treatment of British policies in Ireland. This intertextual connection sheds new light on the possibilities of interpretation, both of “Nothing Like the Wind” and of “Eveline”.

The South African-born writer Zoë Wicomb has always displayed a keen interest in the practice of intertextuality, epitomized both by her literary works and by her theoretical essays. From the epigraphs by Arthur Nortje and George Eliot opening her first collection of short stories, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), up to the intertext of Toni Morrison’s work in Wicomb’s most recent novel October (2014), Wicomb’s literary texts resonate extensively with voices of other writers, both major and minor. An explanation for the pervasive use of this literary technique can be found in Wicomb’s groundbreaking essay “Setting, Intertextuality, and the Resurrection of the Postcolonial Author” (2005/2018). In the essay, Wicomb argues for the equivalence of setting and intertextuality, showing how the former can function as an intertext in postcolonial writing; she underlines the importance of the “transformative effect” of intertextuality, which “asks the reader to reflect on indeterminate meanings produced by citations, meanings that destabilize received views” (Wicomb, 2005/2018: 231). Apart from affecting the aesthetics of her works, intertextuality thus also represents a strong ethical imperative for Wicomb. Her embracing use of intertextuality responds to the urgent need of engaging with the voices of other writers, South African and foreign, to defy any notion of authority and emphasize the hybrid nature of culture (Van der Vlies, 2018: 17). At the same time, the embedding of other texts into her own complicates the reading of her works, which require the active participation of readers in the process of interpretation; through intertextuality, she reaffirms her consistent interest in complexity and nuance (Van der Vlies, 2018: 5).

Wicomb’s strategy when using an intertext is strikingly varied: she can announce overtly her original source, most notably in her numerous epigraphs, or she can work with intertextuality in a covert way; the textual presence of other writers can be surmised from a word-for-word quotation of the intertext, or it can be reworked to fit into the new context. This characterizes Wicomb’s intertextual strategy as extremely subtle and complex. Among Wicomb’s works, her volume of short fiction The One That Got Away (2008) offers examples of all these usages. Indeed, almost every story in the collection addresses one — or more — intertexts, which are mostly linked to the dual setting of the stories, Scotland and South Africa, and to the past colonial relationship between the two countries. To name but a few, readers can find references to the Scotland-centred works of Helen McCloy and Kathleen Jamie, while the last story of the volume is a pointed — albeit covert — response to Sarah Gertrude Millin’s now infamous God’s Stepchildren (1924). Wicomb has confessed her “obsession” with Millin’s eugenicist book (Willemse, 2002: 147), which appears as an intertext also in Wicomb’s novel David’s Story (2000/2001). Thus, intertextuality allows Wicomb to revise and write back to the demeaning colonial representations of a white South African writer. Together with intertextual references to the works of Scottish and South African authors, however, other writers provide a context, as with the covert quotation of John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale in the story “N2” in The One That Got Away. In fact, the collection resonates so much with (possible) intertexts that it provides readers with a limitless set of responses to the narratives. Hence, the potential for intertextual connections in and among the stories of The One That Got Away remain to be explored (see Hoegberg, 2017: 67).

Starting from this last consideration, this paper discusses the covert but substantial presence of a Joycean intertext in the ninth story of The One That Got Away, “Nothing Like the Wind”, with a focus on the similarities, at both the levels of content and form, between Wicomb’s short story and James Joyce’s “Eveline”, the fourth narrative in Dubliners (1914/1956). A brief overview of Joyce’s influence on postcolonial writers, with a focus on South Africa and Wicomb in particular, will provide the context for a full appreciation of the significance of such an intertextual link.

In the preface to his volume Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory and History (2000), Derek Attridge speaks of the enduring legacy of Joyce’s texts. Among the several responses to the Irish writer, the South African-born critic identifies postcolonial studies as one of the main critical domains which have reread Joyce’s work. In particular, Attridge focuses on his own experience as scholar both of Joyce and of South African literature:

[M]y South African background and my interest in the literatures of the former British colonies — which I had hitherto never thought of as connected to my interest in Joyce — quite suddenly became a resource for new kinds of thinking about Ireland and Irish writers, with their complex relation to English metropolitan culture. (Attridge, 2000: 12)

Indeed, Joyce’s writings do (partially) overlap with the themes tackled by postcolonial studies, since Ireland was until 1921 a British colony. This has led to a significant Joycean intertextual presence in the literary works of several writers from the former British colonies. Furthermore, as Ariela Freedman suggests in her article “Global Joyce”, the Irish writer’s interest in accessing “the global through the core of the local makes Joyce a particularly suggestive example for writers interested in a rooted cosmopolitanism” (2010: 799; emphasis in original).

If on the one hand Freedman rightfully identifies a dearth of critical studies concerning the influence of Joyce on writers outside of Europe and North America (2010: 800), on the other hand she mentions only briefly what Attridge (2011: 870) calls “the multifaceted role Joyce has played in African writing south of the equator”. ¹ Tony Voss underlines the importance of Dubliners for the South African literary context, stating that the short story cycle may have been a stronger model for some South African writers than Ulysses has proven (2014: 21). A first translocal link between South Africa and Joyce, however, can be identified precisely through Ulysses: the day of the Soweto rebellion of schoolchildren in South Africa (16 June 1976) falls on Bloomsday. Wicomb herself was aware of the connection, which she highlights in her novel David’s Story (2000/2001: 206), thus linking the South African intertexts in her novel to a European literary tradition (Driver, 2012: 21).

Even though Wicomb’s texts and intertexts increasingly deal with the connection South Africa–Scotland, a discussion of a Joycean intertext in The One That Got Away may instead foreground political and aesthetical links between South Africa and Ireland. Between 1896 and 1899, several Irish activists slipped into the Transvaal Republic to fight alongside the Boers in the Second Anglo-Boer War (McCracken, 1992: 147). For them, South Africa was the only place in the English-speaking world where white nationalists were effectively fighting the British Empire (McCracken, 1992: 146). Joyce himself was well informed on the struggle between British and Boers in South Africa, to the point that this interest is reflected in his fiction: the Irish writer makes direct reference to South African events in 11 of the 18 episodes in Ulysses (Temple-Thurston, 1990: 249).

Joyce’s writings have rarely been considered as possible intertexts in Zoë Wicomb’s works; nonetheless, her texts bear clear evidence of an intertextual link with Joyce. There have been some comparisons with the Irish writer, yet these are merely concerned with general themes; critical studies seldom focus on formal similarities between Wicomb and Joyce. Attridge, for instance, suggests a potential interconnection between the treatment of history in Wicomb’s David’s Story (2000/2001) and in Finnegans Wake (1939) (2011: 871), and Rob Gaylard recognizes a Joycean influence in the pattern of home and exile that structures You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1996: 178). Saikat Majumdar devotes a whole chapter of his study Prose of the World to the same collection of short stories, discussing the importance of Dubliners’ banality of daily experience for the South African volume (2013: 101–133); André Viola (1989) and Majumdar (2013: 112) further compare Wicomb’s text to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

However, the (potential) intertextual link between her most recent collection of short stories, The One That Got Away, and Dubliners has been overlooked. The two short story cycles share significant features, first of all their generic classification. Variously labelled as “composite novel”, “short story cycle”, and “collection of stories”, this genre fluctuates between the two extremes of the novel and of the individual short story (see Griem, 2011: 393). Among the “organizing principles” that achieve whole-text coherence in short story cycles, Dubliners seems to revolve around the principles of place and of collective protagonist (Dunn and Morris, 1995: 39–59). Similarly, The One That Got Away, set in Scotland and South Africa, is structured according to the same principles, as Fiona McCann notices: “This latest collection [The One That Got Away] is a short-story cycle of both place and character” (2010: 56). These internal linking devices notwithstanding, the dominant mood in The One That Got Away is one of disconnection and, above all, dislocation (Marais, 1995: 34), as appears also from a reading of “Nothing Like the Wind”.

“Nothing Like the Wind”, the ninth episode of Wicomb’s volume, belongs to the group of autonomous stories published before 2008 and later included in the collection. ² The focal character is Elsie Reid, a young coloured South African girl who has moved to Glasgow with her father and brother Freddie after the demise of apartheid and the death of her beloved grandmother. The main feature of “Nothing Like the Wind” consists in a striking exploration of the effects of displacement on Elsie, conveyed through a pervasive and poignant use of free indirect style. Her perception of place appears so distorted that her bodily and sensory experience of Glasgow incessantly overlaps with her memories of “another world”, of her farmhouse in South Africa’s Karoo (Wicomb, 2008: 135). ³ This superimposition of the landscapes of the two countries, and the intermingling of the South African past with the Scottish present, is symptomatic of Elsie’s numerous difficulties. Indeed, readers learn — or rather surmise — that, in Scotland, Elsie has been victim of some kind of sexual abuse on the part of her brother Freddie. To add to the context of violence, Freddie in turn has been raped and murdered by a man in Glasgow, while her father, “talking the sad nonsense of fathers deranged with grief”, has started to collect brass objects obsessively (143). The change of location has also brought about new economic impediments: the Reid family is not so well-off in Scotland as in their South African days. Elsie, therefore, is victim of multiple tragedies, stemming from her gender, country of origin, and social class. This situation leads to an act of surrender on her part. The story ends with Elsie taking refuge in her bed, refusing to go to the school dance with an Eritrean boy who has invited her to partner him.

From this brief overview of the main events, it can be argued that the narrative overlaps with some of the main thematic concerns of Dubliners, a collection in which “lives are numbed even by the very affections of family and home, the last outposts of intimacy in the disenchanted world of bourgeois private life” (Gibbons, 2006: 197). Family and home, moreover, can be defined as the predominant centripetal forces around which one short story of Dubliners in particular revolves, namely “Eveline”. Indeed, Gibbons’s summary of Joyce’s narrative reads as follows: “Domestic violence […] occurs in ‘Eveline’ when a young woman attempts to escape the emotional aridity of the home after her mother’s death, to escape with her paramour to far-off Buenos Aires” (2006: 207). The phrase “domestic violence” whirls around the two staple thematic concerns of both “Eveline” and “Nothing Like the Wind”, namely family and home. Domestic violence enters the two texts in several ways. To start with, the tragedy of the death of Eveline’s mother “presides over the story” (Gibbons, 2006: 208) in the same way that Elsie’s grandmother’s death represents “a change so profound that it upsets all members of the family in different ways” (McCann, 2010: 57). The demise of these two maternal figures, moreover, is strongly linked to histories of violence in both families. Even if never overtly stated, there are manifold hints in Joyce’s story at the abuses of Eveline’s mother by her father; the man’s violent behaviour ultimately leads to her illness and death, making Eveline state that “[s]he would not be treated as her mother had been” (Joyce, 1914/1956: 38). While Elsie’s grandmother has died of old age, her death is nonetheless repeatedly juxtaposed with images of violence: “The old woman’s sage-green shawl is almost black — with blood […] Everything — face, neck, hands, every part of her — has turned blue-black with outraged blood” (139).The women in the Reid family are surrounded by brutality: the final violent phase of apartheid, the murder of Elsie’s brother in Scotland, and, ultimately, the private abuses inside Elsie’s own family. Thus, the deaths of both maternal figures, which hover over the two short stories, can be linked to the violence interwoven in the plots of the two narratives.

Patriarchal abuse is precisely what renders Eveline and Elsie alike victims. Joyce’s short story is replete with explicit references to violent behaviour on the part of Eveline’s drunken father, who “was usually fairly bad on Saturday night”: “[S]he sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence. […] latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother’s sake. And now she had nobody to protect her” (Joyce, 1914/1956: 38–39). What Vincent Cheng (1995: 103) says of “Eveline” — “It is a story with devastating feminist resonances” — can be applied to “Nothing Like the Wind”, for Elsie, too, has “nobody to protect her”. Her father, like Eveline’s, spends his time at a pub “playing darts […] every Friday night” and “has taken to drink” (144). He is not able to cope with the new Scottish environment, where he is “no longer well-off and must do without servants” (138). Thus he fails to protect Elsie from the two main difficulties that she encounters in Scotland: he cannot understand the nuances of social class, for which Elsie feels discriminated against; ⁴ more importantly, he never defends his daughter from the abuses on the part of her brother. Even though hints at domestic violence in “Nothing Like the Wind” are linked to Elsie’s brother, and not to her father, the short story nonetheless presents a strong critique of the patriarchal family, very much as does “Eveline”. Indeed, apart from their violent behaviour and their drinking habits, the two fathers are also depicted negatively in their essentialist and parochial attitudes to foreigners and black people, respectively. When Mr Hill hears Italian organ-players outside of his wife’s sickroom, he exclaims: “Damned Italians! Coming over here!” (Joyce, 1914/1956: 41). Similarly, Elsie’s father is covertly racist: “[w]hite people are clearly not cut out for domestic work and as far as he could see there were no available black women hanging about the streets” (138).

Strongly opposing the girls’ fathers, the two male figures linked to Eveline’s and Elsie’s chances of a better life deserve to be mentioned. Frank and the Eritrean boy embody the only possible escapes for the two heroines from their stifling life. Accordingly, they appear associated with music and entertainment: Frank takes Eveline to the theatre and is “awfully fond of music” (Joyce, 1914/1956: 40), whereas the Eritrean boy asks Elsie to the school dance. Frank, however, is much more thoroughly described in Joyce’s story than Elsie’s anonymous schoolmate. The Eritrean boy appears only at the very end of the story — previously, readers are given no hint whatsoever at his role in Elsie’s life. Nonetheless he too, like Frank, could be interpreted as rival to Elsie’s father, for she herself admits that “[t]here could have been some pleasure in rising, smoothing the skirt of her satin frock and saying to her father, Ah, that will be Hassan or Hussein at the door” (144). As the quotation shows, however, Elsie, an “implicitly coloured” South African girl (Van der Vlies, 2017: 134), strikingly forgets the name of her partner, a refugee from Eritrea — and, therefore, probably black-skinned. Elsie’s vagueness when it comes to her school-mate can be interpreted as an omen of her refusal to face not only Scotland, but also any connection with South Africa.

As we have seen, the two stories parallel each other in terms of plot and characters. Their affinities, however, are to be found also on a structural and formal level. Indeed, each text signals a neat break within its own collection: “Nothing Like the Wind” is the first story which does not share characters with other episodes of The One That Got Away, while “Eveline” is the first story with a third-person narrator (the preceding episodes of Dubliners are told in the first person). Thus, in the economy of the short story collections, both “Nothing Like the Wind” and “Eveline” unsettle readers. The narrative voice further links the two texts. “Eveline” and “Nothing Like the Wind” are characterized by the presence of a third-person narrator, who, throughout the stories, foregrounds Eveline’s and Elsie’s thoughts, respectively. The extensive use of free indirect style can be detected by some words, or expressions, clearly belonging to the two girls. The slang word “bedonderd” (135) in the opening of “Nothing Like the Wind”, for instance, relates specifically to Elsie, who still uses her vernacular in her thoughts (McCann, 2010: 57), whereas the phrase “man out of the last house” (Joyce, 1914/1956: 37) is typical of Eveline’s Irish diction (Attridge and Fogarty, 2012: 93). Even if both stories consistently adopt the point of view of the two heroines, it is still possible to locate the presence of the observing narrators, whose linguistic skills differ markedly from the two protagonists’. Indeed, both texts present lyrical passages, such as the renowned opening sentence in “Eveline”, “She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue” (Joyce, 1914/1956: 37), or the onomatopoeic and alliterative rendering of the “wind whoosh[ing] with a whistle” (137) in “Nothing Like the Wind”.

Notwithstanding the similarity between the two narrative voices, one meaningful element needs underlining: “Eveline” is told in the past tense, and “Nothing Like the Wind” in the present. Joyce’s text is consistent with the other stories of Dubliners, in that it sets the narrated events in the past — although with deictics referring to the present. The predominance of past tenses in “Eveline” is textual evidence of the paralysis surrounding the girl: “Dreams of the future always seem to be grounded in a past nostalgia, so that the text itself cannot think of future possibilities without reverting to comfortable memories of the past” (Ben-Merre, 2012: 455). The present tense in “Nothing Like the Wind”, at times retained even when Elsie’s thoughts swiftly move to her past, instead conveys the immediacy of the girl’s perceptions in her new home, and it aptly expresses her sense of displacement. Thus, the use of two different verb tenses responds to the divergent experiences of Eveline and Elsie. The former refuses to board the steamship to a new continent, remaining in backward Ireland; the latter has already moved to another continent, but her new home only enhances her alienation.

The comparison between the two short stories appears even more appropriate if we look at the endings of both narratives. After the two protagonists’ recollections from the past, conveyed in free indirect discourse, the main action of both stories takes place at the end of the narration — and, interestingly, equally at the end of the day. Eveline, who “sat at the window” weighing her decision to leave, swiftly “stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her […] She had a right to happiness” (Joyce, 1914/1956: 41). Her impromptu assertion of agency, tightly bound as it is to the remembrance of her mother’s “final craziness”, lures readers into the illusion of a happy ending. Avoiding a life of “commonplace sacrifices”, Eveline would finally sail for a new life in Buenos Aires with her lover Frank (Joyce, 1914/1956: 41). After many glimpses of Elsie’s inner life, readers of “Nothing Like the Wind” recognize an assertion of agency on the part of the South African girl, too, which is deeply linked to her gender. When Elsie finds her grandmother’s shawl in her father’s room, she reacts determinedly: “Did he wear it wrapped around his shoulders in the privacy of his rooms? She didn’t care. Granny’s sage-green shawl was not meant for a man; it belonged to her” (144). Thus, Elsie claims the right to the shawl — her grandmother’s only legacy — because she needs it to go to the ball with the Eritrean boy from her school. A potential happy ending appears imminent, too, in Wicomb’s short story.

Nonetheless, several hints, scattered across the two narratives, suggest the outcomes will be otherwise. In the first place, neither of the girls challenges her father’s authority to their face: the two men are not at home when the girls decide to act. Furthermore, when Eveline reaches the quayside with Frank, her cheek is “pale and cold” while she observes the “black mass” of the boat blowing a “long mournful whistle” (Joyce, 1914/1956: 42). The hints at the incoming denial of a happy ending are subtler in “Nothing Like the Wind”, and can be grasped only by attentive readers. Right after taking the shawl from her father’s room, Elsie describes her beautiful dress as an “uncomfortable garment”, and she feels her arms “covered in goose bumps in spite of the shawl” (144). An even more telling hint is represented by Elsie’s doubts regarding Hassan/Hussein’s motive for asking her out: “[T]he invitation perhaps a dare issued by boys with stiffly spiked hair?” (144). Thus, “Eveline” and “Nothing Like the Wind” similarly prepare readers for their powerful, abrupt, anticlimactic conclusions. Joyce’s short story ends with Eveline refusing to sail for Buenos Aires with Frank:

A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:

“Come!”

All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.

“Come!”

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish! […] Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition. (Joyce, 1914/1956: 42–43)

The bell mentioned at the beginning of this excerpt, even though it clearly refers to the bell of the boat, symbolizes Eveline’s inner agony, and it triggers her sudden reaction. Likewise, Joyce brilliantly uses the image of the sea as both a realistic and a symbolic element to depict the anguish of the Irish girl. Wicomb interestingly adopts almost the same fictional devices to represent Elsie’s refusal to go to the ball with the Eritrean boy:

When the bell rings at precisely twenty to eight Elsie scrambles into her bed, black frock and all, and pulls the covers over her head. The wind roars through the outbuildings, tearing figs from the tree, and the rain beats down so that waves high as houses leap over the slate roofs. An ark, light as a paper boat, drifts down the Great Western Road with the sail of Granny Reid’s sage-green shawl flapping in the distance. (145)

Compared to the closure of “Eveline”, the description of Elsie’s irrational action appears much more tacit: it never overtly expresses anguish or desperation as the narrator in “Eveline” does, thereby enhancing its shocking effect on readers. There are, however, striking similarities between the two conclusions. Again, it is the presence of a bell that marks the reaction of the South African girl, who hides into her bed. If Joyce turns to the sea to represent Eveline’s most intimate fears, Wicomb instead resorts to wind and rain — the two landmarks recurring throughout the story. It is worth noticing, however, that rain is converted into “waves high as houses” in Elsie’s perception, thereby echoing the presence of the sea in Joyce’s text. Natural elements are thus transformed into the main obstacles to change in the life of the two girls. The sea might drown Eveline, whereas the roar of the wind and the rain coming in waves might prevent Elsie from going to the ball. The final image of the paper boat, moreover, starkly recalls the presence of the boat in “Eveline”. Thus, metonymic resonance — boat, sail, shawl — beautifully links the two texts. The sentence on the unattainable paper boat can be interpreted as the definitive answer to the obscure question at the beginning of Elsie’s story: “Could there be an ark drifting beyond reach in the distance, light as a paper boat?” (136). If the beginning of “Nothing Like the Wind” presents Elsie’s future as still open to debate, by the end of the story her fate has been sealed: the ark, figuratively also a place of refuge, drifts away from Elsie. In both short stories the pivotal signifier of the boat stands for the two girls’ missed chances of a journey towards change and the unknown. Indeed, McCann defines the poignant closing image of “Nothing Like the Wind” as a “metaphor for Elsie’s inability, or lack of desire, to grasp the (albeit limited) possibilities offered to her in this new environment” (2010: 59).

As the above quoted excerpts have shown, however, an important distinction needs to be drawn: if for Eveline the chance to escape is literal, Elsie’s getaway has much greater symbolic significance. ⁵ While the image of the boat is only used metaphorically by Wicomb, for Joyce it represents Eveline’s voyage on the steamship. Elsie’s choice of not going to the school ball thus appears played down when juxtaposed with Eveline’s prospective intercontinental move at the beginning of the twentieth century. The comparison between the two short stories proves significant, nonetheless. In “Nothing Like the Wind”, Elsie has already moved from South Africa to another continent, hoping to “start again in another place, somewhere civilised” (140). Unlike Eveline, who only daydreams about “another life with Frank” (Joyce, 1914/1956: 39), she is able to face the challenge of leaving home for a different continent — albeit a much easier challenge, given the travel facilities available to Elsie in the twenty-first century. As the short story by Wicomb shows, however, her move has brought about no change whatsoever, for the violence encountered in South Africa is to be found also in Scotland.

Hence, “Eveline” and “Nothing Like the Wind” can be described in terms of (self-imposed) paralysis, which hinders the two protagonists’ path towards a new kind of life. Joyce’s Dubliners is one of the literary works mostly associated with the concept of paralysis. “Eveline” enacts the passivity hovering over Dublin particularly well: unable to choose action over paralysis, Eveline condemns herself to the prison of her house, eschewing the freedom of potentially “good air” for a hard life in Dublin (Cheng, 1995: 103). Thus, in “Eveline” the Joycean notion of paralysis becomes intertwined with the very idea of home, since “home is not where you escape to, but where you escape from” (Gibbons, 2006: 209). The enduring interpretation of the idea of home in “Eveline” as “psychological prison” (Leonard, 2004: 100) finds a ready equivalent in the depiction of home entailed in “Nothing Like the Wind”. Indeed, Glasgow is repeatedly represented as a prison, for doors are “massive, triple-locked monoliths that fit tightly into their frames” and “cannot be elbowed open” (137). McCann, however, properly speaks of “self-imprisonment” (2010: 59), since Elsie herself is obsessed by the locking of doors and shutters: “Elsie checks the front door once more. She can’t remember whether she has locked it” (139). Thus, the girl, much like Eveline, dreams of “an elusive freedom from the gender, class, and geographical prison she finds herself in” (McCann, 2010: 57). It should not escape our notice, however, that Elsie’s self-imprisonment does not originate in Glasgow. While still in her farmhouse in South Africa, Elsie used to hide in a fig tree, because “there was no bolt on the door of her room” (141). The sentence is textual evidence of the girl’s alienation in South Africa, where she was surrounded by brutality — “it’s violence everywhere”, in the words of Elsie’s father (140). Once in Scotland, her alienation becomes magnified.

This consideration is germane to a thorough comparison of the two short stories. Indeed, when examining the “competing propagandas” of home in “Eveline”, Katherine Mullin analyses a staple concern of Joyce’s narrative that also holds true for “Nothing Like the Wind”. She writes that in “Eveline” “‘Home’ is counterpointed with ‘house’, both words appearing six times in a five-page story, and the tension between the two loosely synonymous terms articulates the difference between a physical and an ideological space” (Mullin, 2000: 180). The greatest difference and the most substantial similarity between the two short stories revolve precisely around the main thematic concern of “home”. Both heroines do not identify “home” with their physical locations. ⁶ Eveline longs to leave the parochial and hard existence of her native city, Dublin, where she lives the life of the (semi)colonial subject. She is lured by the promise of a new world in the exotic Buenos Aires, which she fantasizes about as “home” (Cheng, 1995: 101) — the allusions to a life of prostitution in Argentina notwithstanding (see Mullin, 2000). On the contrary, Wicomb’s protagonist refuses to adapt to her new surroundings, idealizing only her native South Africa as “home” (see McCann, 2010: 59). This marked difference between the two short stories is also evident in the dichotomous concepts of familiarity/unfamiliarity. Eveline, for instance, is repeatedly described while she observes the “familiar objects” in her house (Joyce, 1914/1956: 37–38). By contrast, Elsie is continuously confronted with the unfamiliar features of Glasgow, language included: “Not gnats. In Scotland they are called midges” (142). In both cases, however, the possibility to move forward towards a better life is thwarted by the girls’ bond with their native countries. Eveline’s paralysis is triggered by the memory of the promise made to her mother “to keep the home together” (Joyce, 1914/1956: 41), while Elsie’s irrational (non)action is caused by her constant recollections of her homeland, strongly linked to the figure of her grandmother. Luke Gibbons (2006: 207) titles the last part of his article on Joyce and the politics of paralysis “The Tyranny of Home”, and specifically refers to “Eveline”. Elsie, as we have seen, is also paralysed by “the tyranny of home”. Not surprisingly, Wicomb recurs to a very similar phrase — “the tyranny of place” (2005/2018: 230) — when speaking of her own fiction. ⁷

The two short stories by Joyce and Wicomb, therefore, share many similarities. The definition of “Eveline” as a “particularly intricate and politically loaded perversion of familiar fiction” (Mullin, 2000: 172) can also be applied to “Nothing Like the Wind”. Apart from the parallelisms in terms of plot and narrative structure, though, there is a deeper affinity between the two texts. As we have seen, the staple thematic concerns of home, emigration, and the (dysfunctional) family constitute the narrative centres of both short stories. There is, nonetheless, a distinction to be drawn, for the two texts convey differently the spatial, political, and personal dislocation of the two colonial/colonized subjects. If Joyce works within the formula of the “anti-emigration story” (Leonard, 2004: 94), he does so to implicitly criticize both the Irish nationalist propaganda and Britain’s imperialist policy in his native land. This has led Katherine Mullin to define “Eveline” a “semicolonial story” (Mullin, 2000: 172). Wicomb, conversely, situates her postcolonial fiction in Scotland; she is thus able to undermine the colonial ideology of the imperial centre, at the same time refusing any notion of nationalism. However, both writers do minutely depict the effects of colonialism and nationalism on the individual psyche of their heroines, who are equally suffering because of their gender, social class, and physical location.

To support the comparison between the two stories, another issue must be considered. The interpretation of “Eveline” as covert intertext in “Nothing Like the Wind” is consistent with the overall intertextual structure of The One That Got Away. The presence of Joyce adds to the polyphony and variety of intertextual references inside the collection, proving that Wicomb’s scope in her latest volume of short stories is not limited to the relationship between Scotland and South Africa:

Wicomb’s stories also suggest that the very imperfection of our lives originates in an intricate web of concealed, dimly registered and ever proliferating relations that ultimately grants life its richness, its texture. This accounts also for the shape and texture of the stories themselves: intertextual echoes abound, yet rarely announce themselves in an “authoritative” manner. (De Villiers, 2008: n.p.)

The echo of Dubliners’ fourth narrative in “Nothing Like the Wind” is never authoritative; rather, it is subtle and nuanced. Even though no explicit reference to Joyce, Dubliners, or “Eveline” can be found in Wicomb’s story, still a cross-fertilization between the two texts takes place. ⁸ This intertextual connection sheds new light on the possibilities of interpretation, both of Wicomb’s work and of Joyce’s. As far as “Eveline” is concerned, the juxtaposition with a postcolonial text brings to the fore a reading informed by the paradigms of postcolonialism, thus outlining those “semicolonial” traits first identified by Attridge in Joyce’s writing (see Attridge and Howes, 2000). The comparison with “Eveline”, in turn, enhances the feeling of paralysis hovering over “Nothing Like the Wind”. Joyce’s text, moreover, provides readers with a key to the interpretation of the most obscure passages in Wicomb’s short story: the final, cryptic image of Granny’s sage-green shawl flapping in the distance as a sail, for instance, becomes more straightforward if read alongside “Eveline”. Finally, the influence of Joyce’s short story is not confined to “Nothing Like the Wind”. It can be argued that the concept of paralysis resonates in other stories of the collection, informing narratives such as “In the Botanic Gardens”. Thus “Eveline” can be thought of as an urtext: the reading of the story of this “dutiful daughter, battered woman, (failed) romance heroine” (Johnson, 2004: 204) informs subsequent works of art, functioning as an intertext during the process of both composition and interpretation, for readers and writers alike. Through the use of free indirect style, metonymic resonances — boat, sail, shawl — and the logic of spaces, “Eveline” and “Nothing Like the Wind” dialogue across time and space, similarly tackling the felt experience of the colonial/colonized subject.

Ultimately, the intertextual relationship between “Eveline” and “Nothing Like the Wind” foregrounds the complexity behind the apparent simple plots of the two narratives. Joyce’s text “demands as much of its readers as it does of its character” (Ben-Merre, 2012: 466), and the same can be said of Elsie’s tale. The “competing propagandas” of home (Mullin, 2000: 180) in both stories and the two binaries — Ireland–Argentina and South Africa–Scotland — are never easily resolved, but, rather, complicated by the texts themselves. Furthermore, both stories, in which “‘home’ carries dual ideological overtones of both a national and a gendered space” (Mullin, 2000: 180), invite readers to question the role of Frank and of the anonymous Eritrean boy, whose motives remain intentionally ambiguous. The paralysis that equally hovers over the endings of “Eveline” and “Nothing Like the Wind”, therefore, does not represent the key to the ultimate interpretation of these powerful stories. Instead, the concept of paralysis serves as a starting point for different understandings of the two narratives, whose intertextual dialogue further challenges readers in the process of interpretation.