University of Cape Town – ELL1013F

 ‘You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town’ Essay

‘Speak now, or forever hold your pieces’: The multifarious role of metafiction in Zoe Wicomb’s opus

If Zoe Wicomb’s ‘You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town’ (YCGLiCT) contains one unambiguous conclusive twist, it is it’s marked transition from being a credible (if loose) autobiographical text to revealing itself as a discursive meditation on the existential purposes of fiction. Of course this change of emphasis isn’t entirely sudden, but it does only openly reveal itself to the assiduous reader in the explicit postmodern turn of the final story of the collection (‘A Trip to the Gifberge’). Gazing back from this resting-point in Frieda Shenton’s life, we may be surprised to find the whole book shaken up completely by the infusion of this metafictional perspective. That is to say that each particular story has come to seem to me to be partly a reflection on its own existence as a coherent text and partly the content that actually inspired its own later inscription. Pretty much my first critical commentary on the book after finishing it -which I myself didn’t immediately understand- was that ‘everything has the appearance of a trauma’. The poetic density of the prose and the frustrating arbitrariness of much of its content seemed certain signs of Wicomb’s haunted consciousness; a condition only alleviated through written representation of the specters in question. In this essay, I’m remaining loyal to that first insight but with the essential caveat of explicating how Wicomb somehow manages to include the paradoxes of that process of representation in the body of the text itself. As such, my three chosen quotes will be systematically examined as symptoms of the ‘existential’ nature of the book’s own self-consciousness. Though, rest assured, I also do promise to keep matters entertaining.

So, having accepted YCGLiCT as Wicomb’s mere “flirt[ation] with autobiography” (Hunter & MacKenzie, 1993: 93), the reader may justifiably come to wonder ‘whose’ text the recollected stories can actually be ascribed to? If it is Frieda Shenton, as seemingly revealed in the final story, then where does she find the courage (or anxiety) in hindsight to memorialize her “terrible stories”? (189) Of course we shouldn’t fall into the same trap of taking the first nine stories as Frieda’s testified history (given that the resurrection of her mother is what colours the tenth) but if we accept that Wicomb is essentially representing Frieda representing herself, we can posit that both ‘authors’ share at least broadly similar emotions in recalling their vocational struggles. To wit, in the middle of the title story Frieda hints at her first stuttering attempt at mature writing- a surreal vignette of a picturesque day at Cape Point with her white boyfriend- that, to her mind, stands as her first failure. Despite the decidedly bourgeois appreciative comments of said boyfriend, Frieda comes to ‘puzzle’ at “why [she] had shown him [the poem’s] words that did not even make sense to [her].” (83) She then quite promptly destroys her work. We can read into this episode the old adage of ‘a true artist can never be satisfied’. That is that Frieda begins with the human instinct to evoke this nostalgic ‘immoral’ moment in time but she has also already accepted herself as her own harshest critic. Wicomb herself seems to implicitly share this understanding, having stated in interviews: “I don’t feel that I have any authority [as an author]… [however] I can no longer keep quiet and that’s where the conflict lies.” (Hunter & MacKenzie, 1993: 84-5) To my mind, this conflict is not only Wicomb’s impetus to continue writing, but also the ‘traumatic’ crux that connects the whole of YCGLiCT. In this sense, every story appears as the disquieting return of the memory of an intrinsic failure. In ‘Bowl like Hole’ and ‘Jan Klinkies’ it’s the various observed failures of communication between Frieda’s Anglicized father, the ‘proper gentleman’ Mr. Weedon and the rural coloured community represented by men like the titular cousin; in ‘A Clearing in the Bush’, the title story and ‘A Fair Exchange’, it’s Frieda’s own failures to express her critical opinions, her trauma at an abortion and Skitterboud’s empathetic narrative respectively; and in the final story, it’s seemingly the failure of fiction itself not to include Frieda’s living mother in the ‘factual’ course of the whole preceding book. All of which stems from a coherent metafictional metaphor for the distance and alienation inherent in any attempt at honest representation. The only course of action then, to quote Samuel Beckett, is seemingly to “Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.” (Beckett, 1983)

For now though, an elaboration of those concurrent ideas of ‘distance’ and ‘alienation’ will bring us neatly to a second paradox of (Wicomb’s) fiction. Namely that it is only from the ‘objective perspective’ of exile that both Frieda and Wicomb can create the lived-in subjectivity of their recollections of South Africa. Frieda’s mother, of course, gets to this point before me in the very last lines of the book, gibing at Frieda’s intention- actually mirroring Wicomb’s- to return to the Western Cape that “with something to do here at home perhaps you won’t need to make up those terrible stories hey?” (189) She’s absolutely right, though for slightly misguided reasons. If Frieda can only write about her erratic revisits to her homeland, it’s not for want of otherwise interesting diversions in the UK. In fact, it is only from the relative spiritual calm of “the intimate summer light of England” (9) that the unconcluded elements of her responses to ‘life back home’ can begin to re-emerge. On top of that, her separation from the land of her defining institutionalisations allows her the necessary critical platform to transmute those formative experiences into the kind of knowing, politically aware fiction YCGLiCT exemplifies. I like to think I can sense here as well Wicomb’s occasional self-effacing humour in the fact that the mother’s words are also the book’s sign-off line. As such, it has the effect of turning the reader’s attention, in a closing reflection, back to the collection’s credentials as a coherent künstlerroman. However, the crucial emphasis is tellingly placed on the birth of the writings- the ‘terrible stories’- and no longer that of their writer. This is metafiction in the surest sense- a kind of brief wink at the overly analytical reader- that certainly makes a clearer ending than that of the majority of the other stories in the collection. The bottom line though is that Frieda, as her mother knows, will not be able to create this same kind of ambiguous fiction were she to return from exile. From this I would hazard a direct connection in Frieda’s story between her literal separation in time and space from her homeland and the distance both she and Wicomb hold as first-person storytellers from the content of their tales. To write fiction is to attempt to express in words one’s deepest possible emotions while nonetheless remaining in control of that expression. For Frieda, the ‘authority’ of attaining that control can only be achieved by a concurrent physical escape from the oppressive ideological clarity of Apartheid.

Ironically of course, Frieda’s objective control of her own representation leads us straight to the great old gamble of fiction: the belief that personal truth can be most accurately portrayed through the earnest construction of well-told lies. This is explicitly the subject of the ‘postmodern turn’ of a passage in ‘A Trip to the Gifberge’ where, in answer to the reader’s surprise at her resurrection in the narrative, Frieda’s mother berates both her daughter and apparently the book itself for the sin of fictional matricide: “Ask me for stories with neat endings and you won’t have to invent my death …You’ve killed me over and over so it was quite unnecessary…” (179-180) The obvious result of this outburst being to utterly discredit the accuracy of both the 8 stories following the mother’s first exit and ultimately the autobiographical elements of Wicomb’s book as a whole. Needless to say, the passage reveals itself essentially as fiction about the falsity of fiction. But a follow-up question should be asked here along the lines of ‘Why does Frieda actually have to ‘kill’ her mother in order to create her fiction?’ Well, I would suggest that, to Frieda’s mind, her mother’s presence has become, in an almost traumatic sense, inexpressible. However, thankfully, as a writer of ‘mere stories’, she doesn’t require what her mother calls “the courage to tell the whole truth” (179) in order to evoke her experiences. It is ‘fiction’s failure’ here- as previously mentioned- to purposely exclude the unnecessary elements of “the real” whilst happily taking what it can from “recognis[able] places and people” (ibid.) to help constitute its subjective truth. In most other pseudo- realistic texts this oblique reflection of personal history is merely taken for granted as the writer’s prerogative, but Wicomb draws concerted attention to it here so as to expose it as perhaps the most intrinsic paradox of fiction. The overstated mantra of all creative writing classes is, of course, to ‘write what you know’, but we can say that here Wicomb takes the opportunity to amend that advice to reflect the true ambiguity of any kind of representation. In her view- and Frieda’s- what you actually ‘know’ doesn’t have to match up exactly to the facts of your reality. “Everyone knows [the stories are] not real, not the truth.” Frieda replies to her mother, but that’s not to say they’re not, in themselves, truthful or without meaning. In fact, it is seemingly only through fiction that Frieda can attempt to reconcile her remembered history and present self-consciousness.

If my preceding elaborations have felt a touch too discursive, it is only because I have attempted to match and possibly disentangle the many overlapping webs of (meta)fictional ambiguity that Wicomb has woven into the supposed ‘looseness’ of the text. Taking into account the self-reflexive revelations of the last story, I like to think of the book in overview as being a successful representation of a failed autobiography, where Frieda’s mother’s resurrection exposes the defining ambiguity of all narratives. As such, this makes it the very point Wicomb means to convey in her own disavowal of the autobiographical elements of her stories. Nonetheless, what is ultimately affirmed beyond these underlying paradoxes is the necessity of narratives themselves: the fact that it is the right of all writers ‘not to keep quiet’ any longer.

Word Count: 1622

Reference and Passages List:

Beckett, S. 1983. Quoted from Worstward Ho in:http://thinkexist.com/quotation/ever_tried-ever_failed-no_matter-try_again- fail/14668.html [2014, May 2].

Hunter, E. & MacKenzie, C. Eds. 1993. Between the Lines II: Interviews with Nadine Gordimer, Menan du Plessis, Zoe Wicomb, Lauretta Ngcobo. Grahamstown: The National English Literary Museum.

Wicomb, Z. 2008. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Roggebaai: Umuzi.
1st Paragraph quote: From the story ‘You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town’. Pg. 83. Starting from “I wrote a poem about that day and showed Michael…”
Ending with “…I tore the paper into little bits”

2nd Paragraph quote: From the story ‘A Trip to the Gifberge’. Pg. 189.
Starting from “When I take Mamma a cup of cocoa…”
Ending with “ …perhaps you won’t need to make up those terrible stories hey?”

3rd Paragraph quote: From the story ‘A Trip to the Gifberge’. Pgs. 179-180. Starting from ““Stories”, she shouts, “you call them stories?”…
Ending with “…it was quite unnecessary to invent my death.”