Title: The One That Got Away (Short stories)
Author: Zoë Wicomb
Publisher: Umuzi
Format: Paperback
Pages: 190
ISBN: 978-1-4152-0052-0
History and identity, we have established beyond any doubt, are complex matters. Yet they ask to be encapsulated in some way, and they inevitably acquire a particular shape and meaning as we engage with them. Such "definition" may be afforded by manifestos and official histories, sociological analysis or archeological research, or whatnot; but inevitably works of art, and thus literature, also have an important role to play. Zoë Wicomb's latest collection of short stories, The One That Got Away (which takes Glasgow, Scotland, and Cape Town, South Africa as its primary settings), enters this field self-consciously and with a problematising intent.
The Scottish presence in South African history is a notable one: one thinks of Thomas Pringle who, despite residing at the Cape for only a few years, would go on to become South Africa's first canonical poet; of the Scottish soldiers and missionaries who established the Presbyterian influence; of Andrew Geddes Bain, who built some of our most memorable mountain passes and is assumed to have authored "Kaatje Kekkelbek". Yet while such references (all of which crop up in The One That Got Away) may at first glance seem to suggest a kind of one-way influence, a linear history of the transformation or, indeed, creation of South Africa, it may be revealing to think of the process "in reverse", ie to think of the ways in which these Scottish "givens" were in fact transformed - and variously enabled - by South Africa. Yet the problem is that then we remain stuck in a simple pattern of opposites, and consequently fail to register the convoluted give and take of influences operative in the moment when worlds meet.
At any rate, Wicomb's collection of twelve short stories is not really about this Scottish dimension of South Africa's history; nor is it even concerned with South African history per se. Rather, one might recognise here the creative rendering of two contexts which have themselves been home to someone who is, among other things, a noted literary scholar - someone, in other words, who has to negotiate the divide between a keen historical sense and lived experience. In shuttling between these two countries Wicomb's text explores the ineffably meshed character of identity, traversed by countless lines of influence. The stories are set in the "global village" of the present, yet also register the global entanglements of the past. In the process, Scotland itself becomes a less stable and certain point of reference than we might initially assume: while it may be seen to operate metonymically to imply Great Britain (and thus to "stand for" the centre of the British Empire), Scotland itself has a history of colonial oppression by England. A character like Grace, for instance, remains insensible of the difference between Scotland and England - her response is quite simply: "same place, same people" (27). It is a view in which we recognise a certain pragmatism, but also an undeniable historical insensitivity.
One of the ways in which Wicomb sets forth an unstable, surprising world is to problematise the status of memory. Memory - that on which both history and identity rely - has an important role to play in the challenging and rewriting of official histories. Yet, as is pointed out in the opening story, it also strives to fix and foreclose; it tends to tidy up traumatic existence, to gather together or trim all "loose ends" (10). As the title of Wicomb's collection suggests, many of these stories involve a haunting sense of lack or absence, of an elusive, wayward element in the structure of existence. Whether in the form of half-remembered quotes ("N2"), of a dead brother and a lost landscape ("Nothing like the wind"), of a sudden distance between friends ("Friends and goffels"), or of a sudden estrangement from oneself ("Neighbours"), the incompleteness of human existence persistently obtrudes itself. Several characters are brought to face the question of who they are, or find themselves, as does Grant Fotheringay in the opening story, "at a loose end" (9) - a fair description of the challenge posed by the present, in which one always has to resolve yet again in which direction to steer one's life.
However, 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; characters in one story turn out to be related to characters in another; people travel and leave traces of themselves elsewhere, or encounter themselves via the perspective of others. In the domain of everyday living the effects of inter-personal (and cross-cultural) encounters are uncanny and incalculable.
This is aptly demonstrated in the title story, in which an adventure novel (The One That Got Away by one Helen McCloy) belonging to a Glasgow library is stumbled upon in Cape Town library. The book's very misplacement hints at some prior, untold journey, and in turn begets another: Drew, an artist, anonymously returns the book to its home after carefully modifying it - by adding a second title page - so as to register within it the traces of its sojourn among books on mining in South Africa. A title page may, of course, be said to establish a book's identity, and Drew's modifications suggest that the book has been altered and its identity compounded by its (mis)classification in another part of the world. In other words, although Drew's actions would seem to bring one movement to a neat close - "A book must be returned to the library from which it was borrowed" (45) - they in fact do nothing of the sort, for the book that returns is no longer the book that once left the library for another hemisphere.
Another feature of Wicomb's book is that, as part of its proliferation of perspectives and impressions, it also draws attention to its own literary nature, and experiments with different registers. This makes for a sometimes uneven but generally engaging reading experience, one in which we are never quite sure of our destination. Even so, several of the stories manage to end surprisingly, not because of startling disclosures or ironic twists, but rather because a closing gesture, act, event, or statement suddenly exceeds what we took to be the frame of the tale, or propels the narrative in a new direction altogether. At the end of "The one that got away", for example, the third person narrator - who in the course of the story twice addresses the reader as narrator - suddenly appears in conversation with Drew, who seems uncomfortable at having been incorporated into "someone's story" (49). Ironically, even his objections also end up becoming part of the story itself. "Trompe l'oeil" ends with a dénouement of uncertain status: Does the passage describe the conclusion to Gavin and Bev's evening, or is it, rather, the conclusion of the story Gavin is reading, or perhaps even "the last page of a novel" (132) at which he has in the past stolen a pre-emptive glance? There is a sense in which these stories might be said to get away from their reader, to remain elusive without ever becoming obscure (although the ending of "Trompe l'oeil" comes close).
In its exploration of questions of identity in relation to questions of race, gender, and social class, and its consideration of the place of storytelling in the drama of identity, Wicomb's work is nothing if not topical. The strength of her writing, however, seems to me to exceed such "topicality" - the fact that it directly and self-consciously speaks to those concerns that at present dominate scholarly discourse. There is nothing belaboured about the design of the stories; there is a kind of playfulness about them, a sense of discovery. Yet one is constantly struck anew by a memorably accurate turn of phrase or a coolly timed formulation, as well as Wicomb's ability to make even simple words announce their complex linguistic heritage.
The prose admirably manages to register the evanescent play of consciousness as impinged upon by sense impressions, and in the process setting forth a landscape, a social space, a historical moment. An overt example of this occurs in "Nothing like the wind", when Elsie, listening "to the traffic on the Great Western Road", manages to "track [...] the sound of a double-decker bus along the incline from Kelvinbridge, an incline that pedestrians may barely be aware of, but as the traffic lumbers up towards the robots - she must remember to say traffic lights - the sound betrays the gradient" (137). What is captured here is one of the myriad ways in which we locate ourselves in - and place ourselves in relation to - the world we inhabit. The topography makes itself felt in our daily experience even before we render it intelligible in the form of language (whether we ultimately choose to speak of "robots" or "traffic lights").
In the "Acknowledgements" at the end of the book it is pointed out that the last four stories are "older" stories and have previously appeared elsewhere. This would account for the absence of any overt Scottish reference in two of them, "N2" and "Another story". The latter, which also closes the book, has already acquired what amounts to the status of a critical set piece, precisely because of its focus on storytelling, its undeniable validation of the significance of storytelling in relation to identity even as it critiques the project of simply countering one "official" history with another.
The One That Got Away is marked by a sense of homelessness, a sense that identity is never exactly only here or there, that the world - and in particular our world as it is at the present - has the ability suddenly to call into question what we thought we were. To do so Wicomb does not resort to the outlandish or the extreme. She employs recognisable characters; here and there actions and gestures are repeated, as are perceptions. Like the device of focusing on Cape Town and Glasgow (instead of co-opting a still wider, global stage), the point is less to stress infinite variety than to establish patterns of behaviour and perception that nevertheless never produce the merely identical. We gain a sense here of the "intertextual" quality of life itself, in which moments a acquire a certain weight, or stake a certain claim on us, because of their connection and resonance with a vast fund of prior experiences or events (this effect is more readily achieved in the novel, which constructs a world, than in the short story, which presents a striking glimpse of a world - but this is precisely where Wicomb's use of interconnected stories is so effective). These stories promise to engage the reader for a long time to come.