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.