Tupperware and Flowerville

Abstract

Consumerism, as represented in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2000) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), provides a useful theoretical model for rethinking the relationships between earlier texts and the later texts that allude to them, particularly across such comparative contexts as Ireland and South Africa. In both novels, food and kitchenware make possible and render visible characters’ communal relationships. Both novels represent consumerism in detail, from shopping trips to the attribution of meaning to consumer goods, and refer to the other people essential to one’s seemingly individualist consumerism, such as milkmen and Tupperware party hosts. Wicomb’s Sally Dirkse pursues this relationship-making capacity of consumer goods to the point of asserting that she and her husband David, both classified as “coloured” in South Africa, are “Tupperware people”. In this essay I trace how both David’s Story and Ulysses frame consumerism as a politically productive means of theorizing and asserting one’s communal identity. Furthermore, I argue these two novels’ shared interest in diet, consumerism, and identity points to a useful reframing of intertextuality as a productive form of consumption that transforms both the consumer and the consumed – both the allusive text and the text it references. Such a critical model of intertextuality challenges Eurocentric accounts of modernism’s influence on later, similarly formally experimental texts.