The Troubling of Place

Joyce, in spite of his own peripatetic existence, set his first three works of fiction solidly in Dublin, even naming his short story collection after the inhabitants of the city; there are repeated intimations of lives lived in other places, but the distinction between ‘here’ and ‘there’ is consistently maintained. Although other modernist writers registered the experience of travelling to a foreign environment – Richardson's Pilgrimage, a work about England if there ever was one, begins in Germany and moves to the Swiss Alps in the volume Oberland, for example – geographical rootedness remains a common feature of their fiction, as it had been for their Victorian predecessors. This strong concern with location is inherited by the South African-Scottish writer Zoe Wicomb, but she complicates it by exploring the ways in which spaces can overlap or collide in the consciousnesses of those whose existence has a global dimension.

Mercia Murray, the Namaqualand-born central character of Wicomb's 2014 novel October, is on the train back to Glasgow after a rather unsuccessful trip to Edinburgh when she passes through the small town of Falkirk. Seeing the name on the station signs she reflects, ‘No escape from home there’. An explanation of this unlikely association between provincial Scotland and provincial South Africa follows: ‘Falkirk was the name stamped in relief on the three-legged cast-iron pots at home, pots manufactured for the colony, for Africans to cook their staple mealiepap over an open fire’ (112). This is no mere verbal coincidence of the sort Joyce exploited to the limit in Finnegans Wake, but has a basis in the real world: Falkirk Foundry (later Falkirk Iron Company) was established in 1810 and grew to be a leading supplier of cast-iron goods to the Empire; by 1914 it had 1500 employees, and it stayed in business until 1981. Falkirk pots were successfully marketed in South Africa to the indigenous population to replace the clay pots that had traditionally been used for cooking.