'All Chinese boxes, hey, where will it all end?’ : ‘Trompe L’Oeil’ e gioco metafinzionale in The One That Got Away di Zoë Wicomb

The collection of short stories The One That Got Away (2008) by the South African writer Zoë Wicomb presents a great number of characters who are involved in some way or another in the act of writing or in artistic representations. Indeed, Wicomb’s short-story cycle lays bare pivotal aspects of the politics of representation. The One That Got Away foregrounds the textuality of its stories and of reality through a subtle interplay between the conventions of literary realism and postmodernist strategies. My aim in presenting this paper is to discuss the narrative techniques in one story of The One That Got Away in particular, namely “Trompe L’Oeil”. As the title suggests, in “Trompe L’Oeil” Wicomb powerfully and repeatedly conflates the real and the fictional in the narrative space of a single short story. The importance that textuality plays in the story bears witness to Wicomb’s endeavour with literature: in her opera omnia, and in “Trompe L’Oeil” in particular, the South African writer always tries to create gaps and fissures in the apparently smooth texture of reality. Her preoccupation with blurring the distinction between realism and textualism, thus, is both aesthetic and political. By hinting at the artificial construction of her story, Wicomb is able to challenge the supposed heteronormativity of realism, exposing it as a mere literary convention. Wicomb’s use of metafiction mirrors her concerns over the South African socio-political context, and more generally, over ethnicity, class, and gender. My paper, thus, also purports to discuss Wicomb’s narrative devices in “Trompe L’Oeil” as a means to defy monolithic authority, for myse en abyme, or the infinite reproduction of a trompe l’oeil, paves the way for more stories to be told – and, ultimately, to be written.