Shifting Comprehension in Novels by Abdulrazak Gurnah and Zoë Wicomb: Lingualism in Action

Abstract

In an attempt to conceptualise literary multilingualism—or just “lingualism,” to use Robert Stockhammer’s term—without reifying language boundaries, this article reads literary fiction as a negotiation of different regimes of comprehensibility. These negotiations occur (1) on the level of the story-world, (2) materially, in the mediation of the narrative as book artefact and (3) between these two levels. Lingualism, then, is not just context-sensitive but context-constituted. The apparently anarchic freedom of literary language is held in check by regimes of comprehensibility that ensure that even nonsense will carry meaning. The article’s analysis of works by Abdulrazak Gurnah and Zoë Wicomb shows how they engage potentially transformative moments of (in) comprehensibility in what Pratt named the colonial “contact zone.”