South African Great War poetry 1914-1918 : a literary-historiographical analysis

Abstract

Within a southern African literary-historiographical milieu, the corpse of the First World War (1914-1918) either wanders in the ‘darkling’ woods or wades in the ice-mirrored sea of a sinister psychological landscape. The veld, with its moon, flowers, bowers, animals and sea, is a potent South African metaphysical conceit in which both the white and black corpse – the horrific waste product of war – is seemingly safely hidden within euphemistic shadows. However, these shades are metonymic and metaphorical offshoots of an Adamastorian nightmare, which has its inception in a nascent South African literary tradition. This thesis explores these literary-historiographical leftovers within the war poetry of both civilians and soldiers. Both ‘white’ and ‘black’ poetry is discussed in a similar context of dressing the corpse in meaning: a meaning that resides deep within the wound of loss. In tracing this blood spoor in the poetry a highly eclectic approach has been followed. As the title illustrates, both literary and historical approaches were used in analysing the effect of the Great War on the poetry, and by implication, on the society from which it sprung. It is, therefore, a cultural history as well as an intellectual subtext of wartorn South Africa that has been scrutinised, and is revealed in its poetic literature. Archival research and the scouring of individual volumes were the sources of the poems for this study. This is true especially with regards to the ‘white’ poetry, where very few examples of poetry have been published in secondary histories. Various anthologies and studies on ‘black’ poetry considerably lightened the search for war izibongo. A variety of literary theoretical approaches have been most useful in extracting the subtext of early 20th century South African history. The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s collective unconscious have been most insightful. The poststructuralist theory of Julia Kristeva has cast more light on the recalcitrant corpse, the main waste product of war. David Lewis-Williams’s recent archaeological-anthropological approach has also been crucial in understanding the indigenous izibongo by putting forward Neuroscience as an explanation of the universally held neuropsychological hallucinatory poetic experience. Finally, war poetry in this thesis is seen as verse written by both soldiers and civilians as a response to the reality – or rather surreal unreality – of conflict, in an effort to come to terms with the abjection of both body and mind. Thea Harrington‘s manqué reading of Kristeva’s poststructuralist corpse is used as a referent for the abject, or loss thereof, that is to be found in the war poetry. Throughout the thesis, the term manqué is used to refer to the corpse as a fluid linguistic-psychological signifier saturated with loss. It is the manqué that has essentially remained hidden behind the various political histories of the war.