Shovel them under and let me work-I am the grass; I cover all. So begins Carl Sandburg's poem, 'G... more Shovel them under and let me work-I am the grass; I cover all. So begins Carl Sandburg's poem, 'Grass', which, published in 1918, commemorates the processes of nature responding to the human ruins of war. Of course, grass cannot 'speak'. To take up the poem in its own terms, readers must enter into a fictional contract with the poet that enables it to do so. We remain aware that the 'person' speaking is the mediated voice of the poet; yet his text works by inviting us to consider the work of the grass that overlays and ultimately obliterates the violent traces of war. By contrast, Langston Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' retains for its speaker a human voice, identified by his African ancestry and by his witnessing Lincoln's liberation of American slaves. 'I've known rivers', he says (Hughes 1921): I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. (p. 71) Here is no attempt to speak for water, but rather a brooding similitude set up between the speaker and the 'ancient dusky rivers' he evokes. Published in 1921, 3 years after Sandburg's 'Grass', the poem shares with it imagery drawn from nature that insists on an intrinsic interrelatedness with human experience. In a more recent poem, Ted Hughes (1970:93) too eschews first-person, while focalising 'How water began to play'. The form the poem takes is repetitive. The assertions 'water wanted to live', 'it went to' and 'it came weeping back' recur multiple times. On its ventures, water meets 'the sun'; 'the trees', which 'burn' and 'rot'; and 'the flowers', which 'crumple'. When it goes to 'the womb' it meets 'blood', 'knife', 'maggot and rottenness'. Then it wants to die. Having been 'to time … through the stone door'; after searching 'through all space for nothingness', it wants to die. Finally it has 'no weeping left', and lies 'at the bottom of all things / utterly worn out utterly clear'. Hughes's representation relates to what scientists call the water cycle: 'The interdependence and continuous movement of all forms of water provide the basis for the concept of the hydrological cycle', say Ward and Robinson (1990:3) in their Principles of Hydrology. The major processes which make up the cycle are evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. Not all precipitation reaches the ground. What does, follows three courses: remaining on the surface Bordered by the Swartberg mountain range to the north and the Cape Fold Mountains to the south, the semi-desert region and its people inspired Pauline Smith's eponymous collection of stories, The Little Karoo (1925). Earlier critics have argued that, in Smith's stories, the region's geographical boundaries (as well as her use of Afrikaans-inflected language) 'confine' and 'restrict' the world of its characters. Informed by the precepts of ecocriticism, this paper provides a fresh take on Smith's stories of the Karoo, close to a century after their first publication. Our intention is to 'read for water' after Isabel Hoffman, Sarah Nuttall and Charne Lavery, as the motility of the streams and rivers that flow in and through this arid landscape challenges the fixity and enclosure the earlier critics read into her work. Drawing on Hubert Zapf's conception of literature as 'cultural ecology', we are interested in the 'energetic processes' of water in the stories, and the 'ecological space' in which it makes its impact. Rather than reading water as being at the behest of humans, we seek to recognise the valency it is given in the stories, and in this light to explore the impacts of its presence, its actions, and its absence. Contribution: This article adds to the emerging field of ecocriticism in South Africa by exploring the literary valency given to water in Pauline Smith's stories of the Karoo.
Literator -Journal of Literary Criticism, Comparative Linguistics and Literary Studies, 2024
Bordered by the Swartberg mountain range to the north and the Cape Fold Mountains to the south, t... more Bordered by the Swartberg mountain range to the north and the Cape Fold Mountains to the south, the semi-desert region and its people inspired Pauline Smith’s eponymous collection of stories, The Little Karoo (1925). Earlier critics have argued that, in Smith’s stories, the region’s geographical boundaries (as well as her use of Afrikaans-inflected language) ‘confine’ and ‘restrict’ the world of its characters. Informed by the precepts of ecocriticism, this paper provides a fresh take on Smith’s stories of the Karoo, close to a century after their first publication. Our intention is to ‘read for water’ after Isabel Hoffman, Sarah Nuttall and Charne Lavery, as the motility of the streams and rivers that flow in and through this arid landscape challenges the fixity and enclosure the earlier critics read into her work. Drawing on Hubert Zapf’s conception of literature as ‘cultural ecology’, we are interested in the ‘energetic processes’ of water in the stories, and the ‘ecological space’ in which it makes its impact. Rather than reading water as being at the behest of humans, we seek to recognise the valency it is given in the stories, and in this light to explore the impacts of its presence, its actions, and its absence.
After many months or working at home, it is heartening to visit campus and be greeted by familiar... more After many months or working at home, it is heartening to visit campus and be greeted by familiar faces: people whose children I taught in the past; people who have themselves been my students; people who know me as a colleague and call my husband the nickname he earned leading a group of students to teach in the Chapel many decades ago. And, having spent several days now clearing my office, I have reaquainted myself with a working life that has slipped into the past: mounds of paper generated by lecture notes, tests, exams, secondary reading for students; documents relating to the committees, the panels, the task teams, the working groups that dealt with processes and generated policies and plans; records that reflect the trajectory of a long career. It is something of a shock to meet myself again in this way, to reencounter relationships, to remember interactions sometimes traumatic, sometimes sad, sometimes supportive, sometimes shocking, even sometimes funny now that distance has intervened. And, having cleared my office, it is heartwrenching to think of never going back; to see myself out of the building with no acknowledgement or recognition from current colleagues, with no formal farewell. And yet this is what comes, perhaps, of lives being lived at a remove, as most of our lives are at present, from direct contact from one another. Like many couples, my husband and I, watching TV in the evenings, at times tussle over who takes control of the remote. The nickname this device acquired in our household is the 'struction' and of course its purpose is primarily to tell the television which channel we want to watch; how loud or soft to play it; how fast to forward it or to rewind. It serves another purpose, too, which is to free us to sit together and avoid getting up to deal with dials, although this closeness is disrupted when we can't agree on who gets the gadget. It is a small scenario that is metaphoric, I think, of 'the remote' that we must all contend with now. Although the media of instruction are different, my teaching in these final years has all been remote, with communication channelled through email, phone calls, WhatsApp, Teams and Zoom. The term Fourth Industrial Revolution held no sway with me until Covid hit, when we were called on to find ways of reaching students that didn't involve sharing physical presence with them. This has posed inevitable problems: how to ensure those tenuous lines of connection remain open; how to ensure we are speaking to the right people; how to get these people to respond when we do so; how to assess students securely and meaningfully; how to assist when trouble comes, as it often does. And yet this 'remote' has done more: it has complicated and nuanced the nature of academic presence. Its opposite, we have learned, is not in fact 'absence', but rather relationship stretched and extended over space and over time. One can leave a message for a student and find it answered the next day; one can reply, from the site of one's home work space, to a query
Both film-maker Timothy Gabb and anthropologist Michael de Jongh have noticed the disappearance o... more Both film-maker Timothy Gabb and anthropologist Michael de Jongh have noticed the disappearance of the karretjiemense, a marginalised people who travel the Karoo desert using donkey carts or karretjies. Having run a petrol station in Prince Albert in the Eastern Cape, author Carol Campbell’s debut novel My Children Have Faces features a family of karretjiemense who wander the Karoo desert and in real ways ‘belong to’ it. This belonging is reflected in the novel through the ‘interchanges and interconnections between [their] human corporeality and the more-than-human’, which ecocritic Stacey Alaimo calls ‘transcorporeality’. It is an engagement that enables the resilience of the tight-knit family to the vulnerabilities of living in the desert in order to escape the pursuit of the murderous Miskiet. Campbell reflects this transcorporeality, fictionally, through naming, through animal imagery and through the motifs of smell and of movement. She also registers how transcorporeality dwind...
Ordinary definitions of the word 'dirt' do indeed carry negative connotations. Wikipedia calls di... more Ordinary definitions of the word 'dirt' do indeed carry negative connotations. Wikipedia calls dirt 'a blanket term for unclean matter'; the Oxford Dictionary defines it as 'a substance, such as mud or dust, that soils someone or something'. The roots of the word, evidently, are old Scandinavian 'drit' or excrement, although the form of the word has shifted, and its uses broadened, in modern English, to include the more colloquial 'soil or earth'. The conference call couched it as something 'essential', something 'material', and emphasised how the concept 'reaches out' in a range of ways. Twentieth century theorists have associated the term, variously, with 'disorder', with 'abjection' and with 'disgust'. Recently, philosopher Olli Lagerspetz has argued against the 'easy reductionism' of some theorists for whom 'dirt is not really dirt but something else' (Smith 2018); in Mary Douglas's case as 'matter out of place'; in Julia Kristeva's as an idea banished to 'the misty regions of symbolism'; and, in Martha Nussbaum's, entailing 'disgust'. In words he takes from Wittgenstein, Lagerspetz discerns-and condemns-a dominant trend, in theoretical debate The 2019 Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference took as its theme the subject of 'dirt', and inspired this paper which examines the 'journeys into dirt' by explorer figures in Patrick White's 1957 novel Voss and Robyn Davidson's 1980 memoir Tracks. Drawing on theory of dirt developed by material ecocritic Helen Sullivan and by philosopher Olli Lagerspetz we demonstrate that the narratives of their travels show them engaged in transformative encounters with the Australian desert. In doing so we challenge Tom Lynch's reading of the two texts as 'traversals' which portray the desert as 'alien, hostile and undifferentiated void'. Using Keith Garebian's distinction between 'desert' and 'garden' we examine how these explorers find and respond to 'the garden in the desert'. Davidson couches her memoir as an exploration narrative and treats the desert as a 'lived space' which she 'writes home'; having learned how to 'be' in it, and so to 'recover' the garden in the desert. Like her, Voss and his companions experience the desert as beautiful and inspirational, even, at times, nurturant and sustaining. Since Voss's orientation is spiritual and transcendent, however, White's treatment of the desert shows conceptual and corporeal boundaries between human and environment shifting and fading in their interaction with it. In both texts episodes occur of immersion in dirt-dust in Tracks and mud in Voss-which serve to illustrate and to emphasise the interconnectedness we humans have with the essential, elemental environment of dirt.
Literator - Journal of Literary Criticism, Comparative Linguistics and Literary Studies , 2022
The 2019 Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference took as its theme
the subj... more The 2019 Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference took as its theme the subject of ‘dirt’, and inspired this paper which examines the ‘journeys into dirt’ by explorer figures in Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss and Robyn Davidson’s 1980 memoir Tracks. Drawing on theory of dirt developed by material ecocritic Helen Sullivan and by philosopher Olli Lagerspetz we demonstrate that the narratives of their travels show them engaged in transformative encounters with the Australian desert. In doing so we challenge Tom Lynch’s reading of the two texts as ‘traversals’ which portray the desert as ‘alien, hostile and undifferentiated void’. Using Keith Garebian’s distinction between ‘desert’ and ‘garden’ we examine how these explorers find and respond to ‘the garden in the desert’. Davidson couches her memoir as an exploration narrative and treats the desert as a ‘lived space’ which she ‘writes home’; having learned how to ‘be’ in it, and so to ‘recover’ the garden in the desert. Like her, Voss and his companions experience the desert as beautiful and inspirational, even, at times, nurturant and sustaining. Since Voss’s orientation is spiritual and transcendent, however, White’s treatment of the desert shows conceptual and corporeal boundaries between human and environment shifting and fading in their interaction with it. In both texts episodes occur of immersion in dirt – dust in Tracks and mud in Voss – which serve to illustrate and to emphasise the interconnectedness we humans have with the essential, elemental environment of dirt. Keywords: deserts; journeys; travel narratives; dirt theory; ecocriticism; Voss; Tracks.
Sylvia Plath’s poetry is at times tortuous: she practiced her craft with deliberacy and seriousne... more Sylvia Plath’s poetry is at times tortuous: she practiced her craft with deliberacy and seriousness, and the complexity and difficulty of her life is often painfully registered in her writing. Yet her poetry at times also reflects a joie de vivre that enlivens and responds with whimsy and humour to these travails. In ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ we see something of this: her experimenting with form in order to render a response to a particular instance of the natural world; the rook that is arrivant, that is harbinger of fleeting meeting. What is most arresting in this, my favourite of her poems, is her tone: the tongue-in-cheek sass of her relation with the bird and the context which casts it up in a sublime light.
On first reading 'Amy Foster' I found it puzzling that Conrad had chosen to name his stor... more On first reading 'Amy Foster' I found it puzzling that Conrad had chosen to name his story after 'the woman' and not 'the man', since so much of his imaginative interest seemed to be vested in the history of Yanko Gooral, alien washed up on the shores of English civilisation. In this respect, the story offers an interesting counterpoint to the situation in Heart of Darkness, in which an English narrator recounts his story of alien experiences on an English ship riding at anchor on an English river. Of course, it is expressive of both Conrad's alienation and his irony that the experiences of English civilisation should be as damaging to the alien castaway as the experiences of Kurtz were to him who ventured into the 'primitive interior' of African 'darkness'. In another respect, the narrative structure of both tales is quite similar, since in both we encounter named narrators whose narratives are in turn framed by the anonymous listeners wh...
For some time now critics have been interested in Pauline Smith's use of space and spatialisa... more For some time now critics have been interested in Pauline Smith's use of space and spatialisation. During the 80s in particular this interest was couched in terms of the 'world' of her work: the 'world' she was said to create or construct by writing. Her fiction was read as generated out of the narrative choices she makes, and evaluated (and judged) in terms of the ideology said to underlie and motivate the fictional world thus engendered. J.M. Coetzee's 1981 'Pauline Smith and the Afrikaans Language', Sheila Roberts's 1983 'A Confined World: A Rereading of Pauline Smith', and Dorothy Driver's 1989 'God, Fathers and White South Africans: The World of Pauline Smith' are cases in point. To a certain extent this critical focus coheres with Smith's own sense of 'writing a world'. In a letter to Frank Swinnerton of 15 February 1936, she remarks: The narrowness of some of the lives lived in this valley is what Arnold woul...
And if I write it down, maybe it will cease to trouble my mind. And if I write it down, people ma... more And if I write it down, maybe it will cease to trouble my mind. And if I write it down, people may know that he was two men, and that one was brave and gentle; and they may know, when they judge and condemn, that this one struggled with himself in darkness and alone, calling on ...
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 1013929x 1996 9677993, Jun 1, 2011
... stoppedunexpectedly in front of asquarcof light where men lounged withglassesin their hands, ... more ... stoppedunexpectedly in front of asquarcof light where men lounged withglassesin their hands, and one was carried out into the brilliantly-lit bar for asip ofsearing liquid 'to keep the fever away.' Or it ... A few mendressed in khaki weretalkingaimlessly aboutthe prospects ofrain. ...
Silence as a concept is deservedly receiving increased critical attention. In The Empire Writes B... more Silence as a concept is deservedly receiving increased critical attention. In The Empire Writes Back, for example, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin make this claim: 'It is this concept of silence, not any specific cultural concept of meaning, which is the active characteristic linking all post-...
Yet the relations of history and fiction are by no means as straightforward or as unproblematic a... more Yet the relations of history and fiction are by no means as straightforward or as unproblematic as this judgement would imply. One of the latest critics to take issue with it is Tony Voss, who points out in his Introduction to the 1989 Donker edition that “[tlhe true originality ofMhudi ...
Dan Jacobson is a prolific writer whose oeuvre spans some 65 years, and includes a range of diffe... more Dan Jacobson is a prolific writer whose oeuvre spans some 65 years, and includes a range of different texts. He has lived in Britain for most of his adult life, but his roots are South African, and he set much of his early work in this country. It has however fallen into relative critical obscurity. His 1959 story 'The Zulu and the Zeide'has been widely anthologised, but deserves more serious and more specific critical attention that it has recently received, because it evinces at an elemental level the ways in which, and the extent to which, human caring was able to challenge, arrest and undermine the public proscriptions set up to define and control interaction between people in our country during the apartheid years. This essay explores the embodiment of caritas in the story, the spatialisation that reflects the boundaries (and the crossing of boundaries) of the apartheid world he depicts, the micropolitics of power between the characters in the story and within the complex of relationships that develop between them, and the ethics of our reading of the story.
Sylvia Plath's poetry is at times tortuous: she practiced her craft with deliberacy and seriousne... more Sylvia Plath's poetry is at times tortuous: she practiced her craft with deliberacy and seriousness, and the complexity and difficulty of her life is often painfully registered in her writing. Yet her poetry at times also reflects a joie de vivre that enlivens and responds with whimsy and humour to these travails. In 'Black Rook in Rainy Weather' we see something of this: her experimenting with form in order to render a response to a particular instance of the natural world; the rook that is arrivant, that is harbinger of fleeting meeting. What is most arresting in this, my favourite of her poems, is her tone: the tongue-in-cheek sass of her relation with the bird and the context which casts it up in a sublime light.
Shovel them under and let me work-I am the grass; I cover all. So begins Carl Sandburg's poem, 'G... more Shovel them under and let me work-I am the grass; I cover all. So begins Carl Sandburg's poem, 'Grass', which, published in 1918, commemorates the processes of nature responding to the human ruins of war. Of course, grass cannot 'speak'. To take up the poem in its own terms, readers must enter into a fictional contract with the poet that enables it to do so. We remain aware that the 'person' speaking is the mediated voice of the poet; yet his text works by inviting us to consider the work of the grass that overlays and ultimately obliterates the violent traces of war. By contrast, Langston Hughes's 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' retains for its speaker a human voice, identified by his African ancestry and by his witnessing Lincoln's liberation of American slaves. 'I've known rivers', he says (Hughes 1921): I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. (p. 71) Here is no attempt to speak for water, but rather a brooding similitude set up between the speaker and the 'ancient dusky rivers' he evokes. Published in 1921, 3 years after Sandburg's 'Grass', the poem shares with it imagery drawn from nature that insists on an intrinsic interrelatedness with human experience. In a more recent poem, Ted Hughes (1970:93) too eschews first-person, while focalising 'How water began to play'. The form the poem takes is repetitive. The assertions 'water wanted to live', 'it went to' and 'it came weeping back' recur multiple times. On its ventures, water meets 'the sun'; 'the trees', which 'burn' and 'rot'; and 'the flowers', which 'crumple'. When it goes to 'the womb' it meets 'blood', 'knife', 'maggot and rottenness'. Then it wants to die. Having been 'to time … through the stone door'; after searching 'through all space for nothingness', it wants to die. Finally it has 'no weeping left', and lies 'at the bottom of all things / utterly worn out utterly clear'. Hughes's representation relates to what scientists call the water cycle: 'The interdependence and continuous movement of all forms of water provide the basis for the concept of the hydrological cycle', say Ward and Robinson (1990:3) in their Principles of Hydrology. The major processes which make up the cycle are evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. Not all precipitation reaches the ground. What does, follows three courses: remaining on the surface Bordered by the Swartberg mountain range to the north and the Cape Fold Mountains to the south, the semi-desert region and its people inspired Pauline Smith's eponymous collection of stories, The Little Karoo (1925). Earlier critics have argued that, in Smith's stories, the region's geographical boundaries (as well as her use of Afrikaans-inflected language) 'confine' and 'restrict' the world of its characters. Informed by the precepts of ecocriticism, this paper provides a fresh take on Smith's stories of the Karoo, close to a century after their first publication. Our intention is to 'read for water' after Isabel Hoffman, Sarah Nuttall and Charne Lavery, as the motility of the streams and rivers that flow in and through this arid landscape challenges the fixity and enclosure the earlier critics read into her work. Drawing on Hubert Zapf's conception of literature as 'cultural ecology', we are interested in the 'energetic processes' of water in the stories, and the 'ecological space' in which it makes its impact. Rather than reading water as being at the behest of humans, we seek to recognise the valency it is given in the stories, and in this light to explore the impacts of its presence, its actions, and its absence. Contribution: This article adds to the emerging field of ecocriticism in South Africa by exploring the literary valency given to water in Pauline Smith's stories of the Karoo.
Literator -Journal of Literary Criticism, Comparative Linguistics and Literary Studies, 2024
Bordered by the Swartberg mountain range to the north and the Cape Fold Mountains to the south, t... more Bordered by the Swartberg mountain range to the north and the Cape Fold Mountains to the south, the semi-desert region and its people inspired Pauline Smith’s eponymous collection of stories, The Little Karoo (1925). Earlier critics have argued that, in Smith’s stories, the region’s geographical boundaries (as well as her use of Afrikaans-inflected language) ‘confine’ and ‘restrict’ the world of its characters. Informed by the precepts of ecocriticism, this paper provides a fresh take on Smith’s stories of the Karoo, close to a century after their first publication. Our intention is to ‘read for water’ after Isabel Hoffman, Sarah Nuttall and Charne Lavery, as the motility of the streams and rivers that flow in and through this arid landscape challenges the fixity and enclosure the earlier critics read into her work. Drawing on Hubert Zapf’s conception of literature as ‘cultural ecology’, we are interested in the ‘energetic processes’ of water in the stories, and the ‘ecological space’ in which it makes its impact. Rather than reading water as being at the behest of humans, we seek to recognise the valency it is given in the stories, and in this light to explore the impacts of its presence, its actions, and its absence.
After many months or working at home, it is heartening to visit campus and be greeted by familiar... more After many months or working at home, it is heartening to visit campus and be greeted by familiar faces: people whose children I taught in the past; people who have themselves been my students; people who know me as a colleague and call my husband the nickname he earned leading a group of students to teach in the Chapel many decades ago. And, having spent several days now clearing my office, I have reaquainted myself with a working life that has slipped into the past: mounds of paper generated by lecture notes, tests, exams, secondary reading for students; documents relating to the committees, the panels, the task teams, the working groups that dealt with processes and generated policies and plans; records that reflect the trajectory of a long career. It is something of a shock to meet myself again in this way, to reencounter relationships, to remember interactions sometimes traumatic, sometimes sad, sometimes supportive, sometimes shocking, even sometimes funny now that distance has intervened. And, having cleared my office, it is heartwrenching to think of never going back; to see myself out of the building with no acknowledgement or recognition from current colleagues, with no formal farewell. And yet this is what comes, perhaps, of lives being lived at a remove, as most of our lives are at present, from direct contact from one another. Like many couples, my husband and I, watching TV in the evenings, at times tussle over who takes control of the remote. The nickname this device acquired in our household is the 'struction' and of course its purpose is primarily to tell the television which channel we want to watch; how loud or soft to play it; how fast to forward it or to rewind. It serves another purpose, too, which is to free us to sit together and avoid getting up to deal with dials, although this closeness is disrupted when we can't agree on who gets the gadget. It is a small scenario that is metaphoric, I think, of 'the remote' that we must all contend with now. Although the media of instruction are different, my teaching in these final years has all been remote, with communication channelled through email, phone calls, WhatsApp, Teams and Zoom. The term Fourth Industrial Revolution held no sway with me until Covid hit, when we were called on to find ways of reaching students that didn't involve sharing physical presence with them. This has posed inevitable problems: how to ensure those tenuous lines of connection remain open; how to ensure we are speaking to the right people; how to get these people to respond when we do so; how to assess students securely and meaningfully; how to assist when trouble comes, as it often does. And yet this 'remote' has done more: it has complicated and nuanced the nature of academic presence. Its opposite, we have learned, is not in fact 'absence', but rather relationship stretched and extended over space and over time. One can leave a message for a student and find it answered the next day; one can reply, from the site of one's home work space, to a query
Both film-maker Timothy Gabb and anthropologist Michael de Jongh have noticed the disappearance o... more Both film-maker Timothy Gabb and anthropologist Michael de Jongh have noticed the disappearance of the karretjiemense, a marginalised people who travel the Karoo desert using donkey carts or karretjies. Having run a petrol station in Prince Albert in the Eastern Cape, author Carol Campbell’s debut novel My Children Have Faces features a family of karretjiemense who wander the Karoo desert and in real ways ‘belong to’ it. This belonging is reflected in the novel through the ‘interchanges and interconnections between [their] human corporeality and the more-than-human’, which ecocritic Stacey Alaimo calls ‘transcorporeality’. It is an engagement that enables the resilience of the tight-knit family to the vulnerabilities of living in the desert in order to escape the pursuit of the murderous Miskiet. Campbell reflects this transcorporeality, fictionally, through naming, through animal imagery and through the motifs of smell and of movement. She also registers how transcorporeality dwind...
Ordinary definitions of the word 'dirt' do indeed carry negative connotations. Wikipedia calls di... more Ordinary definitions of the word 'dirt' do indeed carry negative connotations. Wikipedia calls dirt 'a blanket term for unclean matter'; the Oxford Dictionary defines it as 'a substance, such as mud or dust, that soils someone or something'. The roots of the word, evidently, are old Scandinavian 'drit' or excrement, although the form of the word has shifted, and its uses broadened, in modern English, to include the more colloquial 'soil or earth'. The conference call couched it as something 'essential', something 'material', and emphasised how the concept 'reaches out' in a range of ways. Twentieth century theorists have associated the term, variously, with 'disorder', with 'abjection' and with 'disgust'. Recently, philosopher Olli Lagerspetz has argued against the 'easy reductionism' of some theorists for whom 'dirt is not really dirt but something else' (Smith 2018); in Mary Douglas's case as 'matter out of place'; in Julia Kristeva's as an idea banished to 'the misty regions of symbolism'; and, in Martha Nussbaum's, entailing 'disgust'. In words he takes from Wittgenstein, Lagerspetz discerns-and condemns-a dominant trend, in theoretical debate The 2019 Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference took as its theme the subject of 'dirt', and inspired this paper which examines the 'journeys into dirt' by explorer figures in Patrick White's 1957 novel Voss and Robyn Davidson's 1980 memoir Tracks. Drawing on theory of dirt developed by material ecocritic Helen Sullivan and by philosopher Olli Lagerspetz we demonstrate that the narratives of their travels show them engaged in transformative encounters with the Australian desert. In doing so we challenge Tom Lynch's reading of the two texts as 'traversals' which portray the desert as 'alien, hostile and undifferentiated void'. Using Keith Garebian's distinction between 'desert' and 'garden' we examine how these explorers find and respond to 'the garden in the desert'. Davidson couches her memoir as an exploration narrative and treats the desert as a 'lived space' which she 'writes home'; having learned how to 'be' in it, and so to 'recover' the garden in the desert. Like her, Voss and his companions experience the desert as beautiful and inspirational, even, at times, nurturant and sustaining. Since Voss's orientation is spiritual and transcendent, however, White's treatment of the desert shows conceptual and corporeal boundaries between human and environment shifting and fading in their interaction with it. In both texts episodes occur of immersion in dirt-dust in Tracks and mud in Voss-which serve to illustrate and to emphasise the interconnectedness we humans have with the essential, elemental environment of dirt.
Literator - Journal of Literary Criticism, Comparative Linguistics and Literary Studies , 2022
The 2019 Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference took as its theme
the subj... more The 2019 Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference took as its theme the subject of ‘dirt’, and inspired this paper which examines the ‘journeys into dirt’ by explorer figures in Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss and Robyn Davidson’s 1980 memoir Tracks. Drawing on theory of dirt developed by material ecocritic Helen Sullivan and by philosopher Olli Lagerspetz we demonstrate that the narratives of their travels show them engaged in transformative encounters with the Australian desert. In doing so we challenge Tom Lynch’s reading of the two texts as ‘traversals’ which portray the desert as ‘alien, hostile and undifferentiated void’. Using Keith Garebian’s distinction between ‘desert’ and ‘garden’ we examine how these explorers find and respond to ‘the garden in the desert’. Davidson couches her memoir as an exploration narrative and treats the desert as a ‘lived space’ which she ‘writes home’; having learned how to ‘be’ in it, and so to ‘recover’ the garden in the desert. Like her, Voss and his companions experience the desert as beautiful and inspirational, even, at times, nurturant and sustaining. Since Voss’s orientation is spiritual and transcendent, however, White’s treatment of the desert shows conceptual and corporeal boundaries between human and environment shifting and fading in their interaction with it. In both texts episodes occur of immersion in dirt – dust in Tracks and mud in Voss – which serve to illustrate and to emphasise the interconnectedness we humans have with the essential, elemental environment of dirt. Keywords: deserts; journeys; travel narratives; dirt theory; ecocriticism; Voss; Tracks.
Sylvia Plath’s poetry is at times tortuous: she practiced her craft with deliberacy and seriousne... more Sylvia Plath’s poetry is at times tortuous: she practiced her craft with deliberacy and seriousness, and the complexity and difficulty of her life is often painfully registered in her writing. Yet her poetry at times also reflects a joie de vivre that enlivens and responds with whimsy and humour to these travails. In ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ we see something of this: her experimenting with form in order to render a response to a particular instance of the natural world; the rook that is arrivant, that is harbinger of fleeting meeting. What is most arresting in this, my favourite of her poems, is her tone: the tongue-in-cheek sass of her relation with the bird and the context which casts it up in a sublime light.
On first reading 'Amy Foster' I found it puzzling that Conrad had chosen to name his stor... more On first reading 'Amy Foster' I found it puzzling that Conrad had chosen to name his story after 'the woman' and not 'the man', since so much of his imaginative interest seemed to be vested in the history of Yanko Gooral, alien washed up on the shores of English civilisation. In this respect, the story offers an interesting counterpoint to the situation in Heart of Darkness, in which an English narrator recounts his story of alien experiences on an English ship riding at anchor on an English river. Of course, it is expressive of both Conrad's alienation and his irony that the experiences of English civilisation should be as damaging to the alien castaway as the experiences of Kurtz were to him who ventured into the 'primitive interior' of African 'darkness'. In another respect, the narrative structure of both tales is quite similar, since in both we encounter named narrators whose narratives are in turn framed by the anonymous listeners wh...
For some time now critics have been interested in Pauline Smith's use of space and spatialisa... more For some time now critics have been interested in Pauline Smith's use of space and spatialisation. During the 80s in particular this interest was couched in terms of the 'world' of her work: the 'world' she was said to create or construct by writing. Her fiction was read as generated out of the narrative choices she makes, and evaluated (and judged) in terms of the ideology said to underlie and motivate the fictional world thus engendered. J.M. Coetzee's 1981 'Pauline Smith and the Afrikaans Language', Sheila Roberts's 1983 'A Confined World: A Rereading of Pauline Smith', and Dorothy Driver's 1989 'God, Fathers and White South Africans: The World of Pauline Smith' are cases in point. To a certain extent this critical focus coheres with Smith's own sense of 'writing a world'. In a letter to Frank Swinnerton of 15 February 1936, she remarks: The narrowness of some of the lives lived in this valley is what Arnold woul...
And if I write it down, maybe it will cease to trouble my mind. And if I write it down, people ma... more And if I write it down, maybe it will cease to trouble my mind. And if I write it down, people may know that he was two men, and that one was brave and gentle; and they may know, when they judge and condemn, that this one struggled with himself in darkness and alone, calling on ...
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... stoppedunexpectedly in front of asquarcof light where men lounged withglassesin their hands, ... more ... stoppedunexpectedly in front of asquarcof light where men lounged withglassesin their hands, and one was carried out into the brilliantly-lit bar for asip ofsearing liquid 'to keep the fever away.' Or it ... A few mendressed in khaki weretalkingaimlessly aboutthe prospects ofrain. ...
Silence as a concept is deservedly receiving increased critical attention. In The Empire Writes B... more Silence as a concept is deservedly receiving increased critical attention. In The Empire Writes Back, for example, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin make this claim: 'It is this concept of silence, not any specific cultural concept of meaning, which is the active characteristic linking all post-...
Yet the relations of history and fiction are by no means as straightforward or as unproblematic a... more Yet the relations of history and fiction are by no means as straightforward or as unproblematic as this judgement would imply. One of the latest critics to take issue with it is Tony Voss, who points out in his Introduction to the 1989 Donker edition that “[tlhe true originality ofMhudi ...
Dan Jacobson is a prolific writer whose oeuvre spans some 65 years, and includes a range of diffe... more Dan Jacobson is a prolific writer whose oeuvre spans some 65 years, and includes a range of different texts. He has lived in Britain for most of his adult life, but his roots are South African, and he set much of his early work in this country. It has however fallen into relative critical obscurity. His 1959 story 'The Zulu and the Zeide'has been widely anthologised, but deserves more serious and more specific critical attention that it has recently received, because it evinces at an elemental level the ways in which, and the extent to which, human caring was able to challenge, arrest and undermine the public proscriptions set up to define and control interaction between people in our country during the apartheid years. This essay explores the embodiment of caritas in the story, the spatialisation that reflects the boundaries (and the crossing of boundaries) of the apartheid world he depicts, the micropolitics of power between the characters in the story and within the complex of relationships that develop between them, and the ethics of our reading of the story.
Sylvia Plath's poetry is at times tortuous: she practiced her craft with deliberacy and seriousne... more Sylvia Plath's poetry is at times tortuous: she practiced her craft with deliberacy and seriousness, and the complexity and difficulty of her life is often painfully registered in her writing. Yet her poetry at times also reflects a joie de vivre that enlivens and responds with whimsy and humour to these travails. In 'Black Rook in Rainy Weather' we see something of this: her experimenting with form in order to render a response to a particular instance of the natural world; the rook that is arrivant, that is harbinger of fleeting meeting. What is most arresting in this, my favourite of her poems, is her tone: the tongue-in-cheek sass of her relation with the bird and the context which casts it up in a sublime light.
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Papers by Myrtle Hooper
than reading water as being at the behest of humans, we seek to recognise the valency it is given in the stories, and in this light to explore the impacts of its presence, its actions, and its absence.
the subject of ‘dirt’, and inspired this paper which examines the ‘journeys into dirt’ by
explorer figures in Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss and Robyn Davidson’s 1980 memoir
Tracks. Drawing on theory of dirt developed by material ecocritic Helen Sullivan and by
philosopher Olli Lagerspetz we demonstrate that the narratives of their travels show them
engaged in transformative encounters with the Australian desert. In doing so we challenge
Tom Lynch’s reading of the two texts as ‘traversals’ which portray the desert as ‘alien,
hostile and undifferentiated void’. Using Keith Garebian’s distinction between ‘desert’
and ‘garden’ we examine how these explorers find and respond to ‘the garden in the
desert’. Davidson couches her memoir as an exploration narrative and treats the desert as
a ‘lived space’ which she ‘writes home’; having learned how to ‘be’ in it, and so to ‘recover’
the garden in the desert. Like her, Voss and his companions experience the desert as
beautiful and inspirational, even, at times, nurturant and sustaining. Since Voss’s
orientation is spiritual and transcendent, however, White’s treatment of the desert shows
conceptual and corporeal boundaries between human and environment shifting and
fading in their interaction with it. In both texts episodes occur of immersion in dirt – dust
in Tracks and mud in Voss – which serve to illustrate and to emphasise the interconnectedness
we humans have with the essential, elemental environment of dirt.
Keywords: deserts; journeys; travel narratives; dirt theory; ecocriticism; Voss; Tracks.
than reading water as being at the behest of humans, we seek to recognise the valency it is given in the stories, and in this light to explore the impacts of its presence, its actions, and its absence.
the subject of ‘dirt’, and inspired this paper which examines the ‘journeys into dirt’ by
explorer figures in Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss and Robyn Davidson’s 1980 memoir
Tracks. Drawing on theory of dirt developed by material ecocritic Helen Sullivan and by
philosopher Olli Lagerspetz we demonstrate that the narratives of their travels show them
engaged in transformative encounters with the Australian desert. In doing so we challenge
Tom Lynch’s reading of the two texts as ‘traversals’ which portray the desert as ‘alien,
hostile and undifferentiated void’. Using Keith Garebian’s distinction between ‘desert’
and ‘garden’ we examine how these explorers find and respond to ‘the garden in the
desert’. Davidson couches her memoir as an exploration narrative and treats the desert as
a ‘lived space’ which she ‘writes home’; having learned how to ‘be’ in it, and so to ‘recover’
the garden in the desert. Like her, Voss and his companions experience the desert as
beautiful and inspirational, even, at times, nurturant and sustaining. Since Voss’s
orientation is spiritual and transcendent, however, White’s treatment of the desert shows
conceptual and corporeal boundaries between human and environment shifting and
fading in their interaction with it. In both texts episodes occur of immersion in dirt – dust
in Tracks and mud in Voss – which serve to illustrate and to emphasise the interconnectedness
we humans have with the essential, elemental environment of dirt.
Keywords: deserts; journeys; travel narratives; dirt theory; ecocriticism; Voss; Tracks.