1 South African Great War Poetry 1914-1918: a Literary

1 SOUTH AFRICAN GREAT WAR POETRY 1914-1918: A LITERARY- HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS by GERHARD GENIS submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY in the subject ENGLISH at the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA PROMOTER: DOCTOR J. PRIDMORE JANUARY 2014 2 I declare that SOUTH AFRICAN GREAT WAR POETRY 1914-1918: A LITERARY-HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS is my own work and that all the sources that I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of complete references. ________________________________ ___________________ 3 DEDICATION To my wife Regina, who had to keep the homefire burning while I was in the trenches. To my two daughters, Heidi and Meleri. To my mother Linda, whose love of history and literature has been infectious. To my sister Deidre and brothers Pieter and Frans. To my father Pieter, and brother-in-law Gerhard – R.I.P. To all those who served in the Great War. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am happy to acknowledge the indispensable assistance that I received in completing this thesis. I was undecided on a topic when I visited Prof. Ivan Rabinowitz, formerly of the University of South Africa. He suggested this unexplored and fascinating topic, and the rest is history... I want to thank Dr July Pridmore, my promoter, and Prof. Deirdre Byrne from the Department of English Studies for their constructive feedback and professional assistance. The University of South Africa considerably lessened the financial burden by awarding me a Postgraduate Bursary for 2012 and 2013. Dawie Malan, the English subject librarian, was always available to lend a hand to locate relevant sources. Steve de Agrela and Mariette Boraine from the South African National Defence Force Archives, Pretoria, were always willing to go the extra mile in providing a very enjoyable and fruitful research experience in the reading room and library. Ilzé Cloete of the Ditsong National Museum of Military History, Johannesburg, gave very valuable assistance in locating relevant sources. Debbie Landman of the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown provided me with indispensable sources of poetry. The staff at the National Library of South Africa, Pretoria Campus, also provided a very professional service. A special word of thanks goes to Lynette Douglas, who edited the manuscript. 5 PREFACE AND SUMMARY 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. 6 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. KEY WORDS South African poetry, Great War, First World War, war poetry, izibongo, Adamastor, manqué 7 CONTENTS Page Preface and Summary 5 Introduction: The Body of Text that is Missing in Action 8 Chapter 1: Making the Skull Speak Poetically 20 Chapter 2: Shades of Adamastor: Cascading (Cascare) Abject Shadow (or) the Mimetic Other Thing (Leftover) 46 Chapter 3: The White(ned) Corpse, and the Call from across the Sea 60 3.1 The Dreadnought’s Voyage to the Devil’s Wood 76 3.2 Devil’s Wood 109 3.3 The “Broken Doll” adjacent the Open Grave 180 Chapter 4: The Black(ened) Corpse, and the Cross from across the Sea 240 4.1 The Death-defiers 270 4.2 The Leviathan of the Deep 289 Conclusion 352 Bibliography 354 8 Introduction: The Body of Text that is Missing in Action South African war poetry of the Great War is an unexplored literary no- man’s-land. Even in England, where so much literary poetry had been produced on the war, there was and still seems to be, although to a lesser extent than in South Africa, an aversion to this genre. This is so much so that the eminent Irish poet W.B. Yeats did not include any war poet in the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse,1 or in the 1937 Oxford Anthology of Modern Verse, indicating that pity and passive suffering should not be the concern of the modern poet (Campbell 1997: 823; Sychterz 2005: 1; French 2009: 12-13; Norris 2005: 143). Yeats’s premise is that war poetry is the imaginative and aesthetical re-conception of war (Goldensohn 2003: 82). “The poetry is” therefore not, as Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) has famously stated, “in the pity” (Owen quoted in Campbell 1997: 823) or in Owen’s testimonies to raw trench experience (Goldensohn 2003: 82). To Yeats, the soldier represents a tragic and even comic figure to be admired and aesthetically rendered on the stage of art as an active and stoic actor joyfully dramatising man’s endurance, and not to be pitied at all; the dead body is emptied of its Owenesque signification of victimhood and made a symbol without intrinsic meaning (Sychterz 2005: 3-4; Goldensohn 2003: 6) – tragic war is humankind’s fate and war poetry’s elevated subject (Goldensohn 2003: 72-73,74). French (2009) makes an emotional case for the soldier poets who are “suffering [from] canonical ostracism” (9) and who are “Missing in Canon” (10). French (2009: 9) asserts that these poets’ work is under-represented in the standard anthologies such as the influential The Norton Anthology of English Literature and the The Norton Anthology of Poetry.2 However, it must be stated that The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) by Paul Fussell did go a long 1 Norris (2005: 143) points out that the only trench poet included in this volume is Herbert Read. 2 In the fifth edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (2005), First World War poets are given their due, by the inclusion of, amongst others, Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918), Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) and Edmund Blunden (1896-1974). 9 way towards "restoring British trench poetry to the canon" (Norris 2005: 144), by postulating that it provides the topos for all subsequent 20th century war poetry and war experience (Sychterz 2005: 11-12; Christie 2007: 1; Campbell 1999). Additionally, in 1984 The Oxford Book of War Poetry was published by Oxford University Press. The 250 war poems, which cover a period from Biblical and ancient Greek times to the recent past, were chosen and edited by Jon Stallworthy, and republished in 1988 and 1990, and, more crucial to this study, with a South African impression in 1993 (Stallworthy 1993). The Washington Post describes this collection as one “of exceptionally high quality”, and Bernard Bergonzi, the highly regarded British scholar of war literature, indicates in the Observer that this work is “deeply interesting […] the editor’s good taste and literary judgement are apparent throughout”.3 This work has done much to make war poetry more popular, and includes the important poems by the major war poets. However, there is only one poem by a South African war poet included in this anthology. This is F.T. Prince’s Soldiers Bathing. This neglect illustrates the literary ostracism of South African war poetry in general by scholars of Mars’s verse. Furthermore, the greater majority of the poets in this publication are male. Women war poets are seemingly subject to the same canonical omission as their male counterparts had been before The Oxford Book’s publication.

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