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In pursuit of the subject: Towards a biography of Arthur Nortje
Abstract
This article presents the conceptual framework and methodological approach I have adopted in my research towards a biography of the South African poet Arthur Nortje (1942–1970). It begins by identifying the principles of biographical unity advocated by James Boswell, and adopted by subsequent biographers, and proceeds to question the validity of these principles in the light of contemporary reflections on the nature of the subject, language, and narrative. As an alternative to traditional principles of biographical unity, which have evolved in parallel with the principles governing realist fiction, the article proposes the notion of a ‘dialectic of difference’ in the life and work of Nortje, discussing how this dialectic not only differentiates Nortje as subject but is also the subject of his writings. Following consideration of the forms of evidence available to the biographer, the biographical material to hand on Nortje is described and its potential significance indicated in reconstructing the life‐story in the form of a postcolonial biography. The discussion pulls together the various lines of enquiry by reflecting on the implications of reconstructing the life as a discursive event before concluding with an invocation of the subject in process.
This article examines the short story/essay ‘My Name is HannaH’ (2005) by South African-born writer Zoë Wicomb, focusing on its generic hybridity, its translocal quality and its deeply intertextual structure. Retracing the life and works of the South African poet Arthur Nortje through the artifice of fiction, Wicomb exposes the discursive and relational nature of space and identity. By analysing the story’s extremely heterogeneous intertexts and its playful generic inbetweenness, I seek to show how Wicomb refuses any form of categorization or fixed notion, exposing, rather, the seams and fissures of the textuality of reality. Ultimately, I argue that the thematic and formal features of the selected narrative can foreground the relationship between world literature and the short story as a liminal, cosmopolitan and mutable genre, particularly appropriate for the representation of the interconnectedness of our society.
In this article, I aim to expand our understanding of Arthur Nortje as a poet of “exile” by exploring the dialectic between self-loathing and pleasure, as well as between engagement and isolation, which he portrays performatively through his London poetry. While critics have emphasised Nortje’s “marginality” or “liminality”, both as an “exile” and a “coloured” South African, I draw on the critical writing of Zoë Wicomb in order to extend readings of his poetry beyond this tragic paradigm. I furthermore take up Sarah Nuttall’s suggestion that Nortje’s London poetry describes a degree of immersion within the city and that this aspect of his work demands further study. After tracing Nortje’s playful use of literary influences and his reworking of the trope of flânerie, I provide a series of close readings of poems in which Nortje depicts an exploration of queer subjectivities, staged within the city. In his London poetry, Nortje subverts and eludes fixed racial, sexual, national and class identities. Nortje’s London poetry exemplifies how South African literature was developed in response to the alienating condition of exile, but also through engagement with the places where exile occurred.
In American fiction, the theme of the mulatto man’s ambivalence to his white father—a filial investment offset by passionate hatred—dates back to Richard Hildreth’s The Slave. The male mulatto character names whiteness as visible common ground with his father and attempts to bridge the racial gap. In the face of his father’s rejection, however, whiteness becomes a means of retaliation that is often futile. The mulatto embodies bastardy (already a gendered concept) because he is refused recognition by his “real” white father. But the mulatto still experiences the full weight of symbolic white fathers through patriarchal laws such as apartheid and Jim Crow. When read in the context of segregation, the mixed race son of the white father presents a distinctive character— one that ultimately exhibits unrequited love and violent hatred for the father he cannot “own,” imitate, become, or conquer.
This article explores the idea that by writing poems depicting a fragmented identity prior to 1965, Arthur Nortje represented the horror of apartheid by using his body as a warzone. It argues that Nortje uses schizophrenia as a trope for registering the destructive psychological impact of racial segregation in the 1960s. The article examines several of Nortje's poems before his departure into exile which describe a haunting fear of implosion by linking the dissociated gaze of the observer to a devastating socio-political topography. It also scrutinises Nortje's use of the constantly shifting and unfolding condition of an ontologically insecure persona as a poetic device, and suggests that he appears to consciously register schizoid symptoms in constructing a flâneur-type observer to record experiences of fragmentation at a psychic level. Nortje assumes the mask of a dislocated self to voice his inner torment as a young man growing up in displaced communities within segregated cities like Port Elizabeth and Cape Town under apartheid. The focus is on how this works as a stylistic technique in the early poems.
The “coloured” South African writer Adam Small has made an important and largely unrecognized contribution to anti-apartheid literature in Afrikaans. His pioneering use of “Kaaps” (a linguistic variety spoken by “coloured” Afrikaners at the Cape) in his poetry and plays complicated the racial designation of Afrikaans as a “white” language and challenged the dominance of the “white” Afrikaans literary tradition. In a literature where the variety used by the white nationalist government was also that used by (albeit some of them dissident) Afrikaans writers, he created an appetite and appreciation for vernacular language as a medium of resistance against white supremacy. His work has helped to make possible a continuing investment by Afrikaans writers (white as well as “coloured”) in non-standard language as resistance to cultural imperialism and nationalism. During apartheid, however, he faced considerable criticism for his use of what was seen as a degraded and degrading “dialect”, and for his ostensible complicity in apartheid as a self-avowed “brown Afrikaner”. This article examines some of the difficulties which faced “coloured”Afrikaans writers during apartheid, taking Small as a specific example of a writer whose career displays the impact of the collision between “coloured” separatism and a politically pragmatic universalism, and proposes a reconsideration of his work as a subversive, ironic and ground-breaking intervention in South African literature.
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