Joernaal van Jorikherlees

Abstract

Summary With reference to Ricoeur and Thompson's views on ideology and the criticism of ideology, this article offers a discursive analysis of D.J. Opperman's Joernaal van Jorik (1949). Key passages in the poem are analysed to show that the story of Jorik is closely linked to historical meta‐narratives about Western man, colonial history and the growth of a new nation at the Cape. The argument is that different intertexts in the poem are related to one another hierarchically, with the result that Jorik's action within a sociopolitical context is interpreted as the “betrayal” of an a‐historic human and poetic task. Finally, passages in the poem that deal with the poetic fixation of temporary phenomena are related to Opperman's claim in “Kuns is boos!”, that the complete work of art displays a correlation between its internal order as revelation of the complex essential nature of each phenomenon within a field of oppositions, and the structure of Divine creation.