The “bit-less” corpse or mannequin manqué: South African Great War poetic embodiment 1914-1918

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article, I discuss South African Great War1 poetry within a psychoanalytical, postcolonial and poststructuralist framework. This body of poems has never been analysed and reveals the embodiment of blackness, whiteness, masculinity, colonialism and empire during the early twentieth-century South Africa. Essentially, it is the poetry that rhythmically murmurs about the relationship between life and death, object and abject, as well as suffering and loss in the nascent Union of South Africa. The war poets could only through concrete language “re-member(ed)” (Christie 2007: 237) or “mannequin” the decomposing corpse, the abject leftover thing of war experience. This was done bit by bit through words in order to flesh out the decomposing corpse: Kristeva's “word flesh” (Harrington 1998: 141). It was a “chance with meaning” (141) that had to be taken, but it was a leap of faith into the void of naming that is fear itself: words remain unstable euphemistic metaphors of unbecoming (Kristeva 1982). This very act by the war poets to dress the abject in metaphors and metonyms of wholeness reveals the loss inherent in wartime experience.