análisis y presentación de resultados de las mediciones de ruido de fondo del centro comercial por zonas. Las mediciones de

In Nortj e’s poetry one comes across a pattern that incorporates images from non-human nature, humanity and technology, forming a triangle of complex and, sometimes, contradictory relationships among the three to form an everyday post-romantic aesthetics. In this section, using two poems, “Thumbing a Lift” and “Pornography: Campus”, both written before Nortj e’s move abroad, I shall examine this triangle o f humanity, nature and machine and see how they relate to one another in N ortje’s poetic vision. Again, our attention is drawn to Guattari’s idea o f transversality, which allows ‘uncontrolled’ flows o f different and contradictory ideas to interact without privileging one over another.

“Thumbing a Lift”, one o f N ortje’s earliest pieces, was written in September 1962. The poem captures the experience o f the persona stranded outside o f town and in need o f a lift to get home. The first three stanzas, where my focus will be, describe a landscape that is a departure from a nature-centred style of writing by a merging o f nature and machine.

Landscape is not separated from the activity o f humanity, but set within it, a picture of engagement and flow into each other. Instead o f a call to return to nature’, the poem blends nature and industrial culture together:

Emaciated sanddunes and grease-black pylons On afternoons teeming with impurities;

Brittle bitter-brown wire: the sky-blotching ravens M ust be September’s electrified existences. (1-4)

In this stanza we witness a rush o f images from nature and technology void o f sentimentalism.

Nature does not wear any garment of transcendentalism as in Emerson or Thoreau. It is divested o f beauty and made to appear very crude. The opening line testifies to this. “Emaciated sanddunes” (1) suggests a landscape without beauty, sick and deteriorating. Then this is followed by “grease-black pylons” (1). Pylons are symbols o f human work at industrialization, humanity’s effort to modify the world by modifying nature. What is important here is the side- by-side placement o f the two images o f nature and industrialization as various parts o f a single vision. The “and” that connects “sanddunes” and “pylons” also serves as an agent of negotiation between two entities that have been previously viewed as incompatible; it serves to recreate the interaction and the supposed tension between the two, thus invoking the impure, the loss o f pure categories. The use o f the two adjectives “emaciated” and “grease-black”, speaking of nature and machine respectively, rings with decay and un-beauty, a case o f not privileging one over another as both have unclear borders. The second line continues the thought by directly speaking o f the scene as “teeming with impurities” (2). While the line may be speaking of literal atmospheric pollution due to the objects mentioned, it also suggests a demythification o f essences. The third line carries on with the juxtaposition o f “wire” and

“ravens” described respectively as “bitter-brown” and “ sky-blotching” . The last line connects both with electricity in a rather ‘M etaphysical’ manner: wire and ravens, two very different items, are connected to one thing. Electricity, a symbol o f human work and a product o f nature, resists the idea o f separating nature from human activities. This, rather than postulating a separation and a need to return to nature, provides a mix of images that picture a sort of inevitable heterogeneity as humans explore their environment. This stanza further challenges the nature-machine tension by introducing human presence:

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I live beside sap-fired willow striplings Yet alien to their cause, spring-exultation Cars pass by the thin thing o f my brown thumb Rhythmically beckoning in painful indication. (5-8)

Although the machine symbolizes human activity, a human subject introduced further stirs the stability of the divisions, acting at this stage as a counterforce. The persona connects himself with trees now showing that he has not been cut off from nature. He, in fact, lives near nature, with nature. The willow tree is one that has been mentioned numerously in N ortje’s poetry, obviously a common import from Britain to the colony, where it takes root along watercourses.

The fact o f the tree’s foreignness raises two ideas: it questions the neutrality o f nature and speaks o f the history o f colonization that lies beyond. It also shows the proximity o f humanity to nature even in the context o f industrialization. Presenting the tree as “ sap-fired” (5), lively, portrays the speaker’s admiration for the tree. While this connection, proximity and admiration are established, they are immediately disturbed by the introduction o f the next line, a suggestion o f alienation and separation: “Yet alien to their cause” (6). The relationship between humanity and nature is thus shown as impossible to essentialize. There is both knowing and unknowing, intimacy and distance engaging each other in an intricate manner. The last two lines o f the stanza help to show another such relationship, but this time with machine. The persona needs a lift, but the vehicles ignore him, except for the “cattle truck” that in the end “careers [him]

towards the horizon” (28). (I shall say more about the poet’s employment o f the cattle truck where I return to the poem in a later section of the thesis). Technology thus becomes both a symbol o f connection and alienation. There are human beings driving those cars and he is outside wanting to join them, but he is excluded. The introduction of his corporeal figure as metonymy o f his whole self has an underlying sense o f racial tension: “brown thumb” (7).

N ortje’s self-representation comes oftentimes in corporeal terms such as this, invoking the place o f the body in connection to identity in apartheid South Africa. The body and the self often become intricately involved with each other and with the world outside. The qualification o f “brown” (7) says much about N ortje’s identity as a coloured, brown being a ground between white and black. The persona thus fits into the figure o f a subject roaming between nature and machine (nature’s impenetrability and technology’s rejection) and between binarized racial colours. Bunn, noting the political undertones o f this poem, points out that “ [r]ather than affording that detached pleasure to the eye so characteristic o f lyric geographies, here the landscape becomes a home for the corrupted body” (36).

In “Pornography: Campus”, written two years after the previous poem, Nortje creates another scene o f triangulation like the first one. The first stanza begins with a moment of beauty. But instead o f being set somewhere away from human settlement, as might be expected, it is in fact at a place o f human busyness: a campus. It is important, I think, to highlight the background o f the setting o f this poem. It was obviously written at or about the University o f the Western Cape where Nortje was a student at the time. This university was meant for the coloured community as part o f the government’s policy o f separate development along racial lines. The students resented being there knowing that they were in an institution that was inferior to others in the country. So in a complex way the campus presents for Nortje a place of development and rejection, a place to reach his dreams, but not quite.

In the first stanza o f the poem, which focuses on the beauty that sprinklers create as they water the university lawns, we have images like “ singing sprinklers” (1), “the feelings / o f grass” (1-2), “ Southern Hemisphere’s resplendent” (3) and “rainbows o f crystals” (4) which give the poem a sentimental and lyrical quality. But worth noting in the beauty created, human activity through technology is not absent. The water that is pictured as beautiful is, in fact, released through human-made and controlled sprinklers. So, the lawn is representative o f human effort to maintain the presence of nature in an urban settlement through mechanized means. Also important is the poet’s use o f sexual imagery to talk about this relationship. In this stanza, the sexual signification o f the title continues with the masculinization o f technology in the lines “the metal / nozzles

ejaculate

The second stanza pictures the sun shining beautifully on the campus and the hills are given a feminine quality as in the words “hills / stand silent in their cactus brassieres” (8).

Having shown nature as female in this way, Nortje proceeds to show the process o f mowing as a form o f aggression or subduing o f nature in the fourth stanza. Technology, now shown as the perpetrator in the words “the moving machine’s sharp cruelty” (13), is further described as

“murderous” (15) and “lascivious” (16). The feminization o f nature and masculinization o f technology suggests a power-play in a ‘sexual’ relationship. Already the title suggests a

‘pornographic’ relationship between nature and technology. Technology is not only masculinized, it is also pictured as ‘sexually’ aggressive and expressing power over a dormant nature. To reinforce the pornographic motif, the poet alludes to the French writers Francois Rabelais and Charles Baudelaire, who are known for their associations with sexual impudence.

But the underlying view is that o f search and loss: “Continually life / is a hunt below the tousled surface / o f pubic hair’s blond shock, or je t” (17-19). Concluding that “we are bastards o f debauchery” (20) has a ring o f marginality and identity crises or crises o f belonging,

the ontological wandering o f humanity in a world that we try to make sense o f by shaping nature through technology and then finding ourselves continually going round the circles o f searching or even ending tragically as in John Steinbeck’s novel

The Grapes o f Wrath.

From the poems discussed, it is clear that Nortje does not employ an essentialized understanding in representing nature’s relationship to humanity and technology. Rather, he explores the harmonies and discordances that exist in these interactions. In “Thumbing a Lift”, we have seen how nature, technology and human subjectivity or community exist in one space, but redefine one another. The trees were planted by humans and the cars were also a product of human ingenuity, but they have assumed autonomy, now affecting how humans view themselves and the world. “Pornography: Campus”, on the other hand, takes the idea further by exploring how the relationship includes issues o f power relations and sexual dynamics between the different entities involved.