"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

the contradictions of consciousness, catching speech (as insubstantial as air, as
transitory as breath) as it comes and goes, tying it into the eternal. (202)
His tone is more impassioned and sentimental than Bate’s, but the idea is the same. He
stresses the ecopoetical longing for home (or dwelling on the Earth) through language by
hyphenating and therefore stressing the components of belonging: where be-longing
indicates being in a state of longing and echoes Heidegger’s concept of dasein.
Robert Pogue Harrison also writes about the loss and longing that result from
human severance from the natural world (the Earth): “What nature cannot provide is an
image for the longing that pervades human finitude. It is this longing that seeks an abode
on the earth, but the only thing that can house it are the words in which it confesses its
longing for closure” (228). He uses metaphor to explain this longing for a sense of place:
A house is a place to set an image in. This image is made of mud, of the earth, but
it is the image of something which the earth cannot contain. It is the image of … a
word. Not a linguistic word but the logos of human transcendence. It is not for
nothing that logos in Greek means relation, gathering, binding, before it means
language. (229)
In Livingstone’s A Littoral Zone the ecopoetical is most pointed and poignant
because the poems are about the human search for place (oikos). His diction reflects a
human longing to find a place through symbiosis or synthesis between the physical and
the psychic. Even in the poems which deal with the biological (for example, “Cells”)
Livingstone indicates that, in the end, language is humankind’s expression of its
relationship with the Earth.
This thesis will use literary ecocriticism as a hermeneutic tool to show how
Livingstone explores and expresses humanity’s search for a sense of place on Earth. I use
the word hermeneutic to acknowledge the interpretative nature of this thesis. 6 Paul
Ricoeur’s working definition of hermeneutics is “the theory of the operations of
understanding in their relation to the interpretation of texts” (43). Ricoeur points out that
“hermeneutics itself puts us on guard against the illusion or pretension of neutrality”
(ibid.). He refers to “the reciprocity between interpretation of the text and selfinterpretation”
and calls it “the hermeneutical circle” (165). Hermeneutics is a two-step,
6 Interestingly, the word hermeneutics is from the Greek god, Hermes, who was the god of science and
commerce, the patron of travellers and also of rogues, vagabonds and thieves (Brewer 703) as well as of the
arts and eloquence. A truly quixotic figure!
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