"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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to find a closer identification between the word and the thing, we have at the other his
romantic-symbolist attempts to reconstruct new ways of seeing and feeling” (1984: 81).
By his use of “romantic-symbolist” I take Chapman to mean a subjective view of modern
unity, but this ‘classification’ makes no room for the scientific – or material – aspect of
Livingstone’s thought. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines materialism
as:
the general theory that the ultimate constituents of reality are material or physical
bodies, elements or process. It is a form of monism in that it holds that everything
in existence is reducible to what is material or physical in nature… Many
philosophers have been attracted to materialism both because of its reductive
simplicity and its association with scientific knowledge. (Craig 6: 171)
Materialism thus points to Livingstone’s physical or scientific view of the world, while
his psychic apprehensions are included in the Romantic view. By Romantic materialism I
mean the view that the physical world is made up of matter and energy and is subject to
immutable laws of nature, but that this fact does not preclude a reverence for the myriad
interconnections and miraculous existence of life. Gillian Beer succinctly describes
Romantic materialism as “a sense of the clustering mystery of a material universe” (142).
An ecological overview of the critical response to Livingstone’s earlier work
Apart from Michael Chapman’s extensive research on the earlier work of Douglas
Livingstone, there is not a large body of critical writing in this area. Dirk Klopper’s
contribution to Livingstone criticism includes a number of pages in his chapter “Ideology
and the Study of White South African English Poetry” in Rendering Things Visible
(1990), edited by Martin Trump, and a later article “A Libidinal Zone: The Poetic Legacy
of Douglas Livingstone” (1997) (which includes some references to A Littoral Zone).
Geoffrey Haresnape’s article on Douglas Livingstone in the Dictionary of Literary
Biographies (2000) offers a brief biography and a critical summary of all of his work.
I have traced three master’s theses on Douglas Livingstone and another with a
substantial chapter on his poetry. Written in the 1980s and early ’90s, none of the theses
give an explicitly ecological reading of Livingstone’s poetry.
Pieter Daniel de Wet examines ten South African poets in “The Widening Eye:
Images of, Attitudes to, and Consciousness of the African Landscape, as Reflected in the
Work of Selected Poets” (1984). The chapter on Livingstone is titled “Africa Within”. De