"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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History of the Negatio Bacillus” and “Isotopes” is “Livingstone’s concern with
religion” (253). Chapman curiously claims that a lonely protagonist gathers facts in an
attempt to define his existence in “Negatio Bacillus” and that the poem is a powerful
statement of alienation. While the latter statement is true, I understand the negatio
bacillus to be the human race, portrayed as a destructive virus, which is alienated from
nature and therefore is ecologically destructive. The poem is a satire, couched in
scientific terminology, of humankind’s anthropocentricism and arrogance and is not, as
Chapman claims, a poem about “this lonely individual [who] succeeds in increasing his
own sense of uncertainty” (151). In South African English Poetry, Chapman does modify
his interpretation. He alludes to the ecological import of the poem when he correctly
claims:
In diagnosing his state of ‘negatio’, the protagonist comes to realise that man’s
slender hopes of rediscovering an integrated approach to life lie not in reason,
materialism or even in scientific and social progress, so long as these courses
continue to be pursued at the expense of the ‘older remedies’ of imaginative
responsiveness, myth and mysticism. (1984: 106)
Chapman notes that several poems in The Anvil’s Undertone “evoke a bizarre,
sometimes macabre world” (153) and claims that “an element of the hallucinatory” is to
be found in the early poem “The Skull in the Mud” where primordial images are used to
express man’s instinctual life (153). Geoffrey Hutchings, on the other hand, describes the
underlying theme of this poem as “a confrontation between Western technology and an
ancient Africa” (65). I would argue that “The Skull” is more Darwinian than surreal and
that Hutchings’ interpretation is more accurate. Chapman correctly sees the surreal in
“The Voice of the Experiment”, “The Midnight Lama” and “Elegy in a City
Crematorium” (which also has a satiric element) as well as “The Ossuary” and
“Armistice Day, Natal”. African wild life as a source of “images of destruction and
ugliness” is, according to Chapman, pushed further in this collection where Livingstone
“also searches the animal world for his symbols of nightmare” (158). He compares “Veld
and Vlei Poem” and “Under Capricorn” which both offer social commentary. “Veld and
Vlei” parodies “South African nature poetasters, with their idyllic and mystical
conceptions of ‘the veld’” (159) while the latter poem “pierces through the bedrock
where the primary struggles are fought, its super-real images of animal and human life