Poetic Licentiousness and the Destitutions of High Culture

Abstract

In his primer for chroniclers of the African condition, the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina makes a modest proposal: exploit the poor.¹ Protruding ribs, fly-tormented eyelids and the potbellies of skeletal children are key. Other essentials include careful descriptions of crumbling infrastructure and rotting (black) corpses. The same depth and detail should not extend to the characters themselves. ‘The Starving African can have no past, no history …. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering.’² However ugly, such stereotypes are means to a greater end—winning the observer's pity, perhaps even their charity.

Wainaina's ‘How to Write About Africa’ is clearly not an ars poetica but a parody. And like all good parody, it magnifies things that never move quite below the threshold of our perception. We see in the parodist's crosshairs those authors who perpetuate market-ready exoticism, but also those readers whose leering sympathy sustains the trend, which is to say we recognise the trappings of poverty porn. And we recognise poverty porn when we see it, as it too trades in hyperbole and caricature: oversaturated images, blunt realism, morbidity and pathos crudely mixed. Poverty porn caters to low tastes and base desires on the one hand, to disingenuously altruistic sentiments on the other. Yet such a definition neglects how poverty can be differently fetishised. It ignores a type of writing that turns abjection into artistic ideals; it passes over works that appear to insist that something will indeed come of nothing. Standing notions of poverty porn do not therefore trouble the destitutions of high culture—not Beckett's tramps, Shakespeare's beggars, Baudelaire's wretches, nor the shepherds of the pastoral tradition whose humility is the ground for their exaltation.

What follows is not an attempt to make poverty porn a more capacious category. Already, the term is used to dismiss writing whose context allows for little separation between fictive and documentary modes, or whose authors deliberately pursue the conflation of these modes.³ By the same token, crying ‘poverty porn’ is a kind of apotropaic act. It not only declares a work to be aesthetically suspect but also uses this suspicion to ward off any affective or ethical demands, any possibility that the reader might somehow be implicated by the representation of inequality. My concern, instead, is to define the features of another type of poverty fiction: an overtly literary type that fails to trigger moral-aesthetic outrage precisely because of this emphatic literariness—a type that doesn't tug at the heart but excites the imagination.⁴ The word imagination will be key, as it suggests that poverty can be the object of poesis as much as mimesis, the stuff of dubious fantasy and not just dubious reality.⁵ Where poverty porn tends to let poverty speak for itself—to let it manifest in spectacle and grim facticity—this other type of fiction promotes the oracular: the wretch as sage, as prophet and as mouthpiece for a tattered humanity. The appeal of this figure is partly theological, partly ideological and partly aesthetic. Possessed of the wisdom that dispossession brings, he (and it is almost always he) lays claim to a paradoxical richness; liberated from social constraint, he is free to speak a scandalous truth; idiosyncratic yet interchangeable, he becomes an authorial vanishing point. It is therefore not unusual for this figure to attract ‘the narcissistic attentions … of those whose art is linguistic’.⁶ One aim of this article is to show how such attentions take shape. Another is to worry the boundary between poetic licence and poetic licentiousness.

With these aims in mind, I turn to Marlene van Niekerk's short story, ‘The Snow Sleeper: A Field Report’, a text that stands poised between two worlds. Set in the Netherlands and indebted to the European literary tradition mentioned above, it is bookended by South African contexts and concerns. In name and place, it is the centrepiece of a collection of four interlocked stories. This collection, The Snow Sleeper (2019), opens with the story of a South African student who moves to Amsterdam and becomes obsessed with a homeless man; it proceeds to a tale about novelistic licence; and it closes with a pseudo-polemic about the function of art in times of political turbulence. ‘The Snow Sleeper’ stands at the heart of these other stories. It not only treats the subject of poverty but does so by giving us an eloquent vagrant steeped in the tradition of vagrant literature. The collection's tensions—between the Global South and the Global North, between realist documentation and metafictional evasion, between social imperatives and artistic freedom—vex any separation between poverty porn and its opposite. To show why this is so, I will follow the text's labyrinthine allusions as they open onto traditions that mine poverty for artistic treasures. In chasing and contextualising references to Louis MacNeice, Robert Louis Stevenson, T. S. Eliot and others, I want to establish specific coordinates for poverty's metaphoric potency: vagrancy as the fantasy of vanishing or infinite regression; penury as plenitude; the beggar as a reluctant mystic. On the other hand, I will show how the story's canny literariness doubles back on itself—how it is both a parody and ars poetica of the ‘other’ poverty fiction, and how Van Niekerk manages to have her cake and eat it too.

That conceit, to put a name on it, is ‘narcissistic concentration’. It's a term coined by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit in their Arts of Impoverishment, which takes Samuel Beckett, Mark Rothko and Alain Resnais as exemplars of self-effacement and self-assertion, artists who flee the scene of the creative work but linger as spectral presence. Narcissistic concentration specifically identifies an artist's ‘simultaneous confirmation and loss of identity in a potentially endless process of inaccurate self-replications’.¹¹ Such inaccurate self-replications thread The Snow Sleeper throughout, as might already be clear. It's there not only in the opening but also in the closing story, also first a public address, in which Van Niekerk is at once presenter and represented, real-life orator and fictionalised self. It's there in the references to her extant and apocryphal works.¹² And it's there in the would-be title of the last story-lecture, ‘Mimesis, Poeisis, Parody: The Responsibility of the Imagination and the Boundaries of Photography in Turbulent Times’ (p. 155), which uncannily anticipates one of Van Niekerk's serious scholarly articles, ‘The Literary Text in Turbulent Times’. But perhaps the most pointed instance of narcissistic concentration occurs in ‘The Snow Sleeper: A Field Report’, where self-replication is tied not just to the art of impoverishment but also to the articulation of poverty.

The report's putative author, an Amsterdam-based training sociologist named Helena Oldemarkt, is erased from the recordings that capture her exchanges with the vagrant known as the Snow Sleeper; the transcripts contain his responses but never her questions. Given that her research concerns the ‘depersonalisation of the vagrant’ (p. 103), this seems an apt alignment of medium and message, a techno-ethical serendipity that foregrounds subject over scientist. What undermines such a kindly reading, however, are Helena's disclosures of self-interest and the interventions that compensate for her loss of voice. A framing letter addressed to another researcher declares her social work to be a ‘form of consolation’ (p. 99), through which she attempts to process her late father's wandering tendencies. We learn that she too has become iterant in the hope of again encountering the Snow Sleeper, and that their entanglement constitutes a ‘dubious case of transference between caregiver and the incapacitated’ (p. 101). Due to the botched tapes, she has ‘had to fill in the words of the subject … wherever his story became incoherent or his pronunciation unclear’ (p. 102).¹³ These edited transcriptions are supplemented by ‘memos’ better thought of as memoiristic fragments.

Still more telling than Helena's confessional letter is the text that precedes it—Louis MacNeice's ‘Conversation’ (p. 97).¹⁴ Offering up fantasies of interpersonal transgression and fugue states, the poem also supplies the first coordinate of the other type of poverty writing: the vagrant as figuration of vanishing and infinite regression.¹⁵ We're told at the outset that even ‘[o]rdinary people’ have a ‘vagrant in their eyes/Who sneaks away while they are talking with you’ and disappears into the ‘black wood’ of their own subconscious. Eventually, this vagrant ‘comes the other way/Out of their eyes and into yours’, hunting for something, a ‘lost purse’ or perhaps a ‘dropped stitch’. But such intersubjective pilfering and trespass are taboo in polite company (‘vagrancy is forbidden’); and so, after this blip, there will be a return to harmless chatter, except for a last unintended breach of intimacy that occurs when the interlocutors ‘interpolate/Swear-words like roses in their talk’. What becomes clear even on a cursory reading is that, despite its central metaphor, the poem is not about vagrants or vagrancy. Rather, it's about saving and losing face and, deeper down, about the recovery and loss of a personal identity. Less apparent, perhaps, is how this oscillating, egocentric movement—this narcissistic concentration—depends on a twofold indifference: indifference towards others and indifference towards the usual associations that vagrancy elicits.

The first type of indifference resembles Helena's questionable sociology, flagged at various turns in ‘The Snow Sleeper’. One of her memos relays the misgivings of her late brother, who claims that her voyeuristic tendencies are disguised as ‘disaster relief management with a scientific basis’; being an author himself, he also suggests that she exhibits a novelistic tendency to give ‘helpless people a voice while actually feeding off their confessions’ (p. 108). The Snow Sleeper levels a similar charge against artists who fail to ‘cannibalise [themselves] in [their] own inner room, but us[e] another person's misery for [their] experiments of self-discovery’ (p. 133).¹⁶ Of course, Helena knows her work to have an exploitative motive, which is why she reproduces MacNeice's poem in full and echoes its words when disclosing her conflict of interest: ‘Did I really want to hear his story, that night? I couldn't be bothered. Then, as now, it was about finding the lost purse’ (p. 127).¹⁷ Yet she seems unaware that this indifference has been inculcated through her academic training and forms part of its ideology. After all, she is familiar with ‘Conversation’ because a ‘framed copy’ (p. 99) hangs above her supervisor's desk. And although we never meet Dr Gottlieb van Doorn of the Instituut voor Nieuw Sociologish Oderzoek, the poem's prominent display in his office would suggest that his preoccupation with social issues is first a preoccupation with private ones.

What's especially telling about the uneven dynamic outlined here is the degree to which the Snow Sleeper internalises his own ‘depersonalisation’. The ‘contribution’ to famous European galleries is ‘his’ only insofar as he is interchangeable with its various figurations of poverty and stands as a proxy for all outcasts. His ‘facelessness’ is therefore both an indictment and a product of onlookers' supposedly self-abnegating interest. This ambivalence warns against taking his many names simply as buffo. For as much as his rollcall of familiars—the Legion demons of Gadarene, Arturo Rosenblut, Gaspard de la Nuit, Lothario Senzatetto, Cardinal Stefaneschi, Woyzek, Diogenes of Sinope and others—invites piecing together a composite identity, it also projects an infinite regression to the point of facelessness. Perhaps paradoxically, none of these likenesses makes the erasure so visible as Giacomo Gaetani Stefaneschi (see Figure 2), the eponymous subject of a mise-en-abyme tryptic (c. 1320) by Giotto, which repeats the cardinal's features until they can't be seen. Transferred to the vagrant, such diminishing replication doesn't yield narcissistic concentration but its reverse—the dissipation of the Other. In the words of another possible alter ego, Wallace Stevens's Snow Man, he becomes ‘nothing himself’.¹⁹

This vanishing effect carries into the second type of indifference mentioned above: metaphoric indifference. By this, I mean a kind of gratuity that allows the poet or novelist to exaggerate certain associations that a particular image or symbol might conjure while downplaying others. A less loaded term would be poetic licence, which certainly describes MacNeice's selective treatment of the ‘vagrant’. On the side of exaggerated associations, this figure projects an air of social and psychological menace. His shadowy peregrinations reaffirm stereotypical equations of homelessness and criminality, as well as subconscious fears about the breach of personal boundaries.²⁰ Historically, these elements have consolidated, as Linda Woodbridge has shown, in a morbid fascination underpinned by social anxieties over class dissolution, and also by hygienic anxieties that place the vagrant on a ‘line between human and beast’.²¹ Something of this duality is captured in the clipped opening of the third stanza, ‘Vagrancy however is forbidden’, as the line absorbs legal strictures into social conventions. Literal vagrancy is forbidden on grounds of the UK's Vagrancy Act of 1824 (still in force), while mental vagrancy is forbidden on grounds of decorum. (The Snow Sleeper claims to be ‘true to [his] species’ in violating ‘prohibitions against sleeping, begging, walking on dikes, sauntering aimlessly down a public road’ [p. 134].) Elided here are concerns about property, propriety and that which is proper to the individual.

But this is perhaps overstating the case. To suggest that ‘Conversation’ gives us an abject figure that repels and appeals in equal measure would be to allege poetic licentiousness instead of poetic licence. More to the point, it would be to ignore that the poem's central metaphor depends on abstraction rather than accrual, that its dominant procedure is the stripping away of commonplace associations rather than any adding to it. The vagrant of the poem isn't linked to want or limitation but to the opposite—a freedom to escape polite society. Nor is it the person of the vagrant that ultimately drives the metaphor, but the notion of vagrancy: a disembodied thought or metaphysical ideal that arrogates counterintuitive associations and affordances while subtracting poverty's actual properties. Consider, for instance, that the vagrant may ‘mistake’ you not only for a ‘wood’—a place where something may be found—but also ‘for yesterday/Or for tomorrow night’—a time. The emphasis on time beyond the present has particular irony in the context of writings about poverty, as commentators often stress how the poor can't look beyond their immediate situation. George Orwell, writing of his own homeless sojourn in 1934, noted that poverty ‘annihilates the future’. In a similar vein, Athol Fugard has equated poverty with the ‘violence of immediacy’.²² In place of this visceral temporality, however, ‘Conversation’ urges a cerebral fantasy.

That said, the purpose of examining the poem's abstracting tendency is hardly to criticise MacNeice for failing to render his vagrant with the full gamut of usual associations. Instead, it's to highlight how a text may give what is diametrically opposite to licentiousness—that is, not a perverse fixation on particulars—and still manage an indifference or desensitisation similar to that produced by overexposure. The poem ultimately uses vagrancy as an imaginatively charged concept that illuminates something about the unconscious mind and not about poverty. In this light, it might be tempting to invert Denis Donoghue's question about metaphors: does the tenor (in this case, the minds of ordinary people) ‘demean’ the vehicle (vagrant/vagrancy) ‘by declaring what it lacks’—‘Is it shamed by that consideration’?²³ Is this a callously indifferent relation?

‘The Snow Sleeper’ courts these questions as it evades them, which is a feature I return to below. For now, it's sufficient to draw out the ambivalent status of Van Niekerk's use of ‘Conversation’. I have suggested that the poem serves as a gauge of Helena's self-awareness: fronting and returning in the story, it pre-empts and glosses her questionable interest in the vagrant, thus becoming a miniature portrait of her own desire to go vagrant. Such flagging, of course, is questionable in itself, as it calls upon that logic that lets the self-accuser claim indemnity: qui s'accuse, s'excuse. For this reason, it's crucial to see that the poem also stands outside the story proper, particularly as rendered in English. Unlike the Afrikaans original, where MacNeice's poem not only appears in translation but as ‘Vert. H.O.’ (‘translated by Helena Oldemarkt’), the English version gives the poem in English and supplies only MacNeice's name. That's to say, it occupies the place of the interleaf and epigraph. And taken as the latter, it ironises the designs of the report writer, cancelling out whatever self-exoneration Helena's confession might seem to hold. [Correction added on 3 July 2024, after first online publication: Helena Oldemarkt's surname has been corrected in this version.] But because epigraphs are by their nature gestures of authorial intervention, it also shows the author's hand in creating what she critiques—having her cake and eating it too. It seems possible that a framed copy of this poem about transgression and escape hangs not only above Professor van Doorn's desk but also above Professor van Niekerk's.

Another poem that Van Niekerk had to hand is Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘The Vagabond’, from which the Snow Sleeper quotes after interpolating his preferred swearword: ‘Fuck the housing, heaven is my shepherd … “Not to autumn will I yield, not to winter even”’ (p. 116). If Helena is unable to spot the cue, the reader is encouraged to do better. Once we've answered her leading question—‘Where would he have got that from?’—the story presses towards more vexing issues. What does it mean for a fictional vagabond to repeat fiction about vagabonds? What does it mean to treat penury as a kind of plenitude, or to see it as a precondition for realising some fuller version of humanity? Drifting permitted, I will attempt to answer these questions.

To start with Helena's confusion, we can identify the source of the Snow Sleeper's line about autumn and other snippets as Stevenson's 1896 collection, Songs of Travel. Its first poem is ‘The Vagabond’, which is set to an ‘air of Schubert’ and accordingly romanticises bare life on the open road.²⁴ The speaker, wanting nothing more than nature provides, receives its bounty. Heaven is his roof, the bush is his bed and the river is the sauce in which he dips his bread. And when ‘blow[s] fall soon or late’, he adopts a stoic pose, renouncing the need for comfort or company. The same attitude marks another poem in the collection, which is also invoked when the Snow Sleeper teases Helena with fragments about ‘the golden pavilions of a garden, about somebody hiding among the blooming trees …. About calling to her at the garden gate, in passing, and gone is his face’ (p. 141). That poem is ‘Youth and Love’ (part II), where these phrases occur and where the titular Youth forgoes any ‘pleasures’ that might divert him from the ‘nobler fate’ of wandering detachment.²⁵ While not quite roaring ‘Fuck the housing’, he too refuses the seductions of home, hearth and love.

The Snow Sleeper's recitation extends his judgment on the ‘halls of artistic treasures’, those repositories where his likes and likenesses have been recycled to the point of depersonalisation. How canny, for instance, that his remark about facelessness should be mirrored by a line from ‘Youth and Love’ that tells of a drifter whose ‘face is gone’.²⁹ But such parallels notwithstanding, there is one crucial difference between that earlier tirade and these allusive fragments: while the former is a direct and discursive condemnation of artistic exploitation, the repetition of Stevenson's poems is performative and therefore a more ambivalent comment on the same issue. On the one hand, the Snow Sleeper's reference to ‘The Vagabond’ criticises a poetic tendency to fetishise poverty and cast it as the ‘great lustre from within’ (as Rilke had it).³⁰ On the other hand, he rehearses such myths to his own benefit. Consider Helena's very first encounter with the Snow Sleeper. Singing his own song of travel, he not only stresses his displacement but aestheticises it. The lyric, set in alternating rhymes ‘to a tear-jerker’ (p. 104), is a ‘rather literary text’, and much like Stevenson's ‘The Vagabond’, it is ‘presented according to the conventions of a lieder performance’ (p. 105). Whether the accompanying tune is an air of Schubert isn't known or very important, as the Snow Sleeper is not mimicking a particular literary representation of poverty (such as ‘The Vagabond’). Rather, he mimics the general appearance of poverty. This is not to say that he isn't destitute, but that any success he might have as a beggar—whether actual or literary—depends on presenting his destitution in a conventionally legible manner.

It is this readability that Wainaina lampoons in African fiction of a particular type, and that was again the subject of the 2011 Caine Prize debate. But in ‘The Snow Sleeper’, the readability of poverty takes on a different character, and so too does the kind of ‘taste’ it appeals to. Granted, we find elements of mimetic poverty when the Snow Sleeper makes his boot into a ‘begging bowl’ and advertises his vagrant status by becoming one of the city's advertising vagrants.³⁵ Yet it is not primarily through these external features that he secures attention. Instead, he does so by flaunting both a literacy and literariness that go well beyond what Stevenson finds in his soldier, whose taste for poetry is merely sentimental.³⁶ The literacy has to do with the correspondence between the Snow Sleeper's reading and his being, between his knowledge of literature about poverty and his status as poor. The literariness has to do with his enactment of these links: how he, a vagabond, performs ‘The Vagabond’; how he rekindles traditions that cast the poor as Orphic avatars or noble rustics—as swan whisperers or snow sleepers.

If it may be granted that these self-conscious performances do secure attention, it remains to be answered: whose? Helena pauses to wonder about the literary droppings (‘Where would he have got that from?’), but she can't place them and therefore can't appreciate them for anything more than impish theatricality. Yet the same innocence can't be claimed by the reader, whose interest is yet again coopted by frame-breaking strategies. The collection's acknowledgements tell us to look out for ‘lines and fragments from the works of … RL Stevenson’ among others. And once we've found these fragments and made sense of them, we are again confronted with the complementarity of the author's methods. On the one hand, we see the Snow Sleeper's recitation as an indictment. Imitating an imitation, his performance speaks out against an artistic tendency to romanticise the poor. It tacitly agrees with Robert Frost that, looking back over this tradition, ‘you will find …—maybe falsely, hypocritically—poetry has praised poverty’.³⁷ And it turns on readers, on us, too: those ‘over-civilized people’, as Orwell had it, who ‘enjoy reading about rustics … because they imagine them to be more primitive and passionate than themselves’.³⁸ On the other hand, however, Van Niekerk critiques this tradition from the inside, trading on its features and so inviting its suspicions. ‘Do as I say,’ her ars poetica seems to suggest, ‘not as I do.’

So far, we have explored two sides to ‘The Snow Sleeper's’ allusive treatment of poverty. The story draws on MacNeice's ‘Conversation’ to minimise poverty's more common attributes and instead promote a fantasy of vanishing. And via Stevenson's vagabond poems, it imports pastoral ideas about the poor's noble simplicity. The third intertext, to which I now turn, is Eliot's Four Quartets, which supplies a surprising correlate to a stereotype already mentioned: the beggar as mystic or prophet.³⁹ It is surprising in that Eliot's religious-philosophical poem does not address poverty in any direct way. But the echo is also apt, as it allows Van Niekerk to call on a long tradition that connects material poverty with transcendental wealth.

Such an enterprise Van Niekerk would leave for another occasion. ‘The Literary Text in Turbulent Times,’ published 4 years after the live delivery of ‘The Friend’, provides a second reason for not taking the claims about art and social justice agendas too simply. Here, speaking without the buffer of fictive doubling, Van Niekerk declares that ‘the true ethical importance of a certain calibre of artwork lies not in the “messages” that could be extracted from it, but in the autonomy and singularity that makes it “stand on its own” through nothing but its own internal conceptual complexity and formal cohesion’.⁴⁹ Exemplary in this regard, she says, is J. M. Coetzee's own vagrant novel, Life and Times of Michael K, which, far from supplying grist to any socio-critical mill, ‘thwarts our naïve and sentimental compassion for “poor outcasts”’.⁵⁰ Such statements are sufficient to gauge Van Niekerk's views on putting art to instrumental use. And read in tandem with The Snow Sleeper, as it invites us to do, they provide a clear message against ‘messages’.

I started this piece by calling on Wainaina's ‘How to Write about Africa’ and suggested that ‘The Snow Sleeper’ compares in appearing to model specific features of a type of poverty fiction that is seldom treated with suspicion. Through its allusions and exaggerations, the story exposes how this other type uses vagrancy as a metaphor for the escape from social niceties, how it asserts the fullness of the impoverished life and how it casts the beggar as someone in possession of mystical truths. With self-conscious irony, it performs such features as part of an ars poetica—but an art poetica always ringed by parodic intent. We are never allowed to forget that we are reading a story and that the story itself is an occasion for thinking about the making of stories. It rubs our noses in its poesis. At the same time, the poesis is not an individual force of imagination but depends in obvious ways on high art's established and repeated fantasies about low living. On the one hand, then, the story forces us to become aware of the metaphoric gratuitousness that writers allow themselves; on the other, it warns against using this awareness to circumscribe what is artistically permissible. To see this tension is to recognise that the pleasures of the ‘Snow Sleeper’ are entangled with its discomforts. We should feel uneasy about the cerebral excitement that comes with mapping out poverty fiction's genealogies, as such pursuits reduce the act of reading to a game within a game. But erring on the other side—treating the story as a social tract and thus as the basis for a righteous indignation—this too should give us pause. If there is any moral in the tale, it's perhaps that we should hesitate when tempted to distinguish definitively between poetic licentiousness and poetic licence, between poverty porn and its supposed opposite.