“Sermon among the ruins”: Laurens van der Post’s natural aesthetic

Abstract

ABSTRACT Laurens van der Post is chiefly remembered by the general public for his voluminous and at times bewitchingly popular writings, and for his almost guru-like status as a conservationist. Yet only one early and incomplete monograph deals with Van der Post’s literary output. His several novels have received patchy critical attention, and none have been examined ecocritically, despite their pervasive ruminations upon the natural world. This article investigates four relatively neglected novels for their evocation of Van der Post’s “natural aesthetic”: Flamingo Feather (1955), The Hunter and the Whale (1967), A Story Like the Wind (1971), and its sequel A Far-Off Place (1974). I focus on passages which evince, through their stylistics, a distinctive aesthetic, suggesting that internal antitheses and ironies reflect wider dilemmas of nature conservation. I point to a potentially fruitful confluence between some recent developments in ecocriticism, literary animal studies, and environmental aesthetics – all the more necessary in our present global ecological climacteric.