In Pursuit of the Primitive: Van der Post’s Lost World

Abstract

Van der Post has provoked considerable controversy in recent years around what are seen as the fictionalisations and the mystifications evident in his work. In this article I provide a reading of The Lost World of the Kalahari that seeks to understand rather than excoriate these features of his writing. For purposes of my argument, the relevant question is not so much whether Van der Post’s representation of the Bushman is true, but what the context, nature and purpose are of his representation. I begin by looking at the genre of travel writing in the context of ethnographic writing, and suggest that the guiding trope of the text, the pursuit of the primitive in the face of its imminent disappearance by the mid-twentieth century, is characteristic of much travel writing of the period. I ask whether it is possible, from the perspective of the modern, to recognise and understand the primitive at all, and examine the ways in which the text struggles to represent what has been set up from the outset as the other of modernity. The focus of my argument is the contradiction set up by the text between the representation of the primitive as other, and representation of the primitive as that which has been lost to the modern psyche but that can be recovered and reintegrated to yield plenitude of being. I conclude by suggesting that the language deployed by the text in recovering the other reinforces rather than challenges the totalising project of modernity.