Dik en dun, gesirkuleer en afgestroop - kringlope om ’n gedig van T.T. Cloete

Abstract

This article explores the deconstructive technique of the reversal of oppositions by applying it to “uitgedun” (depleted, or depletion) from T.T. Cloete’s first collection, Angelliera. The single most important opposition in the poem, viz. between the basic and the complex or the rich (already a reversal of the usual polarity), is shown to be reversible. The absent rich and full state is necessary to confer a positive meaning on what is essential. The text, however, contradicts itself in the first stanza. There it reaches out to a possible full and rich state in the future, which contradicts the celebration of the basic or depleted state in the rest of the poem. The basic state is celebrated as a state of presentness to the self, after a period of self-alienation to the not so basic. However, the different metaphors of circulation - of blood, of merchandise and of bodies - in the end rather suggest an absence of selfhood, a self split and alienated from itself by cheap exchange in various circulations.