Ted Hughes and Laurens Van der Post

Résumé :

Although it has rarely been pointed, there are many resemblances between Ted Hughes and Laurens van der Post, which clearly owe much to the strong influence of C. G. Jung on both writers. Their most obvious common ground is certainly the “ecoliterary” dimension of both their works, which implies an in-depth criticism of Western civilisation. This paper would try to assess the convergences and divergences between these two authors, both in their lives and in their works, while trying to figure out how far they contributed to a literary movement of sorts, geared to a particular period in the history of ideas. It would also be interesting to try to document the hypothesis that they contributed, however informally, to what was almost a sort of think tank, incidentally gravitating around HRH the Prince of Wales, advocating certain ideas, especially in the domains of environment and education. What these views where exactly, and with what degree of pragmatic organisation they were promoted, remains to be investigated into. However, it is at least possible to make out a sphere of influence, to which Hughes’s and Van der Post’s literary productions concurred to give momentum, each in his own way. As a corollary, this study might take into account the rather complicated rapport that they both had to (auto)biography, which is related on the one hand to their shared philosophy of the human subject, and on the other hand to their wariness of a dominant ideology in which the media played a dominant part. Hughes and Van der Post seem to have had in common a cult of discretion, if not of secrecy, perhaps mainly because they believed that their literary actions were most efficient if they operated on subconscious levels. This paper, I think, is likely to offer a slightly new angle in Hughes studies, by looking at his achievement as a form of ideological commitment, a “mental fight” as William Blake would say, with a deliberate strategy, where the persona of the lonely Devon recluse was only the visible tip of the iceberg.