Thursday November 21, 2024

2:45-4:00pm: Panel 2: Theory-mediation/transmission

Hélène Aji (ENS Ulm): "Learning from Kenneth White: Lessons in Autonomy"

Steven Sutcliffe (University of Edinburgh): "Kenneth White and Dugald Semple: the origins of 'Geopoetics' in 'Life Reform'"

This paper discusses the encounter in the early 1950s in the village of Fairlie, 35 miles south west of Glasgow on the Clyde coast, between Kenneth White (1936-2023) and the vegetarian activist and conscientious objector, Dugald Semple (1884-1964). I will explore the impact of Semple's "life reform" principles on White's intellectual formation and subsequent development of ‘geopoetics’. On the jacket of The Most Difficult Area (1968), White is quoted as saying that he "believes with Nietzsche that civilization’s crying need is 'temporary isolation, a kind of deepest concentration on oneself and self-recovery …'". As a result, the blurb continues, White "has avoided the great thoroughfares of modern life and lived, simply, on its fringes." There is no evidence that Semple read Nietzche (although it is possible since Nietzche was quite widely read in Edwardian Britain). But tropes of ‘self-recovery’ and "living simply" on the "fringes" of "the great thoroughfares of modern life" connote a European ethos of Life Reform in which Semple had participated since 1907 as a liberal/anarchist conscientious objector, vegetarian and advocate of nature cure. If White's later "super-nihilist" stravaiging as poet, essayist and professor of an ‘open world’ seems a long way from Semple, yet "the Orient" and "the East" were first communicated to White through the books he borrowed from Semple’s home library. Drawing on correspondence with White and on passages from his writings, I argue that Semple as mentor and Fairlie and its environs as genius loci were a formative rather than accidental influence on White’s geopoetics. In short, no Life Reform (Semple), no Geopoetics (White).