CHAPTER 5
TEXTUAL RESEARCH – THE LITERATURE OF THE WRI TERS RESEARCHED.
5.1 David Malouf: The Shaman
Scholarly, cosmopolitan and foremost among contemporary Australian
writers of poetry and prose, David Malouf is lauded for the sheer intensity, lyricism
and imaginative quality of his writing. Malouf says that he wants his poetry and
prose “ ...to change the way people see things, to change their state of being and
feeling and perceiving” (Kiernan, 1986:28).^ One of the ways he achieves this is
through the use of a code or cipher as the structural basis of his works in that one
may observe the repetition throughout the corpus of certain motifs and symbols
such as the child and childhood memory, exile or alienation, memory and
imagination and the processes which bring these to consciousness and, of great
importance, place. Place, not so much as geographic location but more in the sense
of a temenos, something which lies outside of consciousness, that locality of
belonging where the soul or psyche focuses itself.
However, my essential concern is with the rich spiritual and psychological
complexities of the Malouf corpus, for these give it a unique transcendental nature
or mythic quality. The transcendence experienced by Malouf’s characters is usually
within the context of the mythic-heroic journey or quest and, therefore, seems to
require that they be tested or suffer before any epiphany can occur. When it does
occur, that epiphany bursts in sudden, unexpected eruption up from the depths of
the soul of the protagonists and places them in the presence of the I neffable.
Accordingly, mind and matter are shown to move closer together in his work and
Malouf’s vision of reality seems to dramatically and vividly express, metaphorically,
elements of the quantum physics of Niels Bohr.
Throughout the Malouf corpus everything seems to be interconnected,
permeated with a vital energy or life force and the physical, psychological and
spiritual domains are encapsulated in a single, unified system. The corpus also has
elements of the Creation Spirituality of Matthew Fox since the protagonists, on their
journey of self-discovery, are led beyond the concerns of egoistic existence to
mystic union with the Beloved or I neffable in a way that requires a rediscovery of
lost innocence, of the unwounded child that exists in each of us and which is so
vividly illustrated in An Imaginary Life.