CHAPTER 1
I MAGI NI NG THE REAL
1.1 I ntroduction: The Topic
I f, as Patrick White suggests, the writer’s purpose is to ‘imagine the real’, we
might begin by asking how they are able to do this and what states of
consciousness are implicated. I believe that White is referring to what I term
Mythopoeic Literary Consciousness, referred to throughout the dissertation as MLC,
to describe a specific state of altered consciousness experienced by mythopoeic
writers; those writers whose works have a particularly puissant effect on their
readers, especially in regard to the sense of place or of an elsewhere-place, in their
literature. The effect of mythopoeic literature might be seen as similar to that of
poetry in that it is imaginatively and intellectually more immediate and intense; this
is why I have termed its creators mythopoeic writers, in order to distinguish them
from the writers of pulp-fiction and commercially or politically motivated prose.
Likewise, mythopoeic-readers demand and experience more from their reading than
mere relaxation or enjoyment.
I consider MLC to be analogous to Shamanic Consciousness (SC) in that
each relates to the sacred or transcendent and transpersonal dimensions of human
consciousness and each utilizes similar existentialist perspectives of place as a tiered
or hierarchical dimension. I want to establish whether MLC is coterminous with SC
and to determine the nature and characteristics of MLC: is it an isomorph of the
outer world of places and the inner world, the intangible realm of the psyche? I
want to determine if the mythopoeic writer shares a similar, perhaps co-evolutionary
function with the shaman because until the emergence of psychology as an
autonomous discipline, it was, in the Western cultural tradition, often the poet or
writer who was expected to interpret and explain the human condition. Thus, I
want to establish if MLC has its roots in shamanism and also the nature of that
dimension of the psyche from which such extra-ordinary knowledge is acquired. I
also want to establish if the mythopoeic writer uses place, like the shaman, as an
especially puissant form of enchantment, in the truest sense of the word.
I want to establish if such a psychic state suggests not merely a phantasy
dimension or an aspect of an aberrant psyche, but rather another level of
consciousness that is a palimpsest of the individual and collective unconscious,