BOUNDARIES OF THE SOUL

Millennium) into a lost time and place; times that were remembered implicitly for
what might have been, and the very definite influence of the particular place
connected with that time. Each work also shows not only both the robustness but
also the fragility of physical, psychological and spiritual existence and of how that
robustness or otherwise is contingent on place. I ndeed, every genius loci
described throughout the literature of the three authors, or the milieu generated by
it, seems to suggest that in its relationship to the protagonists, there is potentially,
something evermore yet to announce itself. These places exhibit configurations that
are beyond the power of urbane geography to explain, in which a random object or
perception can suddenly manifest the deep natural history of the place or of the
soul of the individual protagonist. Of course, 'place' is of central concern to the
entire discipline of geography. However, contemporary scholarship in geography
tends to shy away from any consideration of soul or spirit, and is usually more
concerned with description and delineation. Here, each narrative captures the spirit
that clings to certain places and spaces, which are best understood in terms of
metaphor or metonym and each place is figuratively incised to reveal how it is
imbued with stories and myth, a labyrinth, woven through time as well as space and
where some primordial-archetypal element like the Child, the Virgin, the Soldier or
the Saviour becomes a psychopomp leading the reader out of egoic concern to an
aspect or potential of the I maginal Realm.
There is something else, too, concerning place that insinuates itself in the
selected literature; there is an interstice between the author and a particular place,
an interstice that morphs into elsewhere-place; thus, between Malouf and his
Brisbane there is something that allows him, in a sense, to still be there and yet
both the actual and the imaginal constitution of Brisbane will go beyond that
relationship with Malouf, and so too, Keneally’s actual and imaginal Australia,
Antarctica or his Europe, and McCullough’s actual and imaginal Rome, the South
Pacific or even a futuristic USA. I suspect that every place in the fictive corpus of
each writer reflects a sort of template for elsewhere-place, even though each writer
has embedded in his or her work a wealth and inexhaustible array of actual place
signification.
Finally, to mention the names Malouf, Keneally, or McCullough, in a sense,
anticipates or performs a literary classificatory function in regards to the subject
narrative and suggests the grouping of a certain number of texts, sometimes
thematically or historically, as I have done, for example, in the case of Thomas