Keneally’s European Literature, which differentiates those texts from and contrasts
them to others in his corpus. The corpora of Malouf and McCullough are often
perceived to follow this pattern; Malouf tending to reveal the mythic dimensions and
layering of story and place and McCullough assumed to muse on themes that are
seen by some as populist and pedestrian, often quixotic. Albeit, each corpus seems
to facilitate a sort of intertextuality or even metanarrative, perhaps brought about
through a consistency of the unhinging of temporal sequences, common resonances
expressed perhaps in ‘popular’ motifs such as the allusion to erotic situations
(eroticism, however subtle it may be, is common in all of the works examined), a
dialogism in which a variety of texts reverberate with certain themes or subtexts.
On this last point I am indebted to Umberto Eco for his analysis of the way in which
“ ... texts talk to one another” (Eco, 2002:212-235), as a consequence of the
common time, historical events and culture shared by authors and certainly, in the
case of the writers I have examined, posits each as a historical figure at the cross
roads of a certain number of events.
I ronically, Eco’s theory is given credence in the work of two of the subject
authors and both also serve to elaborate on the important relationship between the
ecstasy of the shaman and the ordered perceptions of the priest. Both Thomas
Keneally and Colleen McCullough invoke the disordered energies of the shaman in
the priest figure through the mythic-sexual. Thomas Keneally has Father Doig
confess that he has a homosexual lover, without whom he would have suicided
(Keneally, 1985:288). Colleen McCullogh has Father Ralph personally aware of a
different kind of sacrament [ erotic] (McCullough, 1977:388). Both protagonists
represent ordered institutionalised religion but beneath even these most
institutionalised and ordered personas, potentially ecstatic, perhaps even shamanic
forces lie in wait.
Each of the narratives examined is richly imaginative, beautifully written and,
ironically, is usually open to more than one interpretation, albeit, within a prescribed
temporal domain, as for example, in the case of Malouf’s An I maginary Life, which
might be seen as an account of the exile and death of the poet Ovid, a metaphorical
narrative of the Jungian individuation process or, an allegorical account of the
evolution of modern Australia; still all within the Western cultural tradition even
though their ultimate aetiology may depend on classical Greek thought. This multi-
interpretive possibility is a feature, to some greater or lesser degree, in the
narratives and imbues them with an extraordinary poetic power. Each narrative
ron
(Ron)
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