examples of it as a European or imperialist milieu superimposed over a natural place
such as Antarctica or a forest. Even Colleen McCullough, the metaphorical atheist of
mythopoeic literature, allows it prominence in her literature, as revealed in my
analysis of her corpus. Even the anecdotal evidence found in the questionnaire
responses points to the existence of this parallel dimension, the I maginal Realm.
Throughout history there appears to be no culture or society, whatever the
aetiology of its development, that has not identified an elsewhere-place or
extraordinary dimension of existence. Harpur suggests that by the second century
in the ancient world everyone, pagan, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, Muslim and
Buddhists believed in the existence of beings who existed and populated another
dimension, an intermediary world (Harpur, 2002:5-6). This is particularly
fascinating because it provides evidence beyond the Western cultural tradition of a
nexus between the physical and non-physical, the literal and metaphysical, through
which we might pass, not as egoic self but as a de-centred self. Ovid in Malouf’s An
I maginary Life provides some hint as to the nature of the de-centred self:
We have some power in us that knows its own ends. I t is that
that drives us on to what we must finally become. We have only
to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us
to make it actual ... Our further selves are contained within us, as
the leaves and blossoms are in the tree. We have only to find the
spring and release it (Malouf,1978:64).These attributes of the psyche are the very substance of mythopoeic
literature; pervading the characters, plots and situations acted out within the
container of place in its many manifestations. I ndeed, mythopoeic reading and
writing have a certain similarity to psychoanalysis in that they too are activities of
introspection where consciousness is turned away from the external world toward
the inner nature of things, to the imaginative interpretation and explanation of what
is hidden but needs to be known.
One of the most interesting findings to emerge from my research is that
mythopoeic fiction is never simply a communication employed by a writer or
storyteller but rather is a collective phenomenon, an assemblage that constitutes a
semiotic or archetypal regime. What my research suggests, particularly when
considered in the context of Chapter 9, is that mythopoeic storytelling can never
simply express, no matter how implicitly, an author’s biography or predilections or
the author’s intended meaning in a personal style, as in the case of Colleen
McCullough.