collective unconscious, their essence, bits and pieces of their lives accessed through
her own imagination.
Then too, there was her expression of a metaphorical shape shifting in
imagining herself as a Michelangelo, sculpting, expressing an intense emotional
involvement in her work yet with an almost perfunctory approach to please her
publishers. McCullough’s use of anachronisms; the word ‘scriptorium’ in response to
Question 9 conjures up an image of an anchorite, a medieval monk, and she also
used ‘brown study’, ‘leprosarium’ and ‘lazaret’ and in their usage hints at other
personas in her psyche. I ronically, her description of the transpersonal dimensions
of Norfolk I sland and of the two spirits or ghosts who haunt her home there and of
her encounters with them belies her stated disbelief in the paranormal.
One can also note two distinctly different styles of writing within the pages
of McCullough’s response. At Question 21, when she begins to describe the ghosts
that haunt her home, her writing suddenly assumes an almost staccato, stream of
consciousness style, suggestive of an altered state of consciousness. However, it is
in the description of the Connecticut countryside that her writing changes to an
intensely lyrical style that reveals the mythopoeic dimension of her consciousness, a
dimension that she refutes.
Thomas Keneally’s responses clearly confirmed the influence of the
unconscious in his writing; he expressed his belief that the unconscious mind has its
own agenda, a sovereign agenda that is sometimes previewed in dreams. I ndeed,
Thomas Keneally seems to be a modern Prospero; he stated that he is both a
participant in his mythic-narratives and an observer, a creating artist as well as
created character. Keneally also suggested that in creating imaginal worlds, he re-
creates himself and becomes a different person. By the very action of becoming a
character of his fiction, Keneally transcends the barriers between fiction and reality,
and in doing so, challenges his reader to re-think the nature of their own identity
and to confront the I maginal Realm or elsewhere-place. This challenge might also
alert the researcher to the need for caution in interpreting Keneally’s and indeed the
other authors’ self reports.
David Malouf revealed an awareness of distinctive shaman-like processes
implicated his writing. He stated that when he was writing he was aware of a
suspension of normal consciousness during which he became responsive to
experiences, sometimes overheard but that he experienced as emotion and also as
real. This facilitated a state that he calls open, a state of consciousness which
ron
(Ron)
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