BOUNDARIES OF THE SOUL

also in the case of Colleen McCullough, the experience of a rich texture of
otherness, indeed, that facilitates the emergence of a de-centred self, of
ambivalence, symbolism and also enchantment. I n the experiences of these two
respondents we see similarities between MLC and SC.
Fortunately, I found in all the responses confirmation not only of this but
also of my most fundamental postulates. Firstly, there is a potential for a de-
centred self to emerge from the act of reading certain form of mythopoeic
narratives. I t seems that the psyche’s functioning is both enhanced and expanded
by MLC and its concomitant mythic-narrative representations because they pierce
the membrane between inner and outer, as in the case of the Palaeolithic cave
pictographs, of the most important existential element of the outer world; the
places in which we exist. The result of this is the unshackling of the mythic-
narrative psyche and the reinvigoration of its primal reciprocal relationship with
place.
The responses confirmed that we seem habitually blind to these subtle
narratives of place and that the shock of deep recognition of the subtle nature of
place comes only when the places we inhabit, in actuality or in imagination, become
theatres of war, trauma or of epiphanies (like the particular locales that epitomise
human or ecological holocaust) that force the egoic self to its wits-end. This is
when we really bring place into presence, when it suddenly, in all its potent
majesty, overwhelms the ego.
Secondly, that this vitalizing mythic-narrative function produces an altered
state of consciousness that involves the dynamics of the I maginal Realm. This also
demonstrates the aptness of Patrick White’s injunction that the writer’s purpose
should be to ‘imagine the real’ in their writings, to engage with the transcendent
meta-historical imagination that is essentially religious or numinous. White’s
injunction was exemplified when Thomas Keneally suggested that writing a novel ...
is like a depth-charge into that area of the brain, a benign depth charge in that it
releases all the people we didn’t even know we knew... and that these characters,
and by implication, the places they inhabit, are manifestations of us and yet more
than that; because they come from a collective pool of myth and archetypes. Thus,
in reading mythopoeic literature, the boundaries between subject and object, self
and other, character and place, frequently collapse and we enter the I maginal
Realm.