powerful narratives with imagery that re-enchants place in a way that is both artistic
and shamanic and where, although the fictive nature of the text is realised, it
nevertheless acts like a puppet show; more as a prompt to interpretative co-
creation. Such mythopoeic literature, I believe, awakens the reader’s mind to a
wider sense of reality and in the act of reading these imaginal narratives the reader
enters the reverie of MLC and discovers an elsewhere-place.
These texts bridge the gap between egoic-consciousness and place because
both become enmeshed in mythic alternatives presented by narratives that poeticise
the realities of life and endow ordinary places with epiphanic potentiality. These
may well be places where the signs are contradictory, where poets are sacred
lawgivers and where rivers may flow backwards, as in the case of Malouf’s An
I maginary Life; where the protagonists are not as they seem, as in the case of
Keneally’s characters, and where objects and qualities are, in an almost alchemical
manner, determined by the context of place, as is particularly the case with
McCullough. I t is literature where place is sanctified, responsive and shamanized
and in which, like a Mobius strip, consciousness is seen to be externalised and place
internalised, one somehow, unsurprisingly, the reverse of the other. Consider for
example, Malouf’s Ovid finding a desolate place transformed by the discovery of a
scarlet poppy or Keneally’s Schindler finding omnipotence instead terror in the Nazi-
occupied Polish town. McCullough too weaves epiphany into the Edenic beach
cottage, the pristine beauty of New Zealand and an island military hospital.
These narratives precipitate a sly disturbance of the reader’s self, a
spreading out of a de-centred self into places where often only the imagination has
ventured, or otherwise feels connected. Even in spite of what sometimes seems a
trite or platitudinous theme in the narrative, there seems to be a density of
implication; there appears to be other things happening within the text that are not
quite specified but which, nevertheless, reverberate. I t is the writers’ meticulous
attention to language and an ability to suggest deeper existentialist resonances in
these works that capture a moment in time and the relationship of the inner and
outer worlds of the narratives’ characters. Their writing seems to be assembled
from layers of voices and fragments of memory, literally excavating their
protagonists’ souls from layers of places, scraping away the surface deposited in
their lives by each place lived in.
I n each of the narratives analysed, the movement is backwards (even by
analogy to the Christ narrative in McCullough’s futuristic, A Creed for the Third
ron
(Ron)
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