much perceive their life as a story: each one having a structure and a plot, one that
may not always be perceived except at moments when there occurs a conflux of
external events and an inner state, a synchronicity. The point is that our lives have
a narrative structure, rather like that of a novel, although the narratives we would
like to live may not necessarily be those that we are living or are meant to live.
11.3 The Mythopoeic Writer as Spiritual Functionary in the Realm of Place
I have shown how the modern Western pictorialization of imagination came
about and how the cave pictographs were a kind of parergon, an ancillary
manifestation of creative consciousness emerging from place. With the
pictorialization of imagination it became more difficult to distinguish the rational
from the imaginal by appeal to nature. MLC emerged from metaphors, sensation,
memory and imagination, and it became more difficult to distinguish because all had
the same aetiology; sensate place.
The research has now enabled us to perceive the writer of mythopoeic
literature as one who, like the shaman, accesses an ontological prior reality, a realm
of essences, the Quintessential, the remnant of the participation mystique or what I
have termed elsewhere-place, still embedded within what we term or see as place.
The term ‘ontological prior reality’ identifies the essential element that lays at the
core of existence and that is independent and free of humankind’s representation of
reality. That core reality is place. I have also established that the psyche has its own
deep psychoid roots in this ontological prior reality and that these roots are what
the shaman and the mythopoeic writer present in their ritual and symbols and
mythopoeic literature, and what Jung later identified, following their evolution into
human experience, as the archetypes.
Each of the three cohort writers have intention behind their writing: David
Malouf said that through his writing he wished to change the way people see and
experience things. Thomas Keneally is unquestionably a priestly figure engaged in
the sacramental task of relating the spiritual and core elements of Australian
experience to the rest of the world, and devising a ‘craftier theology’ for the soul in
this unique environment. Even Colleen McCullough, in spite of her denials, has
demonstrated her capacity to see through the mundane, to draw near the numinous
and return to tell us of it. Each of them provides us with a deep soulful
engagement with truths about existence, identity and the nature of the places we