The corner of your eye ; and, Beyond the bush : mythology of place in Australian literature
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2008
Open Access
Copyright Clearance Process
- Recently Added
- In Progress
- Open Access
This item is open access.
This exegesis examines the links between mythology, history, memory, identity,
landscape and place in Australian literature, with reference to a variety of colonial, postcolonial
and contemporary Australian literature, and with particular attention to the
work of David Malouf. It proposes that a specific and mythologised version of the past
has been indivisible in our literature with a mythologised version of place. This ‘place
of the past’ in Australian literature has invariably been the wilderness, in the form of
either desert or bush.
Mythology is defined here as collective remembrance ordered by narrative and
produced through sets of binary oppositions identified by Claude Lévi-Strauss as
endemic to mythological structures (Neilsen 1990, p.440.) The relationships between
mythology, memory, history, place, culture and literature are identified through the
common denominator of narrative; as a prominent and celebrated form of cultural
narrative, what is deemed to form our national literature plays a vital role in creating
and legitimising both national mythologies of place and mythologies of national
identity. At the same time, there is a continual conflict in both literature and culture
between collective mythologies of place and individual mythologies of place. In essence
this is a conflict between stories we tell ourselves and stories we tell each other. This
raises the question of the function of literature itself: whether it is or should be a means
of representation for individual and anomalous experience or whether it is a tool for
enunciating collective notions of identity and experience. I argue here that the
dominance of the wilderness mythology in Australian literature has fostered reductive
and limited notions of both our national literature and our national identity.
My novel, The Corner of Your Eye (2006), set in contemporary urban Sydney, is
examined in terms of these relationships between memory, landscape, the self and an
Australian literary mythology of place. Concepts of individual memory versus
collective memory, the marginal identity versus the national identity, and individual
mythologies of place versus national mythologies of place are all central concerns of my
own work. In light of this discussion, the exegesis suggest a way out of some of the
contradictions and limitations inherent in a national literature defined by a historical
relationship to place and a national literature which revolves on exclusive notions of a
national identity: namely a heterotopic literature which represents and celebrates
difference rather than unity, and one which replaces homogenous versions of self and
place with a more various and inclusive approach to representations of self and place.
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: