4
Introduction.
The ‗Moment of Touching‘ in David Malouf‘s Poetical Experience
In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs, in
the green that would balance on the wide green world,
air filled with flux, world-in-a-belly in the blue lilac
weather, she had written a letter: You came into my life
really fast and I liked it.
1
My very first encounter was with David Malouf the novelist, through one of his
recent works, The Conversations at Curlow Creek. I clearly recall reading it in the space of
one night, and deciding, in the aftermath, that it would be my favourite book. What I found
most fascinating about his language was the poetic rythm of the prose, how the simplest
words sewn together managed to offer glimpses of human power and fragility, facing,
entering and overcoming the ineffability of a world sometimes too complex to be named,
and yet utterly simple. Of course, after The Conversations at Curlow Creek I have read
dozens of other ‗favourite‘ books, but somehow the first impression of that particular one
still lies in my memory. I soon found out that David Malouf started out as a poet, before
dedicating himself to the ‗steady gaze‘ provided by the literary means of prose
2
, even
though he never gave up writing poems. Hence my second step was to move nearer to his
poetical beginnings, firstly as a simple reader, and then trying to apply the insight and the
methods of analysis of the scholar. I believe this work is a mixture of both the personal and
the conceptual, the rational and the sentimental approach.
However, in dealing with the subject matter and having, perhaps for the first time, to
partially apply those ‗scholarly spectacles‘, possibly without missing on the intrinsic beauty
of what I was studying, I found myself struggling towards the harmonization of the different
feelings I had about it. Indeed, I hung between the fear of losing my trust in the possibility
of explaining poetry, and the joy of discovering that it is actually so: poetry is and remains
inaccessible with the sole means of rational analysis. And yet, I tried to remain firm in my
engagement, without giving up to the conviction that nothing can be explained or revealed. I
thus allowed myself to arrive just to the point where the poet‘s words take off, providing, as
I said before, the hypotetical, partially ‗scientific‘ and partially personal reading of the
1
Luke Davies, Totem, in Totem Poem Plus 40 Love Poems, Sydney, 2004.
2
As the writer himself explaines in an interview with Candida Baker, Interview with David Malouf, in
Picador, Yacker 3: Australian Writers Talk about Their Work, 1989, p. 235.
5
landscape from which these words might have originated. Moreover, I have endeavoured to
build a web capable of comprising them in a conceptual drawing that could – owing to the
numerous gaps – let them breathe and stretch, wherever their power may take them: that is,
much beyond the span of my work.
Moving on to some notations about the structure of this essay: in the first chapter I
will focus on issues related to the ‗postcolonial studies‘ approach, such as the imperialistic
mechanisms of power preservation, the cultural situation of formerly colonized countries
and their peculiar ways of challenging the cultural assumptions established by the colonizers
and rooted - sometimes very deeply - in their societies, and the importance of language both
in settling and uprooting these assumptions, discovering how and where they apply to, or
diverge from, David Malouf‘s poetical themes and attitudes. In the second chapter, I will
analyse how Malouf‘s concept of identity is unveiled by his poetry, and explore the
connection between the sense of Self and that of Otherness, taking into consideration the
philosophical and cultural background which the author‘s personal experiences and ideas
spring from, and seeing how they may acquire a universal value through the means of
poetry. Starting from those poems that better express the poet‘s attitude towards Otherness,
I will describe how he deals with the imperialistic mechanism of ‗othering‘ and subverts it,
and moreover how he understands the subject-object relationship, making Otherness his key
of inspiration; I will analyze Malouf‘s attitude towards space and time, focusing on his idea
of home as Heimat thus assessing the importance of places like Australia and Europe in his
poetical insight; I will furthermore deal with the perception of distance and the problem of
displacement, linking it to some postcolonial features; I will then conclude with a survey of
the various ‗edges‘ present in Malouf‘s poetry. Finally, I am going to provide an analysis of
Malouf‘s poem The Crab Feast, pointing out how all the features mentioned before can be
found in its body, and how the totality of Malouf‘s world acquires a coherence of vision in
being at the ‗edge‘ of this same vision, in the metaphorical and metaphysical place where
poetry and life reside: ‗the moment of touching‘.
6
Chapter One.
A Postcolonial Perspective
3
A writer has a voice as a musician has an instrument, except that the writer composes the music too.
The instrument can be adapted to many different kinds of compositions, but always bears the marks of
a performer‘s particular way of handling it. Training and inheritance, idiosyncrasies and angles, the
shaping pressures of the body, the arc of life – all are carried in the timbre of what we hear. That is
what we learn to recognize. That is what moves us with its human personality. That is what we come to
love.
4
While I am working at this thesis on the Australian poet and novelist David Malouf, his
homeland is facing an interesting pre-electoral period, as it is shaken by events which
may be considered emblematic of Australia‘s peculiar situation. Besides the candidacy, in
the lines of the Labour party, of the first politician with aboriginal roots – a great step
forward for a country whose ruling class has always been ‗white‘, preferably anglo-saxon,
– some quite revolutionary concepts have been expressed, even though seemingly aiming
at making an impression on the voters. During an electoral meeting in August 2010 Julia
Gillard, the Prime Minister in office and candidate of the Labour party, gave voice to the
widespread idea according to which Australia must turn into a Republic, independent from
the British Commonwealth, no longer a branch of its power. This announcement uncovers
some of the main features – and problems – of the Australian attitude towards itself and
towards the other countries that have affected, and continue to be involved in, its history.
One of these features is represented by the precarious balance between a cultural-
historical dependence from Europe, and a feeling of alterity towards this background – a
feeling that can easily develop into a sense of ‗Australianness‘ connected to what is
marginal, periferic, subject, and yet may give rise to a new and different configuration of
Australian identity as independent, particular, unique, ‗like nothing but itself‘
5
. This
ambivalence in the development of the country‘s cultural identity stands out as a typical
3
I use here the term Postcolonial rather than Post-Colonial in order to mark the cultural and discoursive
features of the word, rather than to point at the concrete historical period of decolonization and
postcolonialism (as suggested by John McLeod in his book Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester, 2000,
p. 27).
4
Nicholas Jose, Giving Voice, in David Malouf: a Celebration, Canberra, 2001, p. 21.
5
Candida Baker, Interview with David Malouf, in Picador, Yacker 3: Australian Writers Talk about Their
Work, 1989, p. 238.
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issue connected to the experience of colonialism and the working out of postcolonialism,
matter upon which it is perhaps useful to spend here a few words, regarding both
definitions and themes.
As John Mcleod points out in his introductory book Beginning Postcolonialism, defining the
postcolonial subject may be difficult to the extent that, in the variety of activities and
features that may be grouped together under this definition, there seems to be no
acknowledged starting point, and no ‗critical procedure that we might identify as typically
postcolonial‘
6
. As a matter of fact, the word comes to define a variety of research
procedures, together with the landscape upon which these studies develop and find their
material; and this variety is precisely what confers vitality to the subject, and the power of
challenging fixed cultural assumption, which represents one of its outstanding features. We
regard as belonging to the postcolonial domain all the cultures somehow affected by the
imperial process of colonization, taking into account their development from the period of
direct colonization to the present day, thus dealing, on one hand, with forms of cultural
control that sometimes stretch beyond the end of direct political influence
7
, and on the other
with the challenging and breaking of these forms of indirect control:
[...] there is a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European
imperial aggression. We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term for the new cross-cultural
criticism which has emerged in recent years and for the discourse through which this is constituted.
8
Postcolonialism explores images, representations, modes of perceptions (in one word,
colonial discourses
9
) that are used by colonizers as means of establishing and mantaining
cultural power over the subservient colonized people, and most importantly, it deals with
how a ‗decolonisation of the mind‘
10
takes place, that is, a challenge to these radicated
discourses brought forward as an empowering of the once subservient and colonized people.
Both the ‗colonization‘ and the (hopefully subsequent, but not always fully achieved)
6
John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester, 2000, p. 3.
7
Neocolonialism is the term normally used to indicate an indirect form of cultural and political
predomination, which takes place after the official decolonization of the formerly colonized countries and yet
leaves a state of things in which the colonizer‘s affection persists both in forms of economical submission and
of cultural images (see John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester, 2000).
8
Ashcroft,Griffiths, Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, London, 1989, p. 7.
9
As John McLeod suggests in his study Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester, 2000.
10
A term coined by the indian writer Salman Rushdie, and used at lenght by the scholars Ashcroft, Griffiths
and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back, London, 1989, and by John McLeod in Beginning Postcolonialism,
Manchester, 2000.
8
‗decolonization‘ of the mind happen through the outstanding powerful means of language,
which itself expresses and works at the development of cultural paradigms. And if
Colonialism suggests certain ways of seeing, specific modes of understanding the world and one‘s
place in it that assist in justifying the subservience of colonized peoples to the (oft assumed) ‗superior‘,
civilised order of the British colonizers [...] is perpetuated in part by justifying to those in the colonising
nation the idea that it is right and proper to rule over other peoples, and by getting colonized people to
accept their lower ranking in the colonial order of things – a process we can call colonising the mind.
11
it is then possible to say that the internalisation of this way of looking at things takes place
through language, which has a basic role in building a view of the world and is therefore the
main path by which a redemption of the subjugated world may take place. In his work
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature James Currey cites
the words of the Kenian novelist Ngugi wa Thiong‘o on the matter:
Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body
of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive
themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth,
at their entire relationship to nature and to other human beings. Language is thus inseparable from
ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a
specific relationship to the world.
12
The power of language is also the power of description, and of naming. Giving names to
things or people, imposing names over things and people and connecting to one‘s original,
self-expressive name is one of the main themes of postcolonial literature, which walks
together with the issue of identity and of the relationship with Otherness, issue that we will
widely explore later on in this thesis. As we have seen, the process of decolonizing the mind
is strictly connected with the language, which has to be reshaped in order to serve new
horizons, new points of view that may challenge and dismiss received assumptions: this
means, reading and writing ‗otherwise‘
13
. Creating a ‗New Language‘ is the crucial point
for the postcolonial cultural activity, that is to say, adjusting its forms of representation to
the physical and cultural space/place, remodeling its skin and its bones to serve new
11
John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester, 2000, p. 18.
12
Ngugi wa Thiong‘o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, ed. by James
Currey, London, 1986, p. 16.
13
As pointed out by John McLeod in his Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester, 2000, p. 23.
9
purposes. In their book The Empire Writes Back the scholars Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin
argue that
Writers were creating new englishes [...] through various strategies: inserting untranslatable words into
their texts; by glossing seemingly obscure terms; by refusing to follow standard English syntax and
using structures derived from other languages; of incorporating many different creolised versions of
English into their texts. Each of these strategies was demonstrated operating in a variety of postcolonial
texts, and in each the emphasis was on the writer‘s attempt to subvert and refashion standard English
into various new forms of English, as a way of jettisoning the colonialist values which standard English
housed.
14
In the postcolonial landscape, every country stands out with particular features, which relate
to the individual history of the place. Australia is, alone, an interesting and complex field of
study, with regard to the difficult construction of a new Australian identity, certainly
connected to the British one and yet fairly different in its features. The construction of this
identity is nothing else than the construction of a national identity, one that links the social
and political modes of organisation to a common cultural background, in the sense of an
Australian tradition constructed around an idea of nation (as John McLeod again notices),
which acquires expression through particular symbols and narrations: that is to say, through
the development of myths. ‗The language of culture and community is poised on the
fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past‘
15
: myths express
and, furthermore, help the development of a common identity. Postcolonial writers have to
deal with the fundamental challenge of giving voice to them, and in some case to create
them, as we will see. Indeed, ‗alimentarsi delle proprie ossessioni e dei propri sapori‘
16
is
what the Australians seem to be trying to do in order to cut lose from the haunting shadow
of Britain, albeit without effacing that great part of the European inheritance at the roots of
the new developing identity. But is it a process of identity creation, or is it a rediscovery?
Can the absence of a sense of belonging and of stable identity become itself a national and
cultural feature? Can Australia play on her geographical and cultural sense of marginality –
and on the unease that rises from it – to create a poetics of the place, which is capable of
rescuing the country‘s cultural expressions from the negative development of this same
discomfort? In short, is it possible to create a specific Australian ‗flavour‘ that springs from
14
John McLeod in his Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester, 2000, p. 26.
15
Homi K. Bhabha, Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation, in The Post-
colonial Studies Reader, London, 1995, p. 176.
16
Pietro Spinucci, Un poeta australiano: David Malouf, Roma, 1985, p. 7.
10
the union of other mixed flavours, and that has the power not to be just a sum of them, but
to create a new specificity of taste?
Taste is a cultural matter. Literature contributes in developing cultural paradigms, and
works by means of a specific language. Australia‘s particular
17
research for an expressive
autonomy that may become a cultural one is thus partially linked to the phenomenon by
which a slang (a minority variety) acquires the status of language: this means giving a new,
particular value to the specific variety of English spoken on the continent; to mould it for
the purposes of expressive autonomy; to make it a vehicle of peculiarity and denotative
molteplicity; to take possession of the common jargon in order to create a language that may
speak about its uniqueness, a language capable of expressing
[…] le componenti ancestrali e mitologiche, etniche e fantastiche di ogni nuova area emergente, cioè
tutto quanto segna le caratteristiche dell‘identificazione culturale […] che tendono sempre più a
divaricarsi dalla comune matrice del ceppo linguistico, il quale conserva tutto il suo peso di
denominatore comune ma che l‘esperienza inevitabilmente assoggetta a quella che Patrick White
chiamerebbe la subtlety e la variety delle differenze specifiche.
18
Australia stands out as an interesting landscape because of her being strongly characterized
by literary expressions which, giving voice to particular instances, found themselves on this
same peculiarity, and on the doubt about what elements can better express it. In a word, it is
possible to circumscribe an ‗Australianity‘ of themes, symbols, denominations, disquiets,
objectivations, an Australian language, in other words, which in certain developments
appears as Australian and universal at the same time; a language that builds an Australian
narrative, connected to and expression of the nation (a ‗language of national belonging‘, in
the words of Homi Bhabha).
How do we plot the narrative of the nation that must mediate between the teleology of progress tipping
over into the ‗timeless‘ discourse of irrationality? [...] to write the story of the nation demands that we
articulate that arcaic ambivalence that informs modernity. We may begin by questioning that
progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion – the many as one – shared by organic theories of the
holism of culture and community, and by theorists who treat gender, class, or race as radically
‗expressive‘ social totalities.
19
17
In regard to other postcolonial countries with different situations.
18
Pietro Spinucci, Un poeta australiano: David Malouf, Roma, 1985, p. 8.
19
Homi K. Bhabha, Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation, in The Post-
colonial Studies Reader, London, 1995, p. 177.
11
Therefore, Australia‘s poetical fertility is worth discovering, as the expression of a
‗continente nuovissimo‘
20
that acquires its power both from its newness, making it its
creative impulse, and from its tradition, making it its thematic bond. ‗Ingenui o sapienti, gli
australiani alla morte presente del romanzo rispondono scrivendo romanzi talvolta eccellenti
e alla morte della poesia rispondono scrivendo poesie, esattamente come farebbero tutti
quelli che non amano mascherare la propria afasia sotto mentite giustificazioni teoriche‘
21
,
says Pietro Spinucci, not without criticizing, in contrast, the trend of modern European
literary activity.
Without any doubt, the construction of a tradition, which stands mainly on the recognition
of common cultural elements – that, by the way, continuously connect and disconnect from
other landscapes, as the English one, the Irish, the Aboriginal, the Italian, the Scottish, the
Lebanese, etc. – together with the development of a cultural definition, cannot but work
through artistic production, and chiefly through literature.
When approaching David Malouf, it is important to bear all this in mind. His essence as a
poet is rooted in his being Australian, with all the circumstances of the case. First of all,
being the son of a British mother and a Lebanese father, and thus belonging to the second
generation of the diaspora people, his sense of identity has always been affected by the far-
off horizons of his familiar roots, and by the experience of growing up in a land, and in a
generation, that struggled to fill the invading emptiness derived from the absence of a
cultural background made of symbols, myths, and a language that could give voice to the
unicity of the Australian character, yet without depriving it of its heterogeneous common
roots. Australia is, as a matter of fact, a country build by more or less powerful diaspora
people, that is, by communities living together in a country different from that of their
origins, who ‗acknowledge that the old country – a notion often buried deep in language,
religion, custom or folklore – always has some claim in their loyalty and emotions‘
22
.
The generations born in the ‗new country‘ typically experience a division, a fragmentation
of their sense of identity, due to their ‗living in one country but looking across time and
space to another‘
23
which they have never directly experienced, and to their growing up in a
place they call home, yet without the necessary denotation that the term would require: it is
a living ‗in between‘, an intrinsic uprooting which brings along a variety of consequences.
Concepts like identity, otherness, home and displacement all become moulded by this
20
Pietro Spinucci, Un poeta australiano: David Malouf, Roma, 1985, p. 8.
21
Pietro Spinucci, Un poeta australiano: David Malouf, Roma, 1985, p. 10.
22
Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London, 1997, p. ix.
23
John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester, 2000, p. 207.
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