Place and the narration of space in David Malouf's novels

Abstract

This thesis aims at uncovering the significance of place in David Malouf's novels. As a postcolonial writer the sense of place and the construction of spaces play an important role in Malouf s writings. Through a closer look at his writings, with particular reference to three of Malouf s novels spanning chronologically across his literary career, namely An Imaginary Life (1978), Fly Away Peter (1982) and Remembering Babylon (1993), I attempted to show how Malouf s own concept of place is projected in his novels. Malouf s concern about particular spatial dimensions, which human beings internalize and in tum utilize in establishing a meaningful relationship to the place they inhabit, takes on a particular postcolonial flavour in his writings. Malouf's early career reflects his notions about Australian ways of experiencing place as implicitly juxtaposed to a European colonial centre and repository of culture. His early insistence is about ways of reconstructing Australian spaces in spite of the binary distinction between centre and edge and advocates the autonomy of the edge as a place to be appropriated in its right. His re-mapping and re-construction of perceptual Australian spaces in his earlier novels is done through a series of oppositions and contrasts. His exploration of the gaps or discontinuities focuses on a geographical and cultural distance between Europe and Australia that can be covered. The covering of space and the transcendence of boundaries are extremely pronounced in his earlier novels. Throughout his novels Malouf illustrates a number of processes, which facilitate the appropriation of Australian spaces. His interest in the gulf between Australian landscape and the inherited language is reworked as to show the importance of mapping and naming as creative ways of re-conceptualizing spaces. Language in itself becomes a creative process involved in the re-creation of conceptual maps of space. Underlying his concern for place and the construction of spaces is the need for Australian identity to achieve communion with Australian space. Malouf advocates the need for the self to come to terms with place through the establishing of a cultural meaningful relationship to place and a final reconciliation between the two. Malouf's development shows a moving away from binary distinctions towards the construction of an in-between space that carries all the burden and meaning of culture in his latest novel to-date.