AustLit

'This essay presents a postcolonial, ecocritical reading of Australian author David Malouf's celebrated novel, An imaginary life (1978). By now an important name in contemporary postcolonial literature, Malouf has yet to be discussed as an author who attempts to explode both colonial and human-centred myths and tropes in a manner that promotes a linguistically sensitive, body- and nature-centred vision. As this essay will argue, Malouf's writing, in its critique of Enlightenment values that have led to the racial classification of humans and modernity's dismissal of the importance of the environment, advances a unique postcolonial and ecological aesthetic. One way in which An imaginary life interrogates Enlightenment values is through its interest in the figure of the “feral child”, a “discovery” or construction of the Enlightenment era itself. The term “feral child” derives from Linnaeus's category “Homo ferus”, appearing in the tenth edition of his Systema naturae (The system of nature). Classified alongside Linnaeus's racial human categories (like Homo Afer and Homo Europaeus), Homo ferus emerges concurrently with the colonial obsession with racial “otherness”. For Malouf, however, the feral human eludes the categorisation of taxonomy specifically and language in general: blurring the “human” and “nature”, it undermines the scientific classification of humankind, and without language, it embodies the possibility of human being-in-nature beyond the influence of symbolic enculturation. In An imaginary life, the wordless immersion of the feral child in the environment allegorises the novel's intention – to produce another form of language, a poetic, allusive language transcending classification and chronology, and enacting the unification of the “human” and the “natural”.' (Publication abstract)

'n addition to what has been said about J.M. Coetzee's first and seminal novel since its publication in 1974, one could argue that, in some of his writings, Coetzee consistently contends that a Cartesian ontology could have been responsible for the legitimisation of a wide range of discriminatory and exploitative practices. Among the practices Coetzee singles out are political and economic colonialism, ecological colonialism and gender discrimination. From the seventeenth century onwards, the Cartesian outlook has dominated Western thinking and praxis. Coupled with biological and social Darwinism, and Hegelian phenomenology, these ushered in a highly mechanised, but instrumentalist and utterly morally deficient and alienating era in human history. In book after book, through a series of Cartesian characters whom he invariably satirises, Coetzee delineates the Cartesian trajectory and its consequences, but also explores ways of transcending this illusory ontology. Part of this exploration involves the possibility of an embodied and inter-subjective consciousness which arises from, and is capable of, both the sympathetic and empathetic imagination. These forms of imagination – which are at the centre of an understanding of inter-subjectivity – are seen as a counter to the alienating and brutalising consequences of a Cartesian ontology. What may need emphasising, however, is that discrimination and exploitation are not a preserve of a Cartesian ontology; they are consequences of our ignorance of the constitution of a proper and valid process of consciousness-formation and they manifest themselves in such practices as regionalism, ethnicity, tribalism and sexism. However, because in Dusklands Coetzee deals with the larger geo/eco-politics, my analysis will also go along with his trajectory.' (Publication abstract)