David Malouf

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Forgetting Colonialism

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In the essay below, Otto analyzes Malouf's portrayal of male-female relationships, the sublime, the political, and the social in Remembering Babylon, noting Malouf's delineation of the evolution of Australia's colonial identity into a national identity.
SOURCE: "Forgetting Colonialism," in Meanjin, Vol. 52, No. 3, September, 1993, pp. 545-58.

Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon we know not.

                          Blake, The Four Zoas

Remembering Babylon begins 'One day in the middle of the nineteenth century, when settlement in Queensland had advanced little more than halfway up the coast', at an imaginary line that purportedly divides colonial settlement from its Unknown. It may at first seem odd to associate this locale with Babylon but, as the first of the book's two epigraphs suggests, one of the title's allusions is to Blake's Babylon, a city formed by the dismemberment of Albion (England). The allusion suggests that colonial Australia is a dismembered Albion, formed by successive waves of transportation and migration. If the scattered pieces of Albion's body could be put back together again, then, according to Blake, Babylon would become Jerusalem once more and Albion would rise from the grave. Malouf attempts an analogous task in Remembering Babylon. The book re-members the divisions of colonial Australia, not to reconstruct an imperial Albion but to build a New Jerusalem of (Australian) national identity.

In the aftermath of the Mabo ruling and in the year of indigenous peoples, it hardly needs to be said that this project is fraught with difficulty. Phrases such as 'halfway up the coast' of Queensland and 'One day in the middle of the nineteenth century' will inevitably evoke two very different kinds of recollection. On the one hand, this locale might stand for the point from which a properly Australian identity springs. On the other hand, it is the site of violent dispossession. How is Malouf to re-member the different histories and cultures that collide at this point?

From the first pages of Remembering Babylon it is evident that the book sets out to re-member the former rather than the latter. It displaces the second set of recollections by translating the political into the psychological, and matters of history and politics into questions of creativity and aesthetics. The border between settlers and indigenous peoples is interpreted through a Romantic (or postmodern romantic) psychology and tropology which reads such encounters as thresholds or borders of consciousness. 'Halfway up the coast' of Queensland in the 'middle of the nineteenth century', one does not stumble across a site of dispossession or conflict between races; instead, one comes face to face with the Unknown. The book goes on to suggest that contact between European settlers and the Unknown occurs at a place just beyond the reach of imperial power where, thanks to the mysteries of the imagination, it becomes possible to build an authentic Australian identity.

The translation of the political into the aesthetic and psychological, and the accompanying metamorphosis of the colonial into the national, appears in different guises in other fictions by Malouf. One might describe Remembering Babylon as reformulating, in a more historically specific idiom, the mythology outlined in An Imaginary Life. It is instructive to trace some of the key moments in the erasure of the political in Remembering Babylon, and in particular the use of the sublime to orchestrate his remembering of colonialism. I should underline that my concern is not with the views of Malouf as an individual, but with the implications of the discourse that structures this book. I take as given the literary virtuosity that makes Malouf one of Australia's most accomplished writers.

At the threshold between settler society and the Unknown, 'something extraordinary' occurs. Before the startled eyes of the McIvor children, Janet and Meg, and their cousin, Lachlan Beattie, something separates itself from the forbidden world on the other side of the line:

a fragment of ti-tree swamp, some bit of the land over there that was forbidden to them, had detached itself from the band of grey that made up the far side of the swamp, and in a shape more like a watery, heat-struck mirage than a thing of substance, elongated and airily indistinct, was bowling, leaping, flying towards them.

The cousins' first thought is that they are being 'raided by blacks', but this conjecture turns out to be wrong:

The stick-like legs, all knobbed at the joints, suggested a wounded water-bird, a brolga, or a human that … had been changed into a bird, but only halfway, and now, neither one thing nor the other, was hopping and flapping towards them out of a world over there, beyond the noman's land of the swamp, that was the abode of everything savage and fearsome, and since it lay so far beyond experience, not just their own but their parents' too, of nightmare rumours, superstitions and all that belonged to Absolute Dark.

In the face of this threat from a being that eludes classification, the children's game of make-believe is disrupted, and they stand transfixed, almost as if turned to stone.

Even from this thumbnail sketch it is evident that Lachlan, Meg and Janet are actors in a drama belonging to the literature of the sublime. The opening pages of Remembering Babylon follow the first steps in the plot of the sublime: a state of harmony between subject and object (play or habitual activity) is disrupted by a superior power that brings 'irresistible might to bear' and then to a sense of blockage in which, as Edmund Burke described it [in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful], all of the motions of the soul 'are suspended, with some degree of horror'. This moment of blockage is followed by a powerful sense of release, which for the male subject leads to a newly invigorated identity. This is achieved through a complex sequence of accommodations and transformations. First, the threatening force dissipates. Second, what was at first experienced as a disruptive, blocking force comes to be understood as a sign of a transcendental power that orders and stabilizes the world. The terms used to describe this power are quite diverse: God in the religious sublime, the self or the imagination in the Romantic sublime, language or desire in the postmodern sublime, and so on. Third, some of the might formerly attributed to the blocking agent is now transferred to the subject. As Burke explains,

Now whatever … tends to raise a man in his own opinion, produces a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind; and this swelling is never more perceived … than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects, the mind always claiming to itself some part of the dignity and importance of the things which it contemplates.

In Remembering Babylon one can trace a very similar sequence of transformations and accommodations.

As if waking from a momentary trance, Lachlan steps 'resolutely' out in front of the girls in order to do 'what his manhood required him to do'. He raises his make-believe gun to his shoulder and confronts the phantom. This act of defiance has staggering results. First, the horrifying power turns out to be nothing more than Gemmy (or Jimmy) Fairley (or Farrelly). He is a white man, even though he has 'the mangy, half-starved look of a black'. Gemmy, it transpires, 'had been cast overboard from a passing ship' when he was thirteen and 'had been living since in the scrub country to the north with blacks'. As if in recognition that he stands at a border between worlds, Gemmy jumps onto the top rail of a fence and for a few moments balances between the world he has left and the one he is to enter. He is unable to remain at this point for long. Once he has confessed that he is 'a B-b-british object!' his descent into settler society is swift: Gemmy falls to the ground, crawls 'about with his nose in the dust', is advised to stop speaking in the Aboriginal language he has learnt, and is finally taken into custody by Lachlan and marched back to the white world.

Just as astonishingly, as the Unknown withers, Lachlan expands. It is as if some of the power that had once belonged to the Unknown has been transferred to him. As Lachlan prods the man he has taken prisoner, he hears 'sounds of such eager submissiveness' that his 'heart swelled'.

He had a powerful sense of the springing of his torso from the roots of his belly. He had known nothing like this! He was bringing a prisoner in. Armed with nothing, too, but his own presumptuous daring and the power of make-believe.

The encounter with the Unknown transports Lachlan from the position of child to that of young adult, from the Imaginary to the Symbolic realm. As a young adult, the stick he wields has become 'what his gesture had claimed for it': the Phallus. He is now able to lay claim to the Law (he takes Gemmy into custody), language (he is the one able to translate Gemmy's attempts at communication) and masculine authority (he gives directions to his cousins, and they obey him).

Throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the language of the sublime was frequently invoked by travellers, explorers and writers as a discourse appropriate for an encounter with an alien land or people. A representative instance of this usage can be seen in J. W. Gregory's The Dead Heart of Australia (1909), which offers an account of Gregory's journey around Lake Eyre in 1901–2. In the eleventh chapter of this book, Gregory describes an encounter that closely follows the scenario that I have been describing.

Gregory begins with an account of his boyhood 'yearning for the opportunity of travel', and his particular fascination with the desert, which promises a 'soothing solitude, and the exhilaration of its buoyant sense of freedom'. Unfortunately, when he enacts his dreams, reality stubbornly blocks his desires. The surface of the desert is 'black and rocky'; he gets sun blisters 'from the heat reflected from the ground'; 'a westerly gale' pelts him with 'coarse, black grit'; and the water he is carrying becomes 'warm and putrid, and almost poisonous'. As the narrative proceeds, the desert is personified as a fearsome adversary. What had been the source of a merely physical discomfort now produces an astounding catalogue of horrors:

A vision rises before us of the desperate struggles of the lost explorer, and of the despair of his last mile's march. We begin to realise the agony of death by thirst, when the sun is burning like fire, and perhaps swarms of ants are stinging like a medieval 'jailer's daughter'. We then understand how Nature can rival the malignant tortures of the Inquisition.

Gregory responds to this adversary with a surprising degree of passion. He describes the desert as 'an enemy that must be fought' (my emphasis) and the sun 'in its fiery march' across the sky inspires feelings which 'sometimes approach to hatred'. Night, however, effects a miraculous deflation of the blocking power. The passive foe is softened, the active adversary is displaced by a faint light, and 'the demon dread of day' is exorcized: 'The air is cool and bracing; the low, brown hills that looked so near, but are so far, can no longer mock, or the mirage tantalise.' The desert's blocking force is displaced by a silence broken only by a 'barely perceptible humming' that 'one is tempted to believe' is the music of the spheres, 'such as that you dream'd about'. In touch with this transcendental order, Gregory is elevated and renewed.

Why should this elaborate scenario be used to describe an experience in the desert at the beginning of the twentieth century? Or, for that matter, why should Malouf use the sublime to describe an event that occurs in the 'middle of the nineteenth century', 'halfway up the coast' of Queensland? Remembering Babylon and The Dead Heart of Australia suggest at least three answers to these questions.

First, the sublime offers a powerful set of procedures for constructing a self in the face of an external threat. In effect it is a defence reaction that preserves the self against alterity. Second, the sublime consolidates this self by staging a drama that recapitulates a socially constructed division between the genders. In psychoanalytic terms, Lachlan's (and Gregory's) masculine identity is determined as much by his ability to separate himself from the feminine and the maternal (the pre-Oedipal world suggested by Gregory's dreams and Lachlan's make-believe) as by his willingness to take his father ('his manhood') as a model. The sublime offers an opportunity to effect this separation by dividing the world into two radically different groups: those who are overcome by 'power and irresistible might' and those who are able to assume this power as their own; the passive and the active; women and men.

In a colonial context, however, there is a third reason for the invocation of the sublime. The sublime offers a colonial (and post-colonial) society a drama in which the settler's encounter with an indigenous people and an alien land can be staged as an encounter with the Unknown. In so doing it re-inscribes the imaginary line that marks the furthest extent of settler expansion and Aboriginal dispossession as a limit of vision.

Pictured in this way, the politics of settlement is eclipsed by questions concerning the relation between centre and margin, Europe and Australia. In Remembering Babylon the boundary between white and black cultures becomes not so much a place of dispossession as the point where imperial power falters: it is a place 'only lightly connected to … the figure in an official uniform … and the Crown he represented, which held them all, a whole continent, in its grip'. A story of Oedipal rivalry deftly interprets and displaces the narrative of a conflict between races. This threshold turns out to be not merely a place where a masculine self can be consolidated, but a site where that self can expand, freed from the power of the centre.

Although the sublime may conclude with male swelling, this desired state is preceded by an experience of extreme subjection. The male subject is overcome, possessed, and moved by a power not his own. In the discourse of the sublime this experience is habitually described in the language of (a male vision of) sexual ecstasy. It is small cause for wonder that male writers are deeply ambivalent about this ravishing. In this brief moment they are the possessed rather than the possessor, the object rather than the subject.

Yet male writers, particularly in the twentieth century, are often fascinated by this experience of subjection. It suggests a state in which the social, civilized self is put aside in favour of an encounter with a more primitive, presocial and fundamental power. Writers such as Rilke, Lawrence, Yeats and Malouf figure the moment of sublime submission as a moment of inspiration in which the writer is in touch with the dark gods. The relation between the male self that emerges from the sublime and the 'female' state that is its immediate predecessor then becomes a question of the relation between the male writer and the (female) experience of inspiration and creativity. In Remembering Babylon, these questions are worked out in relation to Janet's experience of the sublime.

As is evident from Burke's notion of male 'swelling', the discourse of the sublime is far from gender-neutral. In the aesthetic discourse of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the sublime is masculine, while the beautiful is feminine; it would be unnatural for a woman to appropriate the power of the blocking agent. Remembering Babylon seems to share this view. Lachlan's mode of defence is not available to Janet or Meg. Instead, they remain passive, caught at the point of blockage, their minds filled by the object that confronts them. In this unenviable condition, their best defence is submission.

Before Gemmy's appearance, Janet and Meg are unwilling participants in Lachlan's game: 'They complained and dawdled and he had to exert all his gift for fantasy, his will too, which was stubborn, to keep them in the game.' Immediately after Gemmy has been taken prisoner, they silently accept the boy's 'new-found mastery' and 'let themselves be led'.

Remembering Babylon, however, claims more for the moment of subjection. It wants its readers to believe that Janet emerges with a premonition of a knowledge and power very different from that which is available to men. Her account of the sublime experience is at odds with the heroic narrative offered by Lachlan. Janet asserts that 'Me and Meg found [Gemmy], just as much as Lachlan' and that, if truth be told, the real agent of discovery is the dog. She proffers this deflationary narrative and waits expectantly for her parents to bring Lachlan down, because for her the experience is one in which her faculties were suspended, not one in which an active self was precipitated.

The different kinds of knowledge and power are first glimpsed through Gemmy's eyes. When Gemmy looks at Lachlan he never fails to see 'the power he had laid claim to with the pretence of arms'. Gemmy is therefore always ready 'to appease' the boy. Lachlan's power, the narrator observes, belongs 'to him because he was a boy; because, one day, the authority he had claimed … would be real'. By contrast, when Gemmy catches Janet looking at him he has the feeling 'that she was trying to see right into him, to catch his spirit'. Janet's knowledge arises from her ability to blur the boundaries between self and other, to allow others to 'enter her and reveal what they were'. As this knowledge is not predicated on the mastery of an object by a subject, Janet's power needs 'no witness' and is 'entirely her own'.

These radically different powers and knowledges reflect lives driven by different ambitions. Lachlan projects his desire out into the world. He is full of 'heroic visions in which the limitations of mere boyhood would at last be transcended'. By contrast, Janet is fascinated by a world beneath this one, by an identity more fundamental than the social.

One day … picking idly at a scab on her knee, she was amazed, when the hard crust lifted, to discover a colour she had never seen before, and another skin, lustrous as pearl. A delicate pink, it might have belonged to some other creature altogether, and the thought came to her that if all the rough skin of her present self crusted and came off, what would be revealed, shining in sunlight, was this finer being that had somehow been covered up in her.

She feels as if she has been relieved of the weight of her own life, and 'the brighter being in her was very gently stirring and shifting its wings'.

This fantasy finds its most extreme form in the fifteenth chapter of the book. The primitive source of the sublime's 'power and irresistible might' here becomes a swarm of bees. Bees are a traditional symbol for primitive energy, either sexual or divine. Remembering Babylon allows both sets of associations to accrue. For Janet the bees suggest 'another life, quite independent of their human one', and evoke the fantasy that 'If she could escape … just for a moment, out of her personal mind into their communally single one, she would know at last what it was like to be an angel.' These intimations of violent possession and dispossession are given graphic form later in the chapter when the bees attack Janet:

She just had time to see her hands covered with plushy, alive fur gloves before her whole body crusted over and she was blazingly gathered into the single sound they made, the single mind.

This barely disguised rape scene is figured by Malouf as a wedding. Janet's 'old mind' is put to one side and her 'new and separate mind' (provided by the bees) tells her that 'You are our bride'. This consummation provides her with a 'new' (spiritual) body and self; it is, however, also a conflagration which leaves her old body 'a charred stump, all crusted black and bubbling'.

In the sexual politics of this novel, male identity is defined in terms of the distance it has moved from the 'feminine'. Janet's metaphorical marriage through rape confirms the position she was allocated in the drama of the sublime: she is the defining other to male identity. But the masculine self is unable to divide itself once and for all from the feminine. In the Romantic discourse of Remembering Babylon, this is not simply because woman is the defining other to male identity, or that woman stands for all of the 'bodies' over which Lachlan's authority will be exerted. Janet's most crucial role at this point in the book is concerned with the status, in a colonial context, of the traditional identification of women and nature. Janet's possession by the bees confirms what was implicit in the drama of the sublime: woman can be possessed by the spirit of this new land. The sublime, therefore, is not merely the vehicle for the production of the Australian man; it also brings the truly Australian woman into being.

This second miracle performs a remarkable coup, a second displacement of the indigenous population. It is the white, female settler who now emerges as the authentic mouthpiece for Australia. She is the natural receptacle for the spirit of place: an Australian who stands, with her Platonic Adam, at the (expanding) edge of empire.

With the displacement of the conflict between settler and indigenous peoples, and the installation of Janet as authentic voice of the land, Remembering Babylon is set to begin its work of recollection. What it proceeds to remember is not the original inhabitants of the land, but a division itself produced by the sublime: a woman who speaks for the primitive voice of the land and a man who represents Australian political and social life. If achieved, this recollection would piece together an androgynous Australian identity. It would hold together the primitive and the civilized, the feminine and the masculine, those who submit and those who force others to submit. The focal point of this remembering is Gemmy.

Gemmy has a complex set of roles to play in this novel. He serves as a locus and catalyst for certain kinds of disorientation intrinsic to the colonial experience. First, as a white man who arrives in settler society from Aboriginal Australia rather than from Great Britain, he suggests a white civilization transposed to an alien context and so made strange. Second, he embodies the feared Unknown. Third, as a person who seems both black and white, he evokes fears of deracination and loss of racial purity. Gemmy also implies the possibility of a future identity and culture that is not simply black or white, Australian or European, but stands between these poles.

The anxiety Gemmy produces in the colonists is related both to their inability to categorize him and their desire not to recognize him. There is a bewildering proliferation of names and circumlocutions for him. Aside from the uncertainty as to whether he is Gemmy or Jimmy, Fairley or Farrelly, he is described as, or compared to, a 'blackfeller', 'plain savage, marionette' and moron, 'puppet', 'mongrel', 'pathetic, muddy-eyed, misshapen fellow', 'half-caste', 'run-a-way', 'straw-topped half-naked savage', 'black', 'nigger', parody of a white man, 'black whitefeller' and 'white black man'.

Remembering Babylon provides what could be called an alphabet of possible responses to the unknowns that are given tangible form by Gemmy. Most of the settlers treat Gemmy in a way that is analogous to their treatment of the land, 'ringbarking and clearing and reducing it to what would make it, at last, just a bit like home'. These are the responses that produce the Babylon of the book's title by dividing white from black, the familiar from the unfamiliar, the known from the unknown, Australia from Europe and the present from both the past and the future.

Lachlan and Janet (along with a few of the other colonists) have a very different response to Gemmy. For them he is the focus of, and catalyst for, the remembering that is to heal colonial society. One might well ask what licenses Gemmy to play this role, for at first glance he appears to be a decidedly lacklustre hero. He is, at best, rather simple; and throughout the novel he acts in an oddly absentminded, childlike way. Yet these disqualifications turn out to be his greatest assets.

The closest model for the character and role of Gemmy is the 'idiot boy' in Wordsworth's poem of the same name, whose simplicity is a sign that he has avoided socialization and is therefore still in touch with nature. This proximity to nature means that he is also close to the transcendental force that informs nature: the imagination. In this regard, the 'idiot boy' is like that staple of Romantic poetry (and second model for Gemmy), the Child. The Child, Words-worth writes, is the 'best Philosopher', an 'Eye among the blind, / That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, / Haunted for ever by the eternal mind', because his imagination has not yet been tempered by the adult world of reality and social necessity. In Romanticism, 'idiot' and Child are often characterized as dwelling on the border between two worlds: they stand between, on the one hand, a paradisal world projected by the imagination and, on the other hand, a world determined by the artificial constraints of adult life. This is why for Lachlan and Janet what is most resonant about Gemmy is the transcendental power he implies as he stands balanced, on the top rail of the fence, between one world and the next. This power is the imagination, which for Romanticism is the active source of both human and physical nature and so represents the spring from which individual and national identity flows.

Once again, many of the key moments here can be found in narratives of colonization and exploration. In the final stages of Gregory's sublime encounter with the South Australian desert, he also discovers a vision of the future, of primitive nature, and of the imagination. As he lies under the stars, listening to the music of the spheres, he feels 'an irresistible attraction towards the better rest and fuller silence of the long, desert journey, that lies before us all'. This proleptic vision of a journey after death is coupled with the stirrings of primitive man:

The simplicity of desert life, the uniformity of its conditions, the merciless severity of its forces, awaken in us the primitive man, lying beneath the carefully built-up fabric of social obligations. The unchanging face of Nature dimly stirs the beginnings of man. His pushing forward into the unknown is as the crown and completion of those beginnings.

Standing on the edge of the Unknown, pushing forward into the future and back into the past, produces an extraordinary sense of elation and inflation. For a moment, Gregory confides, 'a man sums up in himself the long experience of his race'.

This place between the past and the future, the primitive and the civilized, where a man can sum up the entire 'experience of his race' is, not surprisingly, one in which the imagination is free to act:

To retain the knowledge and thought of the twentieth century while meeting the conditions of prehistoric man, to face the mystery of the unchanging desert, divested of the fetish-begotten fears that half paralysed the primitive races, gives that stimulus to the imagination, which is one of the highest joys given to man to feel.

In the last chapter of Remembering Babylon we see Lachlan Beattie, now a respectable politician in his late middle age, attempting to tie up 'one of the loose ends of his own life, which might otherwise have gone on bleeding for ever'. It is this that leads him back to Janet (now Sister Monica), Gemmy and the extraordinary event with which the book began. In these last pages we see the form that the remembering alluded to in the book's title will take:

All that, fifty years ago. An age. They were living in another country. He could afford to admit now that it had not ended. Something Gemmy had touched off in them was what they were still living, both, in their different ways. It would end only when they were ended, and maybe not even then. They would come back, as they had now, from the far points they had moved away to, and stand side by side looking up at the figure outlined there against a streaming sky. Still balanced.

This passage effects a re-membering of child and adult, past and present, which recalls Wordsworth's economics of memory in the 'Immortality Ode'. Wordsworth's poem mourns the adult loss of the child's imagination through socialization, yet affirms that the child's imagination is still present to the adult through recollection and, moreover, that

        those first affections,
        Those shadowy recollections,
        Which, be they what they may,
        Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
        Are yet a master-light of all our seeing.

The closing pages of Remembering Babylon also offer two answers to the question of what relation the now elderly Janet and Lachlan can have to their childhood and to Gemmy. Gemmy, like their youth, is no longer physically present. Lachlan discovers that he has been killed by white settlers (along with the Aboriginal people he has joined). Though Lachlan is not even sure where he was killed, he and Janet can still be with him in memory. Gemmy can still be the 'fountain-light' of their adult day.

Remembering their sublime encounter with Gemmy brings Janet and Lachlan back into relation with their childhood selves and experiences. In a Romantic psychology this is always therapeutic. It draws the fragmented identity of the adult back into relation with its source in the imagination of the child. At the same time, this recollection takes them back to a point where their very different trajectories have not yet diverged. Gemmy is a sign for the vanishing point in childhood (in the Imagination) where male and female, politician and nun, possessor and possessed, have not yet drawn apart.

The passage of fifty years that separates the temporal location of the book's final chapter from its beginning places this work of memory in a historical moment charged with significance: approximately ten years after federation and just before the First World War. In Australian mythology, both temporal markers imply a bringing together of disparate fragments into a new whole. As a result of the former, the colonies came together as a single nation. In the course of the latter, it is still sometimes asserted, a fledgling Australian nation forged a sense of collective identity. This is the vision that Malouf wants to be seen proleptically in Gemmy. If we return to the moment of contact between settlers and indigenous people, we will find, not Babylon, but the redemptive source of national identity in the imagination. The recollection of this beginning draws present-day Australia and colonial Australia into a whole; it opens the possibility of a nation built on the re-membering, the forging into one, of different peoples and states.

Perhaps the most startling thing about this redemptive narrative is the magnitude of what it has to forget in order to re-member, its transformation of a moment of violent dispossession into an anticipation of national unity. Something of the extent of this forgetting is oddly implied by the epigraphs with which Malouf begins this book. The first, included as epigraph to this essay, quotes words spoken by Ahania to her husband and king, Urizen, in Blake's The Four Zoas. Ahania claims not to know whether the fallen world she and Urizen inhabit is Jerusalem or Babylon. These words might at first seem apt, for Remembering Babylon is centred on the premise that the colonial experience harbours the still-living source of the Jerusalem of national identity. In The Four Zoas, however, Ahania equivocates about the nature of the reality she inhabits because she fears that Urizen will cast her out rather than hear the truth. Malouf does not quote the next line, in which Ahania details the full extent of the devastation which surrounds them: 'All is Confusion. All is tumult, & we alone are escaped.'

The book's second epigraph is even more ambivalent. It comes from an untitled poem by John Clare, which imagines an apocalyptic crisis of gigantic proportions:

        Strange shapes and void afflict the soul
        And shadow to the eye
        A world on fire while smoke seas roll
        And lightenings rend the sky
        The moon shall be as blood the sun
        Black as a thunder cloud
        The stars shall turn to blue and dun
        And heaven by darkness bowed
        Shall make suns dark and give no day
        When stars like skys shall be
        When heaven and earth shall pass away
        Wilt thou Remember me.

If one were to read these lines in the light of the last chapter of Remembering Babylon, the 'world on fire while smoke seas roll' might suggest the First World War. The final line would then allude to Janet's and Lachlan's therapeutic recollection of Gemmy. But if one were to take the first chapter of the book as the interpretative context for these lines, then 'A world on fire while smoke seas roll' could just as easily refer to the historical and political realities of colonization that Remembering Babylon displaces. The last line would then have a much more plangent tone. It would refer to the very things that Remembering Babylon works so hard to forget.

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