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Using Practice Led Research: Eco-critical Questions posed by tracking citations in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon
Conference presentation

Using Practice Led Research: Eco-critical Questions posed by tracking citations in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon

Clare Archer-Lean and Gary Crew
USC Research Conference, 2013 (Sunshine Coast, Australia, 01-Jul-2013–05-Jul-2013)
University of the Sunshine Coast
2013
url
https://www.usc.edu.au/View
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Abstract

Literary Studies practice led research literature fiction
David Malouf's novel Remembering Babylon did not, like Athena, spring fully formed from the head of Zeus. It is equally doubtful that the novel was inspired by some mystic muse (Nelson 2009). It is the initial intention of this two part paper to demonstrate that Malouf employed the scholarly methodology of Practice Led Research to write Remembering Babylon, gathering information from historical and literary sources, selecting and rejecting specific elements of these sources then subjecting what he had chosen to his creative imagination. In the afterword, Malouf acknowledges the historical Gemmy Morrell's name and actual words as the 'seed of this fiction' but 'otherwise this novel has no origin in fact'. This paper will investigate specific citations included by the author and reflect on his significant exclusions from the original 'history'. The selections will be taken from the opening chapters of the text, and chosen because of their particular resonance with the novel entire. Based on this initial precept, eco-critical textual analysis illuminates emergent research outcomes in the findings of the initial methodology of Practise Led Research. While the post-colonial implications of the novel are well established (see Ashcroft 1993) the exploration of the unusual citation inclusions and exclusions (noted above) reveals another preoccupation within the work's creative construction: an explicit focus on human relationships with the natural world. The attitude to nature in Remembering Babylon establishes the impossibility of eco-poesis, enacting Kate Rigby's notion that the literary text can 'save the earth by disclosing the non-equation of the word and thing, poem and place' (Rigby 2004, 437). In this sense, Remembering Babylon is a transcendent act of eco-critical world-making, not because it reflects the natural world in mimetic veracity, but because it is celebrating the more than human natural world through the human imperative to make and re-make that world in the imagination. This trope of self-reflective creation appears to be intrinsic to both method of construction and the final novel's position on the human /non-human relationship.

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