‘All you see is what you feel’
A meditation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/qre.25632Keywords:
belonging, Dante, David Malouf, friendship, 'An Imaginary Life', Italy, 'Johnno', Women and Labour ConferenceAbstract
This article explores themes of place, literature and friendship through an engagement with David Malouf’s novel Johhno. Set in Brisbane and Italy, the article takes the form of a creative non-fiction essay, in six sections. The narrator reflects on her wanderings, bent on renunciation of everything except writing, yet hoping for revelation or union. Whereas for Malouf’s characters, Dante and Johnno, Brisbane offers a canvas to hurl themselves against, the narrator of ‘All You See’ takes the city as a point of arrival and departure. She veers towards and away from family, friends and lovers, crossing cities and continents, eventually returning home, yet still at odds with what she knows and what she has lived.
References
David Malouf, An imaginary life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978).
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino elegies, trans. Alison Croggan (Melbourne: Newport Street Books, 2022).
David Malouf, ‘The happy life: The search for contentment in the modern world’, Quarterly Essay 41 (2011), 62.
Malouf, An Imaginary Life, p. 152.
Joanne Watson, ‘Lilla Watson’, Queensland Review 14(1) (2007), 47. https://doi.org/10.1017/S132181660000595X.
University of Queensland, ‘Citation – Professor Emeritus Edna Chamberlain AM’, 1995. Available from: https://alumni.uq.edu.au/story/1563/professor-emeritus-edna-chamberlain-am [1 July 2022]
David Malouf, Johnno (Ringwood: Penguin, 1975), p. 83.
Malouf, Johnno, p. 84.
Malouf, Johnno, pp. 147–8.
