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'The final line of Randolph Stow's To the Islands - " 'My soul', he whispered, over the sea-surge, 'my should is a strange country'" - has perplexed and fascinated readers and critics for five decades. In 1975 Leonie Kramer found Stow's final sentence to be misplaced: ‘It belongs – if indeed it belongs at all – not at the end of a novel of this kind, but near the beginning'. At a time when interest in Stow and his work is again on the ascendency, this paper investigates what Heriot might have appreciated his soul to be, before arguing that he could not have spoken those resonant words until the very moment when he is blinded by illumination atop the coastal cliff. Heriot walks into homelessness in a quest for home. Like Cavafy's ideal voyager his journey is long and hard, and only once he discovers his soul can he appreciate he has no home. Only then can he understand the true meaning of the islands.' (Publication abstract)
Notes
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Epigraph:
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way . . .
C.P. Cavafy, ‘Ithaka’
Old king without a throne,
the hollow of despair
behind his obstinate unyielding stare,
knows only, God is gone:
and, fingers clenching on his chair,
feels night and the soul’s terror coming on.
Judith Wright, ‘The Harp and the King’
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 19 Jan 2017 10:01:59
http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-63067-20150114-1144-www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/3283/4072.html
Heriot's Ithaka : Soul, Country and the Possibility of Home in To The Islands
JASAL
Subjects:
- To the Islands 1958 single work novel
- Between Stations 2009 selected work autobiography essay
- Strange Country : A Study of Randolph Stow 1986 single work criticism
- An Imaginary Life : A Novel 1978 single work novel
- Patrick White : Letters 1994 selected work correspondence
- Tourmaline 1963 single work novel
- Raw Material 1961 single work criticism
- Tourmaline and the Tao Te Ching : Randolph Stow's Tourmaline 1978 single work criticism
- Voss : A Novel 1957 single work novel
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