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The magic words shall hold thee fast:
Thou shalt not heed the raving blast. (Lewis Carroll, 115)
These passages recall Koch’s own description in ‘Crossing the Gap’ of his first
experiences of Asian literature, of the wayang kulit, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, where
he discovered ‘familiar figures: figures from my childhood reading, strangely transformed into
darting shadows’ (Koch, 1987, 24). This play on memory, much of which is ancestral, and on
the prototypal images themselves, are ever suggestive of the flickering shadow figures of the
old wayang kulit, of Alice’s Wonderland, and are central to the puzzling and teasing
construction of Koch’s novels.
5.5. Into the Rabbit Hole—Through the Earth to the ‘Antipathies’
Having warned us to keep rather innocent, open minds as we read, Koch takes us on one
of those remembered journeys leading into Wonderland. The appropriateness of the allusion
is immediately established in Carroll’s work when Alice follows the White Rabbit into the
hole and finds herself ‘falling down what seemed to be a very deep well’, which apparently is
taking her straight through the centre of the earth into a world which is immediately
distinguished by its strangeness (Lewis Carroll, 10). Alice figures such a fall to the earth’s
centre to be four thousand miles down, and then ponders the quintessential Australian
question: ‘I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?’ (Alice had not the slightest idea
what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but she thought they were nice grand words to say.)’
Lewis Carroll, who first published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1863, a time of great
activity in the whole question of Australian identity, has no doubts about where Alice would
end up after such a fall, however, when he has Alice realise that she may well fall all the way
through the earth.
‘I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come
out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The antipathies,
I think—’ (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn’t
sound at all the right word) ‘but I shall have to ask them what the name of the
country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand? Or Australia?’
(Lewis Carroll, 11)
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