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8.1. Introduction
The ‘Divinisation of History’ and the Duality of Justice
Alongside the important Western sources like A Passage to India, Alice in Wonderland
and 1984, C. J. Koch draws deeply on Asian archetypes for his novels, some of which Blanche
d’Alpuget introduces, though for other purposes, in her novels. The philosophic canon of
India, as represented especially by the Bhagavad Gita, or ‘Song of the Lord’, ‘the most
important, the most influential, and the most luminous of all the Hindu scriptures’ (Zaehner,
10), by other sources from the Vedic, Buddhist, Tantric and Vedantic traditions, and by their
development in the Javanese culture as well, have provided Koch and d’Alpuget a vast
mythopoeic wellspring to call upon in their fiction. Beginning with its rather pedantic
presentation in Across the Sea Wall, the philosophy becomes the principle mechanism in
Koch’s development of structure as well as theme in The Year of Living Dangerously, and
most recently, in the 1996 novel Highways to a War, provides the archetype for Mike
Langford, Koch’s new version of ‘The Coming Man’, who is modelled on the ‘Ford Makers’
of Hindu tradition. D’Alpuget uses her Eastern pretexts more subtly than does Koch, and
limits their influence to thematic and character development, yet is just as successful in
expressing the relevance of the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana to contemporary Western
society.
This chapter will take a threefold approach to exploring Koch’s and d’Alpuget’s
applications of these Eastern literary structures and themes which demand that their novels be
judged as syntheses of Eastern and Western traditions. First, it will look at the previous
criticism in this area, specifically at Sharrad’s excellent article on Koch’s intertextual use of
the Gita, and the following critical analyses which have typically depended too much on, and
misinterpreted, Sharrad. The resulting tendency has been to discount Koch’s influence and
impose strictly Western critical models on his novels—a tendency so extreme in d’Alpuget’s
case that her attention to Eastern pretexts is almost universally ignored. Second, it will outline
two landmark calls for a rapprochement between antagonistic cultural systems, one found in
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