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Bhagavad Gita’s poet(s); and third, that The Year of Living Dangerously is ‘founded upon
structural motifs of warped representation’ due to Koch’s reliance on a marginal but not
disinterested narrator who relates the story according to unreliable conversations and hearsay
and ‘Billy Kwan’s crazy attempt to catalogue his life’. Sharrad allows that ‘Koch would claim
that artistic, textual truth’ makes the distortions necessary, and concludes that the distortions
finally reflect back on the truth of the Bhagavad Gita.
Everything in mortal life is infected with illusion and to “see it clearly and see
it whole” we must seek the detachment of Arjuna meditating, of Cook on his
country mountaintop assembling his narrative, or of the mystic dalang
puppeteer showing us truths through the shadowy stories of the epics.
(Sharrad, 1990, 177-81)
It might help to see The Year of Living Dangerously as a progression from Across the
Sea Wall. Here, the protagonist’s anxieties generated by his illusions of himself and India lead
to a spiritual paralysis. O’Brien pursues an ‘illusion of detachment’, ignoring that ‘he is
projecting his own fear of inadequacy onto a landscape that is only as sterile as his own
judgment of it’ (Huggan, 1993, Tourist Gaze, 84). Huggan says that O’Brien is submitting
India to a ‘neo-colonial tourist gaze’. He is seeking reassurance ‘in a romantic idealist
vocabulary of impressionistic essences’ mixing Biblical and European pastoral/elegiac
conventions. By anthropomorphizing India, with the north being the dynamic faculty and the
south mysticism and blind emotion, he is taking ‘refuge in the schematic distinctions of
Jungian psychology’ (Huggan, 1993, Tourist Gaze, 84-85). Only by breaking off his journey
and retreating to the pure air of the mountains can O’Brien, like Shiva, who goes to meditate in
the mountains to get away from not only the mad world but also his own active, dancing
aspect, begin to free himself of his illusions. He returns to Australia, and becomes the
journalist who could very easily turn out to be Guy Hamilton. Hamilton is still hemmed in by
self-imposed illusions, but not as badly as the young Robert O’Brien; he is moving toward
enlightenment, or at least toward a better understanding of himself and his world. This,
however, is predicated on the ‘theme of colonial culture’, and must be transformed through the
wayang and the Bhagavad Gita, a conjunction which the Gita’s poet could not have imagined.
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