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the message of the destruction of this world and creation of the next. The wayang kulit sense
of being is that the two sides of the screen express differing levels of reality, and Koch’s
purposes here, as throughout his novels, are to demonstrate the unsharpness in the lines of
tangentiality between the worlds of substance and imagination, making it extremely difficult
sometimes to know into which world one has tread.
The second problem is the logical end of Pons’ argument that Billy Kwan’s life and
death were sterile. The validity of Pons’ argument is assured only as long as it is limited to the
vocabulary of Western critical tradition. Pons makes no accounting at all for Asian influences,
and for the good reason that they would contradict the Oedipal thesis. Wally O’Sullivan,
Kevin Condon and others, perhaps even Cookie, and many of Blanche d’Alpuget’s characters,
can surely be analysed according to this formula, but only because they exemplify expatriate
Westerners in Asia. As soon as the characters move into new directions, absorbing the myths
and symbols of the East as do Hamilton, Kwan, Alex Wheatfield, and Mike Langford, then
they surpass purely Western analysis; their uncovered Eastern sides must be taken into
account. From an Eastern point of view, Pons’ statements about Kwan’s ‘phallic power’,
‘castration’ and ‘virility’ are quite simply illustrations of how man is blinded by the illusory
quality of nature.
Pons tries to pre-empt complaints of these critical limitations by claiming for his thesis
place as one interpretation among many contributing to understanding a complex work of art
(Pons, 117). One cannot argue against this, though it is imperative to signal the misleading
implications of Pons paper, especially in view of the corpus of criticism outlined in sections
8.2.1 and 8.2.2, which have looked at the problems of judging C. J. Koch according to
exclusively Western or Eastern traditions. The next section highlights criticism which
recognises the need to take both into consideration.
8.2.3. A Mischievous Synthesis of Eastern and Western Myth
In his analysis of Koch’s hybridised semiotics, D. M. Roskies describes how the
narrator, Cookie, with his vast array of information, from Hamilton’s accounts, the other
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