Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

cycles of life constitute the pervasive metaphor of this novel (McCormack,
171-72).
And there is Mrs. Moore who, as the novel’s personification of the Great Mother Goddess,
focuses those cycles of life in the present and ‘is able to accept the strong whispers of death
that accompany life, even to rejoice in them as necessary aspects of the same process’
(McCormack, 173). All of these are, however, heavily outnumbered by the Eastern archetypes
as Koch, the personification of eclecticism, has gathered unto himself many metaphors,
symbols and myths of East as well as West to compose his new mythology.
Kali appears in some form in all of Koch’s Asian novels. As ‘Ferry across the Ocean of
Existence, womb and tomb, protectress and destroyer, eternal dancer’, she is perhaps the most
pivotal of Koch’s borrowings from Eastern tradition.
All the shifting subtleties of Hindu thought and vision proved to be embodied
in this entity; and her cosmic dance, or ‘play’ as Ramakrishna called it, could
bring pain and joy to humans with equal indifference, since the life force
knows no morality, and is of double aspect. (Koch, 1987, 10)
Koch’s divine feminine is on one level the beautiful and seductive figure who lures men
to their destruction—like the Sirens of Greek mythology. Koch plays teasingly with the
allusion in The Year of Living Dangerously, where ‘the wailing of Sukarno’s sirens’ (YLD,
269) refers literally to the warning sounds of Sukarno’s motorcade as he makes his way
through the city to visit his girlfriends, and figuratively to the lament of the Sirens—his
beautiful Japanese bargirl and other wives, consorts, and indeed all of the feminine land of
Indonesia—who have seduced Sukarno, the romantic, idealistic revolutionary poet-hero, into
being their Judistira, the mythical ‘Just Ruler’. Apotheosis as the incarnated Javanese God-
King goes beyond human competence, however, and its excesses have proved to be Sukarno’s
undoing.
In Across the Sea Wall, the young, innocent and conventional Robert O’Brien breaks the
mould cast for him within the ‘Australian Way of Life’ by running away into beautiful and
erratic Asia with the beautiful and erratic Ilsa Kalnins. Koch wrote that Ilsa was ‘a woman too
alien, too flamboyant, too much of a troubled spirit’ for the limited and unformed young
- 186 -