David Malouf's Remembering Babylon and the Wild Man of the European Cultural Consciousness

Abstract

David Malouf's Remembering Babylon engages with both the myth of the wild man of the Western literary tradition and with Judaeo-Christian concept of the wilderness. In doing so, it illustrates the way in which these myths exert a powerful influence on the European settlers' conception of the Australian landscape and its indigenous people. The myth of the wild man itself recurs throughout the history of Western literature. His presence, according to Richard Bernheimer in Wild Men in the Middle Ages, dates back to the pre-Christian world and to the pagan beliefs of native religions which the Church found difficult to eradicate (21). The image which has persisted in Western art and literature is that of the wild man as a degenerate being—an insane creature who, robbed of the power of speech and intellect, wanders alone in the wilderness. He is inextricably linked with the environment he inhabits, to the point where wildness and insanity almost become inseparable terms (Bernheimer 12).1 These characteristics call to mind Gemmy Fuirley in Remembering Babylon, a simple-minded, strange "white black man" (69), an outcast of white society, who is discovered by the Aborigines and raised as one of them. A hybrid figure, he is interjected into history—from nature into culture, as it were—in order to confront the white settlers with their repression of the Aboriginal presence, as well as to provoke them into a fuller understanding of themselves.