Breathe Tim Winton Essay

Let me begin with a caveat. My argument is establish on the evidence of fiction, on a discussion Tim Wintons close to hot-fangled invention, Breath. Social scientists may suspect this kind of evidence and captivate fact as more trustworthy than fiction. But even up though it is true that the evidence I will be presenting is non based on people and situations in real life whatsoever that may be I would suggest that fiction may squander us to the sources of social awareness and carry out, to the extent that, as Levinas1 suggests that awareness and action may originate in gropings to which one does non even get laid how to give a verbal forminitial shocks which become questions and problems and and then takes us into the dimension of the archaic, the oneiric, the nocturnal2 which (as Levinas goes on to argue) has ontological wing because in it we are able to live the true life which is rattlepated, a life, moreover, which is not necessarily utopian though it refuses the normative high-mindedness of what must be.I want to argue that Tim Wintons recent novel, Breath,3 provides this kind of understanding and that it is one which may be particularly effectual in our reflections on the relationship between family, society and the sacred at least if we take Levinas further point that the social does not get to the sum of individual psychologies and represents the very order of the spiritual, a new plot in creation above the human and the animal.4 inaugural of all, then, let us look at the society in which the novel is situated, a gauzy mill town not far from the ocean in south Western Australia. For the two adolescents, Pikelet and Loonie, the central characters, it is a steer of sheer boredom, what Levinas calls the there is, an impersonal emptiness which is neither nothingness nor being5 barely may well be the state which Lyotard calls post-modern, a state of incredulity towards meta-narratives6 in which there is nothing beyond the self whic h longs for immediate and intense experience. For Pikelet and Loonie, however, this longing leads to an encounter with the sacred, some mysterium tremendum et facinans at the heart of existence, as Rudolph Otto famously defined it.For the two boys this encounter begins not at the centre but at the edges of social experience, in a rebellion against the monotony of taking breath(p. 41), a gamble with devastation in which, diving into the local swimming hole, they stay underwater retentivity as long as possible and then surfacing to divert inthe alarm they have provoked, the watching them, the tourists from the city especially. As time goes on, the boys contempt not only for ordinary folk but excessively for the town they live in as they come realise how small and static and insignificant it really was(p. 36), a prison from which escape is impossible, a form of fate, inhabited by the kind of people A D Hope described in his poem, Australia, Whose boast is not we live but we surviv e,A type who will inhabit the dying earth.7Loonies family has fall apart his mother has walked out on his father, the local publican, who consoled himself with other women. So he is more or less free to do as he likes. But for Pikelet finds it is more difficult to break out. His parents, affectionate but ineffectual, English migrants and thus outsiders, are different from the rough and ready locals, portentous not only of the surrounding bush but also of the nigh ocean having seen a fisherman swept off the rocks by a huge wave and smashed against the cliffs, his father