Breathe Tim Winton
Let me begin with a caveat. My argument is based on the evidence of fiction, on a discussion
Tim Winton’s most recent novel, Breath. Social scientists may suspect this kind of evidence and see ‘fact’ as more trustworthy than ‘fiction’. But even though it is true that the evidence I will be presenting is not based on people and situations in ‘real life’ — whatever that may be
— I would suggest that fiction may take us to the sources of social awareness and action, to the extent that, as Levinas1 suggests that awareness and action may originate in ‘gropings to which one does not even know how to give a verbal form…initial shocks [which] become questions and problems’ and thus takes us into the dimension of ‘the archaic, the oneiric, the nocturnal’2 which (as Levinas goes on to argue) has ‘ontological reference’ because in it we are able to live ‘the true life which is absent’, a life, moreover, which is not necessarily
‘utopian’ though it refuses ‘the normative idealism of what “must be’”.
I want to argue that Tim Winton’s recent novel, Breath,3 provides this kind of understanding and that it is one which may be particularly useful 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 reduce to the sum of individual psychologies’ but represents
‘the very order of the spiritual, a new plot in being above the human and the animal’.4
First of all, then, let us look at the society in which the novel is situated, a small mill town not far from the ocean in south Western Australia. For the two adolescents, ‘Pikelet’ and ‘Loonie’, the central characters, it is a place of sheer boredom, what Levinas calls ‘the there is’, an impersonal emptiness which is ‘neither nothingness nor being’5 but may well be the state which Lyotard calls ‘post-modern’, a state of ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’6 in which there is nothing beyond the self which longs for immediate
Tim Winton’s most recent novel, Breath. Social scientists may suspect this kind of evidence and see ‘fact’ as more trustworthy than ‘fiction’. But even though it is true that the evidence I will be presenting is not based on people and situations in ‘real life’ — whatever that may be
— I would suggest that fiction may take us to the sources of social awareness and action, to the extent that, as Levinas1 suggests that awareness and action may originate in ‘gropings to which one does not even know how to give a verbal form…initial shocks [which] become questions and problems’ and thus takes us into the dimension of ‘the archaic, the oneiric, the nocturnal’2 which (as Levinas goes on to argue) has ‘ontological reference’ because in it we are able to live ‘the true life which is absent’, a life, moreover, which is not necessarily
‘utopian’ though it refuses ‘the normative idealism of what “must be’”.
I want to argue that Tim Winton’s recent novel, Breath,3 provides this kind of understanding and that it is one which may be particularly useful 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 reduce to the sum of individual psychologies’ but represents
‘the very order of the spiritual, a new plot in being above the human and the animal’.4
First of all, then, let us look at the society in which the novel is situated, a small mill town not far from the ocean in south Western Australia. For the two adolescents, ‘Pikelet’ and ‘Loonie’, the central characters, it is a place of sheer boredom, what Levinas calls ‘the there is’, an impersonal emptiness which is ‘neither nothingness nor being’5 but may well be the state which Lyotard calls ‘post-modern’, a state of ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’6 in which there is nothing beyond the self which longs for immediate