Qoutes AOS RMF Flashcards
Journey to construction of self is shown in when Romulus My Father traces Romulus’ journey from Yugoslavia to
eastern Australia after the Second World War, through marriage, friendship, migration, grief, insanity, work and death.
Romulus’ conception of character:
Character - or kar a cter as they pronounced it, with the emphasis on the second syllable - was the central moral concept for my father and Hora. It stood for a settled disposition for which it was possible rightly to admire someone (101-102).
As an embodied morality, kar a cter organises the self always in relation - able to be admired, never self-sufficient, open to the other in directing one’s actions well. This concept is clearly linked to the importance of
conversation in its openness to the other, to a flow of sociality that nourishes, challenges and extends the self without consolidating it.
ar a cter is related to other qualities of self, including skill at a trade:
I have never seen a workman as skilled as my father. His unboastful confidence in what he could do impressed me as much as his achievements. He was so at ease with his materials and always so respectful of their nature that they seemed in friendship with him, as though consenting to his touch rather than subjugated by him (97).
skill and craftsmanship
interanimated with morality
Parental care further exemplifies this relational self. In the face of Christina’s depressive illness, Romulus takes on, with the assistance of his friends, sole care of their son:
My father would walk up to eighty kilometres for a litre of milk or for a small sack of beans or potatoes. Exhausted by his efforts to get food for us and because he denied himself so that I would have more, he fainted from hunger on more than one occasion (5).
is marked by a complex and yet utterly prosaic temporality
here family relations are determined by care and labour on behalf of another rather than simply or onerously by chronology.
persistence of loss, the impossibility of closure over the death of a mother, frames an understanding of
family relations in terms of generation as a mode of interrelation
Romulus’ capacity to perceive a common humanity rests not only his own individual moral wisdom
the core of his goodness, but also the possibility of its articulation, and indeed the responsibility that we face to do so, to bear witness to “a goodness that claims one but whose existence seems to defy reason” (ix).
the imperatives that face the writer are
those of human relations, the face as well as the story of the afflicted child.
When Gaita writes: “For my father, truthfulness was [not an abstract principle, but] a condition of human interchange, a condition of conversation”
he is also explaining the ways that the protagonists of his story cannot be severed from the moral and psychic dramas they have inhabited, cannot be confined to the times or truths of history.
the complicated imbrication within the memoir,
of aesthetics and truth; the rhetorical force of skilful and apt expression (not far but far enough from truth) against the weight of truthfulness itself, at once rhetorical, embodied and to an extent, inexplicable, the both-and of Gaita’s sense of his story’s protagonists, verified according to historical principles but not reducible to them. It is also, I have suggested, for both writers, a point where aesthetic questions come up against other human relations, in particular, compassion.
complex visual archive charting
the possibilities of an Australian selfhood, and the problematics of its mediation through forms and structures that are insistently European.
The landscape of the film thus speaks to the diversity of the times of the nation
Gaita’s story of traumatic arrival (the bleak stretch of road up which Christina walks toward the hut is the same track along which the young Raimond rides his bike in scenes of joyous connection with the landscape) overlays colonial accounts with other forms of loss and pleasure, other modes of articulation, and returns us to the imperatives of truth and of language that animate the memoir, and Gaita’s important contribution to our understandings of national belonging.
Romulus’ ‘character’ is already strong like steel at the age of thirteen
He is fearlessly courageous in his defence of principle and has the inflexibility of a moral ‘innocence’ which, in the end, breaks under the shocks of life.
He is driven mad by the failure of human life to meet his exacting demands.
