“The Only Speaker of His Tongue. David Malouf and Endangered Languages and Id-Entities”

This essay challenges the traditional binary model intrinsic in our contemporary rational/scientific language, fundamentally based on patriarchal Logos, by re-emphasising the power of what Raimon Panikkar defines “the creative word” as a symbolic instrument of self-knowledge. The “creative word” is capable of unlocking a whole system of echoes and reverberations conveying deeper meanings, as elegantly expressed in David Malouf’s prose. This study shows that, while the scientific use of words as mere terms eliminates imagination and reduces language to a simple transferring of notions, the metaphorical, allusive, intuitive use of the word becomes an expression of a greater state of harmony, peace and reconciliation, thus opening spaces beyond what is temporarily accepted and acknowledged as true and real.