How many people would think to write a novel around the proposition that the ghosts of the newly dead take some time to adjust to their sudden change of status? This is the subject matter of I Saw Water. On an island setting, the heroine pursues spiritual enlightenment through her stay at a convent. She is subjected to various spiritual and physical tribulations and it is only as the novel unfolds that we realise that the island is the Island of the Dead and that the characters are all discarnate. They continue to behave as they did in material existence, and to build round themselves the illusion of time and space. Gradually they adapt to their circumstances and the narrator, at least, achieves a measure of calm.
As in Goose of Hermogenes, the hermetic is embedded into the structure of the novel. In Goose of Hermogenes, progress through the narrative reflected progress through the stages of alchemical transformation. In I Saw Water, the author’s original intention was for the heroine to ascend through the Tree of Life from Chapter 1 (Malkuth) to Chapter 12 (Kether). In the final draft, a further chapter had been added and each was now associated with one of the alchemical elements. Colquhoun planned that, when published, each chapter would be printed on appropriately coloured paper. For example, those chapters attributed to elemental Air would be on yellow paper, whilst those attributed to elemental Fire would be printed on red.
The novel’s dream-like quality is directly attributable to the fact that the content was based directly on the artist’s dreams. Her working notes show that Colquhoun began work on the novel in about 1967, selecting dreams from her dream diaries from as far back as 1939. (1) In the sense that she selected, edited and re-arranged her dreams, I Saw Water is a collage novel, comparable in certain respects to the collage novels of Max Ernst. However, whereas Ernst generated visual images by cutting up his source material – engravings and woodcuts – and linking them with a text, for Colquhoun, the origin lay in the visual imagery of her dreams, transformed into words and then assembled to provide an overall narrative. The odd juxtapositions and sense of strangeness that pervades Colquhoun’s novel comes from the manifest content of the dreams rather than from the manner in which they were subsequently arranged. There are differences, too, in subject matter. For Ernst in, for example, Reve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, the underlying theme is the seduction fantasy that is so central to Freudians. For Colquhoun, the theme is the spiritual growth that was so central to her occultist enquiries.
The book was never published. Although it was generally liked by publishers’ readers, as one of them pointedly asked: who would buy it?
Notes
1. Notes and drafts of the novel are at TGA 929/2/1/31. The final typescript is at TGA 929/2/1/31/8.
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