Metaphysician: Trying to Read Peter Goldsworthy’s Prescription
Noel Henricksen
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature June 1, 2011 DOI: 10.1177/0021989411404991 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
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| Key points | Argues that death is ubiquitous in Peter Goldsworthy's work, serving as an engine of tension between his childhood Methodism and his scientific method. The authors contend that Goldsworthy explores the possibility of eternity through motifs such as séances, near-death experiences, cloned Tasmanian tigers, and a mathematical postulate for resurrection, while avoiding dogmatism and expressing only tentative hope for proof of a metaphysical dimension. |
Abstract
As a medical practitioner, Peter Goldsworthy has been confronted, all too frequently, with human suffering, morbidity and mortality: he wrestles with their existential meaning in his poetry, essays and stories. Death, in Goldsworthy’s works, is ubiquitous: it becomes an engine for tension between belief and scepticism, for contention between the legacy of his childhood Methodism and his professional grounding in scientific method. Goldsworthy describes incidents and presents arguments which explore the feasibility that we are not ephemeral but potentially eternal: séances and hoped-for hauntings; near-death experiences … explained physiologically; cloned Tasmanian tigers, and a doctor’s self-insemination with the DNA of Jesus; God-centred science fiction, and a convincing postulate for resurrection expressed in the language of mathematics and quantum mechanics. Detached and irreverent, Goldsworthy dissects and analyses, but avoids circumscription or dogmatism. He desires, at best, some proof that there is a dimension beyond the physical; he feels some sadness that a scientific mind is deprived of a certainty of the metaphysical; and he expresses hope that “perhaps, just perhaps …”.