Patrick White World Literature Analysis
Like most writers, White began his career with what he came to regard as a literary apprenticeship. His first two novels, Happy Valley (1939) and The Living and the Dead (1941), were intensely disliked by their author, who discouraged publishers from reprinting them. Even after White’s death, these novels have been very difficult for literary scholars, much less the general public, to lay their hands upon. White considered his literary career to have fully commenced with The Aunt’s Story (1948), a judgment in which most of his critics concur. This novel began the series of artistically ambitious works that made White a major name in modern literature. The Tree of Man (1955) is a pastoral tale of frontier settlement, characterized by unsparing though affectionate portraits of the protagonists. This was followed by Voss (1957), generally considered to be White’s major work, and then by Riders in the Chariot (1961), which is taken up largely with the idea of a few good individuals redeeming the immorality and pointlessness of their fellows. The Solid Mandala (1966) is a fascinating tale of twins. It began a more artistically experimental phase, exemplified by The Vivisector (1970), and The Eye of the Storm (1973). White’s interests became more historical in A Fringe of Leaves (1976), which returned to the era of the European colonization of Australia, and The Twyborn Affair (1979), which is set amid the tumultuous changes of the early twentieth century. In the 1980’s, White produced both a straightforward autobiography, Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait (1981), and a fictional distortion of one, Memoirs of Many in One (1986). Memoirs of Many in One explores his homosexuality more openly than do previous books.
No one has ever accused White of lacking ambition. He excited much critical controversy during his lifetime. White’s novels are massive not only in size but also in emotional and artistic scope. Each of his books seems to be trying to make a conclusive statement, in artistic form, about the nature of human experience. In this regard, White emulated such great international modernist writers as James Joyce and Thomas Mann. White’s books use setting as the backdrop for the enactment of primal spiritual quests by characters who, though sometimes trapped by the mediocrities of everyday life, are always trying to assert themselves in some sort of higher dimension. This hardly means, though, that White does not delight in sketching individual traits for each of his characters, who are some of the most memorable personages in modern fiction.
Although White was the crucial force in the emergence of modern Australian literature, he never saw himself as an Australian nationalist or as someone whose first aim as a writer was to dedicate himself to recording the full variety of Australian life and society. Opposing the narrowness and anti-intellectualism that he saw as typical of much of the Australian society, White was often at odds with the fundamental values of other Australians. White’s novels resonate, however, with the natural beauty and dynamic breadth of the Australian continent.
White was a writer of high seriousness who, although hardly lacking humor, had a very earnest sense of artistic mission. His works possess deep spiritual energy and are open to a tremendous depth of interpretation. By the end of the twentieth century, this very serious attitude toward fiction was somewhat out of style. More ironic attitudes toward art had more currency. Thus White’s reputation suffered in the years after his death. Yet it may be argued that White’s sense that art mattered, that it could make a difference, is what will endear him most to readers...
(This entire section contains 2621 words.)
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of future generations.
The Aunt’s Story
First published: 1948
Type of work: Novel
Theodora Goodman, as her name suggests, is a good person in search of acceptance.
The Aunt’s Story tells the tale of Theodora Goodman, an eccentric. One of White’s aims in the book is to upend conventional notions of what is and is not normal. Although Theodora is different from most other people, the reader is led to conclude that this difference makes her, if anything, superior to the majority of other human beings, who lack her sensitivity, creativity, and depth. Theodora epitomizes these qualities, which belong to everyone, although the demands of everyday society may often require that they lay dormant.
The Aunt’s Story is an autobiographical work. In the manner of such classics as George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931), the novel attempts to chart the growth and development of a soul. There is a difference, however, in White’s novel. The other authors portray their souls as representative, as typical human selves in whose experience the reader can participate with ease. White, on the other hand, focuses deliberately on an eccentric and wayward soul, in order to show the value of personal qualities that are often despised or repressed by society. The tension between the individuality and universality of Theodora’s predicament is displayed in her name. Theodora means gift of God in Greek, and her surname clearly alludes to the goodness present in the individual.
Theodora is one of two daughters born to George Goodman, an irresponsible landowner who is an irresistible force in the life of his two daughters. The Goodmans live in a house named Meroë, after an ancient Ethiopian kingdom. As a girl, Theodora lives under the illusion that Meroë contains the entire world. Meroë, to the young Theodora, is a self-sufficient universe where she can withdraw into her own private daydream world, secure in the knowledge that Meroë and her father will protect her from any outside harm. Of the two sisters, Theodora is imaginative, creative, and artistic. Fanny is practical, conventional, and worldly. George Goodman is simultaneously dominating and incompetent. Theodora’s childhood takes place under his shadow.
The Goodmans move, under financial pressure, to the urban center of Sydney as Theodora approaches adulthood. This move away from Meroë has the air of an expulsion from Eden to it. Theodora is ejected from the protective cocoon of her childhood and is confronted with the great outside world. Theodora finds that her relationships as an adult are colored by her regret at losing her childhood world of innocence. This affects her romantic relationship with Huntly Clarkson, a young gentleman who is attractive in the eyes of Sydney society. Clarkson is likable and easy mannered, but Theodora nevertheless rejects him because he is too materialistic and too much at home in the world, insufficiently in touch with the unusual states of consciousness that have come to dominate Theodora’s psyche. Theodora has a brief relationship with a man who is more artistic, a cello player named Moraitis, but they are unable to build anything permanent.
In the second part of the novel, Theodora goes to Europe. It is the era between the two world wars, a time of brilliance and decadence. Theodora stays at the Hôtel du Midi, which is a microcosm of European culture and society. Among the representative personages Theodora encounters are General Sokolnikov, a garrulous Russian émigré, Mrs. Rapallo, an allegorical figure who assists Theodora in coming to terms with the unresolved legacy of her fantasies, and Katina Pavlou, a young woman who serves as an object of fantasy for Theodora, who attempts to save Katina from the perils of the adult world to which Theodora believes Katina has fallen prey.
These relationships, though, are transient, not providing Theodora with any stabilizing anchor. This transience leads to the pathos of the third part of the novel. Theodora finds herself in the United States. She has an encounter with a man named Holstius, which, though brief, provides her with more of a soul mate than she has ever possessed. After leaving Holstius, Theodora roams aimlessly across the country. She finally reaches her end in the home of a Midwestern farm family, the Johnsons, who, though not understanding her creativity, treat her with the compassion and humanity she has long deserved. They enable Theodora to die with dignity and honor.
Voss
First published: 1957
Type of work: Novel
A major novel, occupying a central position in Australian literature, Voss tells of epic discovery and epic defeat.
Voss is not only considered Patrick White’s greatest novel, but is most probably the greatest single work of Australian literature. Voss is a story of a German explorer of the Australian outback in the nineteenth century. The title character is often compared to a historical figure, the German-born Australian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, but the inspiration behind White’s character is symbolic, not historical. Johann Ulrich Voss is not pictured simply as an explorer, whose primary aim is the opening up of new geographic territory. He is, equally, an investigator into undiscovered realms of the human spirit, symbolized but not fully expressed by the wild and desolate beauty of remote Australia.
When Voss comes to Australia, he is a confident, even arrogant specimen of European masculinity. His mission of exploration is an assertion of mastery, of certainty that Voss has the power to penetrate the unknown and gain the upper hand over whatever secrets that the unknown may possess. When Voss arrives in Australia, he makes the rounds of Sydney’s high society, seeking to raise money to finance his expedition. During the course of these fund-raising efforts, Voss encounters Laura Trevelyan, a young, beautiful Sydney socialite. Voss and Laura are immediately attracted to each other, but their attraction is not ever fully realized. Voss and Laura are, superficially, very different. Voss is brawny and action-oriented, and Laura has spent her life amid upper-class frivolity, although she is far less corrupted by her milieu than her cousin, Belle Bonner. Laura achieves a more authentic emotional insight into Voss’s mission than do the explorer’s other financial backers who are more overtly encouraging.
Voss leaves Sydney and embarks on his great quest. Accompanying him on his expedition are a number of men, most prominent among them the poet Frank Le Mesurier. Le Mesurier represents intellect as compared to the strength of Voss, the internal world as opposed to the external. Le Mesurier also symbolizes aspects of Voss’s own character.
The expedition, after journeying to Newcastle by sea, goes through the Hunter Valley to the small town of Rhine Towers, which is depicted as bucolic and idyllic. Then the group goes through the hilly New England region and across the Queensland border to the hamlet of Yildra, which is the last beacon of civilization before their plunge into the outback.
White derived his picture of the outback not as much from literal experience as from the landscape paintings of his friend Sidney Nolan. The final portion of the novel, accordingly, becomes less realistic and narrative and takes on poetic and symbolic overtones. As the heroism of the expedition becomes more impressive and praiseworthy, the sense of its inevitable doom becomes all the more resonant. These men not only fail, but die. Le Mesurier’s death begins the expedition’s sense of its own failure. His death also foreshadows the death of the protagonist. By the time Voss meets his end, he has lost his confident arrogance and has been made wise by suffering. His material defeat is his spiritual victory.
As Voss is dying, he has a final vision—of Laura Trevelyan, long since left behind. Laura experiences a vision of Voss at the same time, thousands of miles away in her secure Sydney residence. This spiritual communion underscores the main point of the novel: What occurs within the human soul, not within the easily categorized achievements of the outer world, is what is truly significant.
The Vivisector
First published: 1970
Type of work: Novel
Hurtle Duffield, a painter of humble origins, struggles with his divided, conflicting nature.
The Vivisector is White’s most concentrated study of the nature of artistic genius. Like The Aunt’s Story, it is about an individual marked off from his peers at an early age by an unusual creativity. Unlike Theodora Goodman, however, the protagonist of The Vivisector, Hurtle Duffield, is not merely an eccentric victim of society’s prejudice. Duffield harnesses his creativity into the production of paintings, channeling his talent into a concrete and socially recognized outlet. His art nevertheless stands as a testimony to his unique, sensitive, and tough-minded soul. In telling the story of the life and fortunes of an artist, White places his novel in the European tradition known as the Künstlerroman, or “novel of the artist.” Such a novel not only conveys the biography of an artist, it also serves to reflect upon the nature of art and the role of art in life. The Vivisector is no exception to this tradition.
Young Hurtle Duffield is early recognized for his artistic potential. Hurtle loves his parents and is appreciated by them, but the Duffield family is mired in poverty and knows Hurtle is fundamentally different. Seeing this situation, Mrs. Courtney, a wealthy patron of the arts who has noticed Hurtle’s talent, offers to pay the Duffield family a sum of £500 in order to gain the right to bring him up herself. Even at the age of eight, Hurtle, through his separation from his family, comes to understand that artistic achievement may necessitate sacrifice.
The Courtneys provide Hurtle with comfortable surroundings, but they are shallow and bourgeois, failing to understand his creative temperament. It is only in adulthood that he is fully free to create for himself. A symbol of this independence is his first romantic relationship, with a woman named Nance Lightfoot. Hurtle’s relationship with Nance, however, is not a whole one. He is so preoccupied with his art that the only women with whom he can be involved are those who will not demand the entirety of his soul. Nance, for example, understands none of his paintings.
Hurtle achieves some success as an artist and travels to Europe. In Greece, he encounters another woman, Hero Pavloussis, with whom he has a romantic rendezvous in the island of Perialos. Less stable than Nance, Hero’s experiences glide more seamlessly into Hurtle’s art. The two lovers, nevertheless, do not achieve a permanent relationship, and Hurtle has a vision of the artist as a great vivisector always cutting open other people’s experiences, hurting and damaging in order to create. Far from any conventional view of the artist as celebrant of optimistic creativity, Hurtle’s witheringly honest reconciliation with his own artistic conscience epitomizes the dilemmas of an artist in the modern era.
Hurtle returns to Australia and old age. In his last years, he encounters two more women who, in the manner of Nance and Hero, function as gauges of his own personal and artistic development. Hurtle’s relationships with these women, however, are not of a sexual nature. Rhoda Courtney is the daughter of Hurtle’s former patron and foster mother. Rhoda is physically and mentally disabled. Far from receiving the special treatment accorded to Hurtle by the admiring Courtneys, Rhoda is abandoned and neglected. Hurtle, though, comes to treasure Rhoda as a friend and companion. Kathy Volkov is a young girl who becomes an artistic protégé of Hurtle. Hurtle sees something of himself in Kathy. He is hopeful that Kathy possesses talent such as his without the psychological burdens Hurtle has had to bear. Perhaps Kathy will be able to create without becoming a vivisector.
Hurtle is feverishly working on a painting when he feels death approaching. Slipping across the border of life, he sees flash before his eyes an ideal of spiritual and artistic wholeness he has failed to achieve in life. This ideal is an indigo-colored vision, verging upon divinity.