SOURCE: “Narrative Techniques in the Shorter Prose Fiction,” in The Peacocks and the Bourgeoisie, Adelaide University Union Press, 1978, pp. 173-90.

[In the following excerpt, Myers observes that White's more successful short stories mimic the intensity, tension, and density of imagery in his novels.]

In an interview with Craig McGregor that took place some years after the publication of The Burnt Ones and some years before The Cockatoos appeared, Patrick White had the following to say about his short stories:

Short stories? I don't really like writing them so much—though I have nearly got enough for another volume. All my effects are cumulative, and one doesn't really have the time to get the effects you want. The novella is more satisfactory; you can put more into it. Sometimes if I become very depressed while writing a novel and I get an idea for a short story I get that down, and afterward I feel as though I have been liberated somehow.

It is not uncommon for writers of fiction to compose stories or novellas as off-shoots of their major works, composed while this is in progress, and embodying a theme or an incident which doesn't quite fit within the framework of the novel. Thomas Mann, for example, composed Death in Venice as a companion piece on death to his great epic The Magic Mountain. But authors' intentions about whether an idea will grow under artistic treatment to a story, a novella, or a novel are unreliable, because Thomas Mann informs us that he had intended The Magic Mountain to be a brief, comic story as an antidote to the tragic-lyric form of Death in Venice.

If we accept this connection between short story and novel, we will expect to find certain bonds of theme and imagery between the shorter and the longer works of Patrick White's prose fiction. Although, as I have affirmed in the introduction to this monograph, the short stories and novellas can stand alone on their own merits, susceptible to interpretation as independent works of art, it is equally true that their themes and images are enriched when read in conjunction with the novels. For example, in the short story “Clay” there is a brief and mildly puzzling reference to Clay as a child being terrified by the antics of clowns at a circus and burying his head in his Aunt Maud's bosom. In the novel Riders in the Chariot, where White has the space to develop the omitted scene at length, he provides a detailed description of presumably these same clowns enacting a farcical-macabre scenario of a public hanging, in which a clown is required to spin at the end of a hanging rope and to feign death, and one of the grannies in the audience screams “They will kill the silly bugger yet!”¹ The amplifying of this incident in the novel is more satisfying aesthetically, but the story “Clay” stands as an independent narrative entity because the focus of our interest there is not on the clowns, but on Clay's hysterical reaction to any mildly scary incident and on his instinctive reaction to dive for the cover of the nearest mature female's bosom for protection, a reaction that he repeats in insanity with his mother at the end of the story.

To take another example: in The Tree of Man Mr. Parker senior is said to be a drunkard who once “answered a question in a sermon.”² This incident is amplified in A Cheery Soul to form a theologically farcical climax. Further, at the end of this story a decrepit old cattle dog pisses on Miss Docker, and we are given to understand this is the sentence of God upon her because dog “is God turned round.”³ But at the conclusion of the novel The Solid Mandala Waldo Brown's corpse is eaten by his own dogs as a fitting punishment because as a proud rationalist he had denied God and religion all his life. White's implied judgement in the story is farcical with overtones of pathos for a woman now irrevocably condemned to loneliness, whereas his judgement in the novel is harsh and unrelenting. Nevertheless, the common pun or word-play on which they depend confirms our hypothesis about White's religious sense of humour. We have already noted this inclination to religious puns in connection with the word “stroked” at the climactic epiphany of The Vivisector, and with the word-plays on “blessés” and “remumber” at the climax of “The Letters”, and with the pun on the word “floods” at the end of The Night the Prowler.

Obviously there are many other connecting links between White's stories and novels, but to trace them all is not the purpose of this work. It is rather the function of this section to characterize the narrative and structural techniques of the stories, and to decide to what extent these differ from the techniques of the novels.

Many critics have now attempted to define the short story and in so doing to differentiate it from the anecdote, the sketch, the novella and the novel. I have no original words of wisdom to offer on these theoretical definitions, except perhaps to observe that none of the definitions works for the myriad of stories written in this century, but many of them work for some of these stories. White himself says, as we have noted in the initial quotation of this section, that he prefers to write novellas to short stories, but perhaps what he means by this is that he prefers to write longer stories to shorter stories. Are there hard and fast rules distinguishing a short story from a novella? Do we for example postulate that any story in excess of 6000-8000 words is a novella rather than a story? Or that any story that meaningfully illuminates the lives of more than say two characters separately is so complex as to make it a novella rather than a short story? Or that any story that does not limit itself to the representation of a single crisis or turning-point in the life of one central character, but instead creates capsule biographies of three or four characters through a complex network of flashbacks, constitutes a novella? Or where the thematic intentions of the author within the one story are not limited to the creation of a single effect but where instead there are clearly sub-themes and a number of effects ranging from the farcical to the tragic, that here the border from short story to novella is clearly crossed? The last two questions seem to point towards useful distinctions between short story and novella, particularly as they are written by Patrick White, but are certainly not sufficient justification for the literary theoretician to insist on drawing a dogmatic line between the two closely related forms.

I now propose to take what seem to me to be some of the more perceptive generalisations about the rhetorical and structural techniques pertinent to the short story and the novella, and investigate the measure of their relevance to White's stories.

These generalisations raise the following issues: the search for the overriding point of view and the hidden narrator; the art of an author making indirect comment and implied value judgments without reducing his characters to manipulated puppets; the startling metamorphosis of apparently simple and mundane events into disturbing spiritual problems; the analogy with film techniques in cutting abruptly from one scene to another and thus relying on themes and leitmotifs to establish a continuum rather than on the chronological sequence and the causality of the traditional plot; the selection of a single crisis in the life of the main character as an illustration of the crucial turning-point in his life and hinting at a climactic epiphany for this character, or for the reader of the story; the structural relationship of beginning, middle and end; endings which feature a twist in the tail or a dramatic shock as opposed to open endings which leave the reader puzzled and disturbed; the increasing significance attached to inanimate objects and their often symbolic influence on the characters; the tendency of the contemporary short story to evolve a new kind of open-ended parable; the moral task of the short story to celebrate the uniqueness of the individual as a counterbalance to the conveyor-belt uniformity of modern mass society (in this sense perhaps the short story is making a virtue out of a necessity, because its very conciseness forces it to limit its perspective to one or two main characters); the tendency of modern short stories to the grotesque and the absurd as another way of emphasizing the moral contrast between the way of life of the often strange outsider-protagonist and conventional society and therefore the close relation of the short story to theatre of the absurd and to epic theatre, both of which aim to shock rather than to lull, to trouble rather than to console; the notion that the novella is especially suitable to render “degenerative or pathetic tragedy”; the uniqueness of the novella as consisting in the “double effect of intensity with expansion”; the achievement of a compressive quality in the novella “by an unwavering thematic focus and an accumulation of structural parallels.”⁴

Structurally considered, Patrick White's stories almost inevitably rise, often from paradoxically inappropriate, mundane or farcical levels, to a passionate climax. This climax is either set in the concluding scene, or if in the penultimate scene, it is in order to create a deliberately ironic anticlimax in the end. This climax often coincides with some decisive event such as death or insanity, but the climax itself is not external, but internal. It almost invariably takes the form of an epiphany, either for the main character, or often, for the reader.

Reid defines epiphanies as “sudden momentous intuitions … when an individual is most alert or most alone.”⁵ Patrick White favours an especially elevated kind of epiphany which he features as a characteristic climax for so many of his stories. In the stories collected in The Cockatoos the intuition of the epiphany is often related to the search of the outsider for an ecstatic insight into the underlying principle of all being in the cosmos, a fleeting moment of understanding of the workings of a hidden God in our earthly world, or a tragic triumph over petty egoism and possessiveness, which White sees as the evil of our world, through the medium of inspired love. This moment of transcendence of earthly preoccupations and of death and of the tormenting fact of individuation is characteristically gained by an isolated, unconventional individual, a romantic revolutionary against conventional society.⁶ Even where the medium of the character's unio mystica is love, it is not the intimacy of two lovers that White stresses, but the panerotic or universal qualities of this love. The medium for these epiphanies can be solitary meditation on infinity as with Clem Dowson, aesthetic delight in the beauty of nature with Christian overtones as with Nesta Pine, or a vision uniting the dualistic principle of all being as with Harold Fazackerley, all within the one novella, “A Woman's Hand.” In “The Full Belly” Iordanou seeks for God through the medium of music and confused erotic worship of the ascetic Panayia. In “The Night the Prowler” Felicity Bannister finds harmony with the ways of a hidden God through the unconventional practice of caritas. In “Five-Twenty,” “Sicilian Vespers” and “The Cockatoos” there are what I would call negative sexual epiphanies, in which a character yearns for sexual union rather than mystic union and is either farcically or grotesquely taught the imperfections of this goal. The main characters in these three stories do not show sufficient understanding to grasp what they are being taught, and it is we the readers who experience a decisive insight into their failure. Mrs. Natwick in “Five-Twenty” farcically loses the object of her lust in the moment preceding its consummation. The grotesque inadequacy of Ivy Simpson's blasphemous and tasteless copulation is brought out by contrast with both the praying congregation and with the tear in the eye of Christ Pantocrator. The praying congregation has found spiritual serenity whereas she has gained only a temporary respite from the tormenting mundanity of her rationalistic and atheistic, and therefore pointless existence. The cockatoos inspire flowing passion in the inhibited Mick Davoren and the frigid Busby Le Cornu, but Mick cannot overcome the sin of his possessiveness and presumably for this reason he is punished by being grotesquely murdered. Olive Davoren is accorded an ironic heightening of her artistic sensitivity and her erotic love for her husband. But she drops away from her inspiration to a trivial widowhood, and Busby sinks back to isolation and despair. Although all three of them, and Tim Goodenough too in his own way, spontaneously feel religious awe of the cockatoos, they never do understand the transformation this vision should make to their lives. It is the reader who comprehends the tragic inevitability of their failure and experiences in this sense a negative epiphany. In “Fête Galante,” by way of contrast, Thekla herself understands all too well the dual nature of her sexual failure. In lusting for the Olympians she has committed the sin of hybris, and in her lust she has betrayed her ascetic Panayia, just as hunger had driven Iordanou to betray his Panayia in “The Full Belly.” Like Ivy Simpson in “Sicilian Vespers” she is grotesquely transformed by her lust into a monstrous fish with the sly face of a woman. In “The Eye of the Storm” we find yet another reference by White to this strange monster.⁷

It is fascinating to note how many of the climactic epiphanies in The Burnt Ones are negative and sexual in character. When Mrs. Mortlock's breath goes “crrkk in her throat” in the last lines of “Dead Roses,” she is annihilated by her awareness of her sexual envy of Cherie Flegg and of having wasted her life because of her sexual inhibitions and her social pretentiousness. In “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight” there is a climactic revelation from the tape recorder, but no character gains real insight because of this revelation. Instead Nora stands isolated in her purity and her humility, and it is we the readers who are hit by the decisive insight into her moral superiority over the other characters' average corruption and deceitfulness. Constantia Phillipides experiences a tragic epiphany at the conclusion of “A Glass of Tea”; she says, as she rises for “a moment above the mounting tide of blood: ‘I am the one, you see, who broke!”⁸

She has taken her life because of her jealousy for her husband. But more than this she rises above her jealousy at this moment, because now in the self-sacrifice of her death, she is concerned only with guaranteeing her husband's future happiness. It is of course ironic that it is herself rather than the glasses who breaks and that she dies knowing that Aglaia will not break under the strain of becoming Phillipides' second wife, and that her sacrifice has not been in vain. In “Clay” the main character's ecstatic sexual suicide is only instinctive self-gratification and it is once again the reader who is given a climactic detail of his clinging to the white wedding shoe in death. In the two concluding scenes of “The Evening at Sissy Kamara's” it is once again not the main character, Poppy Pantzopoulos, who comes to an intuitive understanding of her life's dilemma, but the reader. Because White has startlingly juxtaposed the tragic with the trivial, the reader intuitively grasps, without any comment from the author, the true nature of heroic self-sacrifice as opposed to Poppy's nervous, self-belittling flirtation with the idea. Similarly at the conclusion of “A Cheery Soul” Miss Docker continues on her falsely cheerful path, unaware that God has passed judgement on her through both Mr. Wakeman's sermon and the dog, but we the readers have comprehended the failure of her life and her way. But if “A Cheery Soul” features a negative, farcical religious climax, “Down at the Dump” compensates with the spiritual realisation by Daise Morrow of the love that transcends death and the partial comprehension of her gospel by Meg Hogben. The ensuing anti-climactic coda of four pages in fact rises out of its triviality and sordidness to a renewal of the climactic epiphany in White's representation of Meg's spiritual meditation and the resultant “warm core of certainty.”⁹ The remaining four stories in The Burnt Ones all feature climaxes involving sexual suffering. In “Being Kind to Titina” Dionysaki feels with full bitterness the irony that he has come to love Titina too late because she has now become a whore. But when he offers up his throat for self-sacrifice in expiation of earlier sin against her, he is forced to comprehend a further irony, namely that his “extended throat was itself a stiff sword.”¹⁰ White will not allow him to escape from his sin into the comfortingly passive pose of martyrdom; he must continue to accept the responsibility for further acts of aggression, as these are symbolically indicated by his ‘sword.’ The suffering awareness that Tibby Szabo gains from sexual disappointment remains, by way of contrast with Dionysaki, strictly farcical and Andrew Taylor is justified when he wittily points out that Tibby is not so much ‘a burnt one’ as he is ‘roasted.’¹¹ In “The Letters” Charles Polkinghorn is allowed only one moment of tragic lucidity as he understands that all three of them, himself, his mother and his aunt, are fatefully “blessés.” But his epiphany is, apart from Maud's letter, set in a context that is grotesque and farcical, and his moment of brief dignity is quickly lost in the ensuing parody of the Oedipus-myth. “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats” constitutes a rare exception among White's stories, because here the main character Kikitsa is allowed to transform herself and her way of life as the result of her suffering when she is deprived of her cats and as a result of her epiphanous understanding of sexual psychology. “It was simply that Kikitsa's face had undergone a change, the way faces will, by joy, or suffering.”¹² This is the only one of White's stories with a climax that is both sexual in nature and also happy, indeed farcically so; the concluding anticlimax of Maro Hajistavrou's hatred and envy only serves by way of contrast to highlight Kikitsa's sexual joy.

We have noted that the climactic epiphany in White's stories is often followed by an ironic anticlimax. When the anticlimax is extended sufficiently, it tends to form a coda with a structural importance in its own right. We have also noted how in “Down at the Dump” the coda actually presented a renewal of the epiphany. This structural feature has particular relevance to “A Woman's Hand,” where in a lengthy coda whose artistic justification had been difficult to perceive until this moment, Harold Fazackerley perceives the healing union of the world's dualistic poles and merges himself in ecstatic unity with nature:

He was the black water trickling, trickling at the bottom of it (a great gorge). He was the cliffside pocked with hidden caves. He was the deformed elbows of stalwart trees.¹³

The earlier epiphanies of Clem and Nesta here reach not just a renewal but a new and high er peak of spiritual understanding. But inevitably this peak too is followed by an anticlimax of trivia as the Fazackerleys wait uncomprehendingly to die. “Sicilian Vespers” and “The Cockatoos” also feature extended codas. The function of the coda in “Sicilian Vespers” is to allow us to understand through a flashback to Ivy's childhood why she was driven to her sexual-religious blasphemy in San Fabrizio. We understand, but Ivy doesn't, that her confusion has been caused by her having sexually adored her father who had scorned her and who had also drummed into her that religious exaltation is only hocus-pocus. For her adulthood she has learnt from his rationalism and atheism, but in so doing she has had to drain out her instinctive religious fervour, leaving her an empty but tough shell. The coda in “The Cockatoos” is less well integrated, and Tim Goodenough's story is really a separate one, tenuously linked by the cockatoos. The inadequacy and brutality of Tim's response to the cockatoos are not excused by his justifiable fear of forever being tied to his mother's apron strings, and the reader, as so often in the other stories, is left to come to his own understanding during the extended anticlimax of the coda, of the spiritual and moral failure of all four major characters in this novella.

White's stories tend to have a surface of social trivia and a tension emanating from a hidden, psychological or spiritual truth towards which White's few elect protagonists struggle. White prefers on the whole to replace chronological plot development with a complex network of flashbacks designed to allow the story to comment on itself by the careful juxtaposition of these flashbacks with the present, and to give depth to the characterisation to the extent that the structural movement might be said to resemble a whirlpool spiral into the past and into the subconsciousness of the present with the moment of greatest suffering and highest awareness coinciding at the bottom of the spiral. White's characters tend to fall into two distinct groups in their attitudes to this whirlpool. The larger group are the satirized bourgeoisie who pretend that the whirlpool is simply not there, and who construct fortress-homes and fortress-conventions to protect themselves from it. The alleged positivity of their gospel of happiness and their commitment to order and respectability are undercut by their sour denial of love and their fear of the mysterious and the unknown. The smaller group of seers is not happier, but is often blessed with the instant of epiphanous transfiguration we have discussed above. These seers have given themselves up to the whirlpool, sometimes involuntarily because they bear the mark of fate, and sometimes as a sign of their romantic revolt against the conformist majority. They are more open to such emotions as religious awe, humility, serenity, affinity with nature and generosity in love. They are also more prone in the moments of highest pressure to depths of agony, insanity, violence or death.

We have already noted that the moods in White's stories vary enormously and often abruptly within the one story from farce and satire to tragic pathos. The key to these variations is inevitably to be found in White's many styles which range from the ridiculing mimicry of Australian slang to the lyric positivity and startling power of his serious imagery. One has the feeling that the intensity and the sensitivity of the style and the character-psychology are such that White is sometimes obliged to let off steam in these stories either through outbursts of incoherent passion or through an explosion of ribald farce that can be glaringly out of harmony with the rest of the story. For the most part, however, White remains austere, ironic and elusively aloof from his material. These words denote the essentials of White's overriding point of view in most of his stories. Michael Wilding, in commenting on the story “Five-Twenty,” notes

a somewhat patrician note of the superior anthropologist in denoting the minutiae with a rather distasteful objectivity. It's a narrow line between deep sympathy and contempt. White presents a terrifying picture of the urban industrial world, redeemed by no possibilities, no hopes; it is a powerful nihilism whose gestures and attempts towards mystical communions and epiphanies only confirm the hopelessness.¹⁴

It may be true of “Five-Twenty,” and of certain others of White's stories that feature what I have called negative sexual epiphanies, that the attempts at “mystical communions” are unsuccessful. But this does not justify Wilding in claiming that the stories are informed by “a powerful nihilism.” Failure and suffering are for White necessary paths to religious experience and “true knowledge comes only from torture in the country of the mind.”¹⁵ The depressing ordinariness of his characters' lives is redeemed, but not so much by erotic ecstasy, as by a flash of intuitive vision into the hidden harmony of creation or by a spiritual acceptance of the necessity of suffering.

Even in the inevitability of failure, White's characters are saved from nihilism because what appears to be the triviality of their lives opens up to show hidden depths of repressed intensity. At their climaxes these only apparently humdrum characters fairly explode with emotional intensity and thereby prove their human individuality. R. Hinton Thomas claims that it is

the task of contemporary literature, in the mass-society of this scientific age, … ‘die menschliche Substanz in einer Welt zu zeigen, die allen poetischen Reizes entbehrt,’ ‘die Behauptung des Menschen im Alltag und in der Uniformität’¹⁶ (‘to show the essence of being human in a world that lacks all poetic allure,’ ‘the assertion of what is human in everyday life and in the midst of uniformity’). This is a task which the short story can be particularly well fitted to perform, whether by the special interest it may show in ‘konkrete, oft nebensächliche oder unscheinbare Vorgänge’ (‘concrete, often trivial or insignificant events’) … or by preoccupation with the frankly absurd.¹⁷

These generalisations about the contemporary German short story seem particularly pertinent to White, who is expert in stirring apparently absurd mixes of the trivial and the mystic, the mundane and the Dionysian, the materialistic-rationalistic and the religious-miraculous. These prodigious and abrupt leaps in mood and meaning give White's stories a kinship with the shock effect emanating from theatre of the absurd. Ionesco's “The Rhinoceros” for example, aims, like White's stories, to reveal through an exploration of the absurd, the incongruous and the surreal, the vital differences between the social conformism of the bourgeoisie and the potentially volcanic tremors of the individual soul.

There is another form of modern theatre that White's stories resemble, and that is epic theatre. R. Hinton Thomas perceptively establishes the relationship between epic theatre and many short stories when he says:

We are here concerned with a feature of many a short story that might be spoken of as a ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ (‘distancing device’) and this establishes a point of contact with epic theatre, which, renouncing the conventional structural unity of a play and allowing it to consist of a series of more or less loosely connected scenes, aims not at creating the sense of illusion, but at putting the audience in a critical state of mind, at creating ‘epische Distanze’ (‘epic distance’) at lifting ‘alltägliche Dinge … aus dem Bereich des Selbstverständlichen’¹⁸ (‘everyday phenomena out of the realm of the self-evident’).¹⁹

There are two major points here. The first is the structural point about the “series of more or less loosely connected scenes.” The second is the aesthetic effect on the readers or the audience, namely to give them critical distance from the characters and to estrange them from what has always appeared obvious, thus jolting them into reviewing the familiar with new eyes.

Taking the structural point first: it is dubious whether the sequence of scenes in epic theatre is quite as loose as is generally assumed. The sequence in White's stories is certainly not loose. I would suggest that Brecht, and White too, substitute another pattern of order for the old one of linear chronology and rising emotions, namely the order of a network of juxtapositions that are determined by such intellectual considerations as illumination of contrasting themes and dialectical paradoxes in characterisation. Indirect comment, often satirical, is created by this network of juxtapositions. But here the comparison between Brecht and White must be abruptly halted. For in all other respects they are at the opposite end of the literary poles. It was Brecht's intention to alienate the audience from the familiar environment in order to provoke them into demanding social change towards what he saw as the political rationalism of communism, whereas White forces his readers to review the familiar from a new spiritual awareness that is entirely anarchistic, irrational and private. Brecht optimistically celebrates man as a social creature rationally and historically working towards a utopian political organisation. White pessimistically celebrates man as a religious creature doomed to a suffering remoteness from God and obsessed in his loneliness with a spiritual transcendence of his inevitable agony. With unembarrassed obviousness Brecht pushes his audience didactically towards his simple, political message, whereas White as narrator prefers to remain elusive, remote, complex, non-political and even obscure.

A brief comparison between the narrative stance and the structural technique of juxtaposition in the fiction of James Joyce and Patrick White brings us far closer to understanding the functions of relative distancing between author and characters, and characters and readers. In a statement on the narrative stance of James Joyce that he claims “has now become a commonplace of modern fiction,” Richard Ellmann says that this stance seeks

a presentation so sharp that comment by the author would be an interference. It leaves off the veneer of gracious intimacy with the reader, of concern that he should be taken into the author's confidence, and instead makes the reader feel uneasy and culpable if he misses the intended but always unstated meaning, as if he were being arraigned rather than entertained. The artist detaches himself from his material so as to push the reader into it.²⁰

We do indeed feel uneasy at the end of such stories by White as “A Cheery Soul” or “The Cockatoos,” as we search for a meaning that will integrate the many puzzling jigsaw-pieces. Instead of coolly debating the morality of characters as Brecht intended us to, we find ourselves at the conclusions of the above two stories sympathizing in surprising intimacy with Miss Docker, Busby Le Cornu and Tim Goodenough as they confront the insoluble dilemmas of their lives. These insoluble dilemmas are caused by the inevitability, the unchangeability of their characters. Almost none of White's characters is allowed to develop meaningfully in the course of the stories. They are trapped tragically or farcically in the conformist and usually puritanical prisons or their class or in the haunting traumas of their alienated childhood. There is no escape for them, but there is for the reader through his liberating understanding of the reasons for their limitations.

There are a few notable exceptions to this law of immutability of character in White's shorter prose fiction. They are Kikitsa Alexiou in “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats,” Meg Hogben in “Down at the Dump” and Felicity Bannister in “The Night the Prowler.” Meg and Felicity do not so much develop gradually and naturally as they are transformed potentially by an intimation of the spiritual transcendence for which they have been seeking. Kikitsa acts out her transformation in her new sensual serenity towards nature and her own body, and also towards the awakened sexuality of her husband. Undoubtedly the time-jumps and the general compression of White's novellas contribute to this impression of abrupt change rather than gradual development, but it is also true that White wishes to depict above all the unpredictable abruptness and isolation of the moment of grace and the full illogicality and often grotesque negativity of the epiphanous transfiguration.

The question of compression in White's stories brings us to the issue whether his stories might not be more usefully classified as novellas. Even in such a comparatively uncomplicated story as “Five-Twenty,” White tends to reach back through the flashback into extensive evocation of the past and to tell the story of the malformation of Royal Natwick's character as much as the story of Ella Natwick's insane, erotic expectations of the gentleman in the pink Holden. “The Letters” too shows the germ of White's inclination to reach back into the past and relate impressionist, capsule biographies, instead of illuminating one crucial turning-point in time and leaving the before and the after to be hinted at or filled in by the reader. But “The Letters” is vigorously unified by White's device of quoting the letters themselves and thus thematically and stylistically integrating the extended chronology. The only stories that are unambiguously short stories, it seems to me, are “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight.” “Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover,” “The Letters,” “The Full Belly” and “Five-Twenty.” These stories tend to restrict themselves to a single incident, a single theme, or a single confrontation.

But I am undoubtedly being very conservative in speaking of the short story in these terms. Ian Reid tells us that it was in the first two decades of this century that critics insisted that a short story had to have

three related qualities: it makes a single impression on the reader, it does so by concentrating on a crisis, and it makes that crisis pivotal in a controlled plot.²¹

It is clear that White's stories make complex impressions on the reader, that they are often almost plotless, predominantly low-key and slow to build up pressure, and that the protagonists are often suffering a permanent crisis of quiet desperation throughout their lives and the stories. It is also clear that most of White's stories have no definitive beginnings, are almost all middle, and have open endings that show the suffering as often as not going on uniformly after the conclusion of the story. Most of the stories, it is true, reach a climactic epiphany of one kind or another, but in the anticlimaxes that follow, the inexorable, low-key rhythm of quiet anguish seems to stretch out like an unending desert into the future. In this respect White's stories fit very well into William James' characterisation of his brother's complex shorter prose fiction as giving

an impression like that we often get of people in life: their orbits come out of space and lay themselves for a short time along ours, and then off they whirl again into the unknown, leaving us with little more than an impression of their reality and a feeling of baffled curiosity as to the mystery of the beginning and of their being.²²

Many of White's stories can be usefully interpreted as novellas if we agree that “the novella's medial scope enables it to render with especial force the ‘degenerative or pathetic’ kind of tragedy, as Springer calls it, in which the protagonist's fate is neither heroic nor petty.” Springer further claims that the “relentlessness and the depth of the misery (in the tragic novella) expand it beyond the single episode which often characterizes the short story.” Leibowitz advances the theory that the novella has the “double effect of intensity with expansion.” Reid adds that the “compressive quality is achieved by an unwavering thematic focus and an accumulation of structural parallels.”²³ Let us attempt to relate these generalizations to the medium-length story, “Clay.” Certainly the main figure of the story, Clay, is not heroic, not even in his transfigurations at the end. He is often petty, until he begins to realise himself in insanity, but we might best ascribe this pettiness to an inevitable inheritance from his mother and his environment, which he outgrows at the same time as he remains faithful to them, in a spiritually heightened state, as his continuum. This raises the paradoxical question of whether his tragedy is degenerative. True, he does lapse into insanity, presumably from the pressure of his unfulfilled dream on his unbearably dreary reality. But how gloriously visionary, and also how hilarious this insanity is, when compared with the flat nothingness of his painfully learnt conformism. So he does not just degenerate into insanity, he rises at the same time to a spiritual self-realisation in insanity and despair, like so many of White's central figures in the novels and the stories. Nevertheless, the ambiguous direction of his fate allows him to be compared quite well with the heroic antihero of that classical tragic novella, Death in Venice, Gustav Aschenbach. Aschenbach degenerates from dignified artist respected by the conventional middle classes to a leering, cosmetically adorned pedophile who is trapped by his lust into a fatal passivity towards the ravages of disease in Venice. But Aschenbach is compensated for his tragic fall by a visionary insight into the daemonic relationship of the artist to life whence he draws inspiration and to the artistic form which he reveres. The ambiguity of Aschenbach's degenerative tragedy is parallel to that of Clay, except that Clay's drama unfolds on an incomparably more pedestrian and trivial plane. But then that is explicable because White, as we have already noted, is committed to “discovering the extraordinary behind the ordinary.” In a way White's artistic task is much harder than Thomas Mann's, because White is aiming to express a spiritual revelation in the unpromising host of a simpleton and bureaucrat, whilst Thomas Mann had a sophisticated artist as his medium. The visions accorded to Aschenbach and Clay are therefore on planes as different as the sublime and the grotesque. The parallel nevertheless is an illuminating one, because in both cases ecstasy is achieved at the cost of rationality, and in both cases the inspiration floods from the Dionysian impulse, from the repressed libido, and overwhelms a lifetime based on Apollonian order and the self-restraint called for by convention. To summarise then: the structural movement of degenerative tragedy is to compensate the central character spiritually for what he has suffered in his fall.

To return to the other aspects of the novella's structure present in “Clay”: chronologically the story takes us from Clay at five years old being tormented because he was different, through his equally tormented adolescence, his first and only job as a civil servant, the death of his mother, his marriage, and further through attainment of his true self in insanity, his compulsive attempts at art and his erotic day-dreaming, to death by suicide. White does not mark off the chronological segments one from the other in his usual fashion of inserting abrupt blanks of silence. Instead he glues the various segments together with generalisations about Clay's character that cover the years in between. The resultant impression is of a parodied epitome of a “Bildungsroman,” or novel of apprenticeship, in that the main character is educated to mature years, but instead of taking a responsible place in middle class society he turns compulsively inward to dreams and insanity. In any case the focus is unwaveringly on his misery, and it is the intensity of this focus which expands “Clay” as a novella from the single episode. These episodes gather accumulative impetus and force as they rush towards his fall into insanity, and a feeling of growing intensification is created as the style becomes more laconic in the dialogue-parodies and more and more frenetic, abstracted and obscure in the surreal prose of Clay's interior monologue. This feeling of intensification is also created by the repetition of a few key images or leitmotifs, such as the wedding picture and the bridal shoe, by the increasingly dense colour symbolism, and by what Patrick White in The Tree of Man calls a “mysticism of objects.”

We have briefly noted in the previous section Heseltine's discovery that certain objects in White's fiction “console and soothe by the solidity of their presence” and thus gain a more than ordinarily symbolic significance. Heseltine quotes from The Aunt's Story, “There is perhaps no more complete a reality than a chair and a table” and claims that these two objects are made into “two of the major unifying symbols of the entire novel.”²⁴ In “Clay,” when the titular antihero first begins to write, he is obsessed with the apparent permanence of a table, and in general with “objects, the mysterious life which inanimacy contains.”²⁵ In my specific analysis of “Clay” I have shown in detail how White traces the increasing insanity of the main character with a prose that is feverishly surreal, and how objects like the table or the white wedding shoe acquire from Clay's point of view an eerie, independent life of their own. Objects play similarly eerie and supernatural roles in others of White's stories. Herbert Heckmann claims that objects have acquired a vital new significance in modern literature generally:

There is in modern literature something like an uprising of objects against the falsifying sovereignty of the subject. This is particularly noticeable in Franz Kafka's Description of a Struggle, to take just one example. Here objects escape the orderly control of a respectable, bourgeois world: they themselves become active and defend themselves against the thoughtless clutches of man. They thereby acquire a new fascination, which transports the observer into orgies of discoveries. This requires, however, a virtually phantasmagoric alertness, a dreamlike sacrificing-up of the self to objects.²⁶

This theory clearly has general validity for White's fiction. Think of the supernatural significance of the glasses in “A Glass of Tea,” of the primitive, magical power invested in his talisman of the cockatoo's sulphur crest by Tim Goodenough in “The Cockatoos,” of the “blaze of pumpkins” at the conclusion of “A Cheery Soul,” of the miraculous glass eye of Christ Pantocrator in “Sicilian Vespers,” of the role of Clem Dowson's hutch in “A Woman's Hand,” of Harvey's raped mausoleum in “The Night the Prowler,” and on the more farcical level of the vengeful declaration of independence by the tape-recorder in “Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight,” and the “disembowelled mattress” in “Down at the Dump.”²⁷

The spiritually heightened significance of things is of course just as widespread in White's novels as it is in the stories. But then this is true of most of the rhetorical and structural techniques that we have analysed in White's shorter prose fiction, whether we are talking about searching for the overriding point of view, about beginnings, middles and ends, epiphanies, or open-ended parables. I would therefore suggest that the conclusions I have reached about White's stories are in general valid for his novels and that the only real differences between his stories and his novels are the effects of compression, of sustained intensity and tension, and of a lyric density of imagery that we find in the stories. Indeed the more successful works of Patrick White's shorter prose fiction resemble nothing quite so much as climatic compressions of his own novels.

Notes

1. Riders in the Chariot, Penguin, pp. 453-5.

2. Tree of Man, Penguin, p. 11.

3. The Burnt Ones, Viking, N.Y. 1964, p. 180.

4. Ian Reid, The Short Story: The Critical Idiom, Methuen, 1977, pp. 43-47, and pp. 54-65. An admirably succinct summary of a myriad of theoretical definitions of short story and novella is to be found in these pages.

5. Ian Reid, ibid., p. 28. Cf. the definition of epiphany by Richard Ellmann which I quote in the preceding section of this work.

6. Cf. Frank O'Connor's claim that the short story is “by its very nature remote from the community—romantic, individualistic and intransigent” (The Lonely Voice, p. 21).

7. In a work by Odilon Redon, Elizabeth Hunter finds her spiritual semblance in “the artist's image of what he called a skiapod.” “Unlike most of the other monsters in the book, this half-fish half-woman appeared neither allied to, nor threatened by, death: too elusive in weaving through deep waters, her expression a practically effaced mystery; or was it one of dishonesty, of cunning?” (The Eye of the Storm, Penguin, p. 194).

8. The Burnt Ones, p. 104.

9. ibid., p. 308.

10. ibid., p. 198.

11. Andrew Taylor, “White's Short Stories,” in Overland, No. 31, March 1965, p. 18.

12. The Burnt Ones, p. 268.

13. The Cockatoos, Viking, N.Y., 1975, p. 91.

14. Michael Wilding, “Short Story Chronicle,” in Meanjin Quarterly, June 1971, p. 259.

15. Voss, Penguin, p. 475.

16. W. Jens, Literatur und Politik, Verlag Günter Neske, Pfullingen, 1963, p. 20. As quoted by R. Hinton Thomas, see reference 17.

17. R. Hinton Thomas, Introduction to Seventeen German Stories, O.U.P., 1968, p. 28.

18. B. Brecht, Schriften zum Theater, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1957, p. 76.

19. R. Hinton Thomas, op. cit., p. 30.

20. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, N.Y., 1959, p. 88.

21. Ian Reid, op. cit., p. 54.

22. As quoted by Ian Reid, op. cit., p. 65.

23. As quoted by Ian Reid, op. cit., p. 46. Reid names his sources as Judith Leibowitz, Narrative Purpose in the Novella, The Hague, 1974, and Mary Doyle Springer, Forms of the Modern Novella, Chicago, 1975.

24. Harry Heseltine, “Patrick White's Style,” in Quadrant, VII, 1963, p. 67.

25. The Burnt Ones, p. 117.

26. Herbert Heckmann, “Aufstand der Dinge,” in Die Welt der Literatur, 17, September 1964.

27. The Burnt Ones, p. 290 and p. 305.