[In the following essay, Spinks praises White's short story, “Five-Twenty,” for its “austerity” and insight into human character.]

The pages of The Cockatoos, Patrick White's second collection of short stories, are littered with ruined epiphanies. In the title story each character interprets the migratory birds as a symbol for an experience of transcendence they neither expect nor feel they deserve. Compelled by years of lovelessness into a bitter and silent marriage, Mick and Olive Davoren begin to develop a new language of tenderness in the presence of their mysterious visitors. The cockatoos appear to offer a glimpse into a world of harmony, order and beauty; but their departure leaves death, silence and aching loneliness in its wake. Meanwhile “The Full Belly” depicts the horror of Greece under German occupation, where villagers make faltering attempts to spiritualise their physical distress through religion, sex, and music. The spiritual isolation enforced upon the individual trapped in a world devoid of grace or redemption is perfectly expressed in the character of Costa Iordanou, the young musician, who is alive to the “austerities” of Bach but unable to grasp the “epiphanies”¹ that Bach's music promises to reveal. The mundane and supramundane worlds touch for a moment and then diverge; denied the aesthetic resolution of a musical epiphany Costa is compelled to find sustenance in his own fantasies of change and renewal.

With its stubborn refusal to resolve the tension between existential austerity and the desire for a transcendent release from the rigours of the human condition, Costa's story functions as a hermeneutic rubric for the collection as a whole. Ensnared by the constrictions of history and language, individuals struggle towards a moment of revelation that will infuse their lives with meaning, only to collapse back amidst the ruins of their dreams. White consistently resists these moments of epiphanic resolution because he wishes to explore the dreamscapes, narrative projections and compensatory fantasies that his characters develop in the absence of a redemptive moment of secular transcendence. Nowhere is the space between austerity and epiphany more tellingly articulated than in “Five-Twenty,” a story that charts Ella Natwick's faltering passage from the arid monotonies of a fading marriage towards the possibility of erotic release in the arms of a fantasy lover. Forced to care for Royal, her invalid husband, in his declining years, Ella beguiles the time watching the commuters drive home on the Parramatta Road. Gradually her attention is monopolised by one man, the driver of a Holden, and White's tale describes her growing interest in this unremarkable individual, the two visits he pays to her home in the wake of Royal's death, and the tragedy that destroys her domestic idyll and exposes her once more to evanescence and loss. Recounted in these terms, “Five-Twenty” risks approximation to minor suburban drama; but it is rescued from banality by White's deliberate erosion of the boundaries between fantasy and reality. We are not told the source of Ella's attraction to the unnamed driver, and his figure is only tentatively sketched; but as his image mutates in Ella's mind she is left to confront a lifetime of repressed memories and forgotten dreams. This synthesis of dream and reality is then repeated in the melancholy confusion of Ella's twilight reveries, where desire and the repression of desire combine to produce her unstable and contradictory narrative.

White's subtle exploration in “Five-Twenty” of Ella's mutilated fantasies is assisted by his use of free indirect style to create a mode of address indifferently positioned between first and third person narrative positions. Free indirect style is a technique widely employed by Modernist writers because it places the truth-claims of narrative fiction within parentheses, and, in the epistemological gap so produced, enables the writer to focus upon the difficulty of communicating knowledge between minds. In the hands of a writer like Joyce it is used to describe the effects that linguistic incompetence has upon the perception of the phenomental world. The axiom upon which both Dubliners and “Five-Twenty” turn is that our ability to transform our existence is determined by our ability to describe and reimagine our experience. Existential paralysis is therefore, for both writers, an effect of linguistic paralysis. “Five-Twenty” describes precisely this tortured relationship between word and world in Ella's doomed attempt to articulate her fantasies and take the first steps into a new life.

By gently refracting the story through Ella's consciousness, White quickly reveals her inability to negotiate the abyss between thought and expression. The opening paragraph, which introduces us to the Natwick's ritual observance of the evening traffic along the Parramatta Road, notes that the stream of cars slowly thickened until it sometimes jammed “solid-like” (169). With this casual phrase, a term of equivalence that threatens to become a simile but lacks any final comparative term, we enter Ella's world. “Like what?,” we want to ask. White's point is economically made: the story is about experiences or states of mind for which its witnesses can find no adequate verbal expression. The bestowal of narratorial responsibility upon a character for whom language is an opaque medium gradually opens the text up to multiple ironies. Thus the syntactic confusion of Ella's deference to Royal, “on account of he was more educated”, makes an ironic point about the power of education to confer the linguistic competency she sorely lacks. A similar note is struck by her disinclination to rebuke Royal for spitting “because he'd only create if she did” (171), where the stultification engendered by their daily routine is implied by a verb that evokes an effortless spontaneity. Through Ella's verbal infelicities White continually reminds us of the limitations of the account that we are reading; it is apparent in her reference to her “arthritis” and her casual admission that “[i]t was all very well for men, they could manage more of the hard words” (172). Even in these early moments of the story, White is careful to underline his principle theme: Ella's difficulty in translating experience into language precludes her from the redemptive movement of grace. This becomes grimly apparent in the scene that describes the death of the Chevy driver outside the Natwick's house, an episode which prefigures the collapse of Ella's mysterious visitor at the end of the story. The young man is crushed and unable to speak; his fate is to die within the confines of Ella's narrative, where his last words are buried beneath the typographic monstrosity of “Extreme Unkshun” (171).

Ella's inarticulacy is the dominant theme of the story's opening pages. Even in those moments when she is overcome by an incipient lyricism she manages to keep the feeling at arm's length. Disgusted with her impractical desire to kiss and bite Royal's nose in the moonlight, she proceeds “solidly” (176) to sleep. One assumes she would appreciate the unfussiness of the adjective that governs her rest. Her own explanation for her mental dullness is contradictory: she “hadn't the imagination” to articulate the “thoughts” that swarmed in her mind; but since Royal rebuked her for her “foolishness” in having thoughts at all she concedes they “couldn't have been her own” but must have been “put into her” by some mysterious outside force. The chasm that opens here between intention and denunciation enables White to concentrate our attention upon the theme of repression that gradually dominates the rest of the story and which he uses to interrogate the fantasies Ella constructs to reliever her inner turmoil. This focus upon repression is unavoidable because Ella's personality is constituted by the denial of the libidinal play of the desiring self. It is her refusal to acknowledge the force of the dreams, desires and fantasies that define our modern subjectivity which leaves her damaged and unable to take effective control of her life. We do not need to be reminded of Lacan's dictum that the unconscious is structured like a language to recognise that Ella's inarticulacy and her repression of the economy of desire share a common origin. White underscores this recognition by showing, even in those moments later in the story when Ella begins to elaborate her dream of release, that her fantasies crumble at the point of articulation, relapse into fragmentation when confronted with the conscious demands of narrative coherence.

The twin themes of wordlessness and repressed desire recur in the symbol of the hare-lip “badly sewn, opening and closing” (177) that sends Ella into paroxysms of fear and the images of rebirth that punctuate the text. The most important of these images is, of course, the driver of the Holden, whose daily journey home is absorbed into a fantasy narrative which offers Ella some measure of compensation for a life of fragments and discontinuities. He is only “half” (179) a joke to her: comical because slightly unreal; serious because seriously desired. The Holden driver is in part a creation, a figure who takes on a new identity in her mind, without reason or design. His status as a projection of Ella's unconscious desire is reinforced by her insistence that he reappear in her vision at exactly twenty minutes past five every evening. Against the flow of time, subtly suggested by the chaotic movement of the traffic along the Parramatta Road, the Holden signifies to her a mode of constancy capable of redeeming her hopes and aspirations from the randomness of history. The growing discrepancy in Ella's mind between reality and fantasy is indicated by the “guilt” (181) that sends her scuttling back from her reveries to Royal's sickbed. But her fantasies cannot be so easily assuaged: they reappear in her dream of a man on the path alongside the cinerarias, a vision which recurs like the return of the repressed to such deadly effect at the conclusion of the story.

Ella's dreams of metamorphoses are also suggested in less overt terms. White's confidence in developing his main theme by indirection rather than narrative explication is demonstrated by his short detours into pastoral, such as the scenes in which Ella escapes from a lifetime of scrupulous devotion to lose herself in the sensuous riot of her garden:

She loved her garden.

The shady side was where she kept her staghorn ferns, and fishbones, and the pots of maidenhair. The water lay sparkling on the maidenhair even in the middle of the day. In the blaze of summer the light at either end of the tunnel was like you were looking through a sheet of yellow cellophane, but as the day shortened, the light developed to a cold, tingling green, which might have made a person nervous who didn't know the tunnel by heart.

(180)

The garden in “Five-Twenty” has a similar function to the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream: it denotes a marginal world, closely linked to the unconscious, in which the normal rules and structures of civil society are temporarily suspended. In this new imaginative domain each value encounters its opposite: water, with its plural association of flux, process and regeneration, sparkles on the “maidenhair,” which symbolises innocence and self-enclosure. Ella inhabits the interstate between these two conditions, dreaming of a metamorphosis for which a child is the most visible symbol, while addicted to a life composed of rituals, routines and minor prohibitions. Adrift between the compensations of fantasy and the safety of self-restraint she gazes at life through “a sheet of cellophane”, secure within a “tunnel” whose exits have long since been forgotten.

Royal's death releases Ella into a benign narcotic freedom. This release announces itself, appropriately enough, in her riotous desecration of the garden. In an afternoon of Dionysian excess, she dresses herself up in flowers, a suburban Ophelia, and visits the latent violence of her “thoughtless” unconscious upon the visible world:

She couldn't blame anybody, probably only herself. Everything depended on yourself. Take the garden. It was a shambles. She would have liked to protest, but began to cough from running her head against some powdery mildew. She could only blunder at first, like a cow, or runty starved heifer, on breaking into a garden. She had lost her old wiriness. She shambled, snapping dead stems, uprooting. Along the bleached palings there was a fretwork of hollyhock, the brown fur of rotting sunflower. She rushed at a praying mantis, a big pale one, and deliberately broke its back, and was sorry afterwards for what was done so easy and so thoughtless.

(185-86)

It is also in Ella's garden, where she has constructed an imaginary world to rival the real, that the “two objects” (187) central to her fantasy converge. By insinuating himself into the tunnel that marks the separation between fantasy and reality, the Holden driver enters Ella's privileged interior space. White is quick to emphasise the correspondence between the realisation of Ella's fantasy existence, implicit in the sexual metaphor of his unexpected entry into her secret “tunnel”, and the death of her former self, signified by her conviction that his wish to use her telephone was “a way to afterwards murder you” (187). Her unconscious yearning for a definitive break with her repressive isolation then erupts for a moment into language as she connects “telephone” with “bed” (188) and begins to utter her nameless desires.

But as White repeatedly demonstrates in his fiction, the reality of repression cannot be so easily evaded. Ella's desire to escape from the constriction of her former life is thwarted by the loss of a language in which desire can be articulated. Brought to a point of crisis at which she must choose between two versions of herself, Ella is overcome by the sheer force of language and the promise of redefinition that it extends. As she wanders with her visitor among the cinerarias, flowers that have become imbued in her mind with eroticism and unrestraint, “[h]er throat became a long palpitating funnel through which the words she expected to use were poured out in a steam of almost formless agonised sound” (190). White's touch is mercilessly exact here: the “funnel” of formless sound that denotes her collapse recalls, through the savage ironies of language, the exitless “tunnel” of her married life with Royal. The entire story turns upon this moment when the slip out of language is reconstituted as a linguistic pun. Ella's sudden lurch into the “new language” (190) of tactility cannot therefore be interpreted as a liberating gesture precisely because White relentlessly intertwines the whole question of desire with narrative and story.

The return of Ella's “lover” to her secret garden underlines the inevitable failure of her attempts at metamorphosis. The episode is at once poignant and ironic: poignant because his reappearance, accompanied by the snapping of the “heavily loaded” cinerarias, dramatises her need to break the chains of the bounded self; ironic because the response demanded from her by his gradual slide towards death merely illustrates the abyss that exists within her between desire and expression:

“More air!” she cried. “What you need is air!” hacking at one or two cinerarias which remained erect.

Their sap was stifling, their bristling columns callous.

“Oh! Oh!” she panted. “Oh God! Dear love!” comforting with hands and hair and words.

Words.

While all he could say was, “It's all right.”

Or not that at last. He folded his lips into a white seam. His eyes were swimming out of reach. “Eh? Dear-dearest-darl-darling-darling love-love-LOVE?” All the new words still stiff in her mouth, that she had heard so far only from the mouths of actors.

(196)

At moments like these White reveals how deeply he has absorbed the lessons of Modernist writers: the struggle of the conscious mind to order its repressed desires into coherence finds expression in a narrative of rigorous delimitations and displacements that has its antecedents in Joyce and Stein. It is fitting that “Five-Twenty” ends, as it began, with paralysis and suspended judgements because the text describes a closed circle within which characters are doomed to repeat the same experiences into a nameless future.

Lives in this twilight world are dominated by repetition and compulsion; they move in the same narrow groove as the “rubber tyred wheels” (179) of Royal's wheelchair. The only escape from repression is fantasy; but fantasy brings with it self-consciousness and the terrifying knowledge of existential isolation. Interviewed in 1973, at a time when the stories collected in The Cockatoos were being written, White declared that “everything I write has to be dredged up from the unconscious—which is what makes it such an exhausting and perhaps finally, destructive process. … My first draft of a novel is the work of intuition and it is a chaos nobody but myself could resolve”.² His achievement in “Five-Twenty” is to discover, in the tortured figure of Ella Natwick, a character who conveys the destructive force of the unconscious unable to translate its desires into expressive form, as she waits for a vision of transcendence beside a pot of communion coffee that is never served.

Notes

1. Patrick White, The Cockatoos (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), 99. All further page references refer to this edition of White's text.

2. Thelma Herring and G A Wilkes, “A Conversation with Patrick White”, Southerly 33, (2) 1973, 139.