The Rhetoric of Painting in Patrick White's Novels
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The Rhetoric of Painting in Patrick White's Novels JOAN L. DOLPHIN IN THE CONTEXT of a discussion of various visual arts media, Barbara Herrnstein Smith turns to literature, locating its "corre• sponding 'medium' not simply in words or language conceived abstracdy, but in the whole dynamic complex of verbal behaviour and verbal experience." Given the linguistic complexity of Pa• trick White's novels, and, further, White's declared interest in painting, it is not surprising that he combines best the whole dynamic complex of verbal behaviour with what Smith calls the "dynamics of visual perception" (26) in three of his novels that feature painters: Voss (1957), Riders in the Chariot (1961), and The Vivisector ( 1970). This is not to say that the two art forms conflate only in these novels but in them the presence of painters encour• ages the reader to see the conflation more readily. The impor• tance of painters increases with each of these novels. The first two succeed in making the artistic medium part of the complex of verbal behaviour and verbal experience, or, as I subsequently refer to it, the linguistic medium. In Voss, the artist is a very minor character, but throughout White excels in merging the artistic and the linguistic. Riders in the Chariot has four central characters, only one of whom is an artist; but here too, the conflated artistic and linguistic media pervade and unify the whole. In The Vivisec• tor, the single central character is a successful and single-minded artist; however, although White employs both the artistic and the linguistic, there is an underlying conflict between these two forms that is not resolved. In 1958, not long after the publication of Voss, White first declared his interest in painting: in a short article, "The Prodigal Son," he stated that it had been his intention in Voss to combine ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 24:3, July 1993 34 JOAN L. DOLPHIN the mystical in William Blake's drawings with the more worldly elements found in Eugène Delacroix's paintings. But this is by no means the only external evidence of White's interest in painting. Several painters counted prominently among White's friends are Sydney Nolan, Lawrence Daws, and Roy de Maistre. In his auto• biographical comments in Flaws in the Glass, White calls de Mais• tre his "aesthetic mentor" (60), the one who "taught [him] to write by teaching [him] to look at paintings and get beneath the surface" (Making 218). In Voss and Fäders in the Chariot, White successfully uses the elements of painting as an artistic medium to get beneath the surface, combining the elements effectively with the linguistic medium. Voss is White's first major exploration of this area, but his orientation is much more linguistic than in subsequent texts. The presence of Willie Pringle, the artist, in significant scenes at the beginning and end provides a frame for the novel. White foregrounds Willie's potential as a "living" or enlightened char• acter. In addition, remembering White's use of names to fore• ground certain characteristics, one cannot overlook that Willie's initials are the reverse of White's, and that they are both inter• ested in painting. Willie's desire to see beneath the surface and his latent ability to do so are suggested early in Voss. Willie is still young, "not hardened yet," with "eyes that nobody had suspected of under• standing" (63). His eyes find in Laura Trevelyan a kindred spirit, one with whom he could share "esoteric jokes and tastes" (63). Out of a sense of kinship with Laura, he makes a drawing of her, to show how "her image had invaded his mind with immense power and grief (63). However, he finds the drawing "empty" and tears it up. The scene, apparently insignificant, closely con• nects the artist with Laura, an individual capable of spiritual insight. At the end of the novel, Willie's artistic ability comes to match his insight. As he observes a group of people at the gathering to commemorate the unveiling of Voss's statue, the face of one of the group fascinates him. It "was broken up into little pinpoints of grey light under the globe of blue glass." He sees in it "[t]he grey of mediocrity, the blue of frustration.... If we explore them PATRICK WHITE 35 [sic]" (447). The use of the colours grey and blue to express states of mind denotes the eye of the painter—Willie's as well as White's. Familiar forms breaking into "brilliant shapes" is also a painterly concept. But in Voss, the conflation of the two media is not restricted to mere verbal commentary; the novel embodies it throughout and invokes White's comment about combining Blake's mysticism and Delacroix's worldliness. Voss's exploration of the "common forms" of the desert breaks them into "brilliant shapes" of symbolic significance before the eyes of the reader. To take one example among many, the "infinitely pure white light" of the sunrise becomes a "masterpiece of creation," where a "protoplast of mist was slowly born, and moored unwillingly by invisible wires," and "liquid light was allowed to pour from great receptacles" (282). The importance for Voss of the expedition into the desert is pointed up by the syntactical foregrounding of the subordinate clause written as a complete sentence: "If we explore them." The poetic rhythm of "the grey of mediocrity, the blue of frustration" combined with the syntactical foregrounding of the verb "explore" underlines both the artistic and the linguis• tic insights of writer and painter. Colours always hold symbolic significance for White, but it is in Voss that he first begins to explore linguistically his interest in the "brilliant shapes" and colours of painting and to combine their effects. In this connection, White's concern is that of the novelist as painter to integrate colour, light, and shadow into the text of the novel, and not simply that of the novelist to illustrate or visualize for the benefit of readers. Indeed, if anything, White wants readers to apply themselves like interpreters of paintings; he does not create easy, pretty pictures. Consequently, colours bright and dun abound in Voss, always well integrated into the text itself, linguistically, symbolically, and thematically. The reader encounters the whole spectrum, from the dull black of materia prima that characterizes Voss at the outset to brilliant golds and flashes of synaesthetic green lightning. Appropriately, the burning gold of the sun accompanies the expedition into the hot desert. But gold is also the desired goal of the alchemical process, a symbol that pervades this novel as a metaphor for the process of spiritual enlightenment. The aes- 36 JOAN L. DOLPHIN thetic insight White gained from his interest in painting enables him to combine the symbolic with the actual, so that one flows naturally from the other. As Voss's party rides westward into the desert, the future is likened to the "dusty golden" (241) sunset: the golden purity or enlightenment that Voss will achieve is indeed "dusty" since he is not to survive the experience but will blow with the dust of the desert to "trouble" (448) those who will eventually be enlightened by his legend. Yet the "dusty" sunset fits logically into the passage about the desert. Equally inte• grated, yet even more charged with meaning, is the presence of a golden sun shining on the garden at the moment Laura is symbolically impregnated with the servant Rose's child. The garden, "overflowing" with vegetation, seems a proper place for this scene of fecundity, where the golden sun, so necessary for all growth, is foregrounded: "Heavy with the weight of the golden sun, the girl could feel the woman's pulse ticking in her own body" (160). White's unobtrusive use of colour effectively links the vegetation, the embryo, and the alchemical symbolism. At the same time, the reality of the naturally heavy heat of the Australian summer sun is not abused. White's linguistic use of the artist's medium invites the reader to see beneath the surface. White sees both experience and truth as multifaceted. Not surprisingly, colours convey this multiplicity: Willie sees "com• mon forms . continually breaking into brilliant shapes"; and colours symbolize different truths. Green usually conveys the sense of putrefaction from which ultimate spiritual enlighten• ment grows: settings have "greenish dung" (25g), and an ailing Laura has "greenish flesh" (385). Green also, quite naturally, indicates growth and hope. Thus Laura and the child Mercy are often dressed in green, and Laura has "glistening green laugh• ter" (158). Both the synaesthesia of Laura's bright and hopeful laughter and the repulsive nature of the "greenish dung" are presented visually and effectively through the eyes of a linguistic painter. Because White builds his images gradually, none of these sometimes strange epithets jar the reader. Almost a third of the way through the novel, it seems quite natural that Laura is associated with green, especially because of the growth and hope for the future that is vested in her. PATRICK WHITE 37 White's artist's eye is particularly evident in the way he employs the colour green symbolically without diminishing its graphic significance in the passage that relates how Voss and his men are resting in the aftermath of a violent storm which has taxed their physical and spiritual resources almost to the limit: "Thick, tur• bulent, yellow water was now flowing in the river bed. Green, too, was growing in intensity as the spears of grass massed distincdy in the foreground, and a great, indeterminate green mist rolled up out of the distance.