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A Study of Patrick White's Sylleptic Habits

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A Study of Patrick White's Sylleptic Habits Thetripodinthedunny: a study of Patrick White's sylleptic habits David John Merrington. [S.l. : s.n., 1994?]. xii, 305 leaves; 30 em. Engeng Word processed copy. Summary in English. Thesis (M.A.(English Language and Literature))--University of University Capeof CapeTown, 1994. Town Includes bibliographies. White, Patrick, 1912- -- Criticism and interpretation. The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town Abstract This thesis is a study of relations between aspects of Patrick White's prose style and his perception of a moral equivocation that is entailed in the construction of identity and in the making of fiction. Chapter One presents examples of White's sylleptic style. The virtuosity of the figure is seen to reflect the discursive puissance of a detached and ironic narrative stance.. His habitually ironic perspective is ascribed to his apparent sense that human life is governed by fiction, and. that such governance is morally equivocal. The chapter concludes with the specification of gossip as a malicious social discourse which, for White, also reflects the prac­ tice of narrative fiction. In Chapter Two the analogy between fiction and gossip is developed. The discourse of repute is seen to exercise a perverse and vicarious dominance over its object. This governance by a morally equivocal discourse is considered to illustrate White's habitual apprehension of a universally ironic dispensation under which the human subject exists. The role and the conduct of authorship is ~xamined as the "voice" which governs and articulates such a dispensation. Aspects of M.M. Bakhtin's theory of carnival are adduced, in Chapter Three, to the analysis of-narrative irony. The figure of syllepsis is considered as a stylistic i formula for the carnivalesque. The concept of a reactionary "counter-carnival" is formulated, and is used to examine the equivocal energies of White's ironic dispensation. Chapter Four focuses on the carnivalesque dialectic between the orthodox and the grotesque "other". "Illicit knowledge" of the grotesque is seen to be cognate with the discourse of repute and gossip, and the artist is found to be guilty of vicarious appropriations. Chapter Five is an extended analysis of The Twyborn Affair as White's allegory 'of fiction. The chapter is in two parts: the first focuses on the discursive means by which the· fiction of "Eudoxia Vatatzes" is constructed. The flaws in such "authorship" are examined, and this "text" is seen to be a vulnerable and unreliable narrative structure. The second part traces the development of Eddie Twyborn as a fictional "text", through his personae as a jackeroo and as Eadith Trist the brothelkeeper. The Coda comprises brief illustrations, from Three Uneasy Pieces, of Patrick White's last thoughts on authorship. • ii J. ~I "The Tripod in the Dunny": A Study of Patrick White's Sylleptic Habits. David John Merrington Dr P. Knox-Shaw, Supervisor Dissertation submitted towards fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts, in the Department of English, University of Cape Town. March 1994 iii If-:·~--~--. ·•' _:::·.::_'~·- ._ ........ F_ ·-;-. : •• • - ;, .......~ 'l· ~ ;·::~: __:_..,:- --·'".'--7':::-';_-- -~=-=---:: i: ~; ,;e u~.·~·J~~r.::i.~j• '.tt ..... .... ' i! ! ~;o,:•;;:. ' '' :. :' :'? ~ ::" ";: :~.;.;;~.~ ,; . ~ . /':' .... f" This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Patrick White, who died soon after it was begun. iv Table of Contents Preface vi Acknowledgements xii Chapter One: Sylleptic Habits 1 Chapter Two: The Habit of Gossip 43 Chapter Three: The Habit of Carnival 89 Chapter Four: Grotesque Personal Habits 132 Chapter Five: The Habits of Eudoxia I: Death of an Author 182 II: Death of a Fiction 218 Coda: Three Uneasy Pieces 264 Appendix: Syllepsis and Zeugma 278 Notes 290 Bibliography 302 v Preface I have chosen to make a study of Patrick White's writ­ ing which, despite current fashions for excising the author from the text, would consistently echo his own audible voice. The "presence" of the author within his own fiction is underwritten by many points of intersection with Patrick White's autobiography. White's fictional stock, for in­ stance, of characters, places, events, and images, is read­ ily traced back to his autobiographical writings. Indeed, he says in an interview, "all my characters are fragments of my own somewhat fragmented character". 1 Conversely, but to the same point, his "self-portrait" - as the autobio- graphy Flaws in the Glass is subtitled depicts a figure who, in many ways, is constructed like a character in a novel. White develops his characters - and his autobiograph­ ical self-image - around the concept of some inherent "flaw". I shall argue that, for White, this constitutive imperfection evolves out of the discursive process by which identity is created. The Twyborn Affair is an allegory of fiction which demonstrates this process. Conflicting discourses in the novels give rise to dia­ lectical tension. These are generally, on the one hand, ·a discourse that comprises an "imperfect" signification (and this may mean both "flawed" and "incomplete") and on the other hand, a highly established discourse, such as that vi which articulates a national rnythopoeia. White represents his own identity as an ambivalent construction, formed, as is Hurtle Duffield in The Vivisector, by the heterogeneous mingling of.an imperfect and a perfected "discourse". The following example from Flaws in the Glass illustrates the tension between an hypostatised myth of orthodox identity and the "flaw" of a foreign genesis which defines the young Patrick White dialectically as the imperfect "outsider". Dame Nellie Melba, a national institution in her own right, visits his school and probes the boys' authentitity as Australians: We clattered to our feet as she paraded in, dressed in brown, a springy queen of toads hung with diamonds at 11 a.m. Corning at once to the point, she commanded, "Hands up anyone born in Australia?" No nonsense about Nellie. A matter of shame to a small boy, I couldn't hold up my hand with the others. "Where were you born?" She pointed sternly at the outsider in the front row. When I told her, [London] she muttered with a knowing glint of the professional expatriate, "Not a bad place either." (FG:19) Her answer to the boy seems to formulate a consolation which is putatively subversive to the myth of the orthodox ident- ity; the "knowing glint" implies this. The consolation is that ambivalence is "not a bad place", and the singer's manner suggests some kind of wicked collusion between two who share a subversive but stimulating secret. Patrick White describes himself in the "self-portrait" as an "indecent hybrid". CFG:20) In the novels the "hybrid" vii appears as the product of dialectical conflict between sets of discursive practice: characters who articulate an estab-· lished discourse (such as Austin Roxburgh in A Fringe of Leaves) conflict with the representatives of an "imperfect" discourse (such as the Aborigines, or Jack Chance the con- viet). The product- a third kind of discourse- is forged out of this tension between dialectically opposed categor- ies. It is embodied in White's favoured characters, who are equivalent to the heterogeneous "indecent hybrid". Ellen Gluyas/Roxburgh, who is constructed in ambivalence, is an example, as is Laura Trevelyan in Voss. It is customary, in the canon of Patrick White analysis, to describe characters like Ellen and Laura as "initiates". Whereas this usage in- variably connotes some kind of induction into a felicitous spirituality, my own approach is to consider the character's "initiation" as the apperception of ambivalence and of fict- ional construction which makes them "part of Patrick White" - or part of their own authorship. This next extract from the "self-portrait", much quoted by critics, reflects the importance for White of ambivalence as a constitutive influence. It also expresses his sense that a world that is defined or constructed in language is in fact a world of narrative contracts, or of fiction: Sexual ambivalence helped drive me in on myself. Lacking flamboyance, cursed with reserve, I chose fiction, or more likely it was chosen for me, as the means of introducing to a disbelieving audi­ ence the cast of contradictory characters of which I am composed. (FG:20) viii This could equally well have been uttered by the mul­ tiple persona of Eddie/Eudoxia/Eadith in The Twvborn Affair·, who is the most overtly autobiographical of White's charac- ters. While Eddie Twyborn is defined by the intradiegetic ' narrative practices of gossip and repute, he is also the deliberate "author" of his own fictitious personae. 2 This novel illustrates White's apparent view that identity is discursively constructed, that conflicting "authorships" generate dialectic, and that the discourse of naming is a form of fiction. This consciousness leads him to consider life as an absurd "illusion of reality" - as a gaudy earn- ivalesque or vaudeville production. (FG:l54) White articulates this world of illusion in language which is in itself rhetorically carnivalesque. His typical stylistic habits comprise synaesthesia, aposiopesis, conjec- tural subjunctives, and syllepsis. These devices produce the strategic ambiguities that signify the impossibility, for the author, of achieving a monological stability of meaning and an unequivocal closure in narrating human experience. In my study of White's celebrations of ambivalence and of fiction, I have also considered the moral thematics which are entailed in the tensions between opposing orders of dis- course. In general, he seems to represent the orthodox, established, and apparently homogeneous discourses as the more inimical to honest and sympathetically human express- ix ion.
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