THE PEACOCKS AND THE BOURGEOISIE IRONIC USION IN PATRICKWHITE'S SHORTER PROSE FICTION Thesis presented by David A. ÙIyers B.A., Ph.D. , DePartrrent of C'e:man UniversitY of SYdneY for the Degree of Master of Arts in tåe ÐePartment of English UniversitY of Adelaide February 1979 (1.,^r¿,¿"-cLal and the IronicVision in PatricllWhite's Shorter Prose Fiction David Myefs laide Universiþ Union Press i: COPYRIGHT O r9'7¿ by David A. Myers All rights reserved This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copy¡ight Act, nó., part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Ënquiries should be made to the publishers. Illustration: Silvana Bevilacqua Design and Production: Jon Ruwoldt Typesetting: !'aye Boundy Printing: ' Ëmpire Time:Press, Flinders University Published by Adelaide University Union Press G.P.O. Box 498, Adelaide, S.A. 5001 Wholly set up and manufactured in South Australia National Library of Australia card number and ISBN: O g}ri421 00 X (Hard cover) O 908427 01 8 (Paperback) ,(uuel ro¡ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I should like to acknowledge the stimulating criticisms and bibliographical suggestions of Dr. Ian Reid (now Professor Reid of Deakin University) who has read the entirety of the MS for this book. I should also like to thank Miss Jenny Coles for having helped with the stylistic revision of the MS, Mrs. Margaret King for her work as research assistant and Mrs. Hannelore Castle and Mrs. Inge Naeher for having so patiently typed and re{yped the many different versions. It is self-evident that I must bear the sole responsibility for the finished MS and all opinions ventured therein. The kind permission of Patrick White, Viking Press, Penguin Books and Meanjin Quarterly to quote from TVhite's works is herewith grate fully acknowledged. f! CONTENTS PART ONE Introduction I Cocotte 7 The Twitching Colonel 9 PART TWO THE BURNT ONES Dead Roses t7 Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight 24 A Glas of Tea 28 Clay JJ The Evening at Sissy Kamara's 39 A Cheery Soul 47 Being Kind to Titina 54 Miss Slattery and her Demon I¡ver 62 The Iætters 66 The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats IJ Down at the Dump 82 PARTTHREE THECOCKATOOS A Woman's Hand 93 The Full Belly 105 The Night the Prowler 108 Five-Twenty 116 Sicilian Vespers t2r The Cockatoos 131 Fête Galante 138 : ''j xii Contents PART FOUR Journey into the Interior: The Religious Sense t49 in Patrick White and Franz Kafka PART FIVE Narrative Techniques in White's Shorter Prose 173 Fiction References l9l SUMMARY CriÈícs have devoted'much attention to Vfhite's novels and also to his plays, but his stories, with t}te exception of a large nurnber of favourable but corrparatively brief reviews at the time of Pub lication of The Burnt Ones in 1964 and The Cockatoos 5.n L974, har¡e been on the whole neglected. Alttrough White himse 1f has stated that he prefers to work on the cumulative effects of his novels, there is no aesthetic justification for regarding his best novellas as artistically inferior to his novels' Indeed they often surpass the novels in sheer intensity of effect, achieving complex and de- tailed characterisation by concise flashbacks and interior monologue. Structurally they tend to work towardg a climax featuríng a sexual or a religious epiphany. The stories are particu- larly rich in variation of mood and tone' rang- ing, often ín the one story, from ribald farce to tragic pattros, and are knit together by a net- work of images and leitr¡ctifs that are of imagi- native originality and of great lyric force' Whiters style in these stories is a virtuoso display, almost Joycean, in which he seems able to cïeate a different stylistic tone for each mood that he er¡okes. At one end of the spectrum of stylistic shades and hr:es are the deadly wit, the ' vulgar farce, and the devastating minicry of Aus-' tralian colloquialisms with which he achieves his satire. At the other end of the spectrum are his tragic representations of his incoherent protago- nistst ambivalènt rise to a feverish religious nryrsticism and coexten3ive ph:nge to insanity or death. This tragedy is linguistically achieved with bursts of powerful surrealism, strange con- tortions of syntactical structure and startling imagery. !{hite tends to see oìrr civilisation, as Freud did in Civilisation and its Discontents ' as only seemingly stable on the conscious sur- face but gmawed hol-low by neuroticism stenming from our ignored and repressed irrational sub- consciousness. Tine and again, White shows the inadequacy and vulnerability of our conventional notions of happiness, founded as these notions are on material acquisitiveness. !{hite exposes the euphemism and the hlpocrisy of our social code of "eiderdowniness", which he suqgests is partially rooted in a timid conmunal fear of tJle libido. He shows us as hiåing from genuine commr:nication and true relationships behind a smoke-screen of garrulous and insincere social intercourse. White is shamelessly didactic in his social satire. He is equally unapologetic in using his fiction to propagate his view that the only true meaning of life is to be found in isolated, brief rnoments of ecstatic epiphany that are given only to the courageous few who search in isolation and to:ment for the deeper sprinqs of being within themselr¡es or in con- tãmplation of the otherness of nature's infinity' STATEMENT This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university. To tJre best of q¡ knowledge and belíef, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except as acknowledged in the references. Añ* David *:--Myels aNo ruvd E ¡t '4\ / (\\ INTRODUCTION It is now widely accepted among Patrick White critics that:it is useful to explore his fiction as the representation of a "duality,"r and to discuss "the separation in his vision, the divorce of.grace and horror".2 As yet there exists no full-length study discussing the achievement of this dual vision in Wlúte's shorter prose fiction. Indeed, William Walsh opines that White's stories differ from the novels: But whereas in the novels the deprivation, or lvretchedness, or imperfection becomes a means towards another and deeper reality, in most of the short stories the rnalady or calamity is part of a self-enclosed system. Neithèr in Clay not Deød.Roses, nor The Letters, nor A Cheety SouJ do we have that drama of dialectic we find in the novels. The effect ín most of these is, however complex, essentially single in its impact, and the only value released appears to be a quality of intensity for its own sake.3 Although it is true to say that the stories. in The Burnt Ones tncline more towards pessimism and untranscended suffering than the stories in The Cockatoos, it is misleading to see them as.single in their impact. IVhite's irony is such that he rarely depicts suffering which does not lead to an epiphany of some kind, and that he equally rarely presents a moment of transcendence which is not modifìed by a deflating anti-climax. The impact of irony is dualistic. In the title of this monograph I am suggesting that the duatrism to be explored in Patrick White's stories is not only the tragic irreconcilability of such antitheses as grace and ltorror, epiphany ald sanity, caritative love and bourgeois conventions etc. There is also the dual vision of his irony whích incessantly, modifies both the bitterness and the bliss of his protagonists. White's ironic vision is expressed in complex variations in his point of view towards his 2 Introduction characters. These variations range from. ironic sympatiry for his few questing seers, who yearn for tire redeeming peacocks or the cockatoos of grace in the magnolia tree, and who are rewarded with only wry, ambivalent success, to the militant irony of his satire on the bourgeoisie who refuse to admit tl-rere is any spiritual need for a quest. ln this satire on the bourgeoisie en å/oc White's irony tends to become strident sarcasm and there is little hint of the shades of ambivalence and reserve with which he represents his main characters. In White's stories there are very few and very brief moments when he drops this ironic guard and offers a purely positive vision of a character, such as of Felicity Bannister at the end of The Night the Prowler or Daise Morrow in Down at the Dump. Conversely there are very few major bourgeois characters in the stories for whom White does not at some stage milden his patrician distaste with moments of commiseration for their suffering, as he does for Anthea Scudamore in Dead Roses, for Evelyn Fazackerley in A Woman's Hand and for Olive Davoren in The Cockatc¡os. Fluctuating incessantly between the un-ironic extremes of admiration and contempt lie the inli¡rite gradations of Wlúte's ironic approaches to his characters. It is the aim of this monograph to carry out a close textual analysis of all of Patrick White's shorter prose fiction with specific reference to the above-mentioned dualism of his ironic vision. Patrick Wúte's stories are contained for the most part in the collections Tlrc Burnt Ones and Tlte Cockatoos (both now avaÍlable in Penguin). Two very early stories, The Twitching Colonel and Cocr¡tte are considered as is also the recently published story, Fete Galante.