THE THEATRE OF TRANSCENDENCE: PATRICK WHITE'S LAST FOUR NOVELS by Richard William Young, B. A. (Hons) in the Department of English submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts University of Tasmania December, 1995 This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other higher degree or graduate diploma in any tertiary institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except when due reference is made in the text or in the footnotes. ct_ This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968. Abstract White's fiction is a writing under pressure from the twin claims of being and becoming. In his earlier novels, for example The Tree of Man, the essential and absolute structures of being emerge as the ultimate ground of existence. White was always concerned with the flow of existence, and in particular, with the question of identity. The question White particularly wrestles with is whether identity is reducible to the unchanging forms of being, or whether it is given over to the flux of existence. White's project became, in part, an attempt to find a trope which would contain, without reconciling, the dual claims of being and becoming. In his last four novels, The Eye of the Storm, A Fringe of Leaves, The Twyborn Affair, and Memoirs of Many in One, the theatrical emerges as a structure which contains within its form both being and becoming. The theatrical presents a structure which consists of an enclosing form in which an action —a becoming—unfolds. The enclosing form appropriates being to its structure, while the action appropriates becoming. The theatrical thus operates as a metaphor of the reconciliation of the absolute and the contingent. It is the theatrical, emerging ever more clearly in White's last four novels, which determines the ultimately ungrounded quality which they exhibit, and which denies any seeing of the ultimate. The theatrical elements do not reflect any falling away of White's powers as a writer, on the contrary, they signal a solution to the problem which he wrestled with throughout his career: of holding together within a fictional structure the antithetical claims of being and becoming. This shifts White's fiction away from the modernist attempt to lay hold of the ultimate and unchanging, and towards those concerns with existence as such which might be characterised as post-modernist. In order to justify this view of White's fiction, those philosophers who have contested the notion that mind and language can reach the absolute—in particular Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida—will be appealed to. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Jennifer Livett, for the patient assistance and support she provided throughout the writing of this thesis. [iv] Contents Abstract Acknowledgements iv Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 The Tingeltangel 28 Chapter 3 The Clueless Maze 59 Chapter 4 The Geography of Flesh 88 Chapter 5 The Gourmet of Language 116 Chapter 6 Conclusion 133 Bibliography 136 [v] Chapter 1 Introduction In The Vivisector (1970) the protagonist Hurtle Duffield and his erstwhile lover Hero Pavloussi are visiting the Greek islands. They sit in a cafe drinking coffee as they wait for the ferry to take them back to the mainland. Forgetting she had finished it, she took a mouthful of her coffee, and now had to spit out the muddy dregs; however he remembered Hero, and there was still the return voyage to Piraeus, this might remain the key version: the black lips spluttering and gasping; the terrible tunnel of her black mouth. 'Dreck! Dreck! The Germans express it best. Well, I will learn to live with such Dreck as I am: to find a reason and purpose in this Dreck.' All this time a little golden hen had been stalking and clucking round the iron base of the café table, pecking at the crumbs which had fallen from their mouths. The warm scallops of her golden feathers were of that same inspiration as the scales of the great silver-blue sea creature they — or he, at least — had watched from John of the Apocalypse, ritually coiling and uncoiling, before dissolving in the last light. 'See — Hero?' he began to croak, while pointing with his ineffectual finger. This hen!' he croaked. Hero half-directed her attention at the hen; but what he could visualise and apprehend, he could really only convey in paint, and then not for Hero. The distressing part was: they were barking up the same tree. Their lack of empathy was not put to more severe tests because the proprietor came to the table. As he wiped the marble surface, he made some confidential remark in the language the ex-lover found he still resented. 'Alitheia?' Hero replied, craning. 'He says,' she explained, 'the vaporaki has been sighted from the mole. .. The golden hen flashed her wings: not in flight; she remained consecrated to this earth even while scurrying through illuminated dust . 1 What is it that Hurtle sees, that could only really be conveyed in paint? This scene looks forward to Elizabeth Hunter's experience in the eye of the cydone, in relation to which we are told, that: "You can never convey in words the utmost in experience." Hurtle's experience is one which might suggest an apprehension of the "utmost." However, I want to argue that it involves a seeing under the aspect of existence rather than 1 Patrick White, The Vivisector (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 393-393. All subsequent page references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. 1 sub specie aeternitatis. This latter suggests some kind of transcendental vision which, in turn, would involve a detached viewpoint, whereas if this scene is considered in the light of a line of philosophical thought extending from Kierkegaard through Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, Heidegger and most recently,. Derrida, it suggests an existential predicament rather than a spectacle. There is a sense that the characters are immersed in the situation and are unable to get outside of it in order to see completely. This immersion or embeddedness is a characteristic of existence. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard writes that: As an existing person, he can least of all hold absolutely fast the annulment of the dialectical element (existence); for that there is required a medium other than existence, which is indeed precisely the dialectical element.2 For Kierkegaard this condition of embeddedness denies the availability of the absolute. It leads to the apprehension of a process rather than the ultimate, a becoming rather than a being or thing-in-itself, and such: "Movements, becomings . are below and above the threshold of perception."3 Martin Heidegger wrote that "all Being is for Nietzsche a Becoming."4 It is this identity which is seen in the passage from The Vivisector, and it is this which White writes in his last four novels: The Eye of the Storm (1973), A Fringe of Leaves (1976), The Twyborn Affair (1979), and Memoirs of Many in One (1986). Absolute being appears, but only as becoming appears as being.5 In other words, what seems to be the absolute is the contingent assuming the role of the absolute. Being is thus ungrounded and is realised as theatre. The scene involving Hero and Hurtle is not concerned with the ultimate; it enacts a theatre of the transcendent wherein metaphysical categories are denied. This theatre has to do with the ungrounded play of being and becoming in an identity which gives rise to the appearance of the contingent as ostensibly absolute 2 Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans., Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1993), 315. All subsequent references are to this edition and are included parenthetically in the text as C. U.P. followed by the page number. 3 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 381. 4 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), I, 7. 5 Heidegger distinguishes between "Being," which refers to existence—to the infinitive form of the verb "to be," and "being", which refers to particular entities. Throughout my thesis I will follow Heidegger's distinction. 2 categories such as, appearance and reality, and the mundane and the transcendent. Two strands of thought, one belonging to Wittgenstein, and the other to Heidegger, can offer assistance in seeing how this particular passage from The Vivisector signals the beginning of a change in White's fiction away from the modernist quest to make "literature a form of visual presence,"6 thus, achieving a direct seeing into the heart of reality, towards an attempt to delineate the ungrounded structure of existence itself. White can be seen as a writer whose fiction moves in new directions in the novels after The Vivisector towards those concerns which can be characterised as post-modern. Because it brings existence, or Being into focus rather than the absolute, this scene from The Vivisector invites a consideration of the ideas of the philosopher of Being, Martin Heidegger. In addition, Hurtle Duffield, rather than having some kind of vision of the thing-in-itself, sees the hen as the absolute, and in order to understand this distinction the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein claim our attention. It is not my intention to discuss the ideas of these, or any other philosophers, beyond that which is necessary in using them to develop an approach to White's fiction.7 I wish to draw certain analogies between their philosophy and White's last four novels.