Journal Article

Resuscitating the body: Corporeality in the fiction of Patrick White

Bridget Grogan

2012

Overview

Patrick White's fiction is arguably best known for its metaphysics, in particular its presentation of identity as open to a transcendental dissolution. His writing is therefore often read as dismissive of the physical world, exhibiting in particular an impatience, and even disgust, with embodiment. Yet White's novels do not necessarily correlate with a desire to escape the body so much as to evade discursive subjectivity. They are primarily concerned with the individual's attempt to attain some kind of illuminating revelation, an intuitive epiphany that occurs when rational consciousness dissolves and the character yields to moments of communion-with other individuals, with the landscape, with all aspects of physicality including the onset of death, or with repressed and transgressive aspects of the psyche. These instances exemplify what Bill Ashcroft names White's writerly striving for a 'synthesis of self and other' linked to the theme of the 'sacred' within his work ('Horizon' 132). Further, they coincide with the disintegration of socialised identity, a dissolution constituting the redemptive reward or grace bestowed upon White's often disenfranchised protagonists. Like Theodora Goodman of The Aunt's Story, these characters yearn to 'destroy the great monster Self' (128). It has not been the critical consensus, however, that transcendence in White involves transcending subjectivity rather than corporeality. Andrew Riemer argues that White's fiction is 'dedicated to the notion that the body, the flesh and the senses are utterly worthless' (26). Brian Kiernan reads the work as presenting 'the soul imprisoned in the corrupting flesh' (462). And, for Peter Beatson, White's fiction dismisses the body entirely: 'Every book ends with the implication that the shell has, or will split apart, having outlived its protective and gestative functions' (110).

• Publisher: Association for the Study of Australian Literature,Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL)
• Subject: Australian literature / Authorship / Belgian literature / Data processing / Fiction / French literature / Identification / Identity (Psychology) / Kristeva, Julia (1941- ) / Lacan, Jacques Marie Emile (1901-1981) / Literary studies / Social aspects / White, Patrick, 1912-1990 / Writing