<p>Patrick White is a man divided: one part of him strives for permanence, surety, the ideal, while knowing the contingent, temporal realm he inhabits must inevitably undermine such striving. The desire, and the knowledge of its futility, leads him into a misanthropic devaluation of human creative possibility and, complementarily, into the arbitrary use of imposed symbolic resolutions directed to an elect who can "see". It has been this part of White, largely, that criticism has been industrious in explicating, if not in quite the terms I have used above. But there is another part of White which strains away from the former dualism of idealism and despair, significance and banality, towards a vital wholeness to be apprehended in human relationships. It is this aspect of White which embodies his genuine novelistic power and which, consequently, helps us to understand and place" the former "cerebral" response to the complexity of finding meaning in the twentieth century.</p> <p>The present study deals with four novels in four chapters, and briefly discusses a fifth in an epilogue. It opens with an introduction in which I link the division found in White to T.S. Eliot's theory of the "dissociation of sensibility", and so to the major modernists, Eliot, Yeats, and Lawrence. I then devote a chapter to each of The Aunt's Story (1948), Riders in the Chariot (1961), The Vivisector (1970), and A Fringe of Leaves (1976). The main thrust of these chapters is to demonstrate how White's development as a writer moves from ambivalence toward his vision, through a compensatory rigid dualism, to an increasing awareness and acknowledgement of the reality that creative relationship offers. The epilogue comments briefly on White's most recent novel, The Twyborn Affair (1979), in which he indulges many of the predilections he had sufficiently "placed" through the writing of A Fringe of Leaves. Evidence that White has not forgotten the discoveries of Fringe is present, but in a tenuous form. Though White's creativity is of major status, the divisions that tend to undermine it still have a powerful hold on him.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/14178 |
| Date | 09 1900 |
| Creators | Steven, Laurence |
| Contributors | Berland, Alwyn, English |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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