Patrick White: fiction and the unconscious

Abstract

This remarkable work demolishes long-held beliefs about Australia's leading literary figure, Patrick White. It has also been heralded as an exiting and extremely creative insight into the Australian unconscious. Put simply, David Tacey's argument is that White's fiction is dominated by the workings of his unconscious mind and that its symbolic patterns are those of a mother complex. (In the most recent novel, Memoirs of Many in One , the mother figure is in fact the author and Patrick White merely the editor.) In the earlier novels, this is manifest in the hero's obsessional search for mystic unity with Nature, which in psychological terms corresponds to the dissolution of the ego into the maternal source - self-immolation, not self-realization as many have claimed. After The Solid Mandala the novels focus on the symbolic mother figure rather than the son and for a time she grows in power and fulfilment. Eventually the mother figure loses integrity ( The Twyborn Affair ) and descends into pornography ( Memoirs of Many in One ). For Patrick White an analysis such as this, based on Jungian ideas about archetypal patterns of the psyche, is peculiarly appropriate. White has himself remarked that his fiction seems to well up from the unconscious, to the point where he feels invaded, inundated. Often the fictional material is at odds with the constructs of his conscious mind, for instance the Christian overlay in some of his novels. Tacey's analysis is persuasive, illuminating things that otherwise are puzzling, such as the ubiquitous teeth-sucking women and the split personalities, and demonstrating a pattern for White's work that is most convincing. Moreover, he advances some stimulating ideas about the nature of Australian cultural life and Patrick White's place in it.