Symbolic and social-realist fiction

Abstract

The eleven published novels of Patrick White (1912–) constitute the most impressive oeuvre in Australian fiction, a judgement verified by his being the only Australian writer awarded the Nobel Prize (in 1973). White’s symbolic novels, with their sometimes slow openings, their many new starts, their frequent time and place shifts, their fastidious fascination with bodily functions and oddities, and their homiletic passages, took some time to gain acceptance, though White’s many statements about a uniformly hostile reception in Australia for The Aunt’s Story and The Tree of Man are unsupported by the facts. From the beginning, partly because of his familiarity with twentieth-century French and German experimental writing, he was in a different mould from the social-realist writers of the 1930s, though he was not without interest in some of their concerns. In the 1970s, for instance, he became involved in public demonstrations and speeches on such matters as urban conservation and republicanism. His novels tend to move from outer reality into the disturbed or fragmented mind (a process influenced in later works to some extent by his reading of Jung), and, for a few central characters, the unsuccessfully resisted impulse to spiritual understanding.