Patrick White

1.      Background

Patrick White is one of my favorite writers. I do really admire him because of his experiences that he wrote in many of his works (poem, short story, play, novel and literary critic). I think the special parties of this marvelous writer is his background. He lived in two culture/ place which are Australia and England, he studied language and joined for army, he wrote some literary works while battled in some area during the World War II. Live in this kind of situation, Patrick White could understand more about the situation happened in that time all over the world. He also could write some any materials that he found during his experiences. In the same time, his literary works also could be accepted well in all over the world in that time, not only the European people. In spite of his language skills and hobby of writing, his literary works feel like a real society which written in a piece of papers. His works is so inspire for many people up to this era. Writing experiences and knowing some situations make some any people love Patrick’s works.

2.      Biography

Profile

Patrick White

Born: 28 May 1912, London, United Kingdom

Died: 30 September 1990, Sydney, Australia

Residence at the time of the award: Australia

Prize motivation: "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature"

Field: prose

Language: English

It is important to recognize White's conflicting loyalties to Europe and Australia. In many respects the European background and influences are obvious in his writing. After spending his first school years at private schools in New South Wales, he was sent at the age of thirteen, very much against his will, to Cheltenham College in England. There he spent a "four-year prison sentence," according to his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). All the same, after a couple of years as a jackeroo on his uncle's sheep station in Australia, he chose to return to England and Cambridge in order to study modern languages. He also spent some vacations in Germany and developed a lasting interest in German and French literature.

After taking his degree, intent on forging a career for himself as a writer, he settled in London to write novels, plays and poetry. His first novel, Happy Valley (1939) was praised by some British critics, but the next, The Living and the Dead (1941), forced out prematurely because of the impending war, was a failure even according to the writer himself. The same year he received his Royal Air Force posting as an Intelligence Officer in the Middle East and Greece. His experiences in the Western Desert led him to the reading of Australian explorers. Eire's Journal of Expeditions into Central Australia evoked in him "the terrible nostalgia for the desert landscapes," a feeling that was to influence his later novels, above all Voss. His first visit to his native country after the war made him decide to settle in Australia. He was then nearly forty years old.

Even though all the later novels are wholly or mainly set in Australia, they belong to the European epic tradition insofar as they are inspired by and based on Greek mythology, Judeo-Christian mysticism, C.G. Jung's psychology, and the Joycean stream-of-consciousness technique. White has quite often been compared to the greatest among Russian and French novelists. After his return, external Australian conditions and details merged with abstractions from his European experience. In consequence, tensions both between Europe and Australia and between a "real" and a "symbolic" Australia became significant. There is also an obvious love-hate relationship with the country of his childhood. His disappointment in the materialism and shallowness of what he terms the Great Australian Emptiness, is very marked in the essay "The Prodigal Son" (1958), in which he expresses serious misgivings about the country's future. This attitude also comes to the fore in his writing, and caused many critics to accuse him of elitism and intellectual snobbery. White's "Australianness" and commitment to the continent are nevertheless generally recognized in the sense that his return brought true colours back to his palette and, in The Aunt's Story (1947), introduced a new style into his canon, initiating novels of depth and dedication.

3.      Nobel Prize

When Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, the Swedish Academy's commendation referred to the author's epic and psychological narrative art as having introduced a new continent into literature. This standpoint may seem surprising now, but at that time it was a generally valid Swedish (and European) perspective - up to then literary criticism had largely ignored post-colonial writing and other new literatures in English. In many non-European countries, however, Patrick White was a well-known name, and he had already won prestigious prizes. His Nobel Literature Prize was the first to be awarded to an Australian, it is true, but the quality of Australian literature in general and of Patrick White’s writing in particular had long been recognized, not only by Australians, but also outside the country. To White's fellow-countrymen, the Nobel Prize confirmed his status as a major novelist whose fiction had, for more than twenty years, been regarded as an important

With the prize-money he created the PATRICK WHITE LITERARY AWARD to encourage the development of Australian literature. The committee has been instructed to give precedence to authors whose writing has not yet received due recognition. Among the winners have been Christina Stead, Randolph Stow, Thea Astley, and Gerald Murnane.

4.      The First Phase

The Aunt's Story and The Tree of Man

For many reasons, the two novels The Aunt's Story and The Tree of Man can be considered as the initial phase of a novel sequence. Unlike the earlier books, they are concerned with the most fundamental issues of humanity, such as the relationship between madness and sanity, reality and illusion, and the problem of communication in existential matters. For the first time, the idea of movement is structurally and consistently combined with the search for ultimate truth, the quest. Here, as in his later books, the characters are divided into two categories from a spiritual point of view: the living and the dead. The true questers are explicitly heading for salvation or damnation in a religious sense, not merely for an intenser form of life. They are opposed to the materialistic characters, who are rooted in social conventions, dreaming of possessions and gentility.

The Aunt's Story presents the quest of Theodora Goodman, a spinster, "dry, leathery and yellow." She is the first in a series of alienated, humble seekers in search of a true reality behind the appearances of social life. Like Theodora, they are all facing the choice "between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality." Increasingly estranged from ordinary life, she passes through a series of heightened moments of insight and awareness, "epiphanies" to use James Joyce’s term, leading up to final illumination. The question is asked whether spiritual illumination is compatible with the retention of selfhood and mental sanity. Theodora Goodman's ending is characteristically ambiguous. To the world, she appears to be mentally deranged when she is finally led away by Doctor Holstius, whose name hints at a sense of ultimate wholeness. Holstius knows that "lucidity isn't necessarily a perpetual ailment," and he summarises the lesson she has learnt: "You cannot reconcile joy and sorrow. Or flesh and marble, or illusion and reality, or life and death. For this reason, Theodora Goodman, you must accept." Like all the later questers, she experiences that "for the pure abstract pleasure of knowing, there was a price paid."

The changes in setting between the various parts of the novel are related to the mental development of the protagonist to such an extent that it is unclear whether Theodora’s odyssey carries her across oceans and continents in a physical sense, or whether the whole journey takes place in her troubled mind. There is a significant epigraph from Olive Schreiner for the third part of the novel: "When your life is most real, to me you are mad."

The Tree of Man was the first novel to win international acclaim. On the narrative level, it deals with the hardships of a farming couple, Stan and Amy Parker, in New South Wales. The frame is that of the conventional pioneering saga, albeit with biblical overtones and associations. Stan is one of White's characteristic seekers, and his spiritual capacity is set off against Amy's conventional attitudes. Stan "respected and accepted her mysteries, as she could never respect and accept his." The story contains the typical features of Australia's natural trials and disasters, such as bushfires, drought, and floods, but above all it enacts the psychological drama of Stan's desire to understand the purposes of God, which "are made clear to some old women, and nuns and idiots." The background and aim of the novel are indicated in White's essay "The Prodigal Son":

It was the exaltation of the "average" that made me panic most, and in this frame of mind, in spite of myself, I began to conceive another novel. Because the void I had to fill was so immense, I wanted to try to suggest in this book every possible aspect of life, through the lives of an ordinary man and woman. But at the same time I wanted to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry, which alone could make bearable the lives of such people, and incidentally, my own life since my return.
So I began to write THE TREE OF MAN.

It was Patrick’s statement when he began to write this marvelous novel.

5.      References

White, Patrick. The Aunt's Story. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948.

White, Patrick. The Tree of Man. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956.

http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/white-patrick, taken on Tuesday December 10 at 09.12 a.m.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/09/patrick-white, taken on Tuesday December 10 at 09.20 a.m.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1973/white-article.html, taken on Tuesday December 10 at 09.30 a.m.