Academic literature on the topic 'The Twyborn Affair'

The Twyborn Affair (1979) is generally regarded as Patrick White’s covert “coming out” novel, followed by his frank “confession” in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). However, this article explores how even an earlier work such as The Aunt’s Story (1977/1948), from the Nobel laureate’s modernist phase, may be seen as a pre-text for the gay self, whereby the author stages incomplete representations of his own subaltern position in the characters he “becomes” in his writing. Through a series of textual feints, his persona is disseminated in the form of polyvalent alternative selves which belie any possibility for recuperation of a stable, authentic selfhood. White thereby refuses the univocal inscription of subjectivity upon which sexual hegemony is predicated. What I aim to do in this article is to extend the particularities of the novel’s writing strategies (found in the Jardin Exotique section, for example, which functions as a Foucauldian heterotopic space) into the province of gender. In doing so, I will show how the gay author, through the central character, Theodora Goodman’s protean identities and the deployment of competing narrative epistemologies, can fabricate alternative subject positions. These attest not only to the artificial technologies of gender constitution, but also function as remnants of White’s own divided status, brought about by his dissonant subaltern position in the borderlands of representation.

Cette thèse se propose de réévaluer la spécificité des quatre dernières œuvres de fiction de Patrick White. En effet, la tendance de la critique fut de ramener l’intégralité de l’œuvre de White aux romans de la période médiane (dont plusieurs appartiennent indéniablement au canon de la littérature australienne), ce qui ne fait pas justice à la spécificité des différents textes et à l’évolution perceptible au sein de l’œuvre. Dans cette perspective, c’est le motif religieux qui fait figure de clef de voûte de l’univers whitien, l’union au divin s’offrant comme solution au questionnement identitaire des personnages, qui y trouvent une forme d’unité. Or, précisément, dans les quatre dernières œuvres fictionnelles, le divin disparaît au fur et à mesure que le sujet émerge, comme en témoigne notamment l’affirmation progressive du récit à la première personne. Cette évolution thématique et esthétique entraîne une révision radicale de la quête d’identité des personnages et de son point d’aboutissement. À la lumière des concepts de moi et de sujet, hérités de Freud et réinterprétés par Lacan, nous proposons de voir comment s’opère une subversion de l’identité entendue comme « mêmeté » (Ricœur), qui aboutit à une redéfinition de l’unité et de la vérité de soi. Cette subversion de l’identité va de pair avec la remise en cause de l’identité littéraire de l’écrivain, dont l’œuvre fictionnelle ultime devient plus ludique, le jeu avec le lecteur participant de la construction d’une vérité à multiples facettes
The purpose of this thesis is to reassess the specificity of Patrick White’s last four long fictional works. Critics have indeed tended to interpret the whole of White’s literary production through the prism of the novels of the middle period – several of which undeniably rank high in Australian literary heritage – thus missing the specific character of the various texts or the perceptible evolution within White’s work. This perspective presents the religious motif as the keystone of the Whitian universe, where uniting with the divine is seen as a solution to the characters’ quest for identity. In White’s last fictional works however, the divine element gradually disappears as a divided subject emerges, this being particularly noticeable in the progressive assertion of the first person narrative. This thematic and aesthetic evolution brings about a radical change in the characters’ quest for identity and its conclusion. Freudian concepts of the self and the subject reinterpreted by Lacan allow the subversion of identity – understood as “sameness” (Ricoeur) – to be presented in terms of a redefinition of the self’s unity and truth. This subversion of identity also means questioning the writer’s literary identity: White’s last fictional works become more of a game involving the reader in the process of building up a multi-faceted truth

This study arose out of what I saw as a gap in the criticism of Patrick White's fiction in which satire and its related subversive forms are largely overlooked. It consequently reads five of White's post-1948 novels from the standpoint of satire. It discusses the history and various theories of satire to develop an analytic framework appropriate to his satire and it conducts a comprehensive review of the critical literature to account for the development of the dominant orthodox religious approach to his fiction. It compares aspects of White's satire to aspects of the satire produced by some of the notable exemplars of the English and American traditions and it takes issue with a number of the readings produced by the religious and other established approaches to White's fiction. I initially establish White as a satirist by elaborating the social satire that emerges incidentally in The Tree of Man and rather more episodically in Voss. I investigate White's sources for Voss to shed light on the extent of his engagement with history, on his commitment to historical accuracy, and on the extent to which this is a serious high-minded historical work in which he seeks to teach us more about our selves, particularly about our history and identity. The way White expands his satire in Voss given that it is an eminently historical novel is instructive in terms of his purposes. I illustrate White's burgeoning use of satire by elaborating the extended and sometimes extravagant satire that he develops in Riders in the Chariot, by investigating the turn inwards upon his own creative activity that occurs when he experiments with a variant subversive form, satire by parody, in The Eye of the Storm, and by examining his use of the devices, tropes, and strategies of post-modem grotesque satire in The Twyborn Affair. My reading of White's novels from the standpoint of satire enables me to identify an important development within his oeuvre that involves a shift away from the symbolic realism of The Aunt's Story (1948) and the two novels that precede it to a mode of writing that is initially historical in The Tree of Man and Voss but which becomes increasingly satirical as White expands his satire and experiments with such related forms as burlesque, parody, parodic satire, and grotesque satire in his subsequent novels. I thus chart a change in the nature of his satire that reflects a dramatic movement away from the ontological concerns of modernism to the epistemological concerns of post-modernism. Consequent upon this, I pinpoint the changes in the philosophy that his satire bears as its ultimate meaning. I examine the links between the five novels and White's own period to establish the socio-historical referentiality of his satire. I argue that because his engagement with Australian history, society, and culture, is ongoing and thorough, then these five novels together comprise a subjective history of the period, serving to complement our knowledge in these areas. This study demonstrates that White's writing, because of the ongoing development of his satire, is never static but ever-changing. He is not simply or exclusively a religious or otherwise metaphysical novelist, or a symbolist-allegorist, or a psychological realist, or any other kind of generic writer. Finally, I demonstrate that White exceeds the categories that his critics have tried to impose upon him.