Vivisecting Peter's Identity

What I read 
Exploring Australian cultural values in his long novel The Vivisector, Patrick White tells the life story of Hurtle Duffield, who temporarily becomes the rich Hurtle Courtney when he is adopted from his own poor family of laundering mum and drunken dad (White & Coetzee, 2009). Through the character of Duffield, who progresses from brilliant child keen on sex to famous artist keen on sex, White also carves up for examination a collection of other characters as he explores the Australian identity, or perceptions of Australian identity, that emerged before and after World War II.

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My response
I thought that a novel I've recently read would make a nice change from the news articles I've been blogging the past week. White's great novel was just the thing. I say great, but I suspect that most Australians have not only not read this piece of literature from my country's only winner of a Nobel Prize in literature, but have never even heard of it. In fact, if I asked them, I wouldn't be surprised if my young nieces and nephews had never even heard of Patrick White. I'm not sure whether his work is still taught in high school or not. When I was in high school, we had to study at least one of White's novels.

I remember many days in Mr. Neall's English class trying to remember what the silver nutmeg grater symbolized in The Tree of Man. I think Mr. Neall was a good teacher, but although I loved reading and was reading a couple of novels and other things every week for fun, I was a bit rebellious when forced to spend time away from mathematics or physics on things I had not chosen myself. As I realised a few years later at university, when I read it purely for pleasure, Patrick White's story of the growth of Sydney from a town on the edge of the wild bush to a great modern city is another masterpiece analysing the Australian character and the values that really make us us.

What do I like about White? It isn't just his chosen topics, which are not obviously exciting, especially The Tree of Man, which really is the story of an uneducated man who clears a wilderness, gets a wife, works hard, has children, endures forest fires, floods, an adulterous wife and worse. White makes all of this gripping. What he does best is use the English language to achieve his purposes. I still remember "the long green smell of the cow shit" (I think that's White's phrase) as a perfectly expressed image to create the mood and symbolism that White wanted. He didn't publish a lot, and I suspect he reviewed and revised again and again and again before he sent anything off to his publishers. The result is great works of art that readers like me can enjoy reading again, and again and again.

I wrote the title because I thought my response to White's The Vivisector would also carve up aspects of my identity for analysis, but I'm not sure how much of that I've done. For someone who has read the novel, knowing how I feel about it might suggest a few things about me, just as I like to know what my friends and others are reading as a way to come to know them better.

Currently, I'm reading Donna Tartt's The Little Friend. This modern American writer chooses very different topics (murder and other exciting crimes) and stories to White, but her complex yet seeming natural and easy language remind me a lot of White. Perhaps next week when I've finished it, The Little Friend will be something for me to blog here. I also like Tartt's name, and her avoidance, again very much like Patrick White, of publicity. White almost never gave interviews, went to book functions or any of the usual self-promotion that artists go in for.

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Reference

• White, P. (Author) & Coetzee, J. M. (Introduction). (2009). The Vivisector [Kindle edition]. Penguin Classics. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/Vivisector-Penguin-Classics-Patrick-White-ebook/dp/B001P9W9RC/  (Original work published 1970.)