Patrick White’s Portrait of the Artist as a Vivisector
Artistic genius as a crippling burden
I have been meaning to write this review for a while and also feel duty-bound to do so as an Australian. The Vivisector, like much of Patrick White’s work, is a masterpiece of 20th century modernist fiction and belongs among the great works of William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Jospeh Conrad among others. However, writing about it as an Australian is difficult because the book is not only an Odyssey of magisterial proportions, but acts to illuminate core tensions within our national psyche. For reference, many Australians suffer from what is colloquially referred to as ‘the cultural cringe’; a sense that our culture is shallow and superficial, a crude imitation, lacking something intangible. White himself even coined a phrase for it: “the Great Australian Emptiness”. His work is important to me not only because he is indubitably our greatest novelist, but because it powerfully repudiates this very concept of cultural shallowness. Sadly, however, White is not a household name here despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 and, during his lifetime, he garnered far greater critical acclaim and attention in the US and Europe.
The Vivisector is epic in scope. It is at once an examination of the creative process; a psychological voyage into the mind of an extraordinarily gifted but cripplingly lonely social outcast; a study of dangerous obsession; and a sombre reflection on what it means to tell the truth whatever the cost. The title of the book is indicative of its contents, charting the life of the painter Hurtle Duffield — who some critics believe is based on Australian artist Sidney Nolan — who dispassionately dissects the world around him in search of a higher aesthetic truth. At a young age, he is effectively sold by his poor, working-class parents to a well-to-do family of Sydney’s nouveau riche. An outsider with his birth parents, he is also an outsider in the new world he enters — spurned by his hunchbacked step-sister Rhoda and awkwardly doted on by his new mother. And so begins a life of lovelessness and loneliness, striving to actualise some sort of higher artistic truth with pigment and a brush.
White propounds a profound question: does an artist’s search for truth and perfection inhibit their capacity to form functional relationships with others? In Hurtle’s case his friends and lovers are the fodder for his vivisection. They are cruelly milked as part of his creative process before being cast aside: Nancy, the lady of the night with “the chipped-lacquer look” who dies in an alcohol-drenched haze; his sister Rhoda whose deformity renders her a symbol of national pity in one of his most iconic paintings; Hero Pavloussi, his Greek mistress with an “accent of languid cloves” and “eyes of saints painted on wood” who is driven to suicide by his capricious behaviour. Hurtle is complicit in the demise — and sometimes the death — of his loved ones. Does that make him murderer? For White, there is no clear-cut answer.
Hurtle seeks to erase “the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality”. He views his task as a sacred one. Painting for him not just a vocation or even a dangerous obsession, but the entire raison d’être of his being. The goal of his life — and perhaps that of anyone involved in a creative endeavour — is to answer the ultimate question which he scrawls on the dunny wall: “God the Vivisector/God the Artist/God…”. His life’s seminal paintings come close to the truth though it remains agonisingly opaque. He constructs the bleeding fragments of reality into something new and this is the very essence of any great art. In putting this process into words, White taps into something truly existential. Humans create things — art, music, literature etc. — because it helps us make sense of the world around us and cope with the nagging questions which linger for all of us: why are we here and what is the point?
Stylistically, it is difficult to do this book justice. If literature can be impressionistic, then then this is it. Characters and landscapes are the sum of individual methodical brush strokes, built consciously with meticulous intention. Particularly striking is his stunning descriptions of character’s eyes. For instance, his spiritual child, Kathy Volkov, whose eyes exude “the explosive violence of splintering ice” and those of a group of bedraggled pilgrims on a Greek island which “glow with that suggestion of phosphorescence which emanates from a swamp at night”. While the following passage is the most evocative, accurate description of the Australian bush I have ever encountered:
The bush never died, it seemed, though regular torture by fire and drought might bring it to the verge of death. Its limbs were soon putting on ghostly flesh: of hopeful green, as opposed to the ash-tones of disillusioned maturity: the most deformed and havocked shrubs were sharpening lance and spike against the future.
This is prose of eye-watering quality. Free-form poetry which is not just comprehended, but felt. Critically, the greatest stylistic achievement of the book is that it makes readers complicit. The title, The Vivisector, is apt because, as readers, this is what we become. We dissect Hurtle and his flaws in the very way he does to those around him. This is a formidably impressive technical achievement which places the novel among the highest echelons of modernist masterpieces. It is all the more impressive as it only dawns on us that we are taking the scalpel to Hurtle as he begins to develop granules of self-awareness towards the very end of the book:
If I’ve learnt anything of importance, it was you who taught me, and I thank you for it. […] It was you who taught me how to see, to be, to know instinctively. When I used to come to your house in Flint Street, melting with exictement and terror, wondering whether I would dare go through with it again, or whether I would turn to wood, or dough, or say something so stupid and tactless you would chuck me out into the street, it wasn’t simply thought of the delicious kisses and all the other lovely play which forced the courage in me. It was the paintings I used to look at sideways whenever I got a chance. I wouldn’t have let on, because I was afraid you might have been amused, and made me talk about them, and been even more amused when I couldn’t discuss them at your level. But I was drinking them in through the pores of my skin. There was an occasion when I even dared touch one or two of the paintings as I left, because I had to know what they felt like, and however close and exciting it had been to embrace with our bodies, it was a more truly consummating love-shock to touch those stony surfaces and suddenly glide with my straying fingers into what seemed like endless still water.
Read this, I implore you. It may be a challenge for some — it has some Australianisms which may not make much sense — but, as one critic put it, The Vivisector is “the most convincing of all fictional attempts to capture the magic-lantern sensibility of a great visual artist”.
