Victor – known to everyone as Dick – was one of fourīrothers in parthership at Belltrees on the upper reaches of the Hunter The early years of his life White spend inĪustralia, where his father, Victor Martindale, owned a large sheepįarm.
Patrick Victor Martindale White was born in Knightsbridge, London ofĪustralian parents. Slobbering, perpetually mislaying teeth and bifocals." (from Three Uneasy Pieces by Patrick White, 1987) Unless we are unavoidable members of the same family, farting, Wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, likeīroken furniture or dead flowers. Middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the "I would like to believe in the myth that Unadorning picture of the Australian middle class was accepted. In his own country White had to wait a long time before his These works established him as one of the most important modern (1961) was set in the imaginary Sydney suburban town, Sarsaparilla, White's Yoknapatawpha. Patrick White's international breakthrough novel was Voss (1957), a symbolic story of a doomed journey into the Australian desert. Patrick (Victor Martindale) White (1912-1990)Īnd playwright, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. Finally, then, this study argues that literature’s unique ability to acknowledge alterity enables it to serve as an effective tool for critiquing colonial discourses.A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Chapter Four investigates the representation of landscape, language and subjectivity in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. The third chapter examines Ondaatje’s depiction of the Sahara Desert in The English Patient, and focuses on his concern with the ways in which language and cartographic discourse influence the subject’s perception of the natural world. Chapter Two analyses White’s representation of subjectivity, imperial discourse and the Outback in Voss.
The first chapter of the thesis outlines the postcolonial and poststructural theory that informs the readings in the later chapters. One of the principal contentions of the study, then, is that the novels under consideration deploy a postmodern aesthetic of the sublime to undermine colonial discourses. White, Ondaatje and Malouf chart their protagonists’ inability to comprehend and document the landscapes they encounter, and the ways in which this failure calls into question their subjectivity and the epistemologies that underpin it. The study demonstrates that these novels all emphasise the instabilities inherent in imperial epistemology. This thesis argues that Patrick White’s Voss, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life depict landscape in a manner that reveals the inadequacies of imperial epistemological discourses and the rationalist model of subjectivity which enables them.
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