Literary criticism

• Did you know that 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Patrick White winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Australian writer to be so honoured?
• Until last week, neither did I.
• As a lover of White’s writing, I was shocked by my own lack of awareness, which was quickly overshadowed by the realisation that seemingly everyone had overlooked it.

Cultural cringe

• There should have been conferences and celebrations – a festival that would leave the Opera House in the dust!
• The 50th anniversary of White’s best-known novel Voss in 2007 was marked with a two-day symposium.
• The cringe, Phillips wrote,
  mainly appears in an inability to escape needless comparisons.
• The Australian reader, more or less consciously, hedges and hesitates, asking himself ‘Yes, but what would a cultivated Englishman think of this?’ When it comes to White’s reception, especially post-Nobel, the cringe is everywhere apparent.
• Here were signs, at last, that Australians could produce real literature – at least, according to Europe and Britain.

A writer unread?

• He infamously chastised mainstream Australian writing as little more than the “dreary dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism”.
• A.D. Hope’s similarly infamous review of The Tree of Man judged the novel to be “pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge”.
• White’s uneven reception reflected an anxiety about what Australian literature actually was.
• The preeminent questions asked in undergraduate Australian literature units are still: What is Australian literature?
• That Watts and Tsiolkas are both novelists themselves might explain their fervour for White, a writer who fits well under the moniker a “writer’s writer”.

Reputation

• The question that is asked of White is not just “should we read him”, but should we study him.
• White’s reputation as a canonical writer, and more specifically as a “difficult” modernist author and a “writer’s writer”, is a disaster when it comes to getting people, including students, to actually read him.
• He is not only the kind of writer one would expect to study at school and university; many people assume he can only be read in those contexts.
• Of course, White is a difficult writer, though it is often overlooked that he can also be funny, especially in his depictions of suburbia.
• She had noticed seed at Woolworths and Coles; it was only a matter of choosing.
• So far departed from the rational level to which she had determined to adhere, her own thoughts were grown obscure, even natural.
• Vain or not, it would seem, maybe until now, that the award has been the crowning achievement.