Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 3, December 2006
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The Androgyne : The ambiguity of existence in Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala and
The Twyborn Affair.
by
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India
Patrick White (1912—1990), the Australian writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, was undoubtedly one of the most powerful novelists of the 20th Century. With his rare and varied gifts and exceptional vision of the world, he has been hailed as a “phenomenon…a challenge”(Shepherd & Singh ed. 1).
Patrick White divides his critics. The term difficult novels of a difficult man has come to stay. In his own words, he has been regarded as “an intruder, a breaker of rules, a threat to the tradition of Australian Literature”(Flaws in the Glass 139) . Initially rebuffed by readers, White has survived and weathered the years of abuse and his status today is undisputed.
In The
Solid Mandala and The
Twyborn Affair, there are myriad connections between mind and matter
inviting challenging discourses on
consciousness. In these two novels Patrick White has tried to explore what may
be called the ambiguity of existence on
the basis of the story of two persons living one life, a pair of twins, for the
first work, and the life and
experience of an androgynous character, for the second. The two works provide an intriguing glimpse of
life of things beneath the veil. Since recent interpretations of the self
has reached new and radically different forms of meanings, the subject of
argument is a creative exploration of a baffling subject. Patrick White had
confessed “everything I write has to be dredged up from the unconscious -
which is what makes it an exhausting and perhaps finally, destructive process.
I
suppose all my characters are fragments of my own somewhat fragmented character.
”(Patrick White Speaks)
The
purpose of my study is to reveal how the author has delved deep into the
ambiguous landscape of the self and the
crisis of fragmented identities in the differing perceptions of reality
through the traumatic experiences of Eddie Twyborn, the protagonist of the novel
in The Twyborn Affair placed beside the
pair of twins, Arthur and Waldo Brown in The Solid Mandala.
To
begin with Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala is to view another side of
displacement. In his autobiography White mentioned it as one of his best novels
for he felt that it reflected “ the dichotomy of light and darkness in his own
self”(Flaws in the Glass 34).
The
novel explores the sibling relationships of the two twins, Waldo
and Arthur Brown, who as small children had emigrated with their British parents
to Sarsaparilla, a fictive suburb
of Australia. Spending their childhood, youth, middle age and retirement
together, they shared everything except their way of perceiving life. The work
is divided into four parts. In the first, we are given the initial introduction
to the Brown family. In the second, as a retrospect, life in and around the
family is seen through Waldo’s eyes. In the third part, through the same
shifting sequence, the same span of time is presented through Arthur’s
viewpoint. The epilogue in the final section changes the point of view to Mrs
Poulter, the Brown’s immediate neighbour.
The epigraphs to The Solid Mandala exhibits White’s concern with the inner life of his characters. One is from Paul Eluard. It reads: “There is another worldbut it is this one. ”. The other is from Meister Eckhart: “It is not outsideit is inside: wholly within. ”These two epigraphs indicates the two faces of reality and the ambiguity of perception. In The Solid Mandala, conscious reason and intellect is represented by Waldo and unconscious instinct by Arthur. The work as a whole shows that each is inadequate by himself, struggling to achieve a wholeness together, in putting up an image of the integrated self. The third epigraph from Patrick Andersonreads: “Yet still I long for my twin in the sun. ”This seems to suggest mans quest for a reality beyond the selfseeking a mystical communion with the universe. Patrick White had reflected in his autobiography that he had in his childhood began “the inevitably painful search for the twin who might bring a softer light to bear on [his] bleakly illuminated darkness”( Flaws in the Glass 35)
The novel carries the message of the living dead and the spiritually alive as well as the enigma of isolation and the tragedy of lack of communication. It conveys the idea of the divided personality of twins, each inadequate by itself, by achieving a wholeness together, where each constantly seeks the other out. Together they put up an image of an integrated self, divided, they reveal their fragmentariness.
There is too the novelist’s dominant use of Buddhist Mandala symbolism to bring out the indestructibility of the human spirit set against the wasteland of vast impersonal forces of modern Australian milieu, and his persistence to convey “a splendour, a transcendence which was also there, above human realities”(Herring& Wilkes ed. 136). The writer’s constant contemplation of the mandalic symbolism can be traced early to his novel, The Tree of Man, which was later developed fully in The Solid Mandala.
Mandalas are arrangements or patterns which give expression to the infinite possibilities of the human subconscious. In Hindu and Buddhist religions, a mandala is supposed to aid concentration by restricting psychic vision to the centre. . Its geometric structure is based upon the squaring of a circle around a unifying centre. The mandala, in its classic form juxtaposes the triangle, the square, and the circle--with their numerical equivalents of 3, 4 and 7, which leads to the Essence, the drop- “Bindu” of spiritual and psychic integration. The qualifying epithet suggests substantiality. White himself admitted in his autobiography have evolved his fictive world as his “non-religious or mystic circus” (Flaws in the Glass 146) through the juxtaposition of images and emotional exchanges of human beings.
Arthur’s unique perception of reality leads him to celebrate “ the world of light or silences”(The Solid Mandala 265), revealing the joy of the essential religious spirit where existence becomes a prayer, contrasted with the sterile drought in the mindscape of Waldo. Maybe Patrick White, in portraying Arthur had attempted something like Dostoevsky’s The Idiot “to represent the perfect man”(Dostoevsky 9). Arthur, foolish and dribbling, is completely free from egoism. Like Count Myshkin, he is wise and good. Like him, he becomes a saint, involved in an exploration of both spiritual and social attitudes. A perfect Wordsworthian simpleton, he is “a real dill”(The Solid Mandala 225), having an instinctive rapport with the elemental earth. Whoever meets him is drawn to him for his childlike transparency and open nature and his amazing world of faith and spontaneous warmth. This singular instinct makes him live the lives of others as his own. He loved to play with his four marbles which helped him in understanding the various strands of reality better in his search for a totality of vision . His mandala dance before his neighbour, Mrs Poulter, symbolized the theme of his life “ his life, or dance was always prayerful”(ibid 225). His mysticism is another way of viewing reality which would reveal the world of “the inner man to the world of the outward man—man’s microcosmic quality. The mystical experience has revealed the cosmos with man, the whole immense universe”(Berdyaev 273).
Transgression and repression, to speak the truth, are two sides of the same coin. Arthur’s twin brother Waldo’s negativism was the result of an intense state of anxiety, the outcome of an inherent fear to face life. A pseudo, he felt lost and helpless without his twin, who at the same time was a cause of embarrassment to him. Waldo had planned to write a novel on his own experiences titled “Tiresias, a Youngish Man”(The Solid Mandala 150)and initially had enjoyed moments of rapport with Arthur. He was aware that life was “the twin consciousness, jostling you, hindering you, but which, at unexpected moments it is possible to communicate in ways both animal and delicate. ”(ibid 76) . He was “an anti-visionary”(Heltay 10). His life was a secret, gradually leading to a denial of life. As his clandestine voyeurism rose out of psycho-biological causes, so too, the aridity of his life gave rise to a constant dilemma of identity. His discontent was the outcome of suffering and restlessness, and ambivalent feelings for his parents and others, creating in him an inter psychic conflict. His donning on his mother’s clothes, the satisfaction on narcissistic acts of self voyeurism, were frequent examination before mirrors “the disguise he had chosen to hide the brilliant truth”( The Solid Mandala 193).
Another strand that has been deftly twisted into the theme is that of the androgynous personality. It is mainly because of this that this novel comes closer to The Twyborn Affair. Here we distinguish the distinct trait of the androgynous personality . Arthur had once, just before the incident in the public library, come across a passage relating to “Hermaphrodite Adam”(ibid 281) which opened up the enigma of his brother and his own complex urges:
As the shadow continually follows the body of one who walks in the sun, so our hermaphrodite Adam, though he appears in the form of a male, nevertheless always carries about him Eve, or his wife, hidden in his body( ibid).
Arthur
felt that Waldo and he were but a translation of a would be transvestite. He
believed that it was the mystery of their
basic metaphysical roots, a profound rather than superficial union which so
intrigued him. This throws light on Nicholas Berdyeav’s observation that
“androgynity is the ultimate union of male and female in a higher God-like
being, the ultimate conquest of decadence
and strife, the restoration in man of the image
and likeness of God”( Berdyaev 207). In this light Arthur impulsively
tells Waldo that it would be better to be Tiresias, changing into a
woman for a short time than the
hermaphrodite Adam. Thelma Herring finds in this tale “a device for dramatizing
the concept of the antithetical self”(Herring 274). This is a portrayal, not of
a struggle between good and evil, or between
virtue and vice, but of an opposition between the luminous mystical
consciousness and the psyche together with the subconscious, which in Hindu
philosophy, is called Maya. All experience is a conflict between
the intuition of this maya, which is the deluding or illusive power of
the world which is seen as separate from the ultimate singular Reality of the
world.
Patrick White had sought to determine that the core of reality resides not beyond but within, where the basic psyche merges with the soul and consciousness in celebration of what he had stated in his essay The Prodigal Son as “the Mystery of Unity”(The Prodigal Son 118) . This has been done through the structuring of the Mandalic symbolism used in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and to see if the relentless pursuit of what he preferred to call “the razor blade truth”(Flaws in The Glass 155)is as precisely structured thematically to the ambiguity of Truth and the dualistic concept of reality also in Indian philosophy. It is possible, sometimes, to see him as a writer concerned to find a way of transcending the dross, the corruption, and perhaps above all, the ordinariness of this world and the “Dreck” as Hurtle Duffield in another of his novel The Vivisector had called it.
The
Solid Mandala is
an immensely powerful novel, which marks a significant stage in the portrayal of
interpersonal relations, based on a great human psychology of the ambiguities of
existence. With this novel, Patrick White has carved “ another milestone in a
strange and poetic journey of the soul”(Smith 197).
Eddie’s quest for permanence under the veil of separate identities, namel, Eddie/Eudoxia/ Eadith presents the ambivalent self in its experiences of a journey through what may be called the underworld of life, thereby clearing the psychic debris in the realization of the integrated self. Moved by mutiple aspirations she attempts to justify her change of guise as “being true to what I Am-If I know what that is. I must discover”(ibid 54). She cries out in her singular predicament: “Nothing of me is mine, not even the body I was given to inhabit, nor the disguises chosen for it. ”(ibid 67)
The androgynous personality has figured in classical literature, legend and religion. George Kisker, tracing the development of the androgynous personality has thus observed:
In Greek Mythology, the first human beings were androgynous or bisexual with Zeus later separating them into two different sexes. Among the Hindus we find a similar idea. Purusha, who was alone in the world became so lonesome that he divided himself into two beings-man and wife. The idea that Gods and men were originally bisexual accounts for the word ‘sex’ which is derived from the Latin ‘sexus’ akin to secare-to cut apart or to separate(Kisker 225).
It will be pertinent to recall here what Alfred Kubin, in the concluding words of his only novel On the Other side(1909) had said “Der Demiurg ist ein zwitter”(“The Demiurge is a hermophrodite”). it is interesting to find that most of the cosmogenic gods were bisexual in nature, uniting in themselves the most striking opposites. Even Adam was created bisexual. God had created Eve from his ribs. Thus arises the basic bisexuality in man—the image and the likeness of God in him:
The images and likeness of God was still preserved in man, in both man and woman;man remained in the roots of his being an androgyne, a bisexual being. This is now beginning to be recognized anew by science, philosophy and religion. Man would be irrevocably lost if the androgynous image in him diasappear completely(Berdyaev 172) .
Going back to the Greeks, it was Plato’s opinion that Love, which belongs to Common Aphrodite had in her birth a share of both female and male : First of all you must learn the constitution of men and the modifications which it has undergone, for originally it was different from what it is now. In the first place, there were three sexes, not as it is, two, male and female;the third partook of the nature of both the others and has vanished, though its name survives. The hermophrodite was a distinct sex in form as well as in name, with the characteristics of both male and female, but now the name alone remains and that solely as a term of abuse…. . Each of us then is the mere broken tally of a man, the result of a bisection which has reduced us to It delineates the mystery of life and Being. a condition like that of a flat fish, and each is perpetually in search of his corresponding tally (Hamilton ed. 59)
C. G. Jung in laying down the principle that every normal man carries his eve in himself finds that“The whole nature of man presupposes woman. His system is tuned into woman from the start”(Jung188). The feminine personification of the Unconscious within every man is called Anima, while the masculine projection of the unconscious within every woman is called Animus. This aspect of Jungian Depth psychology was explored in Patrick white’s relationship between Voss and Laura In his novel Voss. This Jungian Anima- Animus has a counterpart in Siva-Sakti of Hindi philosophy: The Jungian bisexual soul is the Indian androgynous image of atman as half Siva, half Sakti(ardhanarisvara). The difference between Jungian Anima –Animus and Hindu Siva-Sakti is that the latter is not a psychological notion but a profoundly philosophical and religious concept that brings about the draining and sublimation of the unconscious trends on a lofty imaginative plane. Indian myths and folk tales as well as religion, ritual and the arts all work towards the transcendental goal of androgynous completeness…(reaching) full sublimation and symbolic integration (Mukherjee 82).
Virginia Woolf defends the complete androgynous mind in this way that in the man’s brain,
The woman predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain, the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating…Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous (Woolf 170-171).
Patrick White in The Twyborn Affair must have intended to explore the same concept which he later set forth in these words: I see myself not so much a homosexual as a mind possessed by the spirit of man and woman according to the actual situation or the characters I become in my writing(Flaws in the Glass 81). He has emphasized that ambivalence in his own personality has taught him “insights into human nature denied…to those who are unequivocally male or female”(ibid 154). In this work, White can be said to have endeavoured to present the philosophical concept of the universe which rests with the polarities of opposites, of the male and the female principles of knowledge and love of transcendence and immanence, Purusha-Prakriti, Siva-Sakti, Krishna-Radha and Yin-Yang which resolved in the unity of the undivided male female image (Mukherjee 87).
Eddie Twyborn is the personification of the new man of transfigured self who is intrigued by the mystery of life and Being, the mystery of the androgyne. As with the The Solid Mandala, so in this novel, the question of consciousness, self and identity is left open for fresh possibilities: “The Real E has not yet been discovered, and perhaps never will be”( The Twyborn Affair 79).
The true concept of reality which
preoccupied Patrick White from The
Solid Mandala onwards becomes widely
extended in The Twyborn Affair.
When we begin to move away from oppositional categories, we see how two things
that were once thought to be opposites can exist at the same time in a positive
tension . of the either/or view of
the world. We understand, too, that a spectrum of being in the world fills in
the space between the extremes. A middle ground can exist between seemingly
oppositional ideas
The ultimate mystery of androgynous being will never be unraveled completely in the limits of our present world. Every personality is androgynous. Androgynity is the restoration of the integrity of sex in the Godlike being of personality(Berdyaev 208).
Works cited
Dostoevsky, F. The Idiot. Magarshack, David. (ed). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
Hamilton. ed. The Symposium. Penguin Classics, 1951.
Herring, Thelma, “Self and Shadow: The Quest for Totality in The Solid Mandala” in Ten Essays on
Patrick White. G. A. Wilkes ed. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1970.
Heltay, Hilary. “The Novels of Patrick White” in Southerly. XXXIII, 2, 1973.
Jung, C. G. “The Psychology of Transference” in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Vol7, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.
-------------- “Two essays on Analytical Psychology” in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Vol 7, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.
Kisker,
G. W. The
Disorganized Personality. Mcgraw Hill, 1964.
Mukherjee,
R. The
Philosophy of Personality. George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1963.
Shepherd,
R. & Singh, K. ed. . Patrick White: A Critical Symposium. Adelaide:
Centre for
Research in the New Literatures in English, 1978
Smith, Martin Seymour. ed. The Guide to Modern Literature. Vol 1, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973-75
Tanis, Justin Transgendered: Theology, Ministry and Communities of Faith, Chapter 9, pages 176-186. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2003.
White, Patrick. Flaws in the Glass. A Self Portrait. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981.
-------------“The Prodigal Son” in Twentieth Century Prose. Heseltine(ed. ), Melbourne : F. W. Chesire Pvt Ltd, 1963.
-------------The Solid Mandala. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1969
------------The
Twyborn Affair. The King Penguin, 1981.
-------------Patrick
White Speaks. Primavera Press, Sydney, Publisher Paul
Brennan, 1989.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of ones own. London: Hogarth Press. 1954, 1973-75