Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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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
 
Krishna Barua

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). The enigma of the androgynous self touched but briefly in The Solid Mandala, was treated exclusively in The Twyborn Affair, where White has attempted to delve deep into the ambiguous nature of all existence through the conflicting experiences of an androgynous protagonist Eddie Twyborn.  David Malouf’s epigraph to the novel is illuminating: What else should our lives be but a series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become. The Twyborn Affair is primarily the story of  Eddie Twyborn, the son of a judge.  Eddie is bisexual “pseudo man –cum cryto woman( The Twyborn Affair 201). He runs away from home on the eve of his marriage to Marien Dibden, severing all ties with the past, and lives in France under the feminine   guise   as Eudoxia Vatatzes, wife of an aged Greek merchant, Angelos. When Angelos dies, Eudoxia sheds her feminine existence, and fights as a lieutenant     in the First World War, and returns home to Australia as Eddie. He works as a jackeroo for a time  in an Australian sheep farm, where  he gets entangled in an affair  with the owners wife and is physically ravished   by the manager Don Prowse. He abruptly leaves the station and settles in London  as Mrs Eadith Trist, owner of a brothel. Consequently, the mutual attraction between Rod Gravenor, aristocratic dilettante and Eadith Trist is developed without any physical consummation. At long last she faces her mother and is accepted in her new guise without any surprise. She meets her tragic end in bomb wrecked London where she is dismembered in an air raid.  

 

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. Perhaps, for those of us who live a transgendered or androgynous existence, there is a reason to explore gender integration on both an outer and inner manifestational level.  As  Berdyaev puts  it so succinctly: 

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

Berdyaev, N. The Meaning of the Creative Act. New York:  Collier Books, 1962.

Chatterjee, M. The Existentialist Outlook. Orient Longman, 1973.

 

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 ProseHeseltine(ed. ),  Melbourne :   F. W. Chesire Pvt Ltd,  1963. 

 

-------------The Solid Mandala. Harmondsworth,  EnglandPenguin,  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