Abstract
This article examines the interplay of the intuitive and the rational in the realization of transcendent reality in Patrick White’s Voss (1957). Drawing on images and metaphors found in Vedic and Upanishadic literature, the article explores how White’s highly mystical and ambiguous novel illuminates the “cosmic and acosmic” split of Being and Time across two transcultural spaces — the Australian and the Indian — and considers whether this split of time-consciousness signifies a timeless reality or a unifying force. The novel is shown to be not merely an Australian epic but a profound meditation on consciousness, identity, and the nature of the Absolute.
Keywords: Patrick White, Voss, Being and Time, Vedic philosophy, Upanishads, Australian literature, transcendence, consciousness
Introduction
The novels of Nobel laureate Patrick White (1912-1990) had earned the phrase “difficult novels of a difficult man” which inadvertently 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). However, the way Patrick White deals with the mysteries of Being and Time and explores the nature of reality provides some interesting insight in the genre of speculative fiction of the twentieth century.
The epymonous hero Voss’s life is based on the real German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, who disappeared in the Australian wilderness in 1848. Patrick White had conceived of writing Voss during the early days of the Blitz, when reading Eyre’s Journal in a London bedsitting room.
This epic tale about a man’s journey into the heart of the Australian desert and into his own heart and mind is a classic of modern literature. Here Patrick White interweaves the indigenous and the foreign with endless play of meanings against the visual and the spatial. Voss is obsessed by a long-held ambition to set off into the interiors of an immense unmapped desert with an ill assorted ragtag of followers: “I shall cross the continent from one end to the other” (Voss 33).
Voss and Laura: A Transcendent Love
Around the narrative of the expedition is woven the relationship of Voss and Laura Trevelyn, niece of one of the patrons of the project. The second part shows the expedition entering the innermost deserts of Australia, facing extreme physical suffering, decay, death, mutiny and ultimate anhilation at the hands of the natives. On this voyage, with the journey out and the journey back, which is “a journey to hell an’ back” (Voss 43) is a structure ironically duplicated on time travel.
Laura waits in Sydney, syntactically reinventing the resistant trace of space or time. When Voss and Laura are not together, the relationship takes place in the mind, with some sort of sixth sense resulting in a synchronisation of feelings. Amazingly, their love blossoms across time, transcending the barriers of a class driven society. In them, there is endlessness, being “nowhere and everywhere at once”(Voss 239). It is testament to the author’s imaginative powers and his skill as a novelist that their transcendent union, despite the hundreds of miles between them, is consummated with a wedding and a newborn child.
Time, Being, and Vedic Philosophy
In Voss it is a journey deep into the human condition where Time is neither a condition, nor a purposeless obstacle to some Truth where the chronological past becomes the present. The experiencer and the experienced are a joint phenomenon. Solitude as a means of cultivating sensitivity becomes a necessity. The intense experiences of sublimity in rare moments are those where the flux of time seemed to merge with a deep silence, and a sense of oneness, which is almost flagrant. As the observer watching the whole structure of consciousness, Voss becomes aware choicelessly: “True knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind” (Voss 446).
A parallel consciousness in Voss reveals “the core of reality” (McGregor ed.219) a concentrated visualization of the stages of consciousness that lead inward from the everyday polar play of ignorance-Avidya to the logic shattering paradox of eternity and time to the realization of the Universal Self (Brahman-Atman).
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 with its intricate linear composition is conceived and designed as a support to meditation — more precisely to a concentrated visualization and intimate inner experience of the polar play and logic-shattering paradox of eternity and time. Philosophically, in the Upanisads, the concept of “Becoming” is replaced by three static states of temporal existence: “Appearance, Extinction, and Continuance.”
Conclusion
It becomes amply clear to any perceptive reader that in treating the subtle edges of experience and the nature of reality as a whole, White presented what may be called “the crystallization of a mode of experience which is the act of literary creation”(Murry 52). He wanted to convey the immensity of space, within and without, giving a fresh cosmic dimension to the eternal Truth, as envisaged in the Upanishads that consciousness is infinite and absolute. Transcendence resides not beyond but within, where the basic psyche merges with the soul and consciousness in celebration of what can be appropriately called “the mystery of Unity”(The Prodigal Son 118).
Works Cited
- McGregor, Craig.ed. “An Interview with Patrick White.” In The Making. Melbourne: Nelson. 1969.
- Murry, J. Middleton. The Problem of Style. OUP, 1952.
- Nakamura, Hajime. “Time and Eternity in Indian Thought.” Man and Time. New York: Pantheon, 1958.
- White, Patrick. “The Prodigal Son.” Twentieth Century Prose. Heseltine.ed. Melbourne: F.W.Chesire Pvt Ltd. 1963.
- -----. Voss. London: Penguin, 1959.
- -----. Flaws in the Glass: A Self Portrait. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981.
- Zimmer, Heinrich & Campbell.J ed. Myths & Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.