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ANDREW McCANN
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The Ethics of Abjection:
Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot
M
ICHAEL Wilding has recently discussed Patrick White's modemism in
terms of White's disdain for what he famously called the 'exaltation of the
"average'" in Australian society (Patrick White Speaks 15). As Wilding
shows it is not difficult to see how this modernism masks an elitism that accounts for
White's at times paranoid fear of suburbia. Riders in the Chariot (1961) is the novel
that clinches this reading of White as the patrician modernist unable to represent
middle Australia except through a series of extravagantly misanthropic caricatures
(Wilding 29-30). In this essay I want to use Riders in the Chariotto suggest another
way of reading the politics of White's modernism. The world of Sarsaparilla in the
novel need not be read as an attempt to represent, in straightforward referential terms,
the truth of suburbia, but, on the contrary, should be seen as part of a textual
topography used to communicate a particular kind of ethicality. This topography
predicates a notion of normality and the forms of alterity that are constituted as abject
with regard to it, that is, as cast out beyond the limits of acceptable sociability. The
novel attempts to reorganise this topography, or the way in which the reader identifies
with it, so that the normal becomes pejorative, while identification with the abject
takes on a deeply ethical resonance. White's obsession with abjection has usually
been read in terms of his transcendentalism, another term that consolidates the image
of the conservative modernist, and Riders in the Chariot's well documented
appropriation of Judaeo-Christian mysticism certainly encourages this view. But the
notion of transcendentalism, or what Simon During has recently specified as 'late-
colonial transcendentalism', has led to some misunderstanding regarding the ethical
radicality that motivates White's recovery of the abject in Riders in the Chariot, and,
in differing degrees, in virtually all his major work subsequent to it. This essay
concentrates on Riders in the Chariot, but also attempts to establish an interpretive
frame in which White's abjection more generally might be read beyond the stigma
that terms like modernism and transcendentalism have come to suggest.
1.
David Marr represents White as someone obsessed with his own abjection in regard
to what he perceived as repressive societal norms. As a chronic asthmatic and
homosexual White understood his own body as the site of alienation and suffering,
and this encouraged his identification with outsiders like those presented as the
illuminati in Riders: 'As a homosexual I. have always known what it is to be an
outsider. It has given me added insight into the plight of the immigrant - the hate
and contempt with which he is often received' (Patrick White Speaks 156-57).
White's annoyance at what Marr calls the 'official image of the Australian man'
(277), figured in the working class racism that culminates in Himmelfarb's mock
crucifixion, also corresponds to his textual valorisation of the abject. Yet this dynamic
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ANDREW McCANN
does not work in simple oppositional terms. Indeed the utility of the abject in White's
work is that it elucidates and undermines the very oppositions that structure what we
might call a fiction of the normal, revealing that the apparently normal subject comes
into being through a repression and displacement of his or her own inability to fully
comply with the demands of a particular social order. By this reckoning the Australian
racists of Riders - Mrs Jolley, Mrs Flack, Blue and his mates - are not so much
representations of actual Australians in all their repUlsiveness, as they are
representations of the performativity of normality, and the violence that this can
entail. The connection between the abject and the maintenance of social order has
been developed by Julia Kristeva, whose work on abjection has much in common
with White's fictional project in Riders in the Chariot. According to Kristeva, the
process of socialisation involves a consolidation of boundaries that attempt to
demarcate the autonomy of the individual, and in so doing predicate a fiction of
normality through a series of oppositions: self and other, subject and object, inside
and outside, clean and unclean, healthy and diseased, c u l t u r ~ and nature. This process
requires the renunciation of an incestuous attachment to the body of the mother, as
the condition of autonomous subjectivity in a predominantly heterosexual, patriarchal
society. Kristeva, however, suggests the impossibility of completing this renunciation
of psychic and. libidinal multiplicity, the impossibility of fully complying with a
particular fiction of normality. The subject, in this way, is constituted in a continual
struggle with residual psychic and sexual identifications, that exceed the forms of
libidinal. activity designated as normal within a particular social order. These
identifications must be cast out, or abjected, in order for the subject to fortify itself in
opposition to an other perceived as external. Accordingly, the abject is figured most
emphatically in those objects that signify the dissolution of the boundaries fortifying
the self - objects considered polluting once they are perceived as external, but which
also emanate from within: menses, faeces, vomit, saliva, as well as waste, filth and
refuse in their more generic senses (1-18).
Kristeva's discussion of the abject has more recently been used to describe social
relations in which the external projection of racial, class or sexual difference, in the
form of an abject other, is understood both as an act of aggression that targets specific
social groups, and as an act of discipline that targets the apparently normal subject,
polices its boundaries and compels adherence to a set of repressive behavioural
norms. This broader application of the idea of abjection is especially evident in work
on the relationship between colonialism and a modernity obsessed with the marking
of safe, purified or domesticated territories and spaces (see Sibley 14-71). White
presents suburbia as a system of such social hygiene. His Sarsaparilla is a world of
paranoid domesticity constantly threatened by forms of literal and metaphorical
defilement. The relationship between suburbia, especially in a country like Australia,
and colonialism is, needless to say, not simply a matter of this common concern with
social hygiene. White's major novelistic portrayals of suburbia, we need to
remember, are also portrayals of a settler society actively engaged in the colonisation
of territory and the appropriation of apparently untamed space into developing
suburban infrastructures. The relationship between a settler ethos and suburbia is
explicitly and bitterlTthematised as an opposition in The Tree of Man, but White's
two subsequent novels, Riders in the Chariot and The Solid Mandala, revise this
opposition to suggest the continuity between colonial origins and suburbia. Both
novels lend the attnosphere of a settler society to the establishment of Sarsaparilla,
situating the genesis of the Australian suburb in an unmistakably colonial context. In
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PATRICK WHITE'S RIDERS IN mE CHARIOT
Riders in the Chariot abjection is a symptom of and counterpoint to the political and
aesthetic norms of both colonialism and suburbia. In this novel White departs from
his earlier valorisations of settler-colonialism and represents the suburb as a form of
a social order historically continuous with the disciplinary practices of colonial
management. In this context abjection takes on an explicitly political character.
White's use of it suggests an attempt to destabilise the oppositional frame that
colonial society and suburbia seem to have in common.
Riders in the Chariot thematises the centtal role of abjection in the constitution of
the settler-subject very early on, establishing an interpretive framework that organises
the rest of the novel. In the fIrst few chapters the tortured childhood memories of
Mary Hare return the reader to the halcyon days of her ill fated family mansion,
Xanadu, built by her eccentric father, Norbert, in the early days of Sarsaparilla. White
presents Xanadu as an ultimately grotesque attempt to consolidate an image of
European civility and gentility in the alien and subtly resistant landscape of the
Australian bush. Norbert and Eleanore Hare embody the bourgeois attitude to
Australia t'1at sustains se much or 'White's satire in other works: 'Norbert and
Eleanore were absent a good deal, of course, in foreign parts, because it was the
period when Australians of That Class - and Norbert was soon ofThat Class - were
returning home to show they were as good as anyone else' (14). Xanadu is Norbert's
attempt to re-establish the cultural and aesthetic norms of 'foreign parts' in Australia,
and, like the Xanadu of Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' (presumedly the 'appropriate
verses' that Norbert 'recites as he introduces 'lady guests' to his own 'Pleasure
Dome'), it is most distinctly a work of the imagination. Xanadu, in the spirit of a
certain conception of cultured aestheticism, is non-utilitarian. It is an act of will that
seems to defy that banal necessities of a settler society that to Norbert seem
'intolerably grey and Australian': 'what was Xanadu to suggest, if not the
materialisation of beauty, and climax of his leisure?' (18-19). Yet Norbert's fantasy,
his imposition of imagination on the landscape, is also quite emphatically an act of
control entirely continuous with the practices of colonial appropriation, management
and ultimately domestication of the land. Dedicated to the 'life of a country
gentleman' ,
What he'required. and did in fact acquire, was an exquisite setting for his humours: the park
of exotic, deciduous t r e e s ~ the rose garden which his senses craved, paSture for the pedigree
Jersey cows which would fill his silver jugs with cream, and stables for the horses which he
drove himself with virtuosity - always grey, always four-in-hand. (19)
The recreation of a distinctly English, moneyed pastoralism also requires the
remodelling of the land, a process of beautifIcation in which geography is made to
conform to an inherited notion of the picturesque.
The success of these endeavours, however" is also contingent on foreclosing the
'native cynicism' of the 'grey raggedy scrub'. Yet the anarchic, disturbing qualities of
the 'scrub' are transposed by Norbert and Eleanore onto their daughter. They can
relieve the failure of Xanadu and the anxiety surrounding their own attempts to prove
themselves 'as good as anyone else' by externalising these feelings in the abject
image of Mary. Mary Hare, both in the omniscient narration, and in the interiorised,
indirect discourse attributed to her parents, is stigmatised in a way that is never
exactly specifIed. It is not clear whether she is just ugly, mentally retarded or
physically handicapped, yet inevitably this stigma isrealised through her affinity with
the 'raggedy scrub' - with the 'native cynicism' that resists beautifIcation.
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ANDREW McCAL'IN
The scrub, which had been pushed back, inunediately began to tangle with Norbert Hare's
wilfully created park. until, years later, there was his daughter, kneeling in a tunnel of twigs
which led to Xanadu. Speckled and dappled, like any wild thing native to the place, she was
examining her surroundings for details of interests. Almost all were, because alive, changing.
growing, personal, like her own thoughts. which intenningled, flapping and flashing, with the
leaves, or lay straight and stiff as sticks, or emerged with the painful stench of any crushed
ant. (15)
Mary is presented in tenns of her affinity with nature. Indeed the passage seems to
represent her dissolution into nature - the dissolution of the boundaries between self
and other, the dissolution, in short, of socialised subjectivity. Her unity with nature
places her beyond the behavioural nonns and identifications that constitute a
desirable social and aesthetic order in the eyes of her father. It is in this sense that she
is abject. It is important that the passage seems referable to an omniscient narrative
position and that, therefore; Mary's affinity to her 'native' surroundings is presented
with some kind of objectivity. The undecidability that surrounds the apparent stigma
of abjection is raised here. In the novel abjection is both a projection, often in an
interior monologue, that fortifies that fragile subjectivity of the settler and later the
suburban subject, and the sign of a difference (aesthetic, ethical and libidinal) that
also seems to have an actual ontological status independently of this projection.
Through the intimation of this doubled meaning the text can couch the abject in
positive tenns despite its clearly pejorative connotations for someone like Norbert.
Hence while Miss Hare is 'speckled' and 'dappled', signifying the degree to which
she is antithetical to the ordering aesthetic of Norbert's 'wilfully created park', these
adjectives, as White would have known, are also central to an aesthetic that runs from
the romantics to Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose devotional poetry may well have
inspired White's descriptions of the 'raggedy scrub': 'Gloty be to God for dappled
things' writes Hopkins, famously establishing the divine order informing an
emphatically undomesticated natural world. In Hopkins' revealingly named poem
'Pied Beauty,' for example, the abject qualities of nature itself, echoed in White's
novel though images of grass 'oozing black juices' (213) or in the 'greenish, steamy
yellow' that comes from the 'flesh of grass' (88), guarantee the pulsating vitality of
the divine.
The ambiguous meaning of the abject - both sign of marginalisation and of
redemption - is epitomised in the image of the foetus, which recurs throughout the
novel, and implicates the maternal, reproductive body, later represented by Ruth
Godbold, in the array of forces that threaten the subject of social hygiene. Norbert
Hare's visions of his daughter as a foetus embody the idea of abjection in an
externalised image of maternal corporeality that can guarantee, through opposition,
his own psychic integrity:
. Once when, unavoidably, in the company of her father, and they had gone down to inspect a
rested paddock, she had thrown herself on the ground and begun to hollow out a nest in the
grass with little feverish jerks of her body and foolish grunts, curling round in the shape of a
bean or position of a foetus. So it appeared to him. (22)
Later Norbert Hare again resorts to the image of the foetus as a way of repressing the
possibility of a value system contrary to his own will to order.
A trick of light had endowed her with what could have been a shadow of beauty under the
goffered bonnet she was wearing: a country beauty. botched and brown, and quickly gone.
But her father would' not allow, He might have been denying the possibility for years, for now
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PATRICK WHITE'S RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT
he said, from a long way off, but very distinctly. as some sounds will convey themselves in a
stillness and from a distance:
'Ugly as a foetus. Ripped oul too soon.' (56)
It is the necessity of denial, of denying a 'pied beauty', botched and brown, that
accounts for the image of the ripped-out foetus - the unformed, cast-off product of
a violently interrupted reproductive process. And this is an image that resonates
through the novel- one of many that establishes the unspoken affinities between the
four illuminati (Mordecai Himmelfarb, Mary Hare, Ruth Godbold and Alf Dubbo),
and the repressive models of social normalcy that are so central to the novel. Alf
Dubbo's art will also be described in these terms - 'all the foetuses were palpitating
on the porous paper' (317) - as will Shirl Rosetree's attempts to forget what she
experiences as the taint of Judaism - 'it was the foetus she had dropped years ago'
(384). Jolley and Flack, on the other hand, in order to confirm their own distance from
the abject, need to be constantly confronted with it. When they spy on Himmelfarb
they do so 'longing for something that would rend their souls - a foetus, or a
mutilated corpse' (214). While the abject foetus mediates' these connections between
ethnicity, maternity, nature and art, it also seems to evoke the idea of redemption that
critics have seen as so central to the text. In a typically one-sided conversation with
his daughter, Norbert Hare couches salvation in terms that require the renunciation of
the burden of the abjected body: '''All human beings are decadent ... The moment we
are born, we start to degenerate. Only the unborn soul is whole, pure ... Tell me Mary,
do you consider yourself one of the unborn?'" (36). There is a clear semantic slippage
between the idea of the unborn, and the image of the foetus, and it is precisely as a
foetus that Mary is unborn, as abjected that she is saved.
In this slippage we are confronted with the undecidability of the abject. On the one
hand, Norbert's image of Mary as an ugly foetus equates her with a kind of
corporeality that cannot be reconciled to his aesthetic ideal. On the other, the semantic
ambivalence of the text suggests that this corporeality also embodies a redemptive
quality of which Norbert remains unaware. This notion of redemption has been read
as indicative of White's transcendentalism. David Tacey, for example, describes Mary
Hare as the 'psychologically ageless unborn soul, whose presence aggravates and
disturbs the strivings of the ego' (96). However the slippage between the foetus and
unborn soul also suggests a valorisation of identifications which nevertheless remain
libidinal and corporeal - identifications with the maternal body, as Tacey also
acknowledges. At any rate, what is figured here is something resistant to the 'strivings
of the ego' - an other, a negation tliat is given some kind of ethical priority, and that
emerges through the text's own multiplication of interpretive possibilities around
images of abjection.
2.
When Mrs Jolley arrives in Sarsaparilla as Miss Hare's attendant and housekeeper,
the continuity between the settler-subject represented by Norbert Hare and an image
of suburban desire is clear, at least in so far as both stand for forms of management
that seize upon the abject as a way of shoring up fragile subject positions. The
eccentricities of Norbert Hare find their corollary a generation later in the cultural and
aesthetic norms indebted to the kitsch of a distinctly feminised consumerism in which
domestic hygiene and corporeal control have become moral priorities. Mrs Jolley's
obsession with brick homes, pink cakes and cleaning appliances correlates
housekeeping as a disciplinary practice, the local containment of f1lth, and the
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ANDREW McCANN
expansion of suburban infrastructures to incorporate hitherto undomesticated space
- 'the red brick boxes increasing and encroaching' (61). 'The mere sight of a bus
passing through a built-up area,' thinks Mrs Jolley, 'restored a person's circulation, as
rounds of beef and honey-combs of tripe feed the spirit, and ironmongery touched the
heart' (72). Her assertion of control at Xanadu also turns Miss Hare into the object of
domestic discipline: 'You are a dirty girl,' Jolley warns her. At the same time Jolley
demonstrates a desperate longing for the fashion magazines and society page images
of bourgeois prosperity apparently realised by her own daughter in Melbourne:
... it is not uncommon for Merle to hobnob with the high-ups of the Service, and entertain
them to a buffy at ber home. Croaky de poison. Chipperlarters. All that. With perhaps a
substantial dish of. say, Chicken a la King. I never believe in blowing my own horn, but Merle
does things that lovely. Yes. Her buffy has been written up, not once, but several times.' (70)
For both Norbert Hare and Mrs Jolley desire is figured in a sequence of signifiers
which are infused with a kind of enjoyment that appears to the reader as alienating
precisely because it is so objectified. Norbert's 'deciduous trees', 'Jersey cows' and
'silver jugs' are echoed in Jolley's 'Croaky de poison' and 'Chicken a la King', and
later in Harry Rosetree's 'apricot brick home' and 'Ford Customline' (207-08). These
continuities in the textual representation of desire also suggest the continuity between
the fonns of colonial management epitomised by Norbert and a culture of
housekeeping, linked to post-war consumerism, epitomised by Jolley. The fonner; it
would seem, is effectively sublimated in the later. The stress on objects that represent
the pleasure content of an identity contingent on the marginalisation of an other, is
tellingly juxtaposed with the semantic mUltiplicity that accompanies the abject. In
this juxtaposition we can begin to see how the text organises the reader's desire
around the repudiation of the object and the valorisation of the abject.
White's portrayal of characters like Jolley as the embodiments of suburban desire
has been criticised as the basis of a fonn of misogyny associated with a modernist
contempt for the philistinism of consumer-culture. Robin Gerster, for example, writes
accusingly that the 'unspoken assumption' of White's work is that 'suburbia is an
essentially female domain' (567). In a tiovellike Riders in the Chariot, however, the
apparent feminisation of suburbia does respond to an actual discourse of domestic
management - largely mediated through advertising - in which the association
between the home, consumer goods and the housewife as an ego-ideal, was
incessantly reinforced. Kirsten Ross's examination of modernisation and
decolonisation in post-war France has done more than any other recent study to
articulate this relationship between colonialism, domestic management and
representations of femininity. Ross argues that at the moment France withdrew from
Algeria the dichotomies of colonial management were recreated in the modernisation
of metropolitan life within France. In this process images of consumerism and
domestic cleanliness were deployed by the 'media as the counterpoint to images of
'pre-modern' peasant, proletarian or immigrant life styles. Ross describes this as the
'colonisation of everyday life', borrowing from Henri Lefebvre. In this shift women
are given a structurally central role:
And women, of course, are the primary victims and arbiters of social reproduction, as the
subjects of everydayness and as those most subjected to it, as the class of people most
for and those responsible for the complex movement whereby the
social existence of human beings is produced and reproduced, are the everyday: its managers.
itS embodiment. The transfer of a colonial political economy to 'a domestic 'one involved a
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PATRlCK WHITE'S RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT
new emphasis on controlling domesticity, anew concentration on the political economy of the
household. An efficient, well-run, harmonious home is a national asset ... If the woman is
clean, the family is clean, the nation is clean. ( 7 7 ~ 7 8 )
This process is structured around the expulsion, the abjection of filth, and the
repression of difference. In order to solidify one's allegiances to a modern, national
culture, filth must be managed, contained or expelled, continuing the ways in which
the modern subject is distanced from a dirty, backward other. In Ross's work the
suburban infatuation with cleanliness is also an infatuation with the perpetually
pristine quality of new commodities which sanctify the domestic interior. To the
extent that they ought never to age or accumulate filth, at least in the imaginings of
the consumer, these objects participate in a fantasy of 'immobilized time' . The moral
value of cleanliness, Ross argues, thus involves the local obliteration of history.
Following Roland Barthes, she understands the 'will to cleanliness' as 'a desire to
immobilize time, to step outside of history, or perhaps, by extension, to retreat inside
a controlled, rationally created environment superior to one engendered historically'
Cl 06). The suburb and its domestic interiors can be seen as precisely this rationally
created environment designed to transcend an outside that includes not only filth, but
history itself. This immobilisation of time has telling implications for colonial
societies. By recoding complex historical processes in tenns of static oppositions
between self and other, inside and outside, clean and dirty, immobilised time grants
the fiction of an eternal newness freed from the compromising effects of material
decay. In White's novel the immobilisation of time in Mrs Flack's pristine living
room fortifies a fiction of nonnality and in so doing encourages a racism that has
devastating consequences.
By the time White introduces Mordecai Himrnelfarb into the novel it is clear that
Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack's insidious regimes of domestic and moral cleanliness are
implicitly related not just to the marginalisation of indigenous Australians, but also to
the fascist extenuination of European Jewry. When Himmelfarb relates his history to
Miss Hare, the slippage between Australian and Nazi vocabularies of moral
cleanliness is unmistakable. The name of the concentration camp to which
Himmelfarb is sent - Friedensdorf - is ironically echoed in the name of Harry
Rosetree's middle class suburb, Paradise East, in which the eradication of ethnic
difference is carried out through precisely the process of modernisation that Ross
describes. Shirl and Harry Rosetree, fonnerly Shulamith and Haim Rosenbaum,
experience their own jewish-European past as contamination, and accordingly need
to banish it from their own 'Home Beautiful', which emerges as a model of the
controlled environment purged of filth and integrated into a nationalist rhetoric of
nuclear families in which Australian children hate 'bloody foreign food'. Shirl
Rosetree in particular has a 'gift for assimilation' and represents the woman as both
arbiter and victim of domestic discipline: 'Of course it was really Shirl Rosetree who
owned the texture-brick home, the streamlined, glass car, the advanced shrubs, the
grandfather clock with the Westminster chimes, the walnut-veneer radiogram, the
washing-machine and the mix-master' (208). Yet the Rosetrees cannot completely
repress their past, and as a result their domestic space is continually threatened by the
traces of their contaminating history.
And at times the Rosetrees would cling together with almost fearful passion. There in the dark
of their texture-brick shell. surrounded by mechanical objects of value, Shirl and Harry
Rosetree were changedmercilessly back into Shulamith and Haim Rosenbaum. Oy-yoy how
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ANDREW McCANN
brutally the Westminster chimes resounded in the hall. A mouse could have severed the
lifeline with one Lilliputian snap. While the seekers continued to lunge together along the
dunes of darkness, arriving nowhere, except into the past, and would excuse themselves in
favour of sleep. that other deceiver. (209)
What disturbs the suburban idyll here is not just ethnicity, but history itself.
In the case of the Rosetrees, then, the culture of suburbia represses very specific
identifications - identifications with Judaism and with the victims of genocide. Yet
the Rosetrees can also be read as embodying a much more general drama of
subjectivity in which. they are constantly threatened by their precarious proximity to
the abject. In so far as they are complicit with forms of social existence that are
represented in the novel as explicitly anti-Semitic, we can say that they are implicated
in a lifestyle that necessitates constant vigilance and discipline, with regard to their
own ethnic identity, as the condition of their belonging in post-war Australia. They
are threatened with the traumatic possibility of lapsing into their own alterity.
... Harry Rosetree knew that a latent misery of his own. of which he had never been quite able
to dispose, had begun to pile up in the fragile, but hitheno protected office,. assuming vast
proportions. like a heap of suppurating corpses. He could have spewed up there and then,
because the stench was so great. and his considerable business acumen would never rid him
of the heap of bodies. (204)
This passage literalises both abject corporeality in the image of suppurating corpses,
and the process of abjecting these identifications in the urge to vomit. Indeed the
relationship between HimmeIfarb and the Rosetrees seems analogous to the
relationship between Mary and Norbert Hare. In each case the former represents an
externalisation of the latter's insurmountable failure to fully comply witha version of
social normalcy - a fiction of the normal. And just as Mary's unity with nature
figures identifications that link her to a corporeality outside gf thesocial order, so too
is Himmelfarb's resilient adherence to his Jewish identity represented as fidelity to an
address that comes from beyond the regime of immobilised suburban time: the voice
of the 'Lady from Czemowitz' 'Calling to him from out of the dark of history,
ageless, ageless and interminable' (184).
Himmelfarb's memory of the Lady from Czemowitz entering the gas chamber at
Friedensdorf typifies the kind of passage that critics of the novel have found virtually
impossible to deal with, except through facile criticisms of White's obsession with
human repulsiveness. In Himmelfarb's recollection, the voice of the Lady from
Czernowitz, calling out of the space of alterity, the dark of history, is also associated
with a graphic image of bodily decrepitude.
She stood there for an instant in the doorway, and might have fallen if allowed to remain
longer. Her scalp was grey stubble where the reddish hair had been. Her one dug hung down
beside the ancient scar which represented the second. Her belly sloped away from the hillock
of her navel. Her thighs were particularly poor. But it was her voice which lingered. Stripped.
Calling to him ont of the dark of history, ageless, ageless, and intenninable. (183-84)
This passage points to the poetics of abjection in White's novel. The Lady from
Czemowitz seems to literalise the maternal body rendered grotesque and disfigured.
In one sense she can be read as a projection of abject alterity. Yet the text also seems
to evoke this alterity as a disfiguration of its own language. The choice of 'dug' for
breast and the evocation of the ancient scar, which tellingly represents the missing
breast, suggest the textualisation of abjection as a willed departure from a squeamish,
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PATRICK WHITE'S RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT
hygienic prose of corporeal decorum that ultimately culminates in the paranoid
projection of the other. What critics often find scandalising in White's writing is
precisely this linguistic recovery of abjection, a recovery which also frequently
dissolves the rules of syntactical logic and multiplies rhetorical figures in a way that
suggests the semantic multiplicity of a distinctly poetic language.
Consider the use of extended metaphor in Hirnmelfarb's famous train ride through
Sydney:
The train was easing through the city which knives had sliced open to serve up with all the
juices running - red, and green, and purple. All the syrups of the sundaes oozing into the
streets to sweeten. The neon syrup coloured the pools of vomit and sallor's piss. (391)
The eruption of abject corporeality is also a refusal of referential language. It enacts
the impossibility of locating the subject (here Himmelfarb) within linguistic
structures. Despite the ambiguous resonance this passage has in the scheme
of the novel, it is clearly driven by a momentum that points to the perverse pleasure
of linguistic excess - the delirium of imagistic profusion. By pushing his own prose
into poetic disfiguration, White' also refuses the sanitising, dichotornising regimes of
suburban desire limited by its fixation with the object. Alf Dubbo, suffering from
tubercular bleeding, is perhaps the novel's most emphatic image of this relationship
between abjection and cultural production, a relationship that will be more fully
developed in The Vivisector. Dubbo's art is represented as inseparable from the
process of bodily breakdown symptomatised in both coughs of blood and paint,
which function as metaphors for each other. WhenMrs Pask lectures him on the
correct use of oil paints and warns against 'undesirable art', Dubbo's creative urges
defy this discipline and find their metaphorical corollary: 'All he knew for the
moment was his desire to expel the sensation in his stomach, the throbbing of his own
blood, in surge upon surge of thick, ever accumulating colour' (322). Through the
semantic uncertainty that lets blood and paint, body and cultural production, signify
each other, White can suggest the abject materiality of Dubbo's art while
simultaneously enacting the abject identifications of his own writing.
3.
Simon During raises the issue of White's transcendentalism in terms of cultural and
political debates framed by postcolonialism. During argues that White's appropriation
of Judaeo-Christian themes and motifs is continuous with a movement he names
'late-colonial transcendentalism', which 'contested the postcolonial shift' in turning
to 'various universal themes, which were often called "metaphysical''' (17-18). This
transcendentalism is conceptualised as a 'return to the timeless and the spiritual' (18).
In the context of During's argument this notion of 'return' is clearly pejorative. It
implies a residual Eurocentricism limiting White's ability to embrace a 'fully fledged'
(During's phrase) postcolonialism capable of articulating the violence of settlement
and the centrality of indigenous cultural forms to national consciousness. During's
argument echoes a fascinating 1963 essay by Jack Lindsay which, arguing from an
orthodox Marxist notion of alienation, criticises Riders in the Chariot in similar
terms. According to Lindsay, White's attempts to 'overcome the rather crushing
monotony of a vision of mere alienation' result in a kind of transcendentalism that
leaves him 'unable to oppose effectively the thing that he so sincerely and fiercely
hates' (258). Both these arguments are convincing to a point, but they can only posit
White's transcendentalism as a regressive term in regard to postcolonialism and
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ANDREW McCANN
Marxism respectively by de-emphasising the extent to which abjection implies an
ethicality based on the rejection of discourses that inscribe and marginalise difference
- an ethicality manifest in the confluence of 'spirituality and transgressive sexuality'
that, elsewhere in his book, During discusses with regard to Riders (53-57). In fact
the more general critical refusal to discuss abjection in White's novel, beyond
accusations of misanthropy and misogyny, is directly related to a persistent if partial
misreading of the role played by Judaeo-Christian mysticism in his writing more
generally. In order to read the merkabah tradition of Ezekiel's chariot as suggestive
just of spiritual transcendence one must foreclose what is most striking in Judaeo-
Christian mysticism - its intimacy with the abject.
The relationship between abjection and mysticism is emphatically stated in the
novel's epigraph, from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which
a fIrst person narrative voice converses with the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel:
I then asked Ezekiel why. he ate dung, and lay. so long on his right and left side? he answer'd,
'the desire of raising other Ipen into a perception of me infinite; this the North American
tribes practise, and is he honest who resists genius or conscience only for the sake of present
ease or gratification?'
Critics discussing White's transcendentalism, even when quoting this passage,
display a prudish reluctance to confront the thought of coprophagy. This passage goes
to .the crux of the novel's mysticism, which resides in embracing the abject,
reincorporating it in order to mark one's distance from a materialism ('present ease'
and 'gratifIcation') that resists genius and conscience, and to re-embody the
unconditioned desire repressed by this. In the above passage from Blake, embracing
the abject is also to assert identity with 'North American tribes', with a colonised
people, and indeed Blake's whole poetic project, in his prophetic books especially, is
emphatic in its opposition to imperialism, slavery and the moralising discourses that
consolidate these forms of oppression through the production of binary oppositions.
It would of course be foolish to suggest that transcendentalism is a redundant term in
regard to White's work. Clearly it is not. What I am claiming here is that mysticism
and transcendentalism also carry within them abject identifIcations. In Christian
doctrine, Kristeva writes, 'abjection will not be designated as such, that is, as other,
as something to be ejected, or separated, but as the most propitious place of
communication - as the point where the scales are tipped towards pure spirituality.
The mystic's familiarity with abjection is a fount of infinite jouissance' (127). We
need only think of Francis of Assisi kissing the lepers, or two examples that Lacan
mentions for their thinly veiled erotics: Angela de Folignio drinking the water in
which she had washed the feet of lepers, and Marie Allacoque eating the excrement
of a sick man (Lacan 188). In White's writing we confront analogous moments:
cannibalism as the incorporation of the abject in A Fringe of Leaves; the saintliness
of the nurses clustered around the body of Elizabeth Hunter in The Eye of the Storm;
Felicity bathing the fetid body of a dying old man with her tears in 'The Night the
Prowler'; or Daise Morrow (the name itself anticipates the millennium) lifting Ossie
Coogan out of the excrement of the show ground stables into her bed in 'Down at the
Dump'. The mystical qualities of such acts suggest an ethical, but also a libidinal
identification with what is fIgured as beyond the boundaries of 'normal' sociability.
This revaluation of the abject is also a revaluation of the representational strategies
that consolidate images of the abject in the fIrst place. In this process signifiers of
abjection take on an ethical significance, in so far as they represent the desire to
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PATRlCK WHITE'S RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT
disidentify with repressive or discriminatory forms of social organisation. This is
actually figured into White's novel very explicitly when Mrs Jolley refers to
Himrnelfarb as a dirty Jew and rehearses the ideological equation of race and
abjection.
Miss Hare was red with rage. She could not see for the sense of injustice which was rising
green out of her. Towering in the perpendicular, it burst into a flower of sparks, like some
obscene firework released from dark memory.
'My what Jew?' The words were choking. 'Dirty? What is true, then? My kind man! My
good man! Then I am offal, offal! Green, putrefying, out of old. starved sheep. Worse, worse!
Though not as bad as some. Offal is cleaner than dishonest women. What is lowest of ~ ?
You could tell me! Some women! Lower, even. Some women's shit!' -
So her memory spat, and the brown word plastered the accuser's back. (295)
This revaluation of signifiers bound intoan ideological topography is at the centre of
White's novel - while offal becomes the ground for ethical identification, the
circuits of desire that regulate suburbia are rendered repulsive. This is .not simply a
matter of realism, of White's attempt to offer an accurate account of middle Australia,
but a strategy by which the novel invites the reader to momentarily withdraw
identifications with the normal in the act of reading. If this is the transcendentalism
of a romantic negative capability - figured in Ezekiel eating dung out of a 'desire of
raising other men into a perception of the infinite' - it is also the basis of an ethical
radicality that gives us a Patrick White very different to the One currently mired in
debates about canonicity imd read as the emissary of a modernism resistant to the
libertarian politics of the academy.
.WORKS CITED
During, Simon. Patrick White. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1996.
Gerster, Robin. 'Gerrymander: The Place of Suburbia in Australian Fiction.' Meanjin 49.3
(Spring 1990): 565-75.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers ofHorror: an Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Rondiez. New York:
Columbia UP, 1982.
Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1992.
Lindsay, Jack. 'The Alienated Australian Intellectual.' 1963. Rp!. in Decay and Renewal:
Critical Essays on Twentieth Century Writing. Sydney: Wild and Woolley: London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1978.246-61. .
Marr, David. Patrick White: A Life. Sydney: Vintage, 1991.
Ross, Kirsten. Fast Cars. Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French
Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995.
Sibley, David. The Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West. London:
Routledge, 1995. .
Tacey, David. Patrick White: Fiction and the Unconscious. Melbonrne: Oxford UP, 1988.
White, Patrick. Patrick White Speaks. Sydney: Primavera P, 1989.
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Wilding, Michael. 'The Politics of Modernism.' Prophet From the Desert: Critical Essays on
Patrick White. Ed. John McLaren. Melbourne: Red Hill P, 1995.24-33.
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