Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-8zxtt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-08T15:17:10.723Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 10 - ‘Time and Its Fellow Conspirator Space’: Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves

from Part III - THE PERFORMANCE OF READING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2018

Brigid Rooney
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in the Australian Literature Program in the Department of English at the University of Sydney.
Ian Henderson
Affiliation:
King's College London
Anouk Lang
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Get access

Summary

If, as some say, timing is everything, the temporal rhythm of Patrick White's drafting of A Fringe of Leaves (1976) – in two bursts more than a decade apart (1961 and 1975) – must have had a bearing on its curiously doubled temporalities, its thickening and interleaving of past, present and future. Events in White's life at the time of drafting may also have contributed to the studied theatricality of its recurring settings, or chronotopes: of boat, shipwreck, island, church and forest clearing. Mikhail Bakhtin provides a painterly description of the literary-artistic chronotope:

… spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.

While this applies to any novel, it resonates with White's fictional vision in particular ways. In Riders in the Chariot (1961), for example, there is a telling description of Alf Dubbo's painting, ‘The Chariot Thing’ in which artistic illusion – standing for fictional fabrication – affords an unlikely access to truth. When viewed from an angle the painting fleetingly achieves an optical illusion, ‘a reversal of the relationship between permanence and motion’, in which the banks of the river seem to move, while the river lies still: ‘So he encouraged an illusion which was also a truth, and from which the timid might retreat simply by changing their position.’

While the irreversible flow of the river allegorizes phenomenal time, the painting's optical inversion – the solid riverbank flowing against the fixity of the river – allegorizes the literary-artistic project itself. Art suspends and thickens time, and liquefies place. All that is solid melts, and all that melts solidifies. There is a cryptic quality to White's chronotopic imagery. It promises without quite revealing truths. Or more precisely, it dwells on an infinite deferral between promise and revelation. A spatio-temporal reversal is effected by the optics of the image from the standpoint of the viewer. By implicating spectator and spectacle, White's vignette of Dubbo's painting also evokes the agonistic theatre of public appearing; it reverberates with self-consciousness about its own image production.

Type
Chapter
Information
Patrick White Beyond the Grave
New Critical Perspectives
, pp. 163 - 178
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×