Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Miscellaneous frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Writing Patrimony: The Son's Book of the Father as a Sub-genre
- Part I Challenging Authority
- Chapter One ‘The Paradigm Case’: Contesting the Father in Edmund Gosse's Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments
- Chapter Two ‘An Indubitable Australian’: Renouncing the Father in Hal Porter's The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony
- Part II Memorialising Self-Denial
- Part III Performing Masculinity
- Conclusion: The Turn to the Father in Autobiography
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Two - ‘An Indubitable Australian’: Renouncing the Father in Hal Porter's The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony
from Part I - Challenging Authority
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Miscellaneous frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Writing Patrimony: The Son's Book of the Father as a Sub-genre
- Part I Challenging Authority
- Chapter One ‘The Paradigm Case’: Contesting the Father in Edmund Gosse's Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments
- Chapter Two ‘An Indubitable Australian’: Renouncing the Father in Hal Porter's The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony
- Part II Memorialising Self-Denial
- Part III Performing Masculinity
- Conclusion: The Turn to the Father in Autobiography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular.
—Robert Frost, ‘Paris Review Interview’We can never again speak of ‘Australian Masculinity’; there are multiple masculinities on the continent.
—R. W. Connell, ‘Australian Masculinities’Determined thereto, perhaps by his father's ghost,
Permitting nothing to the evening's edge.
The father does not come to adorn the chant.
One father proclaims another, the patriarchs
Of truth…
—Wallace Stevens, ‘The Role of the Idea in Poetry’The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony would seem to have little in common with the complex narrative of patrimony of Father and Son. Hal Porter's father, ‘an unfurnished man’ (93), remains a shadowy and indistinct presence for the entirety of Porter's early life story, while it is Porter's mother, and significantly her death, which provides the autobiography's narrative structure. She features so prominently in the text that Porter calls his autobiography ‘my mother's biography’ (62). It could equally be described as a matriography, and might have been fittingly called Mother and Son, though fortunately Porter left this title available for later use. However, as with Father and Son, Porter's text is centrally about the act of renouncing the father in order to assert an authorial identity. In this way, The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony has much in common with another Son's Book of the Mother: Augustine's Confessions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Australian PatriographyHow Sons Write Fathers in Contemporary Life Writing, pp. 39 - 58Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013