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The Vivisector by Patrick White
4.75
The Vivisector, like much of Patrick White’s work, is a masterpiece of 20th century modernist fiction and belongs among the great works of William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad among others. However, writing about it as an Australian is difficult because the book is not only an Odyssey of magisterial proportions, but acts to illuminate core tensions within our national psyche. For reference, many Australians suffer from what is colloquially referred to as ‘the cultural cringe’; a sense that our culture is shallow and superficial, a crude imitation, lacking something intangible. White himself even coined a phrase for it: “the Great Australian Emptiness”. His work is important to me not only because he is indubitably our greatest novelist, but because it powerfully repudiates this very concept of cultural shallowness. Sadly, however, White is not a household name here despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 and, during his lifetime, he garnered far greater critical acclaim and attention in the US and Europe.
The Vivisector is epic in scope. It is at once an examination of the creative process; a psychological voyage into the mind of an extraordinarily gifted but cripplingly lonely social outcast; a study of dangerous obsession; and a sombre reflection on what it means to tell the truth whatever the cost. The title of the book is indicative of its contents, charting the life of the painter Hurtle Duffield — who some critics believe is based on Australian artist Sidney Nolan — who dispassionately dissects the world around him in search of a higher aesthetic truth. At a young age, he is effectively sold by his poor, working-class parents to a well-to-do family of Sydney’s nouveau riche. An outsider with his birth parents, he is also an outsider in the new world he enters — spurned by his hunchbacked step-sister Rhoda and awkwardly doted on by his new mother. And so begins a life of lovelessness and loneliness, striving to actualise some sort of higher artistic truth with pigment and a brush.
White propounds a profound question: does an artist’s search for truth and perfection inhibit their capacity to form functional relationships with others? In Hurtle’s case his friends and lovers are the fodder for his vivisection. They are cruelly milked as part of his creative process before being cast aside: Nancy, the lady of the night with “the chipped-lacquer look” who dies in an alcohol-drenched haze; his sister Rhoda whose deformity renders her a symbol of national pity in one of his most iconic paintings; Hero Pavloussi, his Greek mistress with an “accent of languid cloves” and “eyes of saints painted on wood” who is driven to suicide by his capricious behaviour. Hurtle is complicit in the demise — and sometimes the death — of his loved ones. Does that make him murderer? For White, there is no clear-cut answer.
Hurtle seeks to erase “the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality”. He views his task as a sacred one. Painting for him not just a vocation or even a dangerous obsession, but the entire raison d’être of his being. The goal of his life — and perhaps that of anyone involved in a creative endeavour — is to answer the ultimate question which he scrawls on the dunny wall: “God the Vivisector/God the Artist/God…”. His life’s seminal paintings come close to the truth though it remains agonisingly opaque. He constructs the bleeding fragments of reality into something new and this is the very essence of any great art. In putting this process into words, White taps into something truly existential. Humans create things — art, music, literature etc. — because it helps us make sense of the world around us and cope with the nagging questions which linger for all of us: why are we here and what is the point?
Stylistically, it is difficult to do this book justice. If literature can be impressionistic, then then this is it. Characters and landscapes are the sum of individual methodical brush strokes, built consciously with meticulous intention. Particularly striking is his stunning descriptions of character’s eyes. For instance, his spiritual child, Kathy Volkov, whose eyes exude “the explosive violence of splintering ice” and those of a group of bedraggled pilgrims on a Greek island which “glow with that suggestion of phosphorescence which emanates from a swamp at night”. While the following passage is the most evocative, accurate description of the Australian bush I have ever encountered:
The bush never died, it seemed, though regular torture by fire and drought might bring it to the verge of death. Its limbs were soon putting on ghostly flesh: of hopeful green, as opposed to the ash-tones of disillusioned maturity: the most deformed and havocked shrubs were sharpening lance and spike against the future.
This is prose of eye-watering quality. Free-form poetry which is not just comprehended, but felt. Critically, the greatest stylistic achievement of the book is that it makes readers complicit. The title, The Vivisector, is apt because, as readers, this is what we become. We dissect Hurtle and his flaws in the very way he does to those around him. This is a formidably impressive technical achievement which places the novel among the highest echelons of modernist masterpieces. It is all the more impressive as it only dawns on us that we are taking the scalpel to Hurtle as he begins to develop granules of self-awareness towards the very end of the book:
If I’ve learnt anything of importance, it was you who taught me, and I thank you for it. […] It was you who taught me how to see, to be, to know instinctively. When I used to come to your house in Flint Street, melting with excitement and terror, wondering whether I would dare go through with it again, or whether I would turn to wood, or dough, or say something so stupid and tactless you would chuck me out into the street, it wasn’t simply thought of the delicious kisses and all the other lovely play which forced the courage in me. It was the paintings I used to look at sideways whenever I got a chance. I wouldn’t have let on, because I was afraid you might have been amused, and made me talk about them, and been even more amused when I couldn’t discuss them at your level. But I was drinking them in through the pores of my skin. There was an occasion when I even dared touch one or two of the paintings as I left, because I had to know what they felt like, and however close and exciting it had been to embrace with our bodies, it was a more truly consummating love-shock to touch those stony surfaces and suddenly glide with my straying fingers into what seemed like endless still water.
Read this, I implore you. It may be a challenge for some — after all, Australianisms abound throughout — but, as one critic put it, The Vivisector is “the most convincing of all fictional attempts to capture the magic-lantern sensibility of a great visual artist”.
The Vivisector is epic in scope. It is at once an examination of the creative process; a psychological voyage into the mind of an extraordinarily gifted but cripplingly lonely social outcast; a study of dangerous obsession; and a sombre reflection on what it means to tell the truth whatever the cost. The title of the book is indicative of its contents, charting the life of the painter Hurtle Duffield — who some critics believe is based on Australian artist Sidney Nolan — who dispassionately dissects the world around him in search of a higher aesthetic truth. At a young age, he is effectively sold by his poor, working-class parents to a well-to-do family of Sydney’s nouveau riche. An outsider with his birth parents, he is also an outsider in the new world he enters — spurned by his hunchbacked step-sister Rhoda and awkwardly doted on by his new mother. And so begins a life of lovelessness and loneliness, striving to actualise some sort of higher artistic truth with pigment and a brush.
White propounds a profound question: does an artist’s search for truth and perfection inhibit their capacity to form functional relationships with others? In Hurtle’s case his friends and lovers are the fodder for his vivisection. They are cruelly milked as part of his creative process before being cast aside: Nancy, the lady of the night with “the chipped-lacquer look” who dies in an alcohol-drenched haze; his sister Rhoda whose deformity renders her a symbol of national pity in one of his most iconic paintings; Hero Pavloussi, his Greek mistress with an “accent of languid cloves” and “eyes of saints painted on wood” who is driven to suicide by his capricious behaviour. Hurtle is complicit in the demise — and sometimes the death — of his loved ones. Does that make him murderer? For White, there is no clear-cut answer.
Hurtle seeks to erase “the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality”. He views his task as a sacred one. Painting for him not just a vocation or even a dangerous obsession, but the entire raison d’être of his being. The goal of his life — and perhaps that of anyone involved in a creative endeavour — is to answer the ultimate question which he scrawls on the dunny wall: “God the Vivisector/God the Artist/God…”. His life’s seminal paintings come close to the truth though it remains agonisingly opaque. He constructs the bleeding fragments of reality into something new and this is the very essence of any great art. In putting this process into words, White taps into something truly existential. Humans create things — art, music, literature etc. — because it helps us make sense of the world around us and cope with the nagging questions which linger for all of us: why are we here and what is the point?
Stylistically, it is difficult to do this book justice. If literature can be impressionistic, then then this is it. Characters and landscapes are the sum of individual methodical brush strokes, built consciously with meticulous intention. Particularly striking is his stunning descriptions of character’s eyes. For instance, his spiritual child, Kathy Volkov, whose eyes exude “the explosive violence of splintering ice” and those of a group of bedraggled pilgrims on a Greek island which “glow with that suggestion of phosphorescence which emanates from a swamp at night”. While the following passage is the most evocative, accurate description of the Australian bush I have ever encountered:
The bush never died, it seemed, though regular torture by fire and drought might bring it to the verge of death. Its limbs were soon putting on ghostly flesh: of hopeful green, as opposed to the ash-tones of disillusioned maturity: the most deformed and havocked shrubs were sharpening lance and spike against the future.
This is prose of eye-watering quality. Free-form poetry which is not just comprehended, but felt. Critically, the greatest stylistic achievement of the book is that it makes readers complicit. The title, The Vivisector, is apt because, as readers, this is what we become. We dissect Hurtle and his flaws in the very way he does to those around him. This is a formidably impressive technical achievement which places the novel among the highest echelons of modernist masterpieces. It is all the more impressive as it only dawns on us that we are taking the scalpel to Hurtle as he begins to develop granules of self-awareness towards the very end of the book:
If I’ve learnt anything of importance, it was you who taught me, and I thank you for it. […] It was you who taught me how to see, to be, to know instinctively. When I used to come to your house in Flint Street, melting with excitement and terror, wondering whether I would dare go through with it again, or whether I would turn to wood, or dough, or say something so stupid and tactless you would chuck me out into the street, it wasn’t simply thought of the delicious kisses and all the other lovely play which forced the courage in me. It was the paintings I used to look at sideways whenever I got a chance. I wouldn’t have let on, because I was afraid you might have been amused, and made me talk about them, and been even more amused when I couldn’t discuss them at your level. But I was drinking them in through the pores of my skin. There was an occasion when I even dared touch one or two of the paintings as I left, because I had to know what they felt like, and however close and exciting it had been to embrace with our bodies, it was a more truly consummating love-shock to touch those stony surfaces and suddenly glide with my straying fingers into what seemed like endless still water.
Read this, I implore you. It may be a challenge for some — after all, Australianisms abound throughout — but, as one critic put it, The Vivisector is “the most convincing of all fictional attempts to capture the magic-lantern sensibility of a great visual artist”.
The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić
5.0
It is with great joy and not a little trepidation that I come to reviewing a book I genuinely cherish: Ivo Andrić's The Bridge on the Drina. Today, Andrić is little discussed compared to the mid-20th century where his work met near universal acclaim. As an author, he possessed not only perspicacity and a startlingly beautiful style of prose, but a sweeping sense of history and chilling prophetic power.
Born in present-day Bosnia and a Yugoslav citizen for most of his life, today he is primarily associated with Serbian culture and literature. However, his own complex biography - born to Catholic Croat parents in Eastern Bosnia, but coming to identify with Serbia and reside in Belgrade - reflects the status of the Balkans as an ethno-cultural melting pot. Andrić himself is a fascinating character. He was the only Nobel laureate and perhaps the only man to be personally acquainted with both Gavrilo Princip and Adolf Hitler. In the interwar period, he became a diplomat of international standing who negotiated treaties at the highest level, winning the esteem of both Hermann Goering and future Yugoslav leader Josef Broz Tito. The story of the book's conception is itself remarkable as Andrić wrote it while locked in his house in the centre of Belgrade as war raged around him and the city was subjected to constant bombing raids. He emerged with three manuscripts all of which are superb. Of these, however, The Bridge on the Drina stood apart as his magnum opus.
The Bridge on the Drina is a work that defies easy categorisation. It is not a novel in the conventional sense. Instead, it is a chronicle of sorts. A succession of loosely connected vignettes unified by a single golden thread: the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge which crosses the River Drina at the town of Višegrad. Andrić eschews the typical conventions and form of the novel and opts for something else entirely. He weaves a sort of vast, incohate tapestry which taps into the very rhythms of life in Višegrad over the centuries. The result is something subterranean, something which taps into the very channels of history itself, as civilisations rise and fall yet life, when stripped down to its bare essence, remains much the same. Ever the discerning observer, Andrić's prose has a certain gravitas about it, infused with the wisdom of myth and legend and a thousand lives well-lived.
At the centre of all this sits the Bridge: a structure of striking beauty which is as close a thing to a protagonist as the book has. The early chapters detail its construction as a bequest of Mehmed Paša who was taken from Višegrad as a boy to serve the Ottoman Empire and climbed to the very highest echelons of power. Constructing the Bridge is a Herculean task, but one which transforms the fate of a community. It will become a Bridge on which "destiny is woven". Višegrad will become a centre of commerce. It will bring great opportunity, but also great change:
Even the least of the townsman felt as if his powers were suddenly multiplied, as if some wonderful, superhuman exploit was brought within the measure of his powers and within the limits of everyday life, as if besides the well-known elements of earth, water, and sky, one more were open to him, as if by some beneficent effort each one of them could suddenly realise one of his dearest desires, the ancient dream of man - to go over water and to be master of space.
Of course, on a symbolic level the Bridge itself is a metonym for Yugoslavia: the bridge between East and West. Both figuratively and literally, the Bridge is a meeting place, a cauldron of cultural exchange. It's construction ties a community together and its destruction will rip it apart. The centre of the bridge is the site of passionate assignation, bitter confrontation, zealous debate, and grim execution. The Bridge bears witness to changing habits and customs, to receding Ottoman power and growing Habsburg might. It seems to be the one fixed point, the concrete symbol of certitude that life will go on. But perhaps even that is illusory. After all, Andrić was a grim prophet and foresaw the tragic fate which would befall Bosnia in 1990s. Modernity, to him, was a double-edged sword. With material gains, came intangible losses and a growing sense of jeopardy. Alihodja, Andrić's most astute observer, offers readers a chilling observation following the arrival of rail services: "the time will come when the Schwabes will make you ride where you don't want to go and where you never even dreamt of going". This is Andrić at his most formidable, tapping into the very currents of history.
However, The Bridge on the Drina is not pessmistic, it is a work of great joy. Andrić paints portraits of us at our most human. Our fits of irrationality aren't derisively ridiculed, but empathetically acknowledged. Seemingly insignificant individuals such as One-Eyed Ćorkan the "dishevelled" drunk and Radislav of Užice who is impaled by the Ottomans for resisting the Bridge's construction enter the town's mytholgical canon. Andrić redeems them and makes the ordinary extraordinary. This is a book about the hazy and intense realm of human passions against the backdrop of history's slow grind. The struggles of generations and even time itself seems to merge at various points. In doing so, Andrić offers us ambiguity, but of a satisfying sort. Much changes, but stays the same. We will always have our foibles, our behaviour, after all, will remain very human and very flawed:
This generation was richer only in illusions; in every other way it was similar to any other. It had the feeling of both lighting the fires of a new civilization and extinguishing the last flickers of another. Everything appeared as an exciting new game on that ancient bridge, which shone in the moonlight of those July nights, clean, young and unalterable, strong and lovely in its perfection, stronger than all that time might bring and man imagine or do.
Above all, this book is a meditation on change and history. It tries to make sense of the theme on which Andrić was most hung-up: the sense of misery and loss which is inherent in the passing of time. Change brings with it anxiety and uncertainty. We have an "eternal desire" to "forsee the action of natural forces", "to avoid or surmount them". This is our instinct, but it is also a curse. It means we must know our history. To understand ourselves, to have an identity, we must know what came before us. For Andrić, to know history is to overcome. Events have a certain cyclicality. Here, he brings to mind a remark made by Eugene O'Neill: "there is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again - now". Though it is a story much inspired by centuries old tales, Andrić is asking an urgent question: how much have we really changed?
Stylistically, this work is masterful and extremely distinctive, evoking the delicately balanced nature of Conradian prose. His capacity for describing the natural world is of the highest calibre and he conjures up images of an exotic town surrounded by verdant forests and craggy mountains with markets full of the humdrum of commerce, the scent of cinnamon and cardamom, and the smouldering glow of the languid afternoon sun. His is lyricism distilled, echanting prose which hits you at your very core as shown below:
Always the same black pain which cut into his breast with that special childhood pang which was clearly distinguishable from all of the other pains that life had brought him. In one of those moments, he thought that he might be able to free himself from this discomfort if he could do away with that ferry on the distant Drina and bridge the steep banks and evil water between them, join the two ends of the road which was broken by the Drina and thus link safely and forever Bosnia and the East, the place of his origin & the places of his life. Thus, it was he who first, in a single moment behind closed eyelids, saw the graceful silhouette of the great stone bridge which was to be built there.
This book is, in the words of one critic, a work of "broad experience, rare intution, and philosophical breadth". In my humble, opinion it is an unmissable literary odyssey. Hopefully, some of you will jump aboard.
Born in present-day Bosnia and a Yugoslav citizen for most of his life, today he is primarily associated with Serbian culture and literature. However, his own complex biography - born to Catholic Croat parents in Eastern Bosnia, but coming to identify with Serbia and reside in Belgrade - reflects the status of the Balkans as an ethno-cultural melting pot. Andrić himself is a fascinating character. He was the only Nobel laureate and perhaps the only man to be personally acquainted with both Gavrilo Princip and Adolf Hitler. In the interwar period, he became a diplomat of international standing who negotiated treaties at the highest level, winning the esteem of both Hermann Goering and future Yugoslav leader Josef Broz Tito. The story of the book's conception is itself remarkable as Andrić wrote it while locked in his house in the centre of Belgrade as war raged around him and the city was subjected to constant bombing raids. He emerged with three manuscripts all of which are superb. Of these, however, The Bridge on the Drina stood apart as his magnum opus.
The Bridge on the Drina is a work that defies easy categorisation. It is not a novel in the conventional sense. Instead, it is a chronicle of sorts. A succession of loosely connected vignettes unified by a single golden thread: the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge which crosses the River Drina at the town of Višegrad. Andrić eschews the typical conventions and form of the novel and opts for something else entirely. He weaves a sort of vast, incohate tapestry which taps into the very rhythms of life in Višegrad over the centuries. The result is something subterranean, something which taps into the very channels of history itself, as civilisations rise and fall yet life, when stripped down to its bare essence, remains much the same. Ever the discerning observer, Andrić's prose has a certain gravitas about it, infused with the wisdom of myth and legend and a thousand lives well-lived.
At the centre of all this sits the Bridge: a structure of striking beauty which is as close a thing to a protagonist as the book has. The early chapters detail its construction as a bequest of Mehmed Paša who was taken from Višegrad as a boy to serve the Ottoman Empire and climbed to the very highest echelons of power. Constructing the Bridge is a Herculean task, but one which transforms the fate of a community. It will become a Bridge on which "destiny is woven". Višegrad will become a centre of commerce. It will bring great opportunity, but also great change:
Even the least of the townsman felt as if his powers were suddenly multiplied, as if some wonderful, superhuman exploit was brought within the measure of his powers and within the limits of everyday life, as if besides the well-known elements of earth, water, and sky, one more were open to him, as if by some beneficent effort each one of them could suddenly realise one of his dearest desires, the ancient dream of man - to go over water and to be master of space.
Of course, on a symbolic level the Bridge itself is a metonym for Yugoslavia: the bridge between East and West. Both figuratively and literally, the Bridge is a meeting place, a cauldron of cultural exchange. It's construction ties a community together and its destruction will rip it apart. The centre of the bridge is the site of passionate assignation, bitter confrontation, zealous debate, and grim execution. The Bridge bears witness to changing habits and customs, to receding Ottoman power and growing Habsburg might. It seems to be the one fixed point, the concrete symbol of certitude that life will go on. But perhaps even that is illusory. After all, Andrić was a grim prophet and foresaw the tragic fate which would befall Bosnia in 1990s. Modernity, to him, was a double-edged sword. With material gains, came intangible losses and a growing sense of jeopardy. Alihodja, Andrić's most astute observer, offers readers a chilling observation following the arrival of rail services: "the time will come when the Schwabes will make you ride where you don't want to go and where you never even dreamt of going". This is Andrić at his most formidable, tapping into the very currents of history.
However, The Bridge on the Drina is not pessmistic, it is a work of great joy. Andrić paints portraits of us at our most human. Our fits of irrationality aren't derisively ridiculed, but empathetically acknowledged. Seemingly insignificant individuals such as One-Eyed Ćorkan the "dishevelled" drunk and Radislav of Užice who is impaled by the Ottomans for resisting the Bridge's construction enter the town's mytholgical canon. Andrić redeems them and makes the ordinary extraordinary. This is a book about the hazy and intense realm of human passions against the backdrop of history's slow grind. The struggles of generations and even time itself seems to merge at various points. In doing so, Andrić offers us ambiguity, but of a satisfying sort. Much changes, but stays the same. We will always have our foibles, our behaviour, after all, will remain very human and very flawed:
This generation was richer only in illusions; in every other way it was similar to any other. It had the feeling of both lighting the fires of a new civilization and extinguishing the last flickers of another. Everything appeared as an exciting new game on that ancient bridge, which shone in the moonlight of those July nights, clean, young and unalterable, strong and lovely in its perfection, stronger than all that time might bring and man imagine or do.
Above all, this book is a meditation on change and history. It tries to make sense of the theme on which Andrić was most hung-up: the sense of misery and loss which is inherent in the passing of time. Change brings with it anxiety and uncertainty. We have an "eternal desire" to "forsee the action of natural forces", "to avoid or surmount them". This is our instinct, but it is also a curse. It means we must know our history. To understand ourselves, to have an identity, we must know what came before us. For Andrić, to know history is to overcome. Events have a certain cyclicality. Here, he brings to mind a remark made by Eugene O'Neill: "there is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again - now". Though it is a story much inspired by centuries old tales, Andrić is asking an urgent question: how much have we really changed?
Stylistically, this work is masterful and extremely distinctive, evoking the delicately balanced nature of Conradian prose. His capacity for describing the natural world is of the highest calibre and he conjures up images of an exotic town surrounded by verdant forests and craggy mountains with markets full of the humdrum of commerce, the scent of cinnamon and cardamom, and the smouldering glow of the languid afternoon sun. His is lyricism distilled, echanting prose which hits you at your very core as shown below:
Always the same black pain which cut into his breast with that special childhood pang which was clearly distinguishable from all of the other pains that life had brought him. In one of those moments, he thought that he might be able to free himself from this discomfort if he could do away with that ferry on the distant Drina and bridge the steep banks and evil water between them, join the two ends of the road which was broken by the Drina and thus link safely and forever Bosnia and the East, the place of his origin & the places of his life. Thus, it was he who first, in a single moment behind closed eyelids, saw the graceful silhouette of the great stone bridge which was to be built there.
This book is, in the words of one critic, a work of "broad experience, rare intution, and philosophical breadth". In my humble, opinion it is an unmissable literary odyssey. Hopefully, some of you will jump aboard.