The Queer Novels of Patrick White

Abstract

This thesis argues that the representation of sexuality in the novels of Patrick White articulates and performs a queer politics of critique that resists the trope of identity. If the extant body of White scholarship has struggled to make sense of the sexual dimensions of White’s texts, this thesis argues that this is because the sexual politics that White articulates are inherently ambiguous: the closeted aesthetic that White deploys articulates a crisis of representation that is central to White’s queer politics of critique. The failure of White’s prose to fully circumscribe meaning performs a radical deconstruction of identity that disrupts the basis of the political itself. This thesis argues that White’s texts stimulate the gaps, the silences and the ambiguities inherent in the process of signification in order to problematize any narrative of knowable and legible sexual identities. Even in his later texts, where sexuality is thematised more freely and openly, White’s texts still refuse to cohere around a comfortably stable gay identity, emphasising instead the failures and ambiguities that attend any attempt to represent the process of coming out. White’s overt representations of sexuality emerge as a textual performance of jouissance, as the disruption of, rather than expression of, his character’s true identities. In addition to his closeted aesthetic then, this thesis argues that it is in White’s camp sensibility that we might understand the queer politics that inform his texts: the playfulness, the arch humour, and the wit of White’s prose all attest to a critically queer cultural project that is conceived in opposition to the stable referents of politics and identity. The political White that emerges from this thesis is somewhat different to the one with which most critics of White’s texts would be familiar. While White’s status as a social and political activist is well known, it is equally well known that this activism did not extend to the politics of sexuality. This thesis argues that if, or perhaps even because, White opposed the gay rights movement, it is his literary texts that are the site of a queer project that is resolutely opposed to identity politics. White rarely if ever spoke up about the politics of sexuality in his public speeches arguably because his queer project is conceived in opposition to the identity politics that subtends grassroots political activism. White’s opposition to identity politics is expressed – can perhaps only be expressed – as a literary and aesthetic project that stands at a remove from street demonstrations and practical politicking. Queer theory, as a tool of literary analysis, helps us then to articulate a facet of White’s cultural politics that would otherwise remain hidden behind the very public portrait of White the activist. Show more