Sterile Critics and Fecund Artists: Old themes brought up to date.

Abstract

THE VIVISECTOR, by Patrick White. Jonathan Cape, 1970. $4.70.

It is certainly the right of every artist to carve out his own world and o interpret and re-interpret his creation until he or his audience drop from exhaustion. There are many thousands of ways of saying the same thing, and inevitably anything worth saying will be expressed by someone in each one of these thousands of ways. In The Vivisector Patrick White expounds, exposes and dramatizes the themes which have formed the basis of all his prose novels, short stories and plays. These themes, as every reader knows, are simple, but capable of being experienced or understood at whatever height or depth of awareness the reader desires. 

In the first place, White tries to show that only the meek, the innocent, (but not the ignorant), and- the truly pure of heart can ever achieve a measure at contentment. A second basic theme, and one which it is easier to illustrate in fiction, since oddly enough these characters are more common in real life, is that the ecstasy of gods or of devils is the reverse side of human spiritual agony, and that the man who would realize the divinity within his human frame, the God within him, must undergo the most fearful physical and spiritual hunger and suffering. Such people, says White's corollary, will inevitably be thought insane by most of the world. A third theme, which follows the second, is that the world is inhabited by the living and the dead: on the whole, the dead are in charge, they comprise the establishment, they frame the laws of social conduct, they are the academics, and they go yakkity-yak all the time.

Very often the dead are evil, more often they are merely, embittered, unhappy, or married to a husband whom they are slowly suffocating in & variety of horrible ways condoned by suburbia, the law and the church. The living may not be identical with those in search of the God within, but at least they recognize the Searchers when they meet them in White's novels. The living are the sensitive people, with some faults and weaknesses, and usually they do not say very much. White singles out the rejects of society, and shows that really they are more vital than those around whom society appears to revolve. The stones that the builders of suburbia rejected have become the corner-stones of White's gothic temple of words.