Politics and Patrick White: Cold War Culture and the Paranoid Subject in The Aunt’s Story
Critics have predominantly read Patrick White as a high modernist writer whose metaphysical concerns seek to transcend the histories and economies of everyday life. The effect of such a reading is a resulting tendency towards neglect regarding White’s engagement with the political and his talent for the satirical. In this paper I propose a new mode of reading White’s work that integrates approaches provided by political studies, through a focus on White’s relationship to Cold War culture and themes of materiality, surveillance technology and paranoia. This paper seeks to refute the binary generated by quarantined understandings within literary studies that neglect White’s political engagements, in order to propose relatively unexplored connections and original arguments that are generated by this broader and dialogic critical frame.
This paper scrutinizes new connections that emerge when White’s work is viewed through three usually discrete critical approaches, each of which I argue simultaneously invigorates and enables the other. I will first chart the history of the conflict between literary and cultural studies and their respective positions in reading White, exploring the reasons behind the varying trends that led to a negation of White’s socio-political commentary. Secondly, I will assess the transnational links between White’s work and American writing via an analysis of The Aunt’s Story (1948) in its relation to Cold War culture and propose what this connection means for Australian studies. Finally I investigate these two approaches via a discussion of themes of materiality, paranoia and subjectivity within White, united by the co-productive aims of subject-object relations theory and ‘thing theory’. This approach promises to identify new dynamisms in White’s fiction and demonstrate how his work continues to attract modern readers through its political vitality, radicalism and its relevancy.