Patrick White: Creating “a Race Possessed with Understanding”

Abstract

Patrick White is Australia's only Nobel Prize‐winning novelist. He affirmed the central concern of his writing to be “the relationship between the blundering human being and God.” This concern having been born of an epiphanic experience, he felt obliged to communicate this to the world. He returned to his native Australia seeking a source of renewal after the carnage of World War II, which he felt had reduced Europe to the state of “an actual and spiritual graveyard.” Returning to writing with a new faith, he designed a literary strategy to counter the secular modern mindset that disdains the religious experience, invoking a “poetic” language and a network of images and symbols through which the experience of transcendence could be mediated to readers. His work resonated early with a world readership, though his countrymen were slower to respond. Today he remains an iconic figure on the literary landscape of Australia as well as the world.