The theatre of transcendence : Patrick White's last four novels

White's fiction is a writing under pressure from the twin claims of being and becoming. In his earlier novels, for example The Tree of Man, the essential and absolute structures of being emerge as the ultimate ground of existence. White was always concerned with the flow of existence, and in particular, with the question of identity. The question White particularly wrestles with is whether identity is reducible to the unchanging forms of being, or whether it is given over to the flux of existence. White's project became, in part, an attempt to find a trope which would contain, without reconciling, the dual claims of being and becoming. In his last four novels, The Eye of the Storm, A Fringe of Leaves, The Twyborn Affair, and Memoirs of Many in One, the theatrical emerges as a structure which contains within its form both being and becoming. The theatrical presents a structure which consists of an enclosing form in which an action —a becoming—unfolds. The enclosing form appropriates being to its structure, while the action appropriates becoming. The theatrical thus operates as a metaphor of the reconciliation of the absolute and the contingent. It is the theatrical, emerging ever more clearly in White's last four novels, which determines the ultimately ungrounded quality which they exhibit, and which denies any seeing of the ultimate. The theatrical elements do not reflect any falling away of White's powers as a writer, on the contrary, they signal a solution to the problem which he wrestled with throughout his career: of holding together within a fictional structure the antithetical claims of being and becoming. This shifts White's fiction away from the modernist attempt to lay hold of the ultimate and unchanging, and towards those concerns with existence as such which might be characterised as post-modernist. In order to justify this view of White's fiction, those philosophers who have contested the notion that mind and language can reach the absolute—in particular Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida—will be appealed to