The Vivisector (1970) by Patrick White


The Vivisector (1970) by Patrick White

This is another Penguin Classics book I found randomly on the “free-table” at work, and it turned out to be one of the most uncomfortable novels I’ve ever read. The Vivisector details the life of an Australian painter, Hurtle Duffield, from his childhood, adopted from poverty into a wealthy family as a prodigy-to-be, through his old age as an acclaimed artist, and ultimately (presumably) to his death by a severe stroke.

What’s most striking about White’s novel is that he writes everything as Hurtle sees it - that is, through the eyes of a savant artist. So the reader parses Hurtle’s story not through concrete details so much as the artistic impressions and creative emotions that “paint” them. Hurtle struggles his whole life to commit these impressions to canvas - garnering critical success but not personal solace. He is endlessly troubled, and fails in most all interpersonal relationships from his inability to connect on a human level. Hurtle’s concern is not with rudimentary connection, with communicating truth - at least as he sees and experiences it - however distasteful or vulgar it may be. And many of his works truly are vulgar, albeit honest in Hurtle’s eyes.

White shapes a bleak world through Hurtle’s grasps at truth - and nearly all of his characters add a different flavor of cynicism to it, in spite of their common willingness to endure and trudge on. Yet ultimately, Hurtle finds an ironic strength in connection with the similarly afflicted souls in his life, whose mark in pursuit of some higher truth is, as he sees it, a victory trail of thorns rather than flowers.

There are several perverse aspects of this book that I’d rather not dive into, but one note worth indulging is how fantastically creative White’s writing is. Whenever Hurtle is overstimulated, the reader is strung along run-on sentences of flurrying detail, only as marginally coherent as an excitable brain's ideas really are. And similarly, after Hurtle suffers his stroke, White writes in slurred speech, with miscommunicated names and places to poignantly reflect Hurtle’s affected state.

Surprisingly enough - for a book that tackles art as a creative outlet to express both the beautiful and foul truths of a complicated world, The Vivisector seems to warn against being consumed by such an outlet, that we don’t fail to openly and graciously connect to the same world we’re expressing, and the other flawed but generous people inside it.

 

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