Disturbing Suburbia Rediscovering the Su

Disturbing Suburbia Rediscovering the Subject in Patrick White’s Down at the Dump and The Night the Prowler. by Amy Ireland

It is in the purchase and delivery of a new waxed wood console-radio with an inbuilt record-player and compact cocktail-cabinet including a coloured cut-glass set for twelve that David Meredith, in My Brother Jack, comes to realise the true nature of his suburban existence.1 ‘I hated it from the moment it was delivered to our house’, he declares ‘although I had thoroughly approved of it at the beginning and had signed the time-payment agreement without a qualm’.2 David meditates on the notion that the radio’s power is completely divorced from utility, and that rather, it belongs to ‘this awful fetish of respectability’ which defines the landscape of polished cars and immaculate flowerbeds that he perceives all around him, giving him cause to lament ‘that there had been more things of true value in the shabby house called Avalon, from which I had fled, than there ever would be, or could be, in this villa in Beverly Grove’.3 David’s loathing of the radio, which consequently extends to his surroundings, coincides with his recognition of it as a sign, a condition from which even he himself is not immune: ‘Meredith, Bachelor of Deserts, Doctor of Sterile Studies, Master of the Empty Soul’.4 The suburban estate in which he finds his life entrenched gradually appears to him as the perpetrator of a heavily codified, insubstantial existence based on the ritual accumulation and maintenance of suburban signifiers: cars, gardens, lawns, lobelia, Cutty Sark waste-paper baskets, prints of ‘the right modern paintings,’ coloured pickled onions, Feltex, and waxed wood cocktailcabinet radio consoles.5 Furthermore, it is an existence defined by an unrelenting exteriority that represses any troubling elements, or relocates them to an imperceptible interior, ‘behind the blind neat concealment of their thin red-brick walls,’ in order that the code of representation not be disturbed.6 1 George Johnston, My Brother Jack (Sydney: Collins, 1964). Ibid., 284. 3 Ibid., 286. 4 Ibid., 287. 5 David takes his frustration out on the Cutty Sark waste-paper basket when he ‘rearranges’ his study; the right modern paintings, namely ‘the Van Gogh chair and his cypresses, a Matisse odalisque, that Braque which is so suitable for modern kitchens, and the Cézanne apples.’ Ibid., 280, 251, see also 256, 276, 284. 6 ‘…hedges were clipped and lawns trimmed and beds weeded, and the lobelia and the mignonette were tidy in their borders, and the people would see that these things were so no matter what desolation or anxiety or fear was in their hearts, or what spiritless endeavours or connubial treacheries were practised behind the blind neat concealment of their thin red-brick walls’. Ibid., 285. 2

David’s symbolic purchase of a sugar-gum for his garden reveals the extent to which notions of propriety and the cultivation of nature are codified within the representational identity of the suburb. Whereas a ‘camellia,’ a ‘hibiscus, or gardenia, even a good well-developed double-fuchsia,’ a ‘decorative cypress,’ a ‘mock-orange,’ or ‘one of those Japanese dwarf-maples,’ are considered acceptable embellishments of the neighbourhood, a sugar-gum, ‘a proper tree,’ is not.7 As he had remarked optimistically (and not without a note of dramatic irony) upon signing the lease for his new house, freedom in Beverly Gardens takes the form of a series of permutations of pre-designated options.8 David desires the sugar-gum for two reasons: it is a prohibited object, and, unlike the surface-oriented, history-less space he inhabits, it has roots – long ones.9 Climbing onto his roof to install the radio’s antenna, he struggles hopelessly to find some feature that might allude to the original, natural landscape behind the regulated layout of the lots of the estate as it was ‘before Bernie Rothenstein came in with his bulldozers and graders and grubbed out all the trees and flattened everything out so that subdivision pegs could be hammered in and his lorries could move about without hindrance’.10 The nostalgic, pastoral images he conjures of crests crowned with blue-gums and stringybarks, of slopes of brown bracken, and rabbit squats ‘where they would have hopped about at dusk, flickering the pale cotton tufts of their tails,’ only serve to highlight the absence of history.11 The vision he accesses from atop his house – a cartographer’s viewpoint – gives him no reason to believe that such things ever existed at all, there is no trace of roots, no mark of history, even the natural hills and depressions of the landscape have been ironed out. 7 Ibid., 289, 291. ‘…and although only three basic ground-plans were used for all the hundreds of houses in the sub-division, there were still no two houses in any one street, grove, crescent, drive, or avenue which could be said to really look alike. Each front elevation had its own distinct difference, in the design of the porch, the placement of the picture window, the run of the paths and whether plain or “crazy,” the position of the drive, the design of the chimney, the style of the front door, and so on, and even further permutations were possible, because there were three distinct ways in which the roofs of flat terracotta tiles could be pitched. Ibid., 250-251. 9 ‘Oh, I reckon you could get a tree say thirty-foot high or so within a couple of years if you gave her a bit of encouragement early. Maybe even up to forty foot if the spread’s there for the roots,’ advises Mr Goodenough, the nurseryman, and it is, as David had hoped, these roots that quite literally tear the very material of Beverly Gardens to pieces. Helen chastises David for his purchase: ‘“Mr. Treadwell from next door… insists you’ll have to dig it out. The roots are getting in under the cement of his drive”. Ibid., 290, 294. 10 Ibid., 288. 11 Ibid., 287. 8

It is as if the suburb had no origin, as if the land somehow grew out of ‘Beverly Gardens’ rather than Beverly Gardens being built upon the land: …there was nothing all around me, as far as I could see, but a plain of dull red rooftops in their three forms of pitching and closer to hand the green squares and rectangles of lawns intersected by ribbons of asphalt and cement, and I counted nine cars out in Beverley Grove being washed and polished […] I stared around over the whole of the sterile desolation, and I realised with a start of panic that I had got myself into the middle of this red and arid desert, and there was nobody to bring me water.12 What David perceives is a map that has somehow preceded the territory it professes to depict. Jean Baudrillard, in ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ (from Simulacra and Simulations), undertakes to illustrate the upending of the traditional nature/culture relation in which nature precedes culture (or a referent precedes its sign), in order to explain the theory of the precession of simulacra which, he contends, characterises modern existence.13 To this end, he borrows an image of map-drawing from a story by Jorges Luis Borges in which the cartographers of an ancient empire draw up a map so incredibly detailed that it covers exactly the territory it charts. Over time, the map disintegrates and the land beneath it shows through, leaving only traces of the map, discernable here and there in its deserts. In Borges’ story, the map is a model generated from the reality of the empire’s territory, an articulation of the traditional precession of culture by nature: the map is a sign generated by the pre-existence of its referent. Baudrillard then to inverts Borges’ tale: Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a 12 Ibid., 284-285, 286. Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B Leitch (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2001). 13

real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory… it is the map that engenders the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.14 In this inversion, it is culture that generates nature, the referent is preceded and generated by its sign. This ‘desert of the real itself’ is the selfsame ‘red and arid desert’ of David’s revelation, and his sunset-suffused visions of pre-suburban bushland are simply nostalgia for an unobtainable real, based in nature. As Baudrillard wryly states, ‘[w]hen the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning’.15 The simulacrum’s reversal of the nature/culture relation explains the tabula rasa nature of such representations of suburban spaces as that given by George Johnston in My Brother Jack. It also explains Australian literature’s habit of valuing older, more organic versions of suburbia over newer manifestations, since the former can be understood and humanised due to their retention of vestiges of history and through this, access to a natural reality which is unrepressed. Following Robin Gerster, Nathanael O’Reilly identifies this pattern of valuing certain sites because of an ‘authenticity’ related to ‘history and permanence’.16 David Meredith, accordingly, yearns for and idealises, the life he lead growing up in the inner suburban family home, Avalon.17 In My Brother Jack, the suburbia of Beverly Gardens is presented as a hyperreal state generated by the empty circulation of iconic images, reproduced and modulated through the representational parlance of life-style and real estate advertising. It bears no trace of repressed desire, deviance, anxiety or fear. It is two-dimensional, flat, and lighter than air. No wonder it is detestable. No 14 Ibid., 1732-1733. Baudrillard’s italics. Ibid., 1736. 16 Nathan O’Reilly, ‘Rejecting and Perpetuating the Anti-Suburban Tradition: Representations of the Suburbs in The Tax Inspector, Johnno, and Cloudstreet,’ Antipodes, Vol. 20. No. 1 (June, 2006), 24. See also, Robin Gerster, ‘Gerrymander: The Place of Suburbia in Australian Fiction,’ Meanjin, 49.3 (1990), 569. 17 Johnston, My Brother Jack, 286. Likewise, Dante, the protagonist of David Malouf’s, Johnno, demonstrates his preference for the South Brisbane home of his childhood compared to his family’s later residence in the newer suburb of Hamilton. David Malouf, Johnno (Camberwell: Penguin, 1975). Compare 32 and 49-51. 15

wonder David Meredith has to escape in order to realise his intellectual and emotional potential. No wonder Australian intellectuals and writers from post-war to present day have lashed out vehemently against the vapidity of our sprawling suburban landscape. Such is the argument tendered by Andrew McCann in his ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity,’ a dense but succinct article studded with the tenets of Frankfurt School critical theory that considers the problematics of a literary and intellectual culture obsessed with degrading images of what directly constitutes eighty-five percent of its residential landscape.18 McCann finds fault in the deceptive simplicity of this reoccurring depiction of Australian suburban culture and deplores (although Baudrillard might say that the representation is accurate) above all its literary construction as simulacrum because of the negative implications this bears on the possibility of an active critique waged from within. The problem comes down to what McCann diagnoses as a ‘wilful naivety’ to the nature of the referent of much anti-suburban writing: ‘It is unable to acknowledge that the suburb is itself represented as a representational idiom: not a real place, but the fantasy of a place – a simulacrum or a semiotic system in which the utopianism of Romantic pastoralism and modern social engineering come together in a vision of harmony, beauty, peace and privacy disseminated by the mass media.’19 Such representations of suburbia manifest through a double veil of signification (‘a representation of suburbia in which the suburb itself is thoroughly representative’) which, by virtue of functioning at this double remove from reality, effectively erases all trace of the real, along with any evidence of what has been repressed or expelled in the maintenance of a signature ‘normality’.20 18 Andrew McCann, ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity,’ Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1998): 56-71. This figure is given by Trevor Hogan, in ‘Nature Strip’: Australian Suburbia and the Enculturation of Nature,’ Thesis Eleven, 74.3 (2003), 60. 19 McCann, ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity,’ 58-59. 20 Just as Baudrillard’s simulacrum is a ‘substituting [of] signs of the real for the real itself, that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.’ Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra,’ 1733. This short-circuiting described by Baudrillard stands behind the removal of all unquiet elements, the ‘desolation or anxiety or fear,’ the ‘spiritless endeavours or connubial treacheries,’ from the unblemished surface of prosperous contentment characteristic of representations of suburbia like that of George Johnson. Johnston, My Brother Jack, 285. McCann, ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity, 58.

McCann identifies two specific problems with this rendering of suburbia. Firstly, it is ‘at least implicitly organised by notions of prohibition, repression or lack, according to which ‘the suburban’ functions as a negative pole, as that which impedes the pleasure of the heterogeneous group or individual expression,’ and secondly, the narrative flight from suburbia towards a ‘redemptive heterogeneity’ necessitated by this first point creates a situation in which the critical subjects of suburbia are invariably exiles.21 Interiority, alterity and critical subjecthood are not tenable components of this ‘two-dimensional’ representation of suburbia, whose depth is only that of images. The consummate repression of these qualities and the unfavourable or disturbing elements which threaten to issue therefrom (the cost exacted by fictional suburbia’s ‘normality’) leaves the suburbanite of just such fiction powerless to protest against the literary evacuation of his or her surroundings. For, here ‘a representational idiom has literalised itself’, ‘the suburb is presented as a series of iconic signifiers’ – the dream of advertising has come true.22 Suburban desire is desire for the world suggested by the accumulation of these signifiers. This desire manifests itself in an ‘outer-directed’ way of being that erodes subjectivity and all possibility of its development into a combative, or even plainly different, identity.23 ‘Suburbia,’ McCann writes, ‘is just like housing estate advertisements, is unable to accommodate the sort of scepticism or distance that might indicate some sort of disaffection with it. It is unable to acknowledge that it also displaces other kinds of identifications.’24 It displaces, in other words, the very thing by which it can be critiqued. All that does not fit the advertisers’ model of happiness and ‘the good life’ becomes deviant, perverse, 21 McCann cites My Brother Jack an archetypal example of this flight. McCann, ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity, 56, 59. 22 Ibid., 57. 23 This is a term McCann borrows from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: ‘The result of the liquidation of inwardness was by no means the surfacing of a type of person cured of ideology but rather one who never became an individual in the first place, the type David Reismann termed “outer-directed”.’ Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, (London: Continuum, 1997), 116. McCann: ‘The ‘outer-directed’ individual (in Adorno’s terms a non- or never was-individual) is exactly that entity who caries the burden of representing suburbia. If… the suburb is a series of signifiers gathered from real estate marketing strategies, the outer-directed suburbanite is just as emphatically marked (or better, deformed) by the signifier. The suburbanite, we might say, is represented as a series of signifiers that typify the typical.’ McCann, ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity,’ 58. 24 Ibid., 57.

obliterated by prohibitions, and ultimately expelled and effaced by the lightness of this semiotic system and those who continue to perpetuate its dominance in Australian writing.25 In McCann’s reading, the true subject, as opposed to the ‘non-individual’ of ‘outer-directed’ suburban existence, can only subsist ‘in a degree of alienation from the iconic signifiers of suburban desire’ so that ‘struggle with and escape from the suburb is the condition of something like a developed personality’.26 In sum, the very structure of suburban poetics ensures that one must leave in order to obtain the subject position from which suburbia can be criticised, effectively negating the possibility of criticism from within. How, then, can this be altered? How can the politics of suburban aesthetics be radicalised so that a critical voice can legitimately speak out from within - a privileged position as Diane Powell points out in her study of pejorative perceptions of Sydney’s Western Suburbs, but difficult to establish amongst the strategic flatness of the signifier of a signifier.27 Whereas David Meredith attempts to disturb the internal fabric of Beverly Gardens by re-inserting the roots it has erased, I propose an alternative tactic. Instead, it is necessary to dig down through the double signifier and unearth the controversial tangle of roots that have always been there – only hidden by the invisible prohibitions routinely employed to keep them at bay. The extent to which the eccentric, the abject, the immoral and the heterogeneous live within suburbia must be exposed: we must resist the kind of binary thinking which makes opposites of pleasure and disgust, normalcy and deviancy, interior and exterior. We must return the real to suburban writing. And yet, how can one dig through something that has no depth? What kind of poetics allows for this impossible sleight of hand? 25 ‘The good life’ is a term frequently used by Graeme Davison to refer to the ideals of Australian suburbia. Graeme Davison, ‘The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb,’ in Suburban Dreaming: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Australian Cities, ed. Louise C. Johnson (Geelong: Deakin University Press), 1994. 26 McCann, ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity,’ 57. 27 External perspectives invariably impose their foreign viewpoints onto suburbia and, even where intentions are good, misrepresent it. Powell specifically focuses on the power of media representations typically generated from outside the Western Suburbs. Diane Powell, Out West: Perceptions of Sydney’s Western Suburbs (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995).

McCann has already identified a poetics of perversity in Patrick White’s work.28 I would like to explore this further and open it up to concepts which invoke an experience of boundaries and their potential perforation which promises, I will argue, to awaken a critical subjectivity resistant to the simulacra of fictional suburbia. Australian suburbia has depth; fictional and critical writing have obscured it. The task at hand is to reinstate this depth in order to demonstrate its instability, and this is precisely the mechanism at play in White’s Down at the Dump.29 The driving motor of this short story set in Sarsaparilla, a fictional area of fringe suburbia based on White’s own suburb of Castle Hill in nineteen-sixties Sydney, is the juxtaposition carefully evoked between two sets of the developing suburb’s inhabitants. The story opens with the Whalley family who are considering what to do with the day. Wal Whalley proposes they ‘Pick up a coupla cold bottles, and spend the mornun at the dump’.30 Their house, their possessions and their habits, which fall far short of upholding the representational codes of the more conventional depiction of suburbia epitomised by the ‘brick’ neighbourhood that encircles them, provide a welcome tonic to the lifestyle of the Hogbens, against whom they are played off. In the quick changes of scenery and the complex system of counterpoints set up by this juxtapositional structure, one gets the sense that White is experimenting with different representational idioms in order to subtly undermine one with the other. While Mrs Hogben lives in a ‘liver-coloured brick home – not a single dampmark on the ceilings,’ with a ‘washing machine, the septic, the TV, and the cream Holden Special, not to forget her husband. Les Hogben, the councillor,’ the Whalleys’ abode is of ‘grey, unpainted weatherboard,’ with a ‘hole that had come in the kitchen boards,’ grey masses of unmade beds’, and so full of junk and refuse that it is ‘threatening to give in on them.’31 Curiously, the descriptions White gives of the Whalleys and the ostensibly detestable state of their immediate surroundings are always suffused with odd elements of beauty and vivacity, qualities which are notably 28 ‘What I am calling Patrick White’s perversity consists in his refusal of this representational idyll’. McCann, ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity,’ 59. 29 Patrick White, Down at the Dump in The Burnt Ones (Ringwood: Penguin, 1964). 30 Ibid., 286. 31 Furthermore, the Whalleys’ carries a sense of fascination and adventure: ‘Objects of commerce and mystery littered Whalleys’ back yard. Best of all, a rusty boiler into which the twins would climb to play at cubby’.Ibid., 291, 286.

absent from the controlled, somewhat sterile lives of their neighbours. In the bedroom with its unmade beds, for instance, ‘the sunlight fell yellow [and] turned the fluff in the corners of the rooms to gold.’32 In his description of each Whalley family member, White sets forth the strange beauty of these unregulated bodies (which he will later contrast to the stiff, flabby, coiffed and capped bodies of their counterparts) in a sensuous, visceral vocabulary uncommon to the type of writing criticised by McCann and similarly repressed in the realm inhabited by the Hogbens. White writes of Wal, ‘[h]e came out of the door then, in that dirty old baseball cap he had shook off the Yankee disposals. Still a fairly appetising male, though his belly had begun to push against the belt,’ and of Isba, his wife who is cutting wood, ‘[h]er right arm swung, firm still, muscular, though parts of her were beginning to sag,’ and ‘[h]er eyes were of that blazing blue, her skin that of a brown peach. But wherever she smiled, something would happen, her mouth opening on watery sockets and the jags of brown rotting stumps.’33 The children too ‘had inherited their mother’s colour, and when they stood together, golden-skinned, tossing back their unmanageable hair, you would have said a mob of taffy brumbies,’ even though Lummy, like the others forcibly on the side of nature against culture, ‘was dressed, but might not have been. Lummy’s kind was never ever born for clothes’.34 In such intriguing pairings of beauty and ugliness, sacred and profane, disgust and desire, White lays down the foundations for a mode of speaking about suburbia in which its heterogenous elements are not repressed, but surface instead to intensify the overall effect of its more staple imagery. Against the brilliance of such images it easy to recognise the flatness of the world denoted by ‘liver-coloured brick’ and a ‘Holden Special’. This is viewpoint White bestows on Meg, a Hogben, who sees the wonderful potential in the unrestrained corporeality of her neighbours and the unintended poetry of her recently deceased aunt, Daise.35 In the various criss-crossing trajectories of desire that span the 32 Ibid., 286. Ibid., 285. 34 Ibid., 285, 290. 35 Daise Morrow, like the Whalleys, embodies a way of being completely at odds with the expectations of decorum and respectability extolled by the Hogbens. White justly aligns Mrs (Myrtle) Hogben with the restrictions of culture against the unrestrained nature of her sister Daise: ‘Myrtle Morrow had always been the sensitive one. Myrtle had 33

divide between these competing visions of fringe suburbia, White emphasises their proximity and demonstrates, tellingly, how the objects of desire of the side characterised by the respectable and heavily codified lifestyle of the Hogbens, are simply those elements that have been repressed by its normative conventions. Meg Hogben and Lummy Whalley share an awkwardly reciprocated attraction, each equally seduced by the alterity of the other’s existence, Meg imagining herself in the cabin of Lummy’s semi-trailer, and Lummy with Meg on the freshly cut grass of the botanical gardens eating sandwiches from tissue-paper.36 Meg, as mentioned, loves and looks up to her aunt Daise for whom the two councillors, Horrie Last and Les Hogben, both harbour repressed feelings, and whose openness and unabashed sexuality contrasts the restrained, unimaginative comportment of their wives.37 And Daise, herself, has openly conducted an unrepentant affair with the married Jack Cunningham.38 In the judgements pronounced by the Hogbens and others upon the controversial conduct of Daise and Whalleys, White enacts the conservative equation of aesthetic and moral issues common, as Graeme Davison points out, to the rhetoric used by early twentieth century urban planners who, following Governor Arthur Phillip’s call for sanitary living conditions in the establishment of new colony buildings, dictated that new housing must establish conditions conducive to good health, supposed, in turn, to eliminate the moral evils cultivated in densely populated understood the Bible. Her needlework, her crochet doilys had taken prizes at country shows. No one had fiddles such pathos out of the pianola. It was Daise who loved flowers, though. It’s a moss-rose, Daise had said, sort of rolling it round on her tongue, while she was still a little thing’. Ibid., 295. Meg’s admiration for Daise is best expressed in the following paragraph: ‘Along the road they passed the house in which her aunt, they told her, had died. The small, pink, tilted house, standing amongst the carnation plants, had certainly lost some of its life… How the mornings used to sparkle in which Aunt Daise went up and down between the rows, her gown dragging heavy with dew, binding with bast the fuzzy flowers by handfuls and handfuls. Auntie’s voice clear as morning. No one, she called, could argue they look still when they’re bunched tight eh Meg what would you say they remind you of? […] Frozen fireworks, Daise suggested. Meg loved the idea of it, she loved Daise’. Ibid., 295. 36 A reciprocation which neutralises the possibility of reading Meg’s fantasy of living in a semi-trailer in terms of McCann’s ‘flight towards a redemptive heterogeneity’. Ibid., 302, 308. 37 Ibid., see 292-293. 38 Ibid., 303.

urban slums, such as those of nineteenth century London.39 Daise’s open transgression of conjugal propriety and her nursing of, and implicit sexual relationship with, the down-and-out Ossie, are linked to the untidiness of her house and garden. ‘The Weeds will grow like one thing… now that they’ll have their way,’ Mrs Hogben gratuitously states as her family pass Daise’s house, an outburst prompted by her unvoiced musings on the whereabouts of Ossie.40 Similarly, Mrs Hogben’s own obsession with neatness and hygiene corresponds to notions of personal dignity and decency. She keeps the phone ‘swabbed with Breath-o’-Pine,’ and insists that Meg wear her school uniform and hat to the funeral, reminding her that ‘[a] person must keep to her principles,’ and yet another vision of the ignominious Ossie and his runny nose sees her rushing ‘at a drawer which somebody – never herself – had left hanging out,’ thereby sublimating her moral unease in the purification effectuated by housework.41 Later, the emotional pressure of the funeral and her recollection of having confided certain scandalous ideas of hers in Daise leads her to cry ‘for all those things she was unable to confess, for anything she might not be able to control’.42 For all Mrs Hogben’s commitment to hygiene it is nature and its inherent decrepitude that wins out, symbolised by the dust which ruins the shine of Meg’s shoes and the evidence that Meg herself threatens to become ‘another of Daise.’43 39 ‘In the early twentieth century, sanitarians and planners… constructed a working definition of “liveability” (a word, of course, they did not use) around the provision of adequate living space. While they were principally concerned with the physical health of the city-dweller, they shared the conviction of nineteenth-century slum reformers that it was possible to live a virtuous and happy life only with plenty of room, outside and inside the home’. Graeme Davison, ‘The Past and the Future of the Australian Suburb,’ in Suburban Dreaming: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Australian Cities, ed. Louise C. Johnson (Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1994), 108. 40 ‘She was asking herself whether Ossie could be hiding in there behind the blinds. Or whether, whether.’ Ibid., 295. 41 A similar instance of the sublimation of uncomfortable thoughts into work is evoked by Georgina, Councillor Last’s wife: ‘Funerals are not for women’ she declared, and took up a cardigan she was knitting for a cousin.’ Ibid., 293, 292. 294. 42 “Daise, there’s something I’d like to do, I’d like to chuck a lemon into a Salvation Army tuba. Daise giggled. You’re a nut, Myrt, she said. But never vile. So Myrtle Hogben cried. Once, only once she thought how she’d like to push someone off a cliff, and watch their expression as it happened. But Myrtle had not confessed that’. Ibid., 307. 43 “‘You didn’t do your shoes!” Mrs Hogben protested. “I did,” said Meg. It’s the dust. Don’t know why we bother to clean shoes at all. They always get dirty again.’ Ibid., 294, 310.

Furthermore, in her vaguely sexual encounter with Lummy, Meg, once and for all, loses her hat.44 On a formal plain, this encroaching dust also suggests a type of aesthetic noise that effaces oppositions by means of its interference. Following this logic of disturbance, the story contains many images of an abject object irrupting into spaces of suburban respectability. Just as this dust refuses its symbolic repression and erodes the illusion of respectability Mrs Hogben aims to enforce by way of Meg’s shoes, the socially despicable Ossie appears at Daise’s funeral (Mrs Hogben consoles herself that the presence of ‘a second councillor’ will aid in neutralising the presence of Ossie), Meg is caught in the arms of Lummy Whalley, who has wooed her by throwing a piece of dog poo at her, and the dump, refusing to stay inside its perimeter, ejects ‘a disembowelled mattress’ onto the road leading to the cemetery, looking ‘like a kind of monster from out of the depths of somebody’s mind, the part a decent person ignored.’45 In its lingering and often beautiful evocation of such determinedly heterogenous, controversial or taboo imagery, Down at the Dump effectively stages a retrieval of repressed and prohibited aspects of conventional representations of suburbia (typified here by the Hogbens), placing them in such close proximity that their interpenetration is cunningly guaranteed. As White asserted in a short piece discussing the change of intent in his writing following his return to Australia, ‘I wanted to try to suggest… every possible aspect of life.’46 The intriguing admixture of classically separate aesthetic categories in Down at the Dump, nonetheless, is only a case of laying the groundwork for an even more radical depiction of suburbia. As well as orchestrating a much more profound interpenetration of discrete architectural and aesthetic zones, White charts the development of an active critical alterity within suburbia in the short novella, published two years later, The Night the Prowler.47 McCann writes of Felicity’s contact with the body of the old man in the final scene of The Night the Prowler that ‘[i]t is the moment at which White’s own prose 44 Ibid., 308. Ibid., 293, 289, 298. My italics. 46 Patrick White, ‘The Prodigal Son,’ in Patrick White: Selected Writings, ed. Alan Lawson (St Lucia: UQP, 1994), 270. 47 Patrick White, The Night the Prowler in The Cockatoos (London: Jonathan Cape), 1966. 45

figures its attempt to depart from forms of signification that, like Mrs Bannister’s faith in cosmetics, are committed to an aesthetic that exalts beauty, order and harmony in the interests of a conjugal idyll,’ expressing ‘White’s commitment to the space beyond dichotomised categories like beauty and ugliness.’48 For McCann, the rest of the novella is simply a prelude to this radical moment, and follows an uncomplicated logic of vandalism, reproducing suburban signifiers of normality in order to do violence to them. In contrast to the more nuanced deformation of suburban signifiers into figures of performative excess carried out it works like The Eye of the Storm, The Twyborn Affair or The Solid Mandala, The Night the Prowler simply executes a straightforward negation of suburbia as a field of representation.49 I would argue that this radical evocation of abjection in the encounter between Felicity and the old man, rather than becoming apparent only in this final scene of White’s novella, in fact underlies the formal structure of the entire story and emerges literally in this scene as a manner of consolidating White’s aesthetic point. More importantly, it is his employment of abjection and abject bodies that opens up a space in which the critical subject can be re-posited within suburbia. In her seminal essay on abjection, The Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva argues that contact with the abject activates a memory of the original moment of selfconsciousness – separation from the maternal body – which, in viscerally imbuing the subject with a sense of the collapsibility of boundaries between self and other, leads it to reconstitute and consolidate its subjecthood.50 In other words, in realising the porosity of its own boundaries, the self-conscious subject reinforces them in a manner reminiscent of the first realisation of selfhood established as a break from the mother. Kristeva uses this primal break to designate between the semiotic and the symbolic 48 McCann, ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity,’ 62. ‘In a text like The Night the Prowler this refusal [of the representational idyll] takes the form of a quite literal violence directed against the signifiers of normality. In other texts, however, this direct assault on suburbia gives way to a more nuanced attempt to dramatise the ways in which the signifiers of normality can be pushed beyond caricature into a kind of performative excessiveness.’ McCann, ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity, 59. 50 ‘There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable… a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture’. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1-2. 49

orders, the latter being that of language and subjecthood, the former a continuous realm of natural drives, ignorant of distinctions, and preceding language (which necessarily enforces separation). Hovering between subject and object, the abject is something that disgusts in such a way that it evokes a strong bodily reaction, often that of nausea. An open wound, excrement, nail clippings, menstrual blood, the skin on the top of milk are all examples given by Kristeva capable of invoking such visceral responses.51 The abject thus refers to aspects of the world which menace our sense of boundaries, so that ‘what is excluded from the “clean and proper body” constantly exerts pressure on the symbolic order, threatening disruption and reminding the subject of the impossibility of transcending the corporeal origins of subjectivity.’52 Importantly, abjection, allowing the semiotic realm of organic drives this disturbing intrusion into the symbolic, defies the act of signification so intrinsic to the two-dimensional ‘representational idyll’ of typical anti-suburban writing and, as Kristeva puts it ‘draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’.53 The experience of encountering a corpse, which ‘upsets… violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance’ perhaps best epitomises the experience of abjection, death itself, being the final return to primal unity: A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death… These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border… In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that things that no longer matches and therefore no longer 51 ‘Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me […] Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk – harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring – I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly… Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element… “I” expel it’. Ibid., 2-3. 52 Sue Vice, ed. Psychoanalytic Criticism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 152-153. 53 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.54 In this way the semiotic establishes an essential nature against the culture of the symbolic order, which it precedes and disrupts as a ghostlike presence in experiences of abjection. In a representational world where normality reigns and every deviation is suppressed in the name of respectability and order, where culture devours nature in an unforgiving simulation of reality, where the realisation of a critically different subjectivity emphatically takes place outside, the restorative power of abject experiences in anti-suburban writing cannot be overlooked. Structurally, suburbia is designed to resist the perforation of its borders. ‘Like a colony,’ writes Davison, ‘the suburb was a place of escape or refuge, and it was shaped, therefore, largely by the logic of avoidance.’55 Domestic privacy lies at heart of Australian suburban ideals. From the early plans for Sydney that called for ‘a clause that will prevent no more than one house being built on [an] allotment, which will be sixty feet in front and one hundred and fifty feet in depth’ and the spatial dimension of ‘the quarter-acre suburban block’ have since become institutionalised.56 These large blocks with houses set back from the streets, more often than not fenced or hedged in, express a desire not to be disturbed and render any breach far more astonishing and troubling than it would perhaps seem in a densely populated area.57 An instructive counterpoint to the discrete spatial logic of Australian suburbia is the ‘porosity’ identified by Walter Benjamin (in a short article written in 1925) of the city Naples, in which, 54 Ibid., 3-4. Graeme Davison, ‘The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb,’ in Suburban Dreaming: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Australian Cities, ed. Louise C. Johnson (Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1994), 100. My italics. 56 Arthur Phillip to Lord Sydney, 1788, 147-148, quoted in Ibid.; and Davison, Ibid. 57 Davison’s comments support this notion: ‘In general, I think that British and Australian suburbanites have placed a higher value on domestic privacy than Americans. Consider, for example, the continued preference of Australian and British suburbanites for fenced or hedged allotment compared with the American preference for an unbroken sward of lawn between house and house and from the front door to the street’. Ibid., 105. 55

[b]uilding and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything, they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforseen constellations. The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended forever, no figure asserts it ‘thus and not otherwise.’ […] So the house is far less the refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out. Life bursts not only from doors, not only into front yards, where people on chairs do their work (for they have the ability to make their bodies into tables). From the balconies, housekeeping utensils hang like potted plants. From the windows of the top floors come baskets in ropes, to fetch mail, fruit, and cabbage.58 Here, interior spaces are theatrical spaces, open indiscriminately to all, not at all like the attentively demarcated suburban interior, alarmed, security-doored and hemmed in by curtains, the place where a family sequesters their secrets and any undignified behaviour can remain hidden from the eyes of neighbours.59 In Naples, private life is ‘similarly dispersed, porous, and commingled… [t]o exist – for the Northern European the most private of affairs – is here, as in the kraal, a collective matter’.60 There is no distinction between day and night and the city’s perpetual state of becoming alludes not only to spatial, but to temporal porosity as well.61 In the impossibility of distinguishing a church from neighbouring secular buildings, the sacred is routinely mingled with the profane: traditional aesthetic categories have no purchase in Benjamin’s teeming city.62 58 Walter Benjamin, ‘Naples,’ in Selected Writings, Vol. I, 1913-1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2004), 416, 419-420. 59 Margaret Simons alludes to the ‘closed face’ of outer Melbourne suburbanites in her essay, ‘Ties that Bind,’ Griffith Review. No. 8 (Winter, 2005), 15. 60 Benjamin, ‘Naples,’ 419. 61 ‘Day and night the pavilions glow with the pale, aromatic juices that teach even the tongue what porosity can be.’ Ibid., 418. 62 ‘[T]he typical Neapolitan church does not ostentatiously occupy a vast square, visible from afar, with transepts, gallery, and dome. It is hidden, built in; high domes are often to be seen only from a few places, and even then it is not easy to find one’s way to them, impossible to distinguish the mass of a church from that of the neighbouring secular buildings. The stranger passes it by. The inconspicuous door, often only a curtain, is the secret gate for the initiate. A single step takes him from the jumble of dirty courtyards into the pure solitude of a lofty, whitewashed church interior’. Ibid., 416.

What I am endeavouring to suggest here is that the porosity of Benjamin’s Naples, with its perforated boundaries, is an abject architecture opposed to the containment of traditional suburban spaces. Through Felicity’s prowling in The Night the Prowler, White undermines the rhetoric of containment so important to the advertising vocabulary and imagery of suburbia by revealing the porosity of suburban space. This narrative of containment and penetration is complemented by images of the abject body (reaching their pitch in the encounter with the old man), and Doris and Humphrey Bannister’s respective obsessions with hygiene and virginity. Furthermore the destruction wrought throughout by Felicity can be read as a metaphor for White’s own aesthetic onslaught on the overregulated impotence of typical Australian anti-suburban writing. Felicity’s father, Humphrey, a pillar – one might say a ‘bannister’ – of decency, decorum, and good moral values (although his restrictions on what of the family’s business should be shared outside the home are routinely transgressed by his garrulous wife), breaks down and sobs at the idea of his daughter’s pilfered virginity. The value placed by Humphrey on the notion of her intact body mirrors the containment and seclusion of his suburban habitat. For this Bannister, virginity is important because it subtends a logic that keeps the categories of his world in order and discrete zones separate (day and night, for instance).63 The link between architecture and the body is made explicit by Amanda Wise in ‘Sensuous Multiculturalism: Emotional Landscapes of Inter-Ethnic Living in Australian Suburbia,’ where she maintains that ‘[t]he boundaries of the modern [closed] body extend to modern urban forms where distinctions between purity and defilement are encoded into the built environment’.64 In The Night the Prowler, the body and 63 Hence Doris’s caveat: ‘never at night, Felicity… only drunkards, cut-throats, and perverts… nobody in their right mind, not even a trained athlete, would cross the park after sundown.’ White, The Night the Prowler, 160. entry to park through railings where a rail is missing – structure compromised. 64 Amanda Wise, ‘Sensuous Multiculturalism: Emotional Landscapes of Inter-Ethnic Living in Australian Suburbs,’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 36, No. 6 (July 2010), 928. Here, she is relating our experiences of built environments to the comfort zones of our habitus, leading her to distinguish between the closed modern body and the open pre-modern body: ‘The modern European autonomous, individuated body is closed off from other bodies. It emerged through a history of bodily self-discipline, management and regulation of what “went in and out of the body and how the body was deported.” The closed body is counter-posed to the pre-modern ‘open’ body, which can

architecture come together in a reciprocal structural evocation of abjection in which rape and prowling extort the same level of defilement in their perforation of the boundaries keeping respectability and social decorum in place. Moreover, as in Down at the Dump, the interpenetration of opposed aesthetic categories characterises much of White’s imagery, coinciding here with climactic moments of penetration or disgust. The description of the sunrise on the wall of the derelict house marries riches with decrepitude, sacred with profane, beauty with disgust: ‘the masses of hitherto colourless, or at most dust-coloured wall, were illuminated: the tributaries of decay had begun to flow with rose; the barren continents were heaped with gold’.65 Meanwhile, Felicity’s passionate evisceration of the jam-smeared armchair upon which she madly brings herself to orgasm mingles the grotesque and the erotic in a manner that subordinates signification to visceral effect and serves to render the destruction of the chairs all the more agonising and sumptuous: ‘Riding their thick thighs, still slashing, jerking with her free hand at the reins, sawing at the mouth which held the bit, she was to some extent vindicated, if guiltily wracked by the terrible spasms which finally took possession of her’.66 In the shattering effects of such cathartic jouissance (‘an impure process that protects from the abject only by dint of being immersed in it’) Felicity begins to rediscover her compromised sense of self, a development already hinted at in the emblematic shedding of the apple skin on the morning after her experience with the prowler.67 Insofar as the dissolution of boundaries effected via experiences of abjection enables the consolidation of subjecthood, Humphrey Bannister’s insistence that his daughter retain her virginity seems to grow from the fear that she will develop her own dangerous subjecthood, be characterised as a porous, volatile, sensuous body, open to all manner of contagion, material and spiritual. The modern body – concerned to close off from and eject such invasions – is racked with anxieties around hygiene, body boundaries, “fluids that flow in and out of the body, the ways in which others touch one’s body”.’ White’s imagery sustains this analogy between the architecture of The Night the Prowler and the body, particularly in Humphrey Bannister’s references to Harvey’s house as ‘a mausoleum asking for rape.’ White, The Night the Prowler, 158. 65 White, The Night the Prowler, 167. 66 Ibid., 152. This scene is suggestive of the jouissance Kristeva relates to intense experiences of abjection: ‘One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion.’ The French verb ‘jouir’ means both ‘to revel’ and ‘to orgasm’. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9. Fittingly, White describes Felicity’s desecration of Harvey’s family home as invoking feelings of ‘half horror, half fulfilment’. White, The Night the Prowler, 157. 67 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 29. White, The Night the Prowler, 128.

independent from him and from the role he and his wife Doris expect her to play. Thus, the more Felicity prowls, the more established her sense of her own boundaries becomes. From the moment early on when her frustrated desire to transcend the ‘outerdirected’ emptiness of the suburban psyche is voiced (‘on returning to the diningroom, the slopped brandy and smouldering cigar emphasised her failed intention: to destroy perhaps in one violent burst the nothing she was, to live, to be, to know’), White alludes to her increasing self-possession and cultivation of an identity which is anything but ‘outer-directed’ in a variety of ways, not in the least the brief but important shift to second person narration that coincides with her incarnation as the prowler.68 On the first night that the reader is directly allowed insight into this change, White writes: ‘As she walked through the streets her ice-cold skin increased her sense of inviolacy…. She herself couldn’t at first accept that frightening, still partly dormant, cone of her own will. It was on this night of suspended rain that it began erupting, not for the first, but for the second time’.69 Even in the more relaxed, openended world of her new acquaintances, Felicity cuts ‘an outline which refused to melt into their common blur,’ and in the park, she grows and proliferates with the shadows she casts, communing with an invisible double from the doubled suburb: ‘[a]s she plodded through the sand, her stature was increasing, it seemed... at any moment, she felt she might call out in a heroic voice and be answered by her opposite from what was normally a red-brick suburb on the other side. She imagined how the voices would advance, calling to each other from time to time, for guidance, and to give each other the strength to face ugliness in any form’.70 But perhaps it is his character’s name that provides the real key to White’s endeavour, ‘felicity’ signifying (after its more prominent designation of ‘the state of being happy; happiness; a particular instance of this kind’), ‘the ability to find appropriate expression for one's thoughts; a particularly effective feature of a work of literature or art’.71 It is the crystallisation of Felicity’s subjectivity that allows White to break the codes of the representational idyll deemed so deficient by McCann. 68 White, The Night the Prowler, 156, 146. My italics. Ibid., 148, 147. 70 Ibid., 148, 160. 71 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 69

When the original prowler climbs into her bedroom window Felicity is not frightened, rather, she ‘desires’ her intruder, as she desires symbolically the act of intrusion.72 In the end, his impotence to properly transgress a border outrages her and she reacts by attempting to invert the violation, but a wave of nausea forestalls her, brought on by his rancid breath, or is it the abjection of her act?73 There is a sense that the intruder’s incapacity to carry his penetration through is symbolic of the impotence of all suburbia to step out of its representational straight-jacket, confined as it is to the boundaries of its designated signifiers, unable to reach beyond. In her incarnation as the prowler, Felicity becomes the embodiment of White’s representational task, reconfiguring the representational order of suburbia, blazing a path which intertwines interior and exterior, nocturnal and diurnal, sacred and profane, pleasure and disgust, so that holes begin to open onto the real, and nature shows through the codes imposed upon it by the symbolic order. In Down at the Dump and The Night the Prowler, White posits representations of suburbia which successfully accommodate a deviant alterity that exists within them and sustains itself on the very structure of suburban space. 72 ‘She had not been frightened the night the prowler, not really, not from the very beginning… she kept her face turned towards her desired intruder; and waited for the first move.’ Ibid., 152, 153. 73 ‘Then for an instant the flame rose in her: she fell on him, caressing his cheeks with hers, veiling his already anonymous face with her hair, and plunged her tongue into his mouth. His terror snored deafening around her before she left off: a nausea, brought in by rancid dripping and her loathing of limp potato chips, forced her back on her knees.’ Ibid., 154.

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