A Landscape Without Figures

The most important novels of the previous century, as far as I’m concerned, were written before the Second World War: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, Robert Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften, the works of Franz Kafka. There were no such obvious milestones in the second half of the century – novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gravity’s Rainbow are still awaiting the ultimate judgement that only time can confer. My own very personal candidate for canonization is the Australian writer Patrick White’s novel Voss.

I first read Voss about forty years ago and didn’t pick it up again until very recently. A few years later I was somewhat disappointed by one or two of White’s other books and this must have tainted my recollection. I certainly remembered Voss as a powerful metaphor for the condition of modern man, but when I reread it I was surprised by its force and inevitability. The Marxist critic George Lukács once defined the novel as the epic of a world from which the gods have departed. Voss is first and foremost a gripping epic and the gods have indeed disappeared – or almost: there is still spirituality in the air and the characters seem to have developed special antennae for it. Voss seizes hold of the reader and carries him away on a journey across the unmapped interior of Australia. The opening scene, in which the two main characters meet for the first time, sets the tone. Laura Trevelyan is the niece of a rich textile merchant, Bonner, from Sydney. One Sunday morning when she is alone in the house, waiting for her uncle and aunt and the rest of the family to return from church, a visitor arrives. It is Voss, a German adventurer, who is readying an expedition to cross the Australian continent from east to west. Laura’s uncle is to finance the undertaking. In the course of a rather laborious conversation a sort of complicity grows between  Laura and Voss. Both are outsiders: Laura, an orphan, adopted by the Bonners; Voss, an odd German chap among mainly English settlers. This feeling is reinforced when Voss realizes intuitively that Laura, like he himself, has rejected conventional Christianity and sought other ways of trying to fulfil her spiritual and intellectual needs. White based Voss’s expedition on an actual expedition into the Australian outback by Ludwig Leichhardt, who died in the desert in 1848. Because of this Voss is sometimes seen as a historical novel, but historical reconstruction is not what concerns White. Leichhardt’s expedition is simply the framework he uses for the spiritual journey of his main character. Voss is a trained botanist. As he sets out for the interior in 1845, Charles Darwin is refining the results of his studies and observations into the Theory of Evolution. On the Origin of Species was not published until 1859, but the ideas that produced it had been in the air for more than two decades. Voss is a Darwinist: he is fascinated by insect life and continually draws parallels between human and insect behaviour. Man is only one link in the chain of animal evolution. (‘Walking on numb legs, Voss went over presently to the smaller hut. He had every intention of examining the woman as if she had been an animal. She was, though.’) Besides Darwin, another historical figure lurks in the wings of the novel without ever being mentioned by name: the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, born in 1844. When Voss’s expedition leaves Sydney, Nietzsche’s books had still to be written, and his presence in the prompter’s box is an anachronism. But again, White is not primarily concerned with historical accuracy. Voss’s character has much in it of Nietzsche’s Superman. He doesn’t believe in God and he sees himself as a leader – Führer – of men, though if the choice were his he would have preferred to travel alone. ‘He had no more need for sentimental admiration than he had for love. He was complete.’ He tells Laura, ‘Your future is what you will make it. Future is will.’ Before the expedition sets out and during the early stages of the journey Voss sees himself almost as God, or at the very least a kind of prophet – Nietzsche’s Zarathustra – bringing the message to a backward colony that man is his own master. The novel is also full of biblical echoes. Voss’s companions seem like the apostles and there is fierce competition between them. Voss has a favourite, and towards the end there appears to be a traitor. The journey through the Australian desert is reminiscent of Christ’s forty days in the wilderness. Gradually Voss’s Nietzschean tall talk is eroded. When he is still within reach of civilization he starts a correspondence with Laura, in which he asks her to marry him when he returns. Only the first letter reaches its destination. Later letters are written but not sent. Still Voss communicates with Laura. A sort of mystical union grows up between them. He feels her presence and listens to her advice. The gist of Laura’s whisperings is that she wants Voss to become more humble. It is the condition she sets if he wants to be considered as a future husband. Laura wins in the end: Voss’s humiliation is total. The expedition turns out to be a complete failure. Some of the men desert him, the remaining handful are sick and weak. Voss nurses them back to health: the Nietzschean hero practises the virtue of charity. Gradually the extreme conditions of the journey, bad weather and rough terrain prove unendurable. Finally there is a confrontation with aborigines, who appear as figures in the landscape. Aborigines and landscape merge and together constitute a force that destroys the self-proclaimed little god. In a sense the land has become the novel’s main character, and little by little takes over from its human inhabitants.

The simplicity of the clay-coloured landscape was very moving to the German. For a moment everything was distinct. In the foreground some dead trees, restored to life by the absence of hate, were glowing with flesh of rosy light. All life was dependent on the thin lips of light, compressed, yet breathing at the rim of the world.

If Voss can be seen as a sort of Australian bible, its implicit warnings are against docility and fanaticism – and against a too uncritical relationship with language and literature. One example of the latter comes during the expedition’s last stop in the ‘civilized world’, where a grazier, a sort of Australian version of Conrad’s Kurtz, ‘had torn the boards off Homer to chock the leg of the table’. Another, more subtle and poetic, is the episode in which the aborigine Dugald, sent back to his employer with a package of letters, encounters a tribe of huntsmen who force him to break the seals of the package and show them the letters.

With great dignity and some sadness, Dugald broke the remaining seals, and shook out the papers until the black writing was exposed. There were some who were disappointed to see but the pictures of fern roots. A warrior hit the paper with his spear. People were growing impatient and annoyed, as they waited for the old man to tell. These papers contained the thoughts of which the whites wished to be rid, explained the traveller, by inspiration: the sad thoughts, the bad, the thoughts that were too heavy, or in any way hurtful. These came out through the white man’s writing-stick, down upon paper, and were sent away. Away, away, the crowd began to menace and call. The old man folded the papers. With the solemnity of one who has interpreted a mystery, he tore them into little pieces. How they fluttered. The women were screaming, and escaping from the white man’s bad thoughts. Some of the men were laughing. Only Dugald was sad and still, as the pieces of paper fluttered round him and settled on the grass, like a mob of cockatoos.

Voss is a great novel equal to its great subject – man trying to play god and failing – and the style in which it is written is entirely fitting: a hieratic, sculptured, almost biblical prose. Here is how White describes the return from church of the Bonner family in the opening scene, in which Laura and Voss get to know each other:

But the others were all crowding in, resuming possession. Such solid stone houses, which seem to encourage brooding, through which thoughts slip with the ease of a shadow, yet in which silence assumes a sculptural shape, will rally surprisingly, even cruelly to the owner-voices, making it clear that all the time their rooms have belonged not to the dreamers, but to the children of light, who march in, and throw the shutters right back.

White (1912–90), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, spent part of his early life away from his native Australia, attending public school in Cheltenham, going up to Cambridge, and becoming an RAF Intelligence officer during the Second World War. In his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, he writes: ‘It was landscape more than anything which drew me back when Hitler’s war was over.’ And again: ‘The ideal Australia I visualized during any exile and which drew me back, was always, I realize, a landscape without figures.’ That is the landscape of Voss, the landscape in which Voss fights his demons, in which he eventually lets go of his pride and sacrifices himself. If Voss is an epic from which the gods have departed, their place has been taken by an overpowering, breathtaking land. Its presence fills the novel.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 15 © Wim D'Haveloose 2007