Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala

By David Tacey

Patrick White once said that The Solid Mandala (1966) was his favourite and most personal novel, and one can see why. In this work, the two sides of White’s own personality appear to be split into two warring and quarrelling brothers, Arthur and Waldo Brown. The device of splitting a single personality into two competing figures is hardly a new one, and it is the basis upon which a literary tradition has been built, especially in German Romantic fiction, in which the twin figures of the protagonist and its doppelgänger or ‘double’ play a major role. The question is: why would White want to engage in this splitting or doubling?

It seems as if there is a conflict in White’s personality between reason and intellect on the one hand, and imagination and creativity on the other. White is a creative genius, but his imagination is trapped and held back by his intellect, which appears in this novel as the character Waldo, who is stuck in his ways and hamstrung by prejudices and bitterness. Arthur is the slightly handicapped, awkward twin of Waldo, the more intellectual and ‘sensible’ brother. Waldo finds his twin a burden and treats him with contempt. But Arthur is not just Waldo’s brother, he appears to be a symbolic figure representing his inner self, and it is this role that proves decisive. This too is a characteristic feature of ‘double’ literature: the hated ‘other’ is actually a deeper part of self. Waldo’s punishing attitude toward his brother is a form of self-punishment. Arthur longs to free Waldo from his entrapment and urge him to enter into a creative relationship with imagination. This novel suggests that White can no longer afford the luxury of keeping a part of himself aloof from the creative process and defensively withheld from what it might bring forth. The novel is a ‘note to self’, a dramatic reminder that artist and art must work together, and the artist cannot keep pulling away from the creative source.

This conflict is not unusual, nor am I making a case for some kind of schizophrenic split. All of us, I believe, experience difficulty and tension between various sides of our nature, and so what I am exploring is not peculiar to White, nor does it make his fiction pathological. It simply makes it psychological and personal. The poet W. B. Yeats once said, ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’.ⁱ This novel is not an historical portrayal of Sydney society, but it is a work of psycho-fiction, in which parts of White’s character jostle for supremacy. At the time of its appearance, it must have seemed an odd addition to Australian fiction, which had been a tradition of social observation and ironic characterisation. There is some social observation, especially in the opening chapter, ‘In the Bus’, in which Mrs Poulter and Mrs Dun talk to each other about the new shops at Barranugli, but the novel is chiefly concerned with the tensions within White’s character.

The portrayal of Arthur and Waldo brings the Freudian terms id and ego to mind, but since this is a spiritual novel, I think soul and ego are more appropriate. What takes place in The Solid Mandala is a battle between soul and ego, and it is a battle to the death, with a tragic ending. The soul is desperate to enforce its message of integration on the ego, and in retaliation, the ego protects its own territory and hits back. The price paid for lack of self-integration is immense. Waldo tries to kill off Arthur in cunning and subversive ways, such as forcing him to walk too fast, or urging him to excitements that might cause a heart-attack. But, ironically, it is Waldo who dies of a paroxysm, and Arthur is left bereft and ruined, contemplating his solid mandalas with his neighbour, Mrs Poulter. The ego clings to its rigid rationality and prejudice, and prefers to die rather than be transformed.

As the story opens, the aging brothers, who are observed by Mrs Poulter from the bus, are going on one of their walks, in which Waldo is trying to kill Arthur by exertion. Waldo fails in his plot, and when they return home Arthur tries to ‘trap’ Waldo into an acceptance of the mandala and its image of wholeness. Arthur reads Jung in the public library, and comes to the conclusion that the glass marbles he carries in his pocket and sometimes holds in his hand are ‘solid mandalas’. For Jung, the mandala, a term borrowed from Hindu literature and religion, is a term for ‘wholeness’ of personality. Arthur wants Waldo to accept the mandala, and form an integrated wholeness of their joint lives. Arthur does not like the way Waldo treats him, and he hates the fact that Waldo shows such intense disrespect to the areas of experience Arthur values: women, symbols of the feminine, the mother, feeling, intuition, simple or ordinary people, and the interior world of psychic life. Waldo regards all these elements with hostility and Arthur rises in protest, urging Waldo to overcome his prejudices and to join him in a celebration of life in its wholeness. But even as he offers the solid mandala, Arthur fears the worst:

‘If it would help I would give it to you, Waldo, to keep,’ Arthur said.
Offering the knotted mandala.
While half sensing that Waldo would never untie the knot.
Even before Waldo gave one of his looks, which, when interpreted, meant: By offering me a glass marble you are trying to make me look a fool, I am not, and never shall be a fool, though I am your twin brother, so my reply, Arthur, is not shit, but shit!
As he shouted: ‘No, Arthur! Go, Arthur!ⁱⁱ

What is the knot at the centre of the mandala, and why does Waldo fail to untie it? The knot appears to be a symbol of an unconscious problem or complex, a psychological entanglement or bondage to the past. Arthur wants Waldo to untie it so they can both live more fully. The knot is all the more powerful as a symbol for not being fully understood – certainly not by Waldo, who sees the mandala and its knot as yet another example of Arthur’s attempt to make him look foolish and trap him with psycho-babble. In psychoanalytic terms, the knot is probably the mother-complex, which prevents the ego from moving forward because it is frozen in fear at the prospect of entering the feminine womb, which as Jung pointed out is a symbol of the deep unconscious.

One of Arthur’s central tasks is to try to urge Waldo to see the feminine in a positive light. Arthur himself is described by Waldo as ‘a big fat helpless female’ (42) and on the walk the reader is made aware of ‘some distress, of feminine origin, fluttering in his big, old-man’s body’ (27). Arthur tries to defend women against Waldo’s frequent verbal attacks, as we find in this scene:

‘I wonder why Mrs Poulter is so awful?’
Arthur, puffing, threatened to topple, but saved himself on Waldo’s oilskin.
‘I don’t say she’s awful!’
‘If you don’t say, it’s likely to fester,’ said Arthur, and sniggered.
Some of his remarks were of the kind which should have crumbled along with the cornflour cakes in the mouths of elderly women.
‘It’s splinters that fester,’ Waldo answered facetiously.
‘Perhaps,’ said Arthur, and sniggered again. (28)

Arthur tries to force Waldo to reflect on his fear of the feminine, but to no avail. He brings up before Waldo many symbols of the feminine, such as a poem he wrote about women and blood, and an old, discarded dress that Waldo once wore in strange episode of transvestism. Waldo relates to the feminine and its symbols as if it is toxic, devouring, devastating. Part of the knot that condemns him to isolation is his inability to deal with the feminine in himself – namely, Arthur.

Waldo cannot reach into the feminine part or anima because he fears it will destroy him, and there is a sense in this novel that Waldo’s homosexuality is not due to his love of the masculine but his fear of the feminine. Ironically, in a homosexual act, Arthur tries to become the feminine figure that Waldo needs to embrace. Arthur poses as their mother, Anne Quantrell and draws Waldo into a symbolically incestuous episode:

Except Arthur was not all that innocent. He was waiting to trap him, Waldo suspected, in love-talk. So that he broke down crying on the kitchen step, and Arthur who had been waiting, led him in, and opened his arms. At once Waldo was engulfed in the most intolerable longing, in the smell of mutton flaps and dog, of childhood and old men. He could not stop crying. Arthur led him in and they lay together in the bed which had been their parents’, that is, Waldo lay in Arthur’s vastly engulfing arms, which at the same time was the gothic embrace of Anne Quantrell soothing their renegade Baptist. All the bread and milk in the world flowed out of Arthur’s mouth onto Waldo’s lips. He felt vaguely he should resist such stale, ineffectual pap. But Arthur was determined Waldo should receive. By this stage their smeary faces were melted together. (209)

This is an extraordinary moment, where the theme of incest, buried for so long in the narrative, reveals itself in force. The reader who has not intuited the metaphor of incest probably wonders where all this emotion comes from, why Arthur is so insistent that Waldo ‘should receive’, and why Waldo breaks down and ‘could not stop crying’. But this episode, like so many others, does not lead to transformation. It is a parody of the spiritual journey that Waldo needs to undertake but never does. This novel throws down the gauntlet: transform or bust. And ‘bust’ it is, meaning the mandalic vision is destroyed, and Arthur ends up in the gutter and staring into his marble, the pathetic and retarded figure whom Waldo always feared he was.

ⁱ W. B. Yeats, Anima Hominis (1917), in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Mary Ann Caws ed., University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p.90.

ⁱⁱ Patrick White, The Solid Mandala (1966). Sydney: Vintage, 2007, p.273. Subsequent page numbers will refer to this edition.