Similar hoaxes had already been perpetrated in England and France - one by Doris Lessing, who, in the 1980s, submitted a novel to her long-standing publishers under a pseudonym, and was rejected. Wraith Picket was in fact an anagrammatic Patrick White, born in 1912 and awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1973 the "unpublishable" manuscript was Chapter Three of his novel The Eye of the Storm. The writer was less disappointed than he might otherwise have been because he was already, as his name might have suggested, in the grave. Others recognised a certain flair for language but found it confused, overwritten and in need of the sort of editing that no publisher these days could afford. Some of them simply rejected the manuscript with the usual apologies. LAST YEAR SOME OF Australia's leading publishers and agents received a chapter of a novel in progress from a new and as yet unpublished writer, Wraith Picket. Finally, then, this study argues that literature’s unique ability to acknowledge alterity enables it to serve as an effective tool for critiquing colonial discourses.The author and the lost continent he judged so fiercely had to grow to accommodate each other, writes David Malouf. Chapter Four investigates the representation of landscape, language and subjectivity in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. The third chapter examines Ondaatje’s depiction of the Sahara Desert in The English Patient, and focuses on his concern with the ways in which language and cartographic discourse influence the subject’s perception of the natural world. Chapter Two analyses White’s representation of subjectivity, imperial discourse and the Outback in Voss. The first chapter of the thesis outlines the postcolonial and poststructural theory that informs the readings in the later chapters. One of the principal contentions of the study, then, is that the novels under consideration deploy a postmodern aesthetic of the sublime to undermine colonial discourses. White, Ondaatje and Malouf chart their protagonists’ inability to comprehend and document the landscapes they encounter, and the ways in which this failure calls into question their subjectivity and the epistemologies that underpin it. The study demonstrates that these novels all emphasise the instabilities inherent in imperial epistemology.
This thesis argues that Patrick White’s Voss, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life depict landscape in a manner that reveals the inadequacies of imperial epistemological discourses and the rationalist model of subjectivity which enables them.
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