This may be all very well for the Jungian analyst. But it does seem to beg the central question, the relationship between psychology and criticism and the further one, which is to take priority. True, they are closely related. Psychoanalysis is, after all, a form of narrative discourse; the analysed tells her/his story to the analyst and both together try to interpret it. But in these post-structuralist and deconstructionist days we are aware that interpretation is not the only – some would say is not even a proper – task of the critic.

Tacey’s interpretations however, are almost entirely thematic, based on patterns, archetypes and images he finds in the novels, read more or less literally. He works, that is to say, upstream from the language, symbolic systems, and modes of representation which are for some of us the crux of our interest in this sophisticated, quirky, endlessly inventive writer and thus forms his conclusions about the work without considering its formal and textual effects. He has ever)’ right to do this, of course – dogmatism ought to be foreign to critical discussion. But this failure to recognise the formal qualities of literature leads, as I have argued, to consideration of something other than the literature, of Patrick White rather than his fiction, or, better perhaps, of a ghostly Patrick White, whose angry mother, teeth bared, darkly suffocating, stalks in relentless pursuit.

It also makes the business of reading much more solemn, much less fun. Psychology aims to do things to people, but the economy of literature is the economy of play, of pleasure and of the insight that comes by way of contemplation. One of the great attractions of White’s fiction, for me at least, is its wit, its social satire, its sharp eye for the bawdy, the eccentric and the absurd, and its determination to glory, like Yeats, in ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. So characters like the raucous but kindly Mrs O’Dowd in The Tree of Man get short shrift here and Laura, perhaps White’s most civilised heroine, is characterised at ‘Kali-like. As for Mrs Jolley, already dislikable enough in most readings of Riders in the Chariot, she becomes a ‘Teeth Mother’. Fiction is overwhelmed by Jungian psychology. This is surely a pity. What also matters for many of us in White’s work is edited: his outrageous humanity, his attempts to test its limits and remake a world according to his own specifications, which are the specifications of language. It is these attempts, rather than anything thematic, which leads me to read White as a ‘religious’ writer, as concerned with the other, the unsayable and indefinable, with openness rather than closure, the silence to which language ultimately aspires.

Tacey’s system, however, like Jung’s is closed. Rather than letting the fiction take him in its direction he fits it into his system of archetypes, a system which he takes as given, rather as scientists once took the ‘natural order’ of things. Tacey is concerned with orthodoxy, dismissing other readings, many of them widely held, with enviable certitude and fitting the novels into his own system. Perhaps the most remarkable pronouncement comes at the beginning of the chapter on Riders in the Chariot. ‘Despite its title, its apparent design and its mystical jargon’ this novel, Tacey declares, ‘owes nothing to religious reason’. Why? Since there is no discussion, much less refutation, of the reading he condemns (which may well proceed from a more sophisti­cated sense of language, its displacements and deferrals), we must presume that the reason is that the Jungian system does not allow for it. So, too, with the Christian overtones which are so undeniably important in the earlier works, at least. Tacey is adamant: White’s Christianity is ‘a thin overlay of good intentions and limp ideas, below which has the vast world of pagan mysteries, the image of the aboriginal Mother and her realm of raw energy’. Christianity is psychologically bad for White, serves as a ‘legitimizing and aggrandising framework’ which offers ‘basic explanations and prevents him ‘from having to vigorously examine his strange and disquieting inner world’. Metaphysical ideas arc the source and focus of what Tacey grandly pronounces as a psychological malaise.

This is par for the psychoanalytic course, no doubt, but it is also dogmatic. The case needs to be argued rather than assumed, especially in view of recent work done by theologians like Altizer, Myers and Winquist on the theological implications of language. I have a feeling that Tacey, like Yossarian in Catch 22, does not believe in the god that most believers also do not believe in.

What the Jungian analyst tells us is not always calculated to add to our enjoyment – and, unrepentantly. I believe that lie lion has at least something to do with our enjoyment. The irreverent unbeliever may also find a strange kind of joy in the solemnity of discussions like the one about the old bathtub Stan Parker brings home from the Wallunya floods. The bath, we are told, has ‘long symbolised in the alchemical tradition, the containing soul or anima in which the work of realisation can take place’. Well, yes, but they are also containers in which people take baths. Whether or not Stan ‘unconsciously feels himself prompted to establish a new relationship with archetypal realm’, it is entirely probable that he is also looking forward to a good bath. Fictional life is not ‘real’ life but it tends to imitate it, to refer outwards as well as inwards.

Which brings me to my final problem with Patrick White: Fiction and the Unconscious, its tendency to ignore, even to eliminate, the social consequences of reading. White’s attack on ‘The Great Australian Emptiness’ is not allowed any social weight, therefore ‘White is simply projecting a demonism which he- refuses to acknowledge in himself’. Similarly, the disagreement with London intellectual life described in The Prodigal Son and implicit in many of the novels, is merely ‘a subjective remark about White’s own artificially intellectual stand at the lime’. This, surely, disposes by Jungian fiat of a significant strain in White’s work, the- awareness of the painful weight of history which gives a tragic weight to characters like Himmelfarb, the Misses Bloch. Alf Dubbo and of the end of Eddie/Eadie Twyborn’s story. The worldless world of Jungian analysis, seen from another point of view, may also be- in unconscious complicity with the interior migration, the surrender of all responsibility for public affairs, which Hannah Arendt, for example, associates with the drift towards totalitarianism in our time.

All this is not to deny the learning of Patrick White’s Fiction and the Unconscious, or its usefulness to anyone who happens to be interested in explaining the inner life of Patrick White. Most of his readers, however, are more interested in his fiction, which is quite another matter. The search for the ‘key to all mythologies’ tends, after all, to crush as much life out of novels as out of human beings. One of the claims criticism makes is to be an occupation of some social as well as human significance. This depends on its eclecticism, its ability to liberate the mind from the clamp of preconceived ideas into the realm of the hypothetical, thus forcing us to give up demands for clear origins in favour of the possible and provisional. Fiction’s conclusions are by definition probable rather than certain, associative rather than logical, specific rather than general. But that to my mind makes reading important in a world increasingly totalitarian intendency and vigorous in its controls. There are, one hopes, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any one philosophy, psychology or religion and it is important to insist on these hopes. Tacey’s approach is about solving problems, applying appropriate techniques. Another approach is to pay tribute to mystery, to what transcends techniques and systems, to ‘what you do not know but know’, to quote White himself. Tacey’s book is both important and interesting. It will be a sad day for criticism, however, if it were to become the definitive reading of Patrick White’s fiction.