On the surface, it seems like another Portrait of the Artist. He is an older man this time, however, and attempting to paint the portrait of someone else, Jessica Keal, an academic, newly arrived at what is obviously the Australian National University. He first sees her as he is passing by the common room where there is a party to welcome her. But something about her arrests and unsettles him, an air of detachment, of the gravity of someone who is lonely and does not lie to herself about it. This withholding of herself, he senses, however, may be ‘the foreground of something of great substance, some unshakeable purpose, a private and unspoken intention that she had dwelt on with care and singleness of mind over the decades of her life’.

I quote this not only because of the lucidity and poise of the writing here but also because it points us to the real subject, a ceremonious introspection, at once profoundly intimate and yet paradoxically impersonal, as the artist pursues her in himself and himself in her through the labyrinthine ways of memory as well as of an unfolding of ambiguous relationships. Yet this is not as merely subjective as it sounds. There is a kind of unshieldedness about the gaze brought to bear here upon the movements of perception and intuition, and a melancholy of retrospection which is yet somehow also peaceful, even joyous, creating a sense of life as at once monumental and fugitive. If Sartre was right that in life we paint our own portrait, the understanding here is concerned with further implications. ‘We paint portraits from our alienation from people. It’s nostalgia for company we don’t have and can’t have. Absence and love.’

Memory is the transfiguration of love. But here is also the other side of a sense of exile as we move through an echoing world back to childhood through landscapes of memory and desire, strangely innocent in its distance, towards the portrait and in a sense the reader also dreams of which will mean release into the stillness, some central absence around which the story circles and in which we finally come to dwell.

A story, the narrator remarks, is not an explanation, though many stories are or try to be. This one, however, moves in the opposite direction, in many ways more like an extended poem with its preoccupation with form and language, especially with the limits of language, with the ‘silence that surrounds everything we do while we’re doing it. Always the silence we work in’. So there are echoes of Four Quartets, and more distantly, of Proust, of an art of possession which becomes a fear of dispossession. But those open to that kind of resonance, may also think of Derrida as Reb Derrida, the Kabbalist master of language passing through on its way to ultimate silence, and perhaps of the Symbolists and Chris Brennan, ‘the Wanderer on the way to the self’.

All this sounds both complicated and pretentious. But that, paradoxically, is only because the book reads so simply, speaks to us so intimately, enfolding the reader and drawing us into ourselves, enfolding us in this silence. Partly this is because both author and narrator have refined themselves out of existence; their narrative presence is contemplative rather than active, omnipresent but as a kind of absence, a pool or a mirror, as the self’s purposes here falls away to become a receptivity.

This is the other end of the scale from the Romantic sense that the world is waiting for us to complete it, the humility of a Rilke:

Are we perhaps here just for saying: Home,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit-Tree, Wisdom
– Bridge, Pillar, Tower? … but for saying, remember,
Oh, for such saying as never the things themselves
hoped so intensely to be.

Reflected in the pool of this kind of perception the familiar world returns charged with a mysterious potency and poignancy. Yet it is also a world in which we can believe completely. The artist’s childhood world, his soldier father’s coarse uniform and heavy rifle and later the broken old books he mends which stand for something he never had; the fists of his sister in her torn and dirty school dress, flailing his back as she sat astride him beating out her pain; the nakedness, ‘cool pale and glowing’ of his first girl; the Araluen Valley of Jessica’s inheritance; all of these images are sharply there even as they flow onwards along the traces of desire, caught up in a circulation beyond the merely personal or individual.

The reader, too, is drawn into this flow, so that what is external is suffused with a kind of inwardness. A people and the world they live in do not dissolve under this pressure. Take, for instance, this passage, an early description of the Araluen Valley. There is a long shot first: ‘The light of the day is sharp and clear. The grass and the trees shine with it. The surface of the close cropped paddock is polished.’ Then we move to a close-up: ‘Magpies walk about near the perimeter of the garden and stab at the ground for insects. They pause in their search to examine us, and they warble in a quiet, interior way, conversing with themselves.’

One is reminded here of Wittgenstein’s proposition that it is not why the world is but that it is, that is the mystical. But The Sitters is also very wise in its understanding of people, aware of the many ways of humiliation and subjection but also of human dignity. There are people here who never had a chance: the artist’s father and sister outraged by poverty and violence, the girl in the sandwich van, Jessica’s father, and so on. But what we find in common with these people is not so much humiliation, not pain, but understanding and knowledge of a fatedness which can only be mastered by acceptance, by knowing, as the narrator and his sister do: ‘there is a reason for all this though none of us knows what it is. We just know there is a reason’. The dignity is in this knowledge.

So in the end the portrait is drawn, gravely classical. But it is a portrait not so much of the self as of the limits of the self and of the impossibility of its reaching a conclusion.

We make the mistake of looking for the perfect image. That’s Greek philosophy. It is the antique error. The error of monotheism. It gets you nowhere. The longing for a fixed truth resident behind the reality we’ve brought into being ourselves. That’s futility. The fallacy of the Western intellectual tradition. As if our reality is going to hold forever, in there somewhere if only we can get to it, if only we can dig deep enough, a hard impermeable kernel of truth that will hold out against the apocalypse of our loss of faith.

Strangely provisional, ‘a succession of tones searching for a certain resolution’ which succeeds only in ‘elaborating the silence’, The Sitters takes us beyond this tradition. It is about the place in which, collectively as well as individually, we find ourselves today, the place of modernism as a form, if you like, of unknowing. Elegant yet compassionate, austere yet profoundly human, it may be the kind of masterpiece Judith Wright had in mind:

Searching ourselves in pain, we yet rejoice
That the implacable awaited voice
asks of us all we feared yet longed to say.
(‘Poem and Audience’)