AustLit

'Edgecombe examines Patrick White's novels The Eye of the Storm and The Vivisector and its connection with the works of French novelist Victor Hugo and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The French novel that suggests itself in connection with The Eye of the Storm would naturally be La Chatreuse de Parme, but there are also several points of the narrative that reveal a debt to Hugo's Les Travailleurs de la Mer. The first relates to the "skiapod" of Odilon Redon, which itself seems to have derived from Hugo's account of the King of the Auxcriniers. In the Eye, White stresses the liminal nature of this world, emblematized by an intermediate light that effaces temporal divisions.' (Publication abstract)