Whites Voss :: Religion Australia Suffering Essays

White's Voss White's sense of fate is one in which everyone is doomed to suffer and greatness is measured by the individual's capacity to do so (Brady 1978). This is articulated by Clark who believes that in the harshness of the Australian setting the "only glory men know on earth is how they respond to defeat and failure" (quoted by Bliss 3). The quest in Voss cannot be read as one that looks forward in expectation of discernible results. The usual criteria involved in determining failure must be discarded here. The failures must be seen as inherent, inextricable components of the ongoing process of becoming rather than being, articulated in Voss as the mystery of life "not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming" (269). White has partly used the metaphor of a geographical exploration because the desert explorer must inevitably suffer physically and this allows insight into suffering on the spiritual realm. This links Voss to the wildernes s experiences of Moses, Jesus, St Antony and many other desert ascetics. White shows that suffering through losing self is only the first step of a process of finding a truer sense of self, in acquiring an understanding of the human condition and, ultimately, in coming closer to discovering the Divine. The notion of failure facilitating humility will be used in this essay to establish whether the characters in Voss are fortunate in their failures and to consider how White has subscribed to this "fortunate failure" in the actual process of writing. Different aspects of failure will be examined, but ultimately they are all part of the necessary failure entailed in the religious quest. Bliss explains this failure as being vital in the recognition that the "Infinite, by definition, must be infinitely sought" (205). Her superficial paradox is similar to many of the deliberately paradoxical elements of White's work which all form part of the Christian paradox of recovering a truer sense of self through self-sacrifice. It is not unreasonable to see this as the controlling idea behind the "fortunate failures" as White's self-stated intention was to write a novel concerning the "relationship between the blundering human being and God"(White quoted in van den Driesen 77). The interest lies i n how this blundering is explored as a necessary part of the Divine quest. Le Mesurier's failure could be attributed to his taking his own life, but this is too literal a view to take in a novel where characters are invested with expanding consciousness rather than diminished awareness.