AustLit

Epigraph: ==An individual avant-gardist is his own lawmaker and

executioner. He desires no agreement from anyone.

He doesn’t give a shit about the nodding heads. He

approves of himself and he completes himself.2

—Zhang Jiayan, Low Poetry in China (7)

White sees the world in very much the same terms as Milan Kundera, who

has observed that any view that does not allow for shit is mere kitsch, and that

the existence of shit is incompatible with the kind of belief in God and goodness

found in orthodox Christianity of the kind embraced by such of White’s

characters as the Reverend Timothy Calderon. If God is not in the shit, or in

Stan Parker’s much cited gob of spittle, then He is nowhere. But if we can see

God immanent in the world, including its shit, spittle and semen, then He

also transcends the limitations of His creation and our perceptions of it.

—John McLaren, Writing in Hope and Fear: Literature

as Politics in Postwar Australia (176)