Mystical translation in Patrick White's Voss

Patrick White's Voss consorts with the divine. Its hallucinatory prose transforms the desert interior of the Australian continent into a numinous landscape where even "the souls of rocks" are worthy of consideration (204). The journey across this enchanted landscape implies the work of a divine translator who reads human action sub specie aeterni, translating material failure into spiritual success. On this painful journey to self-discovery, to "death by torture in the country of the mind" (475), the insufficiency of the will to reach spiritual enlightenment is echoed in the insufficiency of words to express it. The explorers struggle with words in the desert haze as much as with themselves, for words, like the will, mortify and betray us as often as they serve us. On the land that resists its inhabitants, words resist their users, thwarting them to the point where silence is chosen "as a state preferable to conversation" (132). The annihilating truth of human subjection to divine power is disclosed at the limits of words and experience, where only silence speaks truly. But just as the failure of words to plumb the depths of experience gives them, paradoxically, the power of transcendence to refer to such depths symbolically, so the failure of human striving on the temporal plane indicates the possibility of wholeness on the spiritual plane. The common structure uniting aesthetic and spiritual experience is negation. The spiritual communion of Voss and Laura is thus communicated telepathically, for "[p]eople do not speak in an exchange of souls", as the quiet Stan Parker of The Tree of Man knows.