VRASIDAS KARALIS AND PATRICK WHITE’S DILEMMAS

 

Vrasidas Karalis’ On Patrick White’s Dilemmas: A Personal Essay constitutes at times playful but nonetheless incisive literary exegesis, one that transcends the bounds of conventional criticism to offer instead a deeply meditative and elegiac reflection upon the life, writings, and continuing resonance of Australian Nobel Prize winning author, Patrick White. What emerges is neither a treatise nor a polemic, but a metatextual act of witnessing, a martyricon that situates itself within the liminal space between literature, theology, critique and contemplation. Karalis does not purport to explain White; rather, he accompanies him in the abyssal struggle for meaning, joining him in a shared interrogation of the sacred, the political, and the self.

From the outset, Karalis mounts a sustained critique of the prevailing modes of literary criticism, whose dependence on over-intellectualisation has rendered them impotent before the ineffable. In his estimation, the sterile analytical frameworks of academic discourse obscure the very pulse of literature, replacing lived engagement with hollow taxonomies. In the face of such aridity, Karalis asserts the primacy of the reader’s embodied, emotional encounter with the text. White’s novels, he contends, confound all flattening and all systems. They demand of the reader not analytical ingenuity, but vulnerability, a willingness to be unmade.

In advancing this position, Karalis offers not a linear study but a palimpsest in which his own subjective experience both as reader and co-inhabitant of the cosmos is interwoven with White’s. The boundaries between narrator and subject, interpreter and text, are intentionally blurred and the voice that emerges is at once confessional and liturgical, intimate and oracular. It is not always clear who is speaking or to whom. Yet this ambiguity is not a flaw, but the very form of Karalis’ engagement. Like White, he refuses clarity in favour of reverent questioning. The text becomes a space of vigil, where reading is transfigured into a spiritual ordeal.

Central to Karalis’ vision is the figure of the legacy of Patrick White as conscientious objector, to the ideological imperatives of this time. His work refuses to conform, to ingratiate, to simplify, to entertain, or even to engage in a world embroiled in wars of culture in which it can play no part. Karalis evokes the solitary grandeur of such a stance as an ethical necessity. In his eyes, or possibly those of the reader, who after all may not go on to read White’s work for themselves, but instead take Karalis’ word for it, with all the peril and pleasure that this entails, White, or his Work, or the narrator, or Karalis, or the reader, are co-opted into becoming metaphysical insurgents, desert fathers of a literary realm.

Consequently, Karalis cannot but reject the mantle of the detached critic. Although he is his corporeal manifestation must inhabit that very world and draw sustenance from it, as author of this patristic commentary, he eschews the polished scaffolding of academic discourse, choosing instead a mode of writing grounded in witness, reverence, and resistance. His prose is not composed to impress but to convey. To navigate through it, we are asked to accept or at least have faith that it carries the weight of memory, of loss, of obligation and of an innate teleological obscurity.

This dual rejection of critical detachment and readerly passivity forms the ethical core of Karalis’ discourse. He indicts the kind of criticism that treats texts as objects, dissecting them with a surgeon’s detachment while remaining impervious to their inner force. Instead, he contends that White’s work is not to be analysed but suffered and not deciphered but inhabited. It is, in a most secular way, sacramental. To read White is to pass through some type of conflagration.

This theological conception of literature appears to position Karalis within a lineage of phenomenological thinkers such as Blanchot, Poulet, and Levinas, who understand reading as a mode of encounter, a hospitality offered to the Other. Karalis does not presume to interpret White’s work in the traditional sense. He accompanies it, viewing White’s characters not as psychological case studies but as ontological wounds, incarnations of spiritual desolation in a world denuded of the sacred.

The very structure of the book mirrors this mode of engagement. Each chapter reads less like an argument than a meditation, a parable. Karalis excels in this genre, the literary parable, imbuing each passage with ambiguity, moral gravity, and unresolved tension. He does not close meaning but opens it, allowing the reader the sense that they are entering into communion with the text. The parables do not teach but beckon.

And this is where a question hovers over the entire work. What is Karalis’ own role in this literary liturgy? Is he White’s executor, tender of the legacy, keeper of the flame? Or is he the undertaker, preparing the body of a neglected prophet for burial, composing the threnody that will mark his final passage? The text itself refuses to decide, for we are not always certain which is the text, nor which author we are engaging with. For Karalis knows that literature, like all things sacred, resists teleological conveniences. It abides in the interval between presence and absence, meaning and the silence that confounds it.

This ambiguity is intensified by Karalis’ own diasporic positionality. As a Greek-Australian intellectual, he approaches White not so much through the prism of national identity but through the lens of exile. He encounters him as a fellow sojourner, estranged from institutions, suspicious of belonging, yet profoundly committed to the ethical possibilities of language. In doing so, Karalis liberates White from parochial appropriation, locating him instead within a broader genealogy of cosmopolitan estrangement. White becomes a spiritual nomad, a figure whose true homeland is the wilderness.

This is a reading that find kinship with Terry Eagleton’s conception of literature as the unconscious of ideology, a topos where the contradictions of the social order erupt in disfigured and transcendent forms. Karalis recognises in White’s work not mere critique but the articulation of a metaphysical crisis. The great author’s characters do not simply suffer society; they suffer being itself. Their wounds are theological because their struggles are so sacrificial.

Karalis’ readings of Voss, The Tree of Man, and The Eye of the Storm reveal these dimensions with profound clarity. These novels, we are given to understand, are not so much about Australia, as about the silence of God. Their landscapes are mystical, their characters pilgrims, their language a kind of ascetic labour. Karalis does not interpret them so much as dwell within them, marking his exegesis with awe.

Even his autobiographical reflections, spare though they are, are offered not for indulgence but as tokens of his own bona fide. They are acts of bearing witness, gestures of reverent intimacy with a writer whose own life was one long resistance to sentimentality. Karalis draws close but never presumes. His prose is an act of homage.

On Patrick White’s Dilemmas is thus a work of rare moral and literary seriousness. It reclaims criticism as a sacred vocation, a mode of fidelity to the word and to the wounded, reminding us that to read is to suffer and to suffer is to remember. In the face of forgetfulness, Karalis writes with the solemnity of love, refusing to let silence consume what remains.

Through his encounter with Patrick White, Vrasidas Karalis has composed not merely a book but a rite. It marks a passing, yet it also affirms a presence, allowing us to mourn without despair.  In doing so, it reminds us that even now, in a fractured and distracted world, literature remains a place where the soul may still be addressed.

Perhaps the most profound dimension of Karalis’ engagement lies in the unique vantage he offers as a bearer of a particular Hellenic diasporic sensibility. Is it this that permits him to discern in Patrick White the spectral presence of the Hellenic, less in allusion than in ethos? White, whose fiction was informed by the tragic arc, by notions of catharsis, divine withdrawal, and the mystery of becoming, is revealed here as a writer situated along a continuum of Greek thought, one who unconsciously channels the pathos of Sophocles and the metaphysics of the desert fathers. Karalis’ interpretive lens, shaped in the crucible of displacement and fidelity, renders visible what has long been veiled. The migrant Hellenic perspective, marginal, complex, steeped in both absence and heritage, may be among the most resonant and vital hermeneutics for a writer like White, whose work itself stands on the threshold of language, culture, and transcendence. It is through this double estrangement, White from his cultural milieu and Karalis from his mother tongue, that a truer communion is made possible. If this is plausible, then the text is not simply a reading but a homecoming.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 29 November 2025