Annotating Patrick White’s "The Solid Mandala" with Deep Features to Unravel Stylistic Devices

Abstract

Nobel Prize winner Patrick White (1912-1990) is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, not only in Australia, his country, but in the rest of the world, as well. His innovative, multi-faceted and complex prose caught the interest of the critics and of many other writers, who in some cases strove to follow on his steps. Interpreting and decoding White’s works was always a challenge, however, considering the intricacy of this author’s style and the multiple levels he used to build his stories, and especially the novels. To shed more light on this debated topic, Gordon Collier examined in detail the stylistic features of The Solid Mandala (1966), one of White’s most famous and important novels, in his The Rocks and Sticks of Words (1992). His theories are fundamental to this master thesis, which aims to continue on the same path, trying to use quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis to better understand the role of the most important stylistic features in White’s style, as well as the use of stylistic devices in general. The dissertation is made of four chapters dealing with complementary aspects of this research. The first is dedicated to the presentation of Patrick White as a national and international author, of his novels – The Solid Mandala in particular – and of the reaction of the critics to his most important works. It also functions as a first approach to the complexity of this kind of style and to the difficulties of finding a comprehensive definition for it. The second introduces Collier’s approach to the stylistic analysis and the most relevant points of his theories, using them as a starting point to set hypotheses for the subsequent original stages of the study. White’s narrative is here proven as psychological, using specific devices in the style to mirror the character’s emotions and mental processes. In order to take the analysis to the text more in depth, these theories were used to build a tagging system to annotate the whole novel. The criteria of this annotation are based on an XML standard tagging system and follow Collier’s take on the stylistic features, aiming to confirm his findings, to detect possible anomalies, and most importantly to elaborate a comprehensive theory on the new data. The third chapter explains in detail this process of annotation, from the subdivision of the text in narremes to the reasoning behind each tag, attribute and value. The fourth and final chapter uses the data collected through the annotation to build a quantitative analysis, combining stylistic, narratological and linguistic features with statistical information, tables and diagrams. The purpose of the research has two directions. In a more general way, its main goal is to establish parameters for the annotation of stylistic features in a novel. The tagging system used for The Solid Mandala is of course specific to Patrick White’s style and to the peculiarities of his prose, but it can be easily adapted to other novels and authors, if needed. Furthermore, the data extracted from The Solid Mandala alone are in themselves sufficient for many different approaches to the novel and the author, leaving a number of broader perspectives to be explored. In a more specific way, this particular approach to the research selected semantic categories and chose to investigate the novel using as references the four sections, the three main characters, and the narremes of the reconstructed fabula as markers of events. With these starting parameters it was possible to give a specific reading of the statistics, which is only one of many, but perhaps the most interesting for a comprehensive view of the novel.