SOURCE: “D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel: Mirrors, Triangles, and Sublime Repression,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2, Summer, 1989, pp. 193-209.

In the following essay, Newman provides analysis of recurring symbols, metaphors, and narrative techniques in The White Hotel that underscore the paradoxical dualities of truth, history, and psychic experience. According to Newman, “Through repetition of images we experience no erasure; instead we have memory and revision of memory.”

I

When Discord has fallen into the lowest depths of the vortex concord has reached the center.

—Empedocles

The horror D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel is also its passion. Its narrative structure propels the reader backward and forward in an obsessive quest to explain the convergence of contraries that constitutes the novel's motifs. Sex and violence parallel and coalesce as the narrative movement conflates the pleasure of the text with its terrifying vision. The reader moves through the...