SOURCE: “The Rhetoric of Patrick White's ‘Down at the Dump’,” in Bards, Bohemians, and Bookmen, edited by Leon Cantrell, University of Queensland Press, 1976, pp. 281-88.

In the following essay, Wilson praises White's short story “Down at the Dump,” asserting that it “demonstrates the superb adroitness with which White can modulate his discourse among many functions—satiric, compassionate, speculative—and give it a dimension that is metaphysical, even religious, in its range.”

This typical and very effective example of White's prose is a reminder of how fully he has exploited the resources of language to create his literature and how well he has assimilated some of those more successful technical experiments that have given to the prose of Joyce and of Faulkner such extreme flexibility and intensity, and how White has in fact produced a mode of discourse that generates a distinctly new rhetoric. The elements comprising it have...