Visitants by Randolph Stow

First published: 1979

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1959

Locale: Papua, New Guinea

Principal Characters:

• Alistair Cawdor, a suicide
• Tim Dalwood, a cadet patrol officer
• K. M. MacDonnell, a planter of Kailuana Island
• Naibusi, MacDonnell’s housekeeper
• Saliba, Naibusi’s helper
• Dipapa, the chief of the natives
• Benoni, his successor
• Osana, a native interpreter
• Metusela, the leader of the native uprising
• Kailusa, Cawdor’s servant

The Novel

The premise of this short, intense novel is a hearing into the cause of the death of Alistair Cawdor, a suicide. Several people—K. M. MacDonnell, Saliba, Tim Dalwood, Osana, and Benoni—give their respective retrospective accounts of the last days of Cawdor’s life; Cawdor is, in a sense, able to participate after the fact in this account through the characters’ recollections of his words and actions and through passages from his journal. The Assistant District Officer, Mr. J. G. Browne, oversees the inquiry.

The last days of Cawdor’s life are spent on a trip that begins Visitants, a journey by boat to the island of Kailuana, ostensibly to conduct a census of the natives but in reality to attempt to determine if a native uprising is about to occur. The old native chief, Dipapa, does not want his reign to be continued by Benoni, his nephew and heir, a native educated in white schools. Metusela, a former rebellion leader, has returned at the instigation of Dipapa to lead a native uprising to turn the natives away from the ways of the whites.

Rumors abound among the natives of visitants from afar, this time of “star people” who have come to them. Having had sufficient visitants from the distant world of European civilization to be considered a cargo-cult culture, the natives are not so moved by the idea of star people as is Cawdor, to whom such a possibility represents hope. When Cawdor realizes that the star people are really non-existent, that the missing natives have down-to-earth explanations, he loses hope. Having lost everything else—his wife, his father, his friend, and finally his position—Cawdor kills himself.

The Characters

Alistair Cawdor is a modern-day Everyman, a man caught between past and present, between two cultures, between being and nonbeing. Having nothing that holds him in this world but pain and suffering, he chooses suicide. He does not have pleasant memories or close relationships, as does MacDonnell, who shares a past with Naibusi. The younger people—Saliba, Dalwood, Benoni—share the future and are resilient and content with their lives in a present world in which they are only beginning to find a place. Representatives of the past in the older people—Metusela, Dipapa, MacDonnell, and Naibusi—are shown as marking kinds of values in the community, values accepted or rejected by the younger people. Osana as an interpreter is between both worlds, and his mastery of the language of whites and natives is a symbolic representation of his power.

The whites represent official order brought to the world of the natives. MacDonnell lives apart from the native groups and has been so long separate from the world of the whites that he no longer fits in either world. The officers who come to the island—Cawdor and Dalwood—stop at MacDonnell’s house before going among the natives, showing this place as a point of transition between the two worlds. Since MacDonnell shares his dwelling with natives—Naibusi and Saliba—the house and its inhabitants mark a transition of both worlds.

Naibusi is more than a mere housekeeper, however, having shared living quarters with MacDonnell since both were young. She supports Benoni to MacDonnell, who disapproves of the young man. This disapproval is felt also by Dipapa, whose youngest wife (of his thirteen wives) was reputed to have been intimate with Benoni. Naibusi has an ally in her approval of Benoni, for Saliba also likes the young man and tries to help him.

Benoni rises to power after Dipapa’s death, which is purportedly accomplished by poisoning at the hands of Dipapa’s thirteenth wife. Benoni’s success is in part the result of Saliba’s killing Metusela, choosing to kill him rather than seduce him, as Benoni had instructed her. Saliba’s morals reflect a respect for herself and her feelings that makes murder preferable to unwanted sex, reflecting the value of what is felt above what is thought or planned. Benoni’s manipulation of Saliba reflects an imposition of order that ignores the reality of feeling, perhaps illustrating an expediency that may be considered as a characteristic of his success.

Benoni, Saliba, and Dalwood are the younger generation rising to replace the older people, though Cawdor, replaced by Dalwood when he loses control of himself in front of the natives, is not so much old as simply over, having lost the desire to live, dealing with his own visitant, the malaria that occupies his body and helps provide the displacement that leads to Cawdor’s suicide.

Cawdor’s assistant, Dalwood, starts out as an apprentice, eager to learn what Cawdor thinks and does. Dalwood is more nearly on an equal basis as a young person in his relationship with Saliba, with whom he has a brief encounter. The basis for this relationship is sex rather than social equality, though, and Dalwood is shown as both insensitive to the feelings of some of the natives and very sensitive to Cawdor’s feelings. Dalwood is a fairly uncomplicated character whose inner and outer worlds are not far apart, unlike Cawdor, for whom the distance within and without is so great that it both exacerbates and illustrates his displacement.

Cawdor is the real subject of Visitants, and what happens to him is a paradigmatic illustration of the process of distancing and loss that results in an isolation so acute in its effect on Cawdor that for him death is less painful than life. His color—black showing and a white bottom—is a physical depiction of his mixed origins: he was born neither in a white world nor in a native one; he belongs to neither culture as a white man born out of a white world. Furthermore, Cawdor’s loss—his wife’s leaving him, his father’s death—is extended in the loss of his friend and in his loss of health. His servant, Kailusa, feels Cawdor’s death as a loss so great that he, too, commits suicide, reflecting another example of detachment from meaning that results in death when Kailusa has no reason to live without Cawdor to care for.

Critical Context

Visitants marked an important turning point in Randolph Stow’s career: Along with The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980), it ended a ten-year silence. Stow’s return to publication in 1979 was acknowledged by the bestowal of Australia’s annual Patrick White Award.

Visitants, regarded by critics as one of Stow’s finest works, should be read in conjunction with his earlier masterpiece on similar themes, To the Islands (1958, revised 1982). In that novel, a native brings comfort to an old white man, Heriot, who has left his world to travel to the “islands” where the natives go to die. Visitants internalizes the journey that is exterior in To the Islands, and where in the latter the journey is from the world toward a place of reconciliation, in Visitants it is a journey toward increasing isolation. Cawdor goes from his personal world to a public or official world in which his isolation is supported by his official identity. When this official role is lost and he is replaced by Dalwood, there is not even a social (or official) place for Cawdor, whose displacement is thus complete in both a personal and a public capacity.

Bibliography

Hassall, Anthony J. A Strange Country: A Study of Randolph Stow, 1986.

Kramer, Leonie, ed. The Oxford History of Australian Literature, 1981.

Ramsey, S. A. “‘The Silent Griefs’: Randolph Stow’s Visitants,” in Critical Quarterly. XXIII (Summer, 1981), pp. 73-81.

Richey, Norma Jean. Review in World Literature Today. Fall, 1982.