SOURCE: “Hystery, Herstory, History: ‘Imagining the Real’ in Thomas's The White Hotel,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 25, No. 4, Winter, 1984, pp. 452-77.

In the following essay, Robertson examines Thomas's effort to reconcile postmodern literary aesthetics, myth, and psychoanalysis with the horrific realities of twentieth-century history and female identity in The White Hotel.

The proper relation of art's forms to social facts has been a pressing problem for artists in this century, and so also has been the relation of psychoanalysis to political explanations of human behavior. For all their acute sensitivity to the society around them, the great modernist artists tended to give us survival by aesthetic escape into a contemplative and esoteric realm of imaginative creation. Yeats, for example, who is invoked in the epigraph of D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel, often worried about his poetry's responsibility for actual destruction, but he always reaffirmed, though with increasing self-irony...