SOURCE: “‘Down at the Dump’ And Lacan's Mirror Stage,” in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, October, 1983, pp. 233-37.

In the following essay, Brady praises White's story “Down at the Dump,” calling it one of the author's most interesting stories “for the insight it offers into people and society.”

‘Down at the Dump’ is one of White's most interesting stories, not merely for the insight it offers into people and society but also for the structures underlying it, structures which deepen our understanding not only of White and his art but also of his relations with his culture as a whole.

By now, of course, it is a truism to say that White's art is not mimetic, not concerned to reproduce surface appearances, but expressive, concerned with inwardness, with the writer's sense of himself and the world. This story, like nearly all of his work, relates primarily to psychic...