Gerald Murnane

In the first part of this book, the narrator is a Hungarian aristocrat looking out from his library over the grasslands of the Alföld and imagining his editor and translator reading what he has written in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute for Prairie Studies on the Great Plains of the USA. But about a third of the way through, he is replaced by an Australian writer looking out over the grasslands of Victoria and reflecting on the books on his shelves, his adolescence in various places around show more Melbourne and the girls from that time he has lost touch with. But there’s no suggestion that these two imagined sets of writers and readers exclude each other, or even that they are actually different. There’s still great play being made with the colours red, white and green, there are unidentifiable quotations that look as though they come from Hungarian writers, and there is a lot of talk about areas of grassland between watercourses that are sometimes European, sometimes Australian and sometimes North American.
Murnane clearly wants to frustrate our instinct to pull a story from the text at the same time as making us think about the kind of exchange between writer and reader that is going on in a fictional text and the way both sides manipulate it. Is the page a window, or a mirror, he asks. Calvino has clearly sneaked into the story somewhere. Hang on, what was that institute called again...?
Mind-bending and an enormous pleasure to read, like everything I’ve read by Murnane so far. show less

Why Reviews of Murnane are Not Adequate, and How Complex Failures Produce Great Literature

I find Gerald Murnane much more perplexing than most readers seem to. In a review of "A Million Windows" in the "New York Times," June 17, 2016, James McNamara sums up Murnane's theory of fiction this way:

"The Australian novelist Gerald Murnane has become known for works of difficult genius, and his latest will only burnish that reputation. An exploration of the mind and of literary creation, it is a show more book of intricate construction and vast intellectual scope.
Moving between fiction, philosophy and literary theory, 'A Million Windows' investigates and demonstrates the aesthetic of what Murnane calls 'true fiction,' which faithfully records the narrator’s 'invisible world' of the mind. This is distinct from artifice, where the writer consciously creates, and realism, where the reader is prompted to think of characters and places as actually existing. Rather, 'true fiction' conceives of an invisible metaphysical plane that extends infinitely forward, backward, even sideways, into every possible temporal, topical and spatial dimension. In it are autonomous 'fictional personages' (characters), whose existence the writer 'learns of' rather than creates."

This is as succinct and accurate a theory as I have read, and it is substantially correct. There are three things to be kept always in mind:

1. "True fiction" is about the narrator's (and the author's) mind. (Exactly how is about the mind is another question.)
2. "Self-referential" fiction (what McNamara calls "artifice") occurs when narrators posture in front of their readers and "wonder aloud, as it were, what fates to assign to various characters," as in "Tristram Shandy." (p. 34)
3. "Film" (Murnane's preferred term) or "realism" (McNamara's term) occurs when the narrator and author wish to present a fictional world as real.

Murnane's idea of fiction isn't any more intricate than McNamara's summary provided that a reader doesn't try to follow Murnane's arguments. McNamara goes on to say "A Million Windows" "performs the theory it advances," but the book isn't just an example of its concerns: even more than a fiction, it is an investigation. The narrator's voice is consistently affectless and grammatically precise. The book asks to be understood, not just "marveled at" as a sign of "genius" or "intellectual power and originality" (paraphrasing McNamara).

McNamara's three-point summary would be an adequate conceptual schema for reading Murnane, except that the three positions are exposited in an exceptionally unclear, inconsistent, irrational manner. These difficulties do not occur at the level of the fictional stories in the book, which are more or less continuous and ultimately traditional in affect, enabling readers to find their way through the book, and to experience its stories as expressive and moving. The problem is that the book itself--its language, its address, its grammatical precision--gives no sign that the passages on narrative theory are to be skimmed or taken as signs of a poetic evocation of the complexity of memory. On the contrary, they give every sign that they are to be understood and evaluated.

The questions I have about Murnane's fiction require an unusual amount of explication. I recognize the fact that spending 800 words on two sentences, as I am about to do in section 1--without even getting near the book's main topics--puts me way off to one side of the bell curve of reader's responses. Either reviewers and readers are reading too loosely, or my response is as nearly pathological as Murnane's own bedroom full of filing cabinets, which are so well described in Mark Binelli's wonderful piece in the New York Times (tinyurl.com/yd9bf98m).

It's possible to agree with Will Heyward's feeling that "beneath the immaculate surface of his formal, outmoded sentences runs a dark current of hopelessly compressed—hopeless, in that is otherwise inexpressible, and seemingly irrevocable—emotion" and at the same time feel Heyward's reading is entirely too loose and poetic. Reading Murnane, Heyward writes,

"The world can seem... as a maze of as yet unmade phenomenal connections. Navigating this maze, and realizing the connections within it, are part of his preoccupation with the act of writing. In writing, these connections are both invented and discovered. A single, remote phrase might rise to a series of responses, which then, like fractals, multiply again." [Heyward, in "Music and Literature," tinyurl.com/ydcg2ywn]

Fractals aren't the right analogy for Murnane's distinctions, because nothing in Murnane disappears from sight into infinite complexity: everything is carefully named. It's also not enough to note that the book's title comes from "The Portrait of a Lady," and conjures fiction's house of a million rooms, or even to cite, as Heyward does, Murnane saying "I would like to be able to write a text, or create a text, so complicated that I would get lost in it." It's not enough because the book itself asks to be read slowly and carefully.

And I disagree absolutely with Heyward's conclusion: "Given the elliptical and awkward nature of Murnane’s writing," he says, "an easy mistake is to strain to understand him, but his writing is a visual proposition." That is like a review of a physics textbook that proposes readers don't worry about the equations, because physics is to be "marveled at" and praised for its "intellectual power and originality." If those qualities are true, it's because physics has arguments worth attending to--even if some aren't true and others are mistaken.

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Here is an example. The pages where Murnane's narrator distinguishes his book from "self-referential fiction" open with a description of the phenomenon, and close a page later with the narrators first negative judgment abou "self-referential fiction." The narrator notes that "Tristram Shandy," "some of the fiction of Anthony Trollope," "much of the fiction of Thomas Hardy," and Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller" oppose "writer and reader... as the players on either side of a chessboard." He then says:

"Even the undiscerning reader of this fiction of mine should have understood by now that I, the narrator, would dread to feel that we were separated even by these sentences." (p. 33)

This is both unexpected and apparently poorly aimed as a rejoinder against self-reference in fiction. I might have expected Murnane's first-person narrator to say that the manner in which he makes reference to his fiction differs from the theatrical model in "Tristram Shandy." Or perhaps that he did not find the staging of a contest between reader and author to be persuasive. Instead we're given an unusual and emotional declaration: he would "dread" to be separated from his reader "even by these sentences." Of course he is separated by exactly those sentences, so the sentence itself cannot be the end of the matter--but more important, we have been given no particular reason to think the narrator wants to be close to us (I am echoing the "we" in the passage) at all. It's as if the implied author has suddenly realized why he doesn't like what he calls "self-referential fiction."

(It's an entirely separate question whether we can believe that Murnane himself was unaware of the entire movement of postnmodern metafiction beyond Calvino, and whether he knew that it doesn't rely on opposing "writer and reader"--whether he realized other people had been experimenting with different kinds of self-awareness not at all unlike his own.)

This passage I quoted is only one paragraph from a three-page section on the difference between "A Million Windows" and "self-referential fiction." The following pages just make things even more obscure. At the conclusion he says he's already explained himself, but "for the sake of the undiscerning reader, I shall repeat that I am the narrator of this work and not the author." (p. 35)

This is a common and reasonable position for anyone interested in narration, and when I read it I expected he wuld continue by saying that as the narrator, he cannot play the games of "self-reference" that Sterne or Calvino play. But instead he says this:

"In the matter of my fate, so to call it, I am no more able to exercise choice than is any narrator of any [text]..." (p. 35)

Surely this doesn't address the question. It's self-evident narrators don't have control and so can't play games of the sort Murnane's narrator is imagining. But that has nothing to do with self-referentiality.

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What matters most in terms of understanding is what Murnane's narrator means by "true fiction." I won't even begin to give arguments as I've done above. Instead I'll just note two salient markers.

First, regarding the narrator's (and implied author's) control of the distance between the events he recounts and the narrator who recounts those events.

Murnane's narrator's distance from his "fictional characters" is variable and unstable. I noted this in my review (on Goodreads and Librarything) of "Barley Patch." In "A Million Windows," the narrator often slips downard, in the direction of what he calls "film," from a starting point that is as abstract and metafictional as he can make it. These slips, I think, are not premeditated, and not wholly in Murnane's control.

A typical section or paragraph might begin like this:

"If ever he had asked himself, during all the years since, how a person might feel on seeming to recognize as a version of himself or herself some or another personage in a work of fiction..." (p. 83)

A half-page later these many qualifications are no longer present:

"Sometimes, in later years, he supposed that... the answer quoted should have shamed and humiliated him..."

The hypothetical, atemporal, ungendered character becomes becomes a generalized, temporalized narrator, who becomes a fictionalized character, who becomes a memory of the narrator's, who becomes a memory of the implied author's.

"A Million Windows," like "Barley Patch," contains a central story--in this case a woman, in "Barley Patch" the narrator's parents. Enframing and infiltrating those stories are metafictional hypotheticals. In both books Murnane (the implied author) can't seem to conrol the degree of separation. It's an expressive quality, this slippage: it's part of the book's interest and pathos, but there is no sign in the narrative that it is intended.

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Second, regarding the narrator's (and implied author's) theories about the ontology--the mode of being--of his "fictional characters."

As McNamara says, Murnane is concerned with "autonomous 'fictional personages' (characters), whose existence the writer 'learns of' rather than creates." Yet Murnane's narrator (and by implication Murnane, since this phenomenon repeats across several books) has a self-contradictory, or at least a very counter-intuitive, theory about the nature of fictional characters. At one point about halfway through the book he rehearses his complaint that reviewers and critics always discuss characters "as though they are persons living in the world." (p. 94) He says he approves of something Evelyn Waugh said: he had never "entertainedf the least interest in why characters behaved as they did." This, it seems, is an anti-realist position, which wants to let fictional characters behave in any number of ways that people don't. Waugh, Murnane's narrator says, "felt no obligation to try to read the minds of his creatures."

So far so good. But Murnane has a theory, both in "A Million Windows" and in "Barley Patch," that characters in fiction can be understood as leading their own lives. In "Barley Patch" he also imagines characters living "in" the worlds of specific fictions even though the authors don't name them. (And he fails to consistently distinguish those two possibilities.)

The sense in which such "fictional characters" (or characters that are "potentially" available for fictions) are alive without intentionality is entirely obscure. I think the best way to understand this is as a theory ruined by its author's intensely held and mutually incompatible desires: to write about fiction in such a way that it becomes "true" to its author's experience of *writing about* fiction, and at thre same time true to its author's experience of *reading* fiction.

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At the moment I can't do better than that. For me, Murnane's books fail to construct reliable theory, and the theory fails to prevent the narrators from telling the very human, "realist" stories of love and memory that are at their core. Together those two failures produce texts that are expressive in ways no other author has achieved. Beckett, Calvino, Stein, and other experimental modernists are consistent and controlled by comparison. These are complex failures of authorial intention and control, and they produce great literature. show less

A combination of several things, but most notably J. M. Coetzee's recent article on Gerald Murnane in the New York Review of Books, made me realize that it was high time to revisit Murnane's work. In particular, because I found Inland to be a very repetitive work which was better fleshed out in the rather complementary Barley Patch, I thought that a more generous immersion into this enigmatic (and often elusive) writer's work would do me well.

The Plains is considered by many critics to be show more Murnane's finest work, and, in many ways, I wish that my journey through his oeuvre had commenced here. The Plains is a metaphysical meditation on our relation to landscapes, how they form our individual, familial, and cultural identities—and yet also how they complicate these identities. Like the narrators of Barley Patch and Inland, the narrator here is trying to fathom creatively the dynamic, interrelated pieces of the plains and yet continually finds his attempts at analyzing fall short of the medium of art.

From "outer Australia," the narrator journeys to "inner Australia" in order to research the region of the plains for a projected film he plans to make entitled The Interior, a "film that would reveal the plains to the world." As an outsider, he wavers between letting the plainsmen know of his true identity or else letting them think that he comes from the borderland close to "the interior." It helps, as he gets to know the plainsmen and the history of the plains themselves, that he is an artist. Indeed, the world of the plains that Murnane creates here is one that is deeply rooted in and also one that is highly respectful of the arts—particularly poetry: "writing was generally considered by the plainsmen the worthiest of all crafts and the one most nearly able to resolve the thousand uncertainties that hung about almost every mile of the plains."

That this portrayal of "inner Australia" is better-versed than its "outer" counterpart, and also that the narrator is able to locate philosophical truths that resonate across borders and cultural spaces, is one that Murnane maps skillfully on to larger questions about artistic creation ("I'll go in search of the places that lay just beyond the painted horizons; the places that the artists knew they were only able to hint at"); the importance of living as opposed to learning; the many possibilities and routes our lives can, and perhaps do, take ("the moment when a young woman saw as he might never appear again a man who saw her as she might never appear again"); traveling as revealing and yet also isolating ("each man in his heart is a traveller in a boundless landscape"); how life resembles one's own landscape ("They saw the world itself as one more in an endless series of plains"; "I was trying to discover my own kind of landscape"); how we spend our lives "shaping from uneventful days in a flat landscape the substance of myth"; and the perpetual sense of dislocation that we feel whether we are in our homeland or in other lands—the landscape "always invisible even though one crossed and re-crossed it daily,—a land beyond the known land."

The Plains showcases all of Murnane's omnipresent themes and concerns while remaining a wonderfully lucid and self-contained narrative in its own right. Murnane might well be said to be one of those writers whose different books all speak to one another in an overarching piece, as if each of his books were a piece of a puzzle that contain ruminations on similar questions but in slightly different keys. If anything, The Plains made me think about Murnane's other work in a wholly different light, and I thank Coetzee for making me see that this revisitation of Murnane's work was a journey well worth taking. show less

Showing by doing absolutely nothing but telling is the curious destabilizing strategy adopted by Gerald Murnane in Landscape with Landscape. His use of the first-person point of view is relentless and strangely effective. There is no dialogue; he has distanced himself from the forms called the novel and the short story, and written instead “fictions” which inhabit a silkily shifting undefinable zone between personal diary, autobiography, and hybrid autofiction. The literary allusions show more read like a mature student’s history of his academic soul, and the timid seemingly wannabe Don Juan narrator’s reticence with women combined with his microscopic attention to and retention of female detail, down to the last freckle, is odd and interesting. As John Gardner says in On Becoming a Novelist, inevitably the best writers have a certain strangeness of style. This is true of Murnane’s prose. Once you give up on categorizing his writing and just flow with it, Murnane will frequently reward you with sentences that sparkle like shards of obsidian in white granite. Here are a few examples:

“And by way of saying goodbye the publisher pointed a little east of north (which was exactly the direction of the writer’s own suburb) and told him to spend every afternoon going from door to door in his suburb, introducing himself as a writer to every young woman who was at home alone, telling her he was looking for material for his next book of fiction, then having an affair with every one of the dozens who would volunteer, and finally urging each of the women to buy the book when it was published and to tell her friends to buy it.”

“At some time in my imagined future I would have wanted to see my landscape as a private place marked off from all others: a place that distinguished me as surely as a pattern of freckles could distinguish a woman.”

“Her face was carefully made up. Whenever she had to concentrate on her driving I looked sideways at the faultless texture of her cheeks and the shiny spicules of silver under her eyebrows and saw into a part of Australia I had scarcely thought about. I saw into ten thousand bathrooms all over Melbourne in the hot, slack hours of Saturday afternoon when young women were getting ready to go out with their regular boy friends.”

“And in the hour before sunrise when I woke to hear Carolyn’s bare feet on my floor as she passed on the way back from the bathroom, and when I heard her pause in the middle of my room and step very quietly towards my bed, and I knew she was standing only a little way from me in the grey half-light, shivering slightly in her thin shortie pyjamas, looking down on me and ready, if I opened my eyes, to sit on the edge of my bed and discuss seriously what she would have called my emotional problem, even then I went on breathing easily and kept my eyes closed until she understood that between the two of us was a broad zone of dreams she knew nothing about, and she turned and went back to her bed.”

“The bar had windows of thick, orange-gold frosted glass, and when I looked towards a window through my beer I felt at a safe distance from Melbourne, ready to go home to my bachelor’s flat and write like a man in the depths of the north: at two removes from the unpoetic experiences of his early years.”

“I began at last to feel that a whole continent was spread out inside me. The feel of its immense prairies and its ten thousand lakes made me no longer anxious to impress the Paraguayans around me or to treat with their young women. I thought I could be content to wait for years until a few discerning people recognised me as a man with a vast and foreign land behind my face.”

“I used to lead the boy to the cases of birds and stand beside him silently, hoping his eye might be taken by all those other eyes – tiny, dark, and staring fixedly at something that was in our world if only we could focus on it.”

“I might have been satisfied, I thought, if the only landscape that seemed my preserve was a dark and complex series of back lounges of hotels each framed within the other and stretching along a sort of tunnel within the ordinary cheerful daylight of Victoria from that bayside suburb to a remote western town, nothing of which was visible around the dark mousehole where I tossed down the last pinpoint of gold, the molten drop that dissolved what was left of my liver and killed me.”

“I was reassured to think of the women of my own city clothing themselves in the same colours that lay just beneath my own skin.”

“Now I was ready to take up my life’s work of searching for the many skeins still missing from the huge, coloured fabric strung between my nervous system and the world. I would be helped in this work by a young woman whose preferred colours could lie like wild stripes among my own. And the promptings of my nerves suggested that the art teacher was such a woman.”

“If I needed to think of my ruling faculty I thought of my imagination – not as something with any colour or shape but as a space wide enough for a system of roads to intersect in it and then diverge and then perhaps meet up again by way of strange branchings and detours.”

“I could have been still standing on a rectangle of asphalt, a road cut off at its beginnings, while I went on looking at the thick trunks and the many layers of leaves in the place that was more quiet than any I had known.” show less