“The Plains” by Gerald Murnane

The most famous of Murnane’s novels, “The Plains” is a strange book. The novel’s narrator is a filmmaker, an outsider from Outer Australia, hired by one of the patrons of the Great Houses of the plains to live amongst them, to soak in their way of life, to study, and to create art. “The plainsmen were not always opposed to borrowings and importations, but in the matter of culture they had come to scorn the seeming barbarisms of their neighbours in the coastal cities and damp ranges.” The people of the plains have unique ways about them and a mythic quality. “They seemed to know what most men only guess at. Somewhere among the swaying grasses of their estates, or in the least-visited rooms of their rambling homesteads, they had learned the trues stories of their lives and known the men they might have been.” The story contains embedded within it a rivalry between two sects of plainsmen- the Horizonites and the Haresmen. “Almost any duality that occurred to a plainsman seemed easier to grasp if the two entities were associated with the two hues, blue-green and faded gold.” There is also much socializing, drinking, philosophizing, and debating. “In moods like this I suspect that every man may be traveling towards the heart of some remote private plain.” And most of all, there is a lot of looking at and contemplation about the greatness of the plains. “The plains are not what many plainsmen take them for. They are not, that is, a vast theatre that adds significance to the events enacted within it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.”

“Stream System- The Collected Short Fiction” by Gerald Murnane

This is a collection of short stories written by Murnane over the past fifty years. Some stories are as short as five pages while the longest span around a hundred. What connects them all is Murnane’s use of imbedded stories within stories. “Somewhere today in a suburb of Melbourne is a man who calls himself a writer of fiction but who writes, in fact, a sort of diary of the man he wishes he could be.” He constantly mines the territory of his home state of Victoria, Australia. “I admired him, for one thing, because he preferred to look at his land rather than farm it.” He also returns to themes of writing, reading, and a relationship with books in general. “The writing of fiction was something that a certain sort of person had to do in order to explain himself or herself to an imagined parent or an imagined loved one or an imagined god.” Many of his stories involve the narrator describing the act of writing the very story Murnane is himself writing. Yet the narrator is not identical to Murnane. Or not quite. “I wrote fiction in order to learn the meaning of certain images in my mind.” Murnane again and again goes back to the craft of writing and the mind as the grounds for imagination. “I have always been interested in what is usually called the world but only insofar as it provides me with evidence for the existence of another world.” He is constantly plumbing the depths of the mind for both images and feelings. “A diagram of my mind would resemble a vast and intricate map with images for its small towns and with feelings for the roads through the grassy countryside between the towns.” Like in his novels, it is hard to decipher what comes from the facts of his real life and what details are made up whole cloth. “Even to his wife and children he had sometimes said that Sunday afternoon was the saddest time of the week: the time when you had to admit that you were no more than the person you were. To himself he would have added that Sunday afternoon was the time when he tried to understand how he had come to be who he was and where he was rather than someone else in some other place.” His nested stories and asides often seem more important and real than the original thread of his story. “I have trusted for many years that I will remember from every text that I read the few words or phrases that I need to remember.” His digressions into the recesses of his mind are so vivid and illuminating that one forgets where one is while reading his words. “Or I might finish this piece of fiction by mentioning that I have always been drawn to writers who have felt their minds threatened.”

“Last Letter to a Reader” by Gerald Murnane

This is supposedly Murnane’s last book. But he has said that before—twice. He has been writing so-called meta-fiction before that was even a term. In this book, the conceit is that he writes an essay purportedly on each of his previous books, after first rereading them. Indeed, the books often serve as jumping off points before the digressions begin. “In mid-2020, during a so-called lockdown in the state of Victoria, I wrote the first few of the pieces in this book — but only for myself and for future readers of my archives…. I had never sat down and tried to confront any book of mine as though for the first time…. I discovered early in life that the act of reading is much more complicated than most people seem to acknowledge…. I did what I’ve always preferred to do in the presence of a certain sort of text: I followed the workings of my mind…. I judge the worth of a book according to the length of time during which the book stays in my mind…. I learned long ago not to claim that I was talking about a book when what I was talking about were my memories or my impressions or my fantasies…. I know of no better way to appraise a work of fiction than to observe and then to report for one’s own benefit, or for others’, the extent to which the reading of the work has changed the set of one’s mind…. The reading of a work of fiction alters — sometimes briefly but sometimes permanently — the configuration of my mental landscape and augments the number of personages who are its temporary or permanent residents…. My reading — and not just the reading of fiction, but any sort of reading — is no search for facts or truths but rather an endless quest for elements in my unique mythology.”

Murnane is what his wife would call an eccentric. For decades, he has created an entire fictional world, comprised of two independent nations, where horse races are regularly run and winners randomly selected. Its history, the Antipodes, is all in his vast archives. His published fiction blends his real life, his past, and his imagination freely. He calls it true fiction. For him, the line between the real world and his fictional worlds is immaterial, “Each personage strides by day or broods and scribbles by night in his native city, but as though an invisible pane separates him from its other inhabitants and an invisible grip prevents him from living as they live.” Murnane views his mind as a vast physical landscape. “I often declare that I think of my mind as a place, but no place in this, the visible world, could be half so resistant to exploration as even the most familiar of mental landscapes. And if my sort of writing is a sort of mapping of mind, then my atlas should depict nothing more stable than images and feelings.” This leads to a unique process of writing. “Revelations of all kinds occur in the place that I call, for want of a better term, my mind and the benefits that I derive from these processes and from my knowing that these processes take place continually and are taking place even now as I write about them — those benefits are my true reward for writing fiction.”

Occasionally, Murnane does write something that one could almost be sure that he, the breathing author, and not he, the implied author or, he, the fictional narrator, actually believes. An example is his recollection of first reading Proust. “I myself, in that cramped room where I ate from cans and urinated into the sink and spent whole weekends talking to no one, learned from certain passages of Swann’s Way how to look out for what I later came to call the detail that winked: the one significant detail from among the many that appeared to me while I wrote.”

Murnane is not modest about his own writing. “I freely admit to re-reading certain passages from my books simply in order to be impressed by them and to find in them more meaning than I had previously found and much more than I had been aware of while I first wrote the passages.” Finally, he concludes, “I’ve mentioned in my own writings my perception of mind as a sort of space the boundaries of which are far beyond my reach, and the image that most often occurs to me when I try to comprehend the significance of the million and more of my published words is of a vast and variegated landscape.”

“Barley Patch” by Gerald Murnane

The stories nested within stories within stories sometimes makes for a challenging read. The layers peel back and forth so that sometimes the reader struggles to figure out which level of the story he is on. Murnane references previous details in the story by making the reader count the paragraphs he has just read backwards as markers. “I reported at the end of the fifth paragraph before the previous paragraph that I was often afraid of the character known as Aunt Bee.” Murnane also blends nonfiction and fiction, all the while claiming that everything is fiction. “I should remind the reader that every sentence hereabouts is part of a work of fiction.” Maybe it is and the reader should take him at his word. The narrator of this novel is never Murnane, the author, but just a fictional character in this novel. Perhaps.

This novel is a meditation on the monkish practice of reading and writing fiction well. “Many years passed before I began to understand that looking at line after line of text is only a small part of reading; that I might need to write about a text before I could say that I had fully read it.” Murnane’s thoughts, at first, seem like they might be a little bit off. “Several times while I was writing the previous pages, I recalled the statement: fiction is the art of suggestion. This statement allows me to suppose that a person without imagination might still succeed in writing fiction so long as his or her reader is able to imagine.” He sometimes less than subtly interjects his opinions on what constitutes good fiction. “I have long forgotten whether or not the narrator of The Glass Spear was one of those unconvincing personages commonly occurring in fiction of the twentieth century: those narrators who claim to know the thoughts and feelings of more than one character in the work of fiction.” Murnane’s novel also tries to get at the heart of what fiction is all about. “During all the years while I had been a reader of fiction and while I had sometimes struggled to write fiction—during all those years, I had wanted to learn what places appeared in the mind of one or another fictional character whenever he or she stared past the furthest places mentioned in the text that had seemed to give rise to him or to her; what places such a character thought of during the hours or the days that were never reported in the text; what places such a character dreamed about…. Now, I was free to suppose what I had often suspected: many a so-called fictional character was not a native of some or another fictional text but of a further region never yet written about…. Now, I was justified in believing in the existence of places beyond the places that I had read about or had written about: of a country on the far side of fiction…. I understood for the first time that a personage mentioned in a work of fiction is capable of devising a seeming territory more extensive and more detailed by far than the work itself.” It sometimes all blurs together and gets very meta. “I find myself now in a strange situation. Nearly sixteen years ago, I stopped writing fiction. A few years later, I wrote a piece of fiction intended to explain why I had so stopped. Now, more than ten years later again, I am trying to compose a passage of fiction that might explain my explanatory piece.” This novel is that fiction.

“A Million Windows” by Gerald Murnane

As is the case with many of Murnane’s works of fiction, this novel has layers of story built upon layers. The stories are embedded within stories. “For the sake of the undiscerning reader, I shall repeat the simple fact that I am the narrator of this work and not the author.” Also similar to some of his previous work, this novel is more about the craft of writing than any so-called plot. In fact, Murnane repeatedly mines the same basic facts about his family and his past, all completely fictionalized, of course. “I recall no reviewer or critic who insisted that fictional characters ought not to be discussed as though they are persons living in the world where books of fiction are written and read.” The beauty of Murnane is that the reader gets so wrapped up in the asides and tangents that if one is not careful one can lose track of who exactly is speaking and what is story and what is commentary. “For him, the personages who had first appeared while he was reading some or another fictional text were no less alive after the text itself had come to an end than while he pored over it.” Of course, nothing is real. It is all fiction. “Fiction, even what I call true fiction, is fiction. An author demeans fiction if he or she requires the reader to believe that what happens in his or her mind while reading is no different from what happens over his or her shoulder or outside his or her window.” Murnane spends the most time in this novel ruminating on the art of narration. “The narrator of the this present work of fiction is one who strives to keep between the actual self and his seeming self and his seeming reader such seeming-distances as will maintain between all three personages a lasting trust.” He reveals on the very first page of this novel, “one of the commonest devices used by writers of fiction is the withholding of essential information.” This is sort of like a magician revealing his trick right before he goes ahead and deceives you. “Even the discerning reader who is also a student of narration — even he or she might struggle so far to classify the narrator of this present work and might struggle further as the work becomes more complicated in later pages. It is not for me to define myself, as it were.” The mystery should satisfy the reader even to the very last page. “But what could I have been hoping to learn about the flesh-and-blood author, the breathing author of these and who knows how many other pages of true fiction?”

“Border Districts” by Gerald Murnane

This is a novel that any writer would love. It is fundamentally about the process of thinking, the images that one pictures in the mind, and the memories that the brain recalls. “I have learned to trust the promptings of my mind, which urges me sometimes to study in all seriousness matters that another person might dismiss as unworthy, trivial, childish.” The novel’s narrator is a writer, as well as a deep thinker, perhaps, even, a philosopher. The ebbs and flows of internal thought are tremendous. “I supposed the endless-seeming landscapes of my own thoughts and feelings must have been a paradise by comparison with the drab sites where others located their selves or their personalities or whatever they called their mental territories.” There are thoughts wrapped in thoughts wrapped in memory. The narrator describes the craft and process of writing the very book he is supposedly writing. He is full of asides and tangents that flow to where his thoughts and memories happen to take him. He digresses and circles back around to conclude or clarify a point made in previous pages. “The mind is a place best viewed from borderlands.” I am not sure if this novel is supposed to be memoir disguised as fiction or fiction disguised as memoir. The details of the narrator’s life certainly mimic the experiences of Murnane. “I moved to this district near the border so that I could spend most of my time alone and so that I could live according to several rules that I had for long wanted to live by.” This novel definitely engages with the reader’s mind and forces one to grapple with one’s own conception of the world, one’s mental constructs, with one’s own faulty memory, and with the experience of life itself.

“Landscape With Landscape” by Gerald Murnane

This book is ostensibly a collection of unrelated short stories and yet each story somehow leads into the next. In fact, the name of the following story is in each case embedded into the final pages of the previous one. Not that their plots, subject matter, or timeframe relate at all. This is the beauty and strangeness of Murnane’s fiction. He is a master of writing about writing. “I might even have told her that if I were a writer of a certain fashionable sort of fiction my standing at the supper table and saying those words to her could later have become part of a story of redoubled complexity, but that since I was a writer interested only in what was real, the scope of my question encompassed no one but my real self.” He is able to embed the narrator within the plot and extract him from the story at will. The narrator at once is describing his life, then will switch to pontificate about writing in general, all the while letting the reader know, in no uncertain terms, that what the reader is reading is only fiction, after all. Murnane’s writing weaves and nests story within story so skillfully that the craft of the writing is what impresses most in the end. “I try to make use of the notion that I am a character in a story that I tried to write twenty years ago, and that I could not finish that story because I cannot now imagine how I should have finished it.”