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| Murnane’s novels are preoccupied with what happens in our minds when we read.Photograph by Morganna Magee |
The Reclusive Giant of Australian Letters
On most evenings this past spring, the man who lives across the street sat at his small desk, turned on the lamp, and began to write as the light faded. The white curtains in his room were seldom drawn. From where I sat, I had a clear view of him, and he, were he to look up from his writing, would have had a clear view of a house across the street, where a woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion was seated by a window, watching him write. At the moment he glanced up from his page, the woman supposed him to be contemplating the look, or perhaps the sound, of the sentence he had just written. The sentence was this: “Since then I have tried to avoid those rooms that grow steadily more crowded with works to explain away Time.”
On certain evenings, the watching woman speculated that the writing man might be the author of the sentence, the reclusive Australian writer Gerald Murnane. She thought this even though Murnane lived thousands of miles away, in Goroke, a town of some three hundred people, in western Victoria, and even though the man, with his bunched silver hair and his wasting English face, looked nothing like the black-and-white photograph in front of her, on the cover of one of his books. The photograph showed an older man wearing a clean white shirt and seated in a dark chair, with one hand holding the other in his lap. He was scowling at a point just beyond the lower border of the photograph. The woman speculated that he might have been scowling at the photographer’s shoes, or at a misshapen stain on the floor. Or perhaps he was not scowling at a shoe or a stain but, rather, concentrating on an image he had caught sight of in his mind’s eye. For him, that image would not have been here—the room in which the photograph was taken at the precise moment the photographer released the camera’s shutter. It would have been there—the foreground of his mind, a fictional place, set at a fictional distance from where the author writes and the reader reads and the photographer takes a picture.
During the years the woman was studying literature in school, she had taken a class on fiction and the mind. Almost all the assigned readings were by the renowned Russian scholar of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin. When trying to explain when and where a novel took place, Bakhtin spoke of the “chronotope,” the peculiar fusion of time and space which created and saturated the invisible landscape of fiction, shaping the thoughts of all who dwelled in it. In the classical epoch, man’s speech and his thoughts were directed outward, to people who gathered to listen in the squares and the agoras. Yet the centuries that followed had warped man’s public essence, making him aware of the possibilities of a private life of the mind. He had grown secretive and shameful, split between his inner and his outer existences, a core and a shell. The landscape inside his mind had broken loose from the landscape outside it. Man, Bakhtin wrote, in a formulation that seemed to distill all the pathos and the possibility of our silences and concealments, had become “drenched in muteness and invisibility. And with them entered loneliness.”
The idea of the chronotope had returned to the woman while she read Gerald Murnane’s third book, “The Plains.” The word “Time” was capitalized throughout the novel, evidence of the same reverence that led other men to capitalize the word “God.” The narrator of “The Plains” was a filmmaker. He had arrived on the plains hoping to capture the way of life of the plainsmen and, through it, the meaning of the landscape. But he had discovered that neither their speech nor their thought could be assimilated to the visible and audible impressions of his medium; that each plainsman had his own understanding of the shape and the significance of the landscape; and that the true substance of each plainsman’s life was nothing anyone could hear or see but the distance he felt between his younger self and the man he was now. The narrator, his film abandoned, spent his days in the library, surrounded by great works on Time about the distance between the memory of an anticipated happiness and the perceived disappointments of the present. These were lonely books which some readers would have called novels, but which the plainsmen called moral philosophy.
As for Bakhtin, so for Murnane: a passage of fiction is a series of utterances that promise access to a time and a space that could never be realized outside of prose—a place whose autonomy grants it a pleasure and a mystery entirely its own. Recalling the plains one evening, I called my husband into the room where I was sitting, so that he might look at the writing man. In a concerned voice, my husband informed me that the man was not, in fact, writing. He was watching television. It was likely that he had been watching television this whole time.
***
Gerald Murnane was born in 1939 in Coburg, a northern suburb of Melbourne, the son of a devoted, if unsuccessful, gambler on horse races. He was raised Catholic, which, as he has reflected, meant for a long time believing in the reality of men and women he could not see. When he turned eighteen, he entered a seminary. It took him fourteen weeks to leave and a few years more to lose his faith completely. During the next two decades, he taught primary school, edited technical publications, and married a woman called Catherine. They had three sons, and Murnane became, in his words, a househusband, who wrote in the hours he was not cleaning or caring for the children. His first two novels, “Tamarisk Row” (1974) and “A Lifetime on Clouds” (1976), were published to moderate acclaim. After six years of struggle and rejection, he published “The Plains,” his best-known book, whose dazzling merger of mirage and reality marked a turning point in his career. Four times, he has claimed to have written the last book he would ever write: in 1991, a year after he published “Velvet Waters”; in 2005, the year he published “Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs”; in 2017, the year he published “Border Districts”; and in 2022, with the publication of “Last Letter to a Reader” (And Other Stories).
The world is fortunate that he has not yet made good on this claim. His inability to stop writing has resulted in a voice that has spoken in an almost unbroken tenor across some fifteen strange and brilliant books; a voice in which one hears a different notion of life’s time than what can be measured by counting the years that elapse from the day of one’s birth to the day of one’s death. In part, his work is marked by its recurring subject matter, the details that Murnane has claimed “wink” at him, demanding his attention. In his youth, there were the glass marbles he lined up on a rug and pushed around an improvised course, envisioning their swirl of colors as the racing liveries of horses. In his adolescence, there was an idea of America created by listening to music on the radio and reading Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” In his adulthood, there were dreams of colored glass, the vulnerability of his young sons, and the novels of Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust, whose “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” he has read regularly, and which the narrator of one of his books goes so far as to copy passages from in longhand. And, throughout, there are the several hundred women with whom he falls in love, to whom he never speaks, and for whom he seems to write, as if to insist that the relationship between reader and writer is one of benevolent voyeurism.
By design, Murnane’s books do not reward discussion of plot, characterization, or historical setting. Beginning with “The Plains,” most of them concern the twinned acts of reading and of writing about the act of reading. This means that they are, in essence, a record of the thinking that takes place when one mind must struggle, in a sometimes pleasant, sometimes maddening, sometimes revelatory way, to discern the pattern of meaning that has been laid out by another. Murnane has referred to what he writes as true fiction. True fiction, he has claimed, is “an account of certain of the contents of the mind of the narrator.” It is a report of the narrator’s “contemplation of what did happen or what did not happen or what might have happened or what can never happen.”
The act of contemplation is rendered in a compact and highly finished style that distinguishes Murnane both from his predecessor Proust and from his contemporaries W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, Jon Fosse, and Rachel Cusk. Murnane has described himself as a technical writer, and his outspoken and fastidious devotion to grammar steers a great deal of the thinking his narrators perform. This thinking is usually about the nature or the essence of fiction’s relation to life, and it often begins with verbs of supposition. “I, who dislike the word imagine, would prefer to use such an expression as speculate about,” reports the narrator of “A Million Windows.” “Speculate,” “suppose,” “presume,” and “seem”—as in “I seem to recall”—all shift narrative into the subjunctive mood, in which ambitions, conjectures, and longings reign.
The mood is enhanced by the sudden appearance of the perfect continuous conditional tense, which considers not what was, or what had been, but what would have been, or might have been, in certain secluded corners of the narrator’s mind. And, in these corners, one also finds a series of smaller, but no less essential, repetitions that hint at how far fiction may range from fact: the avoidance of proper names when referring to historical figures or locations, or the application of adjectives like “certain” or “so-called,” or adverbs like “probably” or “surely.” The effect is a paradoxical sense of both particularity and indeterminacy, exposure and concealment.
Consider the opening paragraph of “A History of Books,” in which the narrator reads what sounds like a work of magical realism:
Simple decisions on every level—word, clause, sentence, paragraph—combine in Murnane’s writing to give the act of thinking a shape and a sound. He has likened reading and writing to walking down a long corridor to reach the innermost rooms of a house; a corridor lighted by the rich glow of memory tinged with fantasy, and one without any window or door that would afford access to what some would call the real world. But it would be wrong to accept that the corridor down which the writer has led the reader is unreal. His supreme conviction as a writer is that the images in our mind are, perhaps, more real than the objects that surround us, however solid or imposing those objects may seem.
***
The style of the grammarian makes no claims to an exceptional ear or a distinguished sensibility. It simply allows the elementary rules of language to surface from down under, from the lessons of primary school into evocations of sensation and perception. There is a wonderful democracy to Murnane’s method. Anyone who has spent time teaching composition or correcting papers knows that the elements of his style are available to all who possess the will to commit them to memory. Murnane’s writing, for all its idiosyncrasies, retains a curious impersonality. The content of the narrator’s mind is filtered through layer after layer of purely linguistic relations.
For this reason, Murnane’s prose can be both exhilarating and exhausting. His materials are primitive, verging on crude, but worked with absolute finesse. His method suggests a cloistered discipline unparalleled by any writer I have encountered. It would be wrong to call him a genius or a mystic. He is an assured craftsman, a workhorse of the written word. He is not unaware of his tendency to pedantry and crankiness, which often emerge as objects of his irony. Yet who could complain? The attention paid to every part of the work ripples outward to the whole, the way that pebbles dropped one after the other into a pond will soon cover the surface in vanishing halos of wonder.
The Murnanian first-person narrator is not identical to Gerald Murnane, and the people who reside in the narrator’s thoughts are not exactly characters—or not of the kind that authors cram full of inner lives in their pursuit of lifelikeness. Both the narrator and the entities that surround him are what Murnane, following Woolf, calls personages. A personage is “less than an actual person and in other respects rather more so,” he writes—a mere voice about “whom nothing is known other than what can be inferred from this text.” Within the world of narrative, a personage may permit the author to expose or conceal himself, to report or invent, to expand or compress time and space as it suits his needs. The relationship between the narrating personage and other personages may be pursued on the basis of perfect equality (as in Murnane’s or Sebald’s fiction) or superiority. On these beings, the narrating personage may exercise vengeance or extend grace, knowing that there exists no higher court to which they can appeal.
What the Murnanian narrator will under no circumstances permit these personages is the power of direct speech. There is a voice, through which other voices may be filtered, but no speech that could be said to belong to one subject or another. In the most memorable section of Murnane’s thirteenth book, “Border Districts,” the narrator listens as a woman, an author participating in a radio interview, speaks about her attempts to imagine the sensations felt by the nineteenth-century English nature writer Richard Jefferies when he walked through one of his favorite landscapes:
The act of describing what the narrator hears when he listens to the woman speak, rather than quoting her, introduces a fascinating ambiguity. It is impossible here to differentiate between the words that might have issued from her mouth and the ones that form in his mind—a situation that conflicts with the woman’s conviction that “a certain sort of insight or knowledge was incapable of being communicated from one person to another.” Murnane’s work is structured by what the linguist Ann Banfield once called “unspeakable sentences,” sentences that no single person or character could vocalize. They can exist only in narrative; indeed, they are what distinguishes narrative from communication writ large.
“A story well told informs us not only that certain things may have happened but what it is to know that such things may have happened,” Murnane writes. What the Murnanian narrator knows is this: so long as one exists on this earth, and so long as one retains no faith that the human body may serve as a vessel for a higher power, the representation of speech and thought in narrative prose is the only way to win one’s freedom from subjectivity—the mortal burden of existing only here and now and as a single self. If the narrator were to stage a conversation with the woman author, or to report exactly what she had said on the radio, he could never achieve the strange dislocation of language that narrative makes possible. It would be her speaking—on a certain night, in a certain city—and, no matter how swiftly the sound of her voice may have fallen or died out, it would have inhabited that particular time and place, and, having existed there, could have existed nowhere else. But writing allows both the author’s voice and the voice that may be imputed to her to withdraw, and, in their absence, a third voice—the narrating personage—may pour itself into the fictional space that the first two voices have abdicated.
The logic of narrative’s unspeakable sentences becomes yet more absorbing in Murnane’s late works. The astonishing books he has published since 2011—“Barley Patch,” “A History of Books,” “Border Districts,” and “A Million Windows”—proceed reflexively, with chains of phrases like “The seven paragraphs following this paragraph” and “I said in the fourth paragraph of this section.” Is the writer of these words identical to his former self—the self he was ten or twenty minutes ago, when he wrote that fourth paragraph? If they are not one and the same, then what distinction inheres between fiction and nonfiction, or between novels and autobiography? “I am not writing a work of fiction but a report of seemingly fictional matters,” the narrator of “Border Districts” explains. Fictional matters proliferate, even as fiction itself implodes. Perhaps this is why Murnane has suggested that all his work should have been published as essays.
“Last Letter to a Reader” gives us the lifetime of Murnane’s writing. It looks back at the fourteen books that preceded it, the books that have made it possible, giving us the image of the aged writer, asking, “How would the man I am now judge the earlier man?” It is not his finest work, any more than “Le Temps Retrouvé” is Proust’s. But it is a necessary work—the only possible conclusion to his life, or to the version of it that he has entrusted to his writing. It insists that we hear in its narrator’s voice the culmination of a whole life, a complete life of thought, freed from the painful frailty of the body that has housed it. One now believes Murnane when he claims that this must really and truly be his last book.
“Le Temps Retrouvé” is the source of the passage Murnane claims has impressed him most in all fiction. In it, Proust’s narrator stumbles on two unevenly placed paving stones in the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion. Without warning, he is flooded by an intoxicating sensation, an inexplicable happiness. His doubts regarding his “literary gifts and even regarding the reality of literature” fall away. Death seems inconsequential to him. He cannot orient himself in space or time. Searching his memory, he realizes that the uneven paving stones have given back to him the sensations he felt standing on the uneven slabs in the Baptistery of St. Mark’s, in Venice—the same intensity of sensation that attended to his eating of the madeleine and to his hearing the sound of a spoon strike a plate. What unites these occurrences?
In “Last Letter to a Reader,” the act of reading one’s words and writing about them is like stepping on the uneven paving stones, again and again. The sensation Murnane seeks is not to be found in the words but in the images released by the act of recalling when the words were written. These images, the ones that wink at him, have no discernible pattern. They include the common red berries of the cotoneaster plant which appeared to him while he was writing “The Plains,” and the Hungarian phrases he sets to song while writing “Inland.” They also include his usual touchstones: horse races, marbles, and books; only now most of the books that supply him with images are the ones he has written.
Although “Last Letter to a Reader” is arranged chronologically, with one section for each of his fifteen books, the images refuse to obey this logic. They keep their own time in the aged writer’s mind: the images of the second novel blur into the images of the third, which blur into the images of the fourth, the fifth, and so on, until we arrive at the fifteenth book, the one Murnane has just finished writing and we have just finished reading. Everything is brought into the present to reveal the paradox of existing in time: nothing in this life is ever truly past, and everything in this life is always already over:
The book’s avowed project, the man judging his past selves, turns out to be a red herring, a very Murnanian joke. There is no embarrassment, no recrimination, no notes given or taken. There is only the extraordinary effort made to retrieve an irretrievable entity: the time of thinking, the time of living, “the book being written continually on one’s heart.” The effort itself is a restoration of faith, not in the higher power of God but in the all-too-human power of literature.
Who is the reader to whom the last letter is addressed? “He has been aware during the past sixty years of a certain personage, so to call her, who first appeared to him while he was reading a certain book of fiction,” Murnane writes in “A Million Windows.” “Her mere presence is powerful enough to suggest to him numerous possibilities in both her past and her future.” This is the personage Murnane has named his Ideal Reader, not to conceal her real name but because he claims to have had no name for her. She, or a version of her, appears in almost every one of his books in the guise of a dark-haired young woman—a benefactress and a Madonna. One answer to the mystery of her identity is that she is a creation of his fiction, and that his fiction’s extraordinary force—its nature, its convictions, its craft, and its techniques; the thoughts it etches into the mind of the discerning reader—endows her with a stability, a spreading warmth of the flesh.
Or perhaps there is no Ideal Reader. There is only a reader (or many readers) sitting alone by a window, listening for the voice of the Ideal Writer—or of many Ideal Writers, the mere presences who come to her suggesting numerous possibilities. They may stretch her mind in many different directions; permit her to flit across the invisible borders that separate one world of space and time from another. The relationship between reader and writer, holier than any relationship between flesh-and-blood creatures, is the only relationship that will tolerate no mortal ending. So long as there are books to read, and people to read them, it may be taken up again and again.
What images wink at the reader of the Ideal Writer? A boy of six or seven raises a marble to the sun and watches as its refracted light dazzles the grass with unnatural hues of yellow and green. A young man stares across a train compartment and attempts to catch the eye of a dark-haired girl. A shaken father speaks to his son’s doctor, and their voices echo in the empty hospital corridor. A woman sitting by the window picks up a book called “Last Letter to a Reader,” by a man called Gerald Murnane. On its cover are fourteen shards of colored glass, red, blue, and green. By some small miracle, they are lit from within. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Goroke in the Australian state of Victoria.
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