The Lonely Giant of Australian Fiction

Most evenings last spring, the man who lives across the street would sit at his small desk, turn on the lamp, and begin to write as the light went out. The white curtains in his room were rarely drawn. From where I was sitting, I had a clear view of him, and he, if he had looked up from what he was writing, would have had a clear view of a house across the street, where a woman with dark hair and slightly olive complexion. she sitting by a window, watching him write. By the time she looked up from her page, the woman guessed that she was contemplating the look, or perhaps the sound, of the sentence she had just written. The phrase was this: “Since then I have tried to avoid those rooms that are increasingly filled with works to explain Time.”

On certain nights, the woman watching speculated that the man writing might be the author of the sentence, the reclusive Australian writer Gerald Murnane. He thought this even though Murnane lived thousands of miles away, in Goroke, a town of about three hundred people, in eastern Victoria, and even though the man, with his graying hair pulled back in a bun and his gaunt English face , looked nothing like the black… black and white photograph in front of her, on the cover of one of her books. The photograph showed an older man wearing a clean white shirt sitting in a dark chair, one hand holding the other in his lap. He was frowning at a point just beyond the bottom edge of the photograph. The woman herself speculated that she might have been frowning at the photographer’s shoes or at a misshapen stain on the floor. Or maybe she wasn’t frowning at a shoe or a stain, but rather focused on an image she had seen in his mind. For him, that image would not have been here—the room in which the photograph was taken at the precise moment the photographer opened the camera shutter. Would have been there—the foreground of his mind, a fictitious place, located at a fictitious distance from where the author writes and the reader reads and the photographer takes a photograph.

During the years that the woman studied literature in school, she had taken a class on fiction and the mind. Nearly all assigned readings were by renowned Russian scholar of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin. In trying to explain when and where a novel took place, Bakhtin spoke of the “chronotope”, the peculiar fusion of time and space that created and saturated the invisible landscape of fiction, shaping the thoughts of all who inhabited it. In classical times, man’s speech and thought were directed outwards, towards the people who gathered to listen in the squares and agoras. However, the centuries that followed had distorted the public essence of man, making him aware of the possibilities of a private life of the mind. He had become secretive and shy, torn between his inner and outer existence, a core and a shell. The landscape inside his mind had become detached from the landscape outside. Man, Bakhtin wrote, in a formulation that seemed to distill all the pathos and possibility of our silences and concealments, had been “soaked in silence and invisibility. And with them came loneliness.”

The idea of ​​the chronotope had returned to the woman while she was reading Gerald Murnane’s third book, “The Plains.” The word “Time” is capitalized throughout the novel, evidence of the same reverence that led other men to capitalize the word “God.” The narrator of “Los Llanos” was a filmmaker. He had come to the plains hoping to capture the way of life of the llaneros and, through it, the meaning of the landscape. But he had discovered that neither her word nor his thought could be assimilated to the visible and audible impressions of his medium; that each llanero had his own understanding of the form and meaning of the landscape; and that the true substance of each llanero’s life was nothing that anyone could hear or see, except the distance he felt between his younger self and the man he was now. The narrator, abandoning his film, 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 solitary books that some readers would have called novels, but that the llaneros called moral philosophy.

As for Bakhtin, so for Murnane: a fictional passage is a series of statements that promise access to a time and space that could never be realized outside of prose, a place whose autonomy gives it a pleasure and mystery entirely its own. One night, remembering the plains, I called my husband into the room where I was sitting, so that he could look at the man he was writing. In a worried voice, my husband informed me that the man was, in fact, not 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, player in horse racing. He was raised Catholic, which, he has reflected, meant for a long time believing in the reality of men and women he couldn’t see. When he turned eighteen, he entered a seminary. It took him fourteen weeks to leave and a few more years to lose faith in him completely. For the next two decades, he taught grade school, edited technical publications, and married a woman named Catherine. They had three children and Murnane became, in his words, a househusband, writing in the hours that he was not cleaning or taking care of the children. His first two novels, “Tamarisk Row” (1974) and “A Lifetime on Clouds” (1976), were published to moderate success. After six years of struggle and rejection, he published “Los llanos”, his best-known book, whose dazzling fusion of mirage and reality marked a turning point in his career. On four occasions he has claimed to have written the last book he would write: in 1991, a year after publishing “Velvet Waters”; in 2005, the year in which he published “Lilacs invisible but lasting”; in 2017, the year he published “Barrios de Frontera”; and in 2022, with the publication of “Last letter to a reader” (And other stories).

The world is fortunate that it has not yet lived up to this claim. His inability to stop writing has resulted in a voice that has spoken with almost unbroken tenor through a fortnight of strange and brilliant books; a voice in which a notion of the time of life different from the one that can be measured by counting the years that pass from the day of birth to the day of death is heard. In part, her work is marked by its recurring theme, the details that Murnane has claimed “wink at him,” demanding his attention. In her youth, there were the glass marbles she would line up on a rug and push on an impromptu course, imagining his whirlwind of colors like racing liveries on horses. In his teens, there was an idea of ​​America created by listening to music on the radio and reading Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”. In her adulthood, there were dreams of stained glass, the vulnerability of her young children, and the novels of Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust, whose “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” she has regularly read, and which the narrator of one of his books even goes so far as to copy passages from it by hand. And, throughout, there are the several hundred women with whom he falls in love, with whom he never speaks and for whom he seems to write, as if insisting that the relationship between the reader and the writer is one of voyeurism. benevolent.

By design, Murnane’s books do not reward discussion of plot, characterization, or historical setting. Starting with “Los llanos”, most of them refer to the twin acts of reading and writing about the act of reading. This means that they are, in essence, a record of the thought that occurs when one mind must struggle, in a sometimes pleasurable, sometimes maddening, sometimes revealing way, to discern the pattern of meaning that has been presented by another. Murnane has referred to what he writes as true fiction. True fiction, he has claimed, is “an account of some of the contents of the narrator’s mind.” It is a report of the narrator”contemplation of what happened or what did not happen or what could have happened or what can never happen”.

The act of contemplation is presented in a compact and highly finished style that distinguishes Murnane from both his predecessor Proust and his contemporaries WG Sebald, JM Coetzee, Jon Fosse, and Rachel Cusk. Murnane has described himself as a technical writer, and his frank and meticulous devotion to grammar drives much of the narrators’ thinking about him. This thought is usually about the nature or essence of the fiction’s relationship to life, and often begins with verbs of supposition. “I, who dislikes the word To imagineI’d rather use an expression like speculate on”, reports the narrator of “A Million Windows”. “Specular”, “suppose”, “presume” and “seem” —as in “I seem to remember”— change the narrative to the subjunctive mode, in which ambitions, conjectures and longings reign.

The mood is heightened by the sudden appearance of the perfect continuous conditional tense, which considers not what was or had been, but what would have been or could have been, in certain remote corners of the narrator’s mind. And, in these corners, there are also a series of minor repetitions, but no less essential, that hint at the extent to which fiction can move away from reality: the avoidance of proper names when referring to historical figures or places, or the application of adjectives like “true” or “supposed”, or adverbs like “probably” or “certainly”. The effect is a paradoxical sense of 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:

A man and a woman, husband and wife, were standing in the main square of a town such as might have been represented, fifty years ago or more, in one or another supposed article on one or another Central American country in one or another another question of national geographic magazine. It was probably mid-afternoon and the air must have been hot. The man and the woman discussed various matters during their passage through the square. Once, at least, the woman hit the man and was hit in turn. None of the disputes between the man and the woman were resolved when he and she became a male and a female jaguar, or it could have been a male and a female hummingbird or a male and a female lizard.