Essay: Shannon Burnson Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane: An Idiot in the Greek Sense

Last November I visited Gerald Murnane where he lives in the very small town of Goroke in
western Victoria. He agreed to be interviewed for a feature article in the Australian Book Review
(published in August, 2015) and over the course of two days we recorded around thirteen hours of
material, ranging across elements of Murnane’s personal life and literary career. The bulk of our
conversations took place in his room, at the back of his son’s house in Goroke. The hours spent
there were exhaustive and businesslike, but at 4.30pm each day Murnane would open a bottle of his
homebrew beer, and the conversation began to meander. When we met again later in the evening, at
the local hotel where I was staying, he was more contemplative and candid. As the nights wore on
he revealed some of his deeper feelings about fiction and the unusual documents he labours over
and stores in his ever-expanding archives.

Geography has been one of Murnane’s passions over the years, despite his notorious reluctance to
travel. In the course of one conversation at the hotel I asked about his fascination with old maps and
the theory of the Portuguese discovery of Australia. ‘I find Portuguese nomenclature stirring,’
Murnane said, ‘and even pleasant sounding. More than pleasant sounding. I had this strange joke
with my son Martin…. I said to Martin, who was about twelve and teased me about this, that I’d
like to change my name to … what was his name? Tristão de Mendoça Puszta Murn. It was my true
name, my secret totem name or my totem creatures. It was not my name among social beings.
Tristão de Mendoça was supposedly, according to a book by a man called McIntyre, the first
Portuguese to travel to Bass Strait. Puszta is from the Hungarian of course and I shortened the last
name to Murn to repudiate my Irishness – my seeming-Irishness – and because of my preference for
monosyllables.’

Murnane was in a confiding mood. When I asked about the fictional women that his narrators or
chief characters claim to love in his fiction, resurrected figures like the ‘girl in the well’ from
Inland, and other strange and spectral presences, he said: ‘They exist at about three removes from
the room in which we’re sitting…Let’s talk about the girl in the well: she’s as real to me as…
almost as real as Brenda [the hotel’s proprietor] out there. I can’t explain it any more than that. I
know that she, or a girl, existed once in Szolnok County in Hungary. I’m not a mumbo jumbo man,
but I know what I know, and through the means of fiction, of writing it and reading it, I’ve
discovered a world that I would never have known otherwise. Actually, I knew of its existence when
I was a boy in Bendigo. I knew it was out there somewhere and I only had to get in contact with it.’

Murnane is earnest when he speaks of his secret totem name and of the other world that he claims to
have discovered by means of reading and writing fiction. In the course of our conversation I suggest
that he is often more candid about his feelings for fictional personages than for people in the visible
world, and he agrees, saying, ‘Yes that’s strange. What can I add to that? It’ll be a mystery.’ After a
small, thoughtful pause he says: ‘The question will arise: did I live this imaginative life because I
didn’t find my real life satisfactory? That’s a question that I can’t answer, that no one else can
answer. You can’t answer these questions definitively. In some respects I was immensely satisfied
by my real life, and yet, by the evidence of my writing, I wasn’t. Some people have terrible lives. I
didn’t have a life like that, yet, on the evidence of my writing, my life wasn’t enough for me, and I
had to have this other life. There’s no answer to these questions. It’s just a wonderful part of the
mystery of being human.’

1
For decades Murnane has been acknowledged as one of Australia’s finest writers, and one of our
strangest. This latter quality seems to have left him marginalised at times, so much so that when I
first came across his work, after Tamarisk Row was reissued by Giramondo in 2007, I was
flummoxed. How had I not heard of Murnane before then? Why hadn’t he already won a fistful of
major awards? Why was the crowd at the launch of the re-issue so small? I’d only read a few pages
of Tamarisk Row, but it seemed obvious from that brief sample that Murnane was ‘the real deal’,
and the more I read the better he got.

I noticed the obvious things first: his sentences, above all else, were pristine; his tone was direct; his
narrative control was stupefying; and he seemed to be writing about something that was at once
totally unique to him and recognisably Australian. Over the following weeks and months Murnane’s
other novels and collections of fiction – most of which were out of print and difficult to find at the
time – revealed to me a local writer who could be mentioned in the same breath as literary greats
(and eccentrics) like Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. Here was the kind of
Australian writer I’d never dreamed of encountering, yet none of his books had received a major
literary award.

Murnane’s idiosyncrasies are an essential part of his fiction, even if they were disguised (or
misperceived by critics) throughout the 1980s and 1990s as variations of the postmodernist textual
play typical of those decades. His literary sensibilities have been as difficult to classify as his public
persona, and his prose has meanwhile been insistently complex and ironically playful – as when, for
instance, the narrator in A Million Windows derides One Hundred Years of Solitude (‘Even the
least-skilled of writers could have composed something more readable than the unvarying wordage
in front of me’) while producing a flawless throw-away counter to Marquez’s lauded ‘spiral of
time’. Murnane has shown that he can perform any narrative trick, but he instead prefers to
interrogate and re-interrogate the images and patterns of images that haunt him. The result of this
focus is an unfailingly singular and uncompromisingly original body of work. No one does what
Gerald Murnane does better than Gerald Murnane.

After reviewing the local critical reception of Murnane’s fiction over the decades, and speaking
with seasoned critics and writers on the subject, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Murnane’s
apparent oddness has contributed to his relatively marginal status in Australian literary culture,
compared with writers like Thomas Keneally, David Malouf, Helen Garner or Alex Miller.
Australian critics have long praised Murnane but their appreciation is yet to translate into a major
literary prize for a single work of fiction; instead, Murnane’s books have received retrospective
awards, in recognition of an undervalued body of work, or marginal prizes, like the Adelaide
Festival Award for Innovation for Barley Patch – in the same year that Malouf took out the more
coveted Fiction Award for Ransom.

Looking back over some of the shortlists and eventual winners of the Miles Franklin and various
state-based prizes for fiction over the last few decades is a sobering experience. It is perplexing that
an author whose work is celebrated abroad despite the odds (miniscule international print runs and
little-to-no marketing), that such an author has been so undervalued by awards judges at home. In
retrospect, it seems crazy that Tamarisk Row, The Plains, Inland, Landscape with Landscape, Velvet
Waters, Barley Patch and, most recently, A Million Windows – all of which have legitimate claims
to be considered classics of Australian literature – have not attracted a single mainstream national or
State-based prize for fiction between them, and that A Million Windows wasn’t considered worthy
of this year’s Miles Franklin longlist (none of Murnane’s books have ever made the Miles Franklin
shortlist).

2
The sheer consistency of the Miles Franklin judges’ neglect of Murnane’s fiction over the decades
seems to me to speak of a larger pattern in the response to Murnane’s work outside his home state
of Victoria. It makes me wonder: is it possible that Murnane simply doesn’t fit into the image that
Australian literary culture has of itself? Is the Miles Franklin beyond his grasp due to something
fundamental and unalterable in his personality and way of writing (the idea that you can fully
separate these is absurd in Murnane’s case), or is it due to a lack of worthiness in his work, a lack
that Australian awards panels are especially good at recognising?

This is a difficult, probably impossible thing to judge, but it seems to me to merit consideration,
partly due to my experiences when talking with people about Murnane. Long before I thought of
writing a profile of him, I’d heard several anecdotes from prominent writers and critics, and most of
them presented Murnane as an oddball figure. More recent conversations with people who have
known him over the years left me wondering whether Murnane’s continuing relegation to the
margins of Australian literature is a reflection of how his work is perceived, how he is perceived, or
a combination of both.

When I suggested to Murnane that he privileges strangeness in his fiction but also signals a
wariness and disquiet about it, he said: ‘It’ll be true of me and my real-life situation anyway.’
People who have known him for an extended period of time accept that Murnane is, in some ways,
an unusual man. He was close to Barry Oakley in the mid-1960s and 1970s, and in a chapter titled
‘My Strangest Friend’ from his memoir, Mug Shots, Oakley recalls that upon the publication of
Tamarisk Row Murnane:

… held a dinner party in celebration. First, a photo album was passed around, containing a
pictorial biography of the author. Later, the author blows a whistle, and we’re told to change places
with others. When I remarked on the magnified marble on the cover of the book, he told me it was
one of those referred to in the childhood chapters, and then led me into a room of filing cabinets,
where he puled out a drawer, selected a file marked M, and produced the marble in question,
preserved for all of those years. Then we returned to the dining room, and he blew the whistle
again.

Oakley’s diary entries in Minitudes sketch a portrait of Murnane as a stay-at-home eccentric, much
given to monologue. At one point Murnane confesses to Oakley, ‘I’ve become slightly stranger in
some ways. I’m dressing more shabbily and find journeys away from the house more and more of a
problem.’ Oakley reports that Murnane felt incapable of attending his brother’s funeral in
Warrnambool ‘for fear of being stranded, broken down on the highway’.

Hilary McPhee was Murnane’s first editor. Her impression of Murnane’s strangeness evokes its
amusing, social side. ‘I thought he was deeply eccentric … He’s very funny company when he
drinks. He could start reciting train stations all the way to Aboka or whatever. He has extraordinary
local information. He could do every train station in the state I reckon. That sort of stuff.’

Peter Craven paints a fuller picture of the man as he was during the 1980s, when Craven, Michael
Heyward and Penny Hueston championed Murnane’s fiction in Scripsi: ‘When I knew him he was
living in a very modest house in Macleod, which is an outer northern-suburb of Melbourne, near La
Trobe University. He had all of his books, but it was a very confined sort of space. He had tall tales
and true about composing on the kitchen table, and given the kind of perfectionist fiction Gerald
writes, it was certainly an unusually small suburban house for a writer to be working in. He was
very matey, jovial and polite, and keen on Coopers Sparkling Ale. He’d talk ’til the cows came

3
home, with great courtesy and affability. He had a sharp sense of humour and would deliver long
anecdotes.’

According to Craven, Murnane is ‘clearly his own person’ but not in a limiting way. ‘I was
conscious of the fact that he wasn’t interested in polite lies about things, and I was conscious of him
talking about his routines. Like anyone, I thought he was a character, but I didn’t think he was an
impossible madman. I always found him funny. There was a point where he wouldn’t allow
newspapers into his house, or only the sports pages… I had a sense of Gerald’s very likable
eccentricity ruling the roost.’

In the early 1990s, while he was still lecturing in creative writing at Deakin University, Murnane
took a job wrapping newspapers in the early hours of the morning. ‘I got a cash-in-hand job at the
local newsagents,’ he explains. ‘Every morning I’d get up for three hours at half past two and wrap
the papers in the machine, except when I had to come up to Goroke to visit my son or have a break,
and the boss would do it.’ According to Imre Salusinszky, who enjoyed a long correspondence with
Murnane, ‘He loved getting up early. He loved working with the machine. He loved the interactions
with the delivery guys. I mean, now it’s weird that a major Australian writer lives in a remote place
like Goroke, but it was equally strange that he would get up at early in the morning and wrap The
Age while he was being nominated for the Nobel Prize. The whole thing is almost too weird to
believe.’

Murnane’s strangeness is so accepted among domestic critics and literary figures that Ramona
Koval felt comfortable suggesting to him that he might be ‘slightly autistic’ in two separate
interviews in the 2000s. When I asked Murnane about the first interview with Koval, he said: ‘I was
so shocked that I nearly walked out of the interview. But she said it with a snigger, and I thought,
She isn’t really serious, she’s just trying to keep the audience interested… I looked at her, and I
thought: You don’t know what you’re saying. I usually can’t remember anything about those
interviews. I’m in a state of shock or tenseness. When I got home Catherine [Murnane’s wife] had
been listening and she said I’d handled it well.’

In the second interview for The Book Show in 2008, Murnane confessed that his ‘essential self’
prefers to keep its distance from the world, and Koval again linked this impulse to autism.

Ramona Koval: I’m kind of tempted to say…there are people now who write about such feelings
of being a little bit separate from the world and making lists and making lots of categories and
would say that that’s a slightly autistic way to be in the world.

Gerald Murnane: I may be that way. You asked me a question like this once before, and the
moment it came out of your mouth I bristled, I thought ‘I’m getting out of here’, but you asked it in
a much more friendly way today…

Murnane then referred to Proust’s conception of a moi profond, or ‘deep self’ to explain the origin
of his fiction, before adding: ‘Perhaps an autistic version of me… does my writing, but I think…
I’m communicating well enough with you.’

Indeed, Murnane has always managed to communicate his idiosyncratic inner world flawlessly,
bridging the distance between relatively unexciting consciousnesses (at least in my case) and his
own with precise prose.

4
The impulse to connect Murnane’s singular fictional output and unusual habits and opinions with a
psychological disorder speaks volumes. Murnane attributes it to an unconscious cultural bias:
‘When a writer walks into the studio Koval would think that he’s one of us, therefore he’ll be
sexually well-adjusted, he’ll be social and go to parties, travel on aeroplanes, and he’ll love the
South of France and drinking wine. When she learns that he isn’t like that and doesn’t do any of
those things she thinks he’s autistic or something else.’

Murnane’s friend, Kate James, has a similar view. While she notes that Murnane ‘lives by all kinds
of regimented rules that he sets for himself, about his eating and drinking and daily habits, because
he seems to enjoy living in a structured way,’ James adds: ‘He’s not actually a slave to his routines.
He’s happy to break them if he needs to… Gerald isn’t nearly as eccentric as people like to pretend
he is. He isn’t a weirdo or an oddball; he isn’t ‘on the spectrum’. He’s responsible and hard
working; he’s held down jobs and raised a family. But he gets labelled as an eccentric because he’s
not the same as most Australian academics and intellectuals… He doesn’t play the games; he
doesn’t care about status; he’s way too honest. Sometimes that shows up other people’s bullshit, so
it’s easier for them to call him autistic than accept that he knows how a serious Australian writer is
supposed to talk and behave, and he just doesn’t much care for it.’

Murnane has willingly presented himself as an eccentric at various times, but typically with heavy
doses of irony and exaggeration. In the documentary Words and Silk, he says, ‘I’m an idiot in the
Greek sense of that word. I’m only aware of what happens in my own backyard, in my own mind.’
In the essay ‘The Breathing Author’, Murnane presents a great catalogue of his curious habits and
quirks, many of which are fairly trivial, like never wearing sunglasses or his inability to understand
the workings of the International Date Line. Murnane’s larger eccentricities, however, have to do
with perception and his way of being in the world, and they seem to connect directly to the content
of his fiction and his engagement with other literatures.

As an example of the latter, Murnane confessed to me: ‘I’ve always had this private view of
Hamlet: that one of his testicles didn’t come down when he was born. I have idiosyncratic views
about these things. But they matter to me.’ Later he said, ‘I’ll never read a text by Shakespeare
again let alone see it performed. I pick out strange figures like Richard Jeffries, strange minor
writers that appeal to me, lonely outsiders who were on the edges of things, doing their own thing.
I’m probably a bit like that myself. I always dreamed that I would read a book that would be
absolutely everything that I’ve wanted, and because I didn’t find that book, I wrote it myself. I don’t
mean one particular book. I mean my collected works. My collected works, now – I can say this
with some pride and satisfaction – I see now that my collected works are exactly the sort of book
that, when I was twenty years old, I dreamed I would find in a translation from Portuguese or by
some minor Uruguayan novelist or something like that.’

In a letter to Imre Salusinszky (15 December 1986) Murnane writes, ‘I’ve spent much of my
reading life among hedgerows and by-roads. The trouble is I’ve tended to shy away from certain
writers just because their houses of fiction are on the main roads.’

Murnane clearly privileges idiosyncratic, foreign and marginal sensibilities, as do a good many of
the narrators and personages who occupy his fiction. The narrator of The Plains recounts:

On that first afternoon I saw that what had sometimes been described as the arrogance of the
plainsmen was no more than their reluctance to recognise any common ground between themselves
and others. This was the very opposite (as the plainsmen themselves well knew) of the common
urge among Australians of those days to emphasise whatever they seemed to share with other

5
cultures. A plainsman would not only claim to be ignorant of the ways of other regions but willingly
appear to be misinformed about them. Most irritating of all to outsiders, he would affect to be
without any distinguishing culture rather than allow his land and his ways to be judged part of some
larger community of contagious tastes or fashions.

Much of this holds for Murnane’s relationship to his own fiction and its critical reception. He
demands to be read and understood on his own terms instead of compromising for the sake of
convention or indulging what he considers to be literary fashions. This, I believe, is partly what
makes his work so challenging. A writer who is a recognisable type is easily subsumed within that
category, and therefore easier to understand and sympathise with, but a writer who is insistently
atypical demands more of readers, because we have to move further out of ourselves, or deeper
inside ourselves, in order to grasp his meaning. Murnane’s failure to win a major mainstream
literary award in this country seems to me to signal a larger inability or unwillingness, on the part of
sections of our literary culture, to reach beyond itself and embrace unfamiliar or awkward
perspectives.

Is it at all worth pondering whether or not Murnane is ‘slightly autistic’, from a critical or
biographical perspective? When he writes, ‘I have sometimes thought of the whole enterprise of my
fiction-writing as an effort to bring to light an underlying order – a vast pattern of connected images
– beneath everything that I am able to call to mind’, is he expressing a pathological will to orient
himself in the face of random, apparently meaningless experiences? Or is he merely expressing an
aesthetic preference? Is this an authentic philosophical impulse? An exaggeration? Or does it
suggest some kind of neurological disorder?

Murnane writes, ‘I admit to a love of order and of devising systems for storing and retrieving
things…’ His extensive archives are the most obvious example of this passion; they contain
mountains of material relating both to his literary output and his personal life, sorted
chronologically, with notes attached in many cases, directing readers to this or that other file in
another section of the archive. Murnane is also an obsessive list maker. His publisher Ivor Indyk
says, ‘When Catherine was alive they used to sit and watch The Price is Right and he would write
down the prices as a record. He had a comprehensive list. His beer brewing has a similar kind of
encyclopaedic intensity because the bottles are colour-coded according to brews, dates and
strengths. So it’s a system. He likes to create systems. That’s part of his world-building: the desire
to create outward from a detail.’

According to Salusinszky, ‘He’s obsessive. He has an aversion to water touching his body, so there
is a fair bit of weirdness there, but a fair bit of normality as well. He’s quite wise. He is eccentric
but of course he’s been able to make high art out of that, and there’s nothing so eccentric or
obsessive or unusual that he can’t relate it back to the mainstreams of human experience, and reveal
bits of ourselves back to us. One of the things that makes him unusual – and this has been more
noticeable in recent years – is that Gerald has become more rigorously authentic in everything he
writes and does and says. He’s more and more unwilling to bullshit or to speak or write or behave in
ways that do not directly reflect what appears to be real to him, which is the contents of his own
mind, and the patterns of images in his own mind, and I guess what Bertrand Russell would call
knowledge by experience instead of knowledge by description… Gerald has become more and
more himself over the years; he is no longer interested in responding in any way except with what
he calls true fiction, to everything. That can seem like someone who isn’t interested in you and has
an autistic person’s inwardness or lack of social awareness. He retreats back into the
phenomenological persona to explore how what you’ve just said to him or written to him creates a
new set of ripples in his own meditation.’

6
In my interactions with him, Murnane was uncompromising in his assessment of all things
connected to literature but generous and flexible in other areas. He preferred to keep to his routines,
but they were far from obtrusive; instead they seemed to make it possible for him to cram a
surprising range of activities – work and play – into each day. Murnane’s extended memory is
astonishing, and his capacity to make his internal life vivid to others is a wonder. In his case, the
dividing line between eccentricity and pragmatism is fluid.

Perhaps ‘genius’ is an outdated concept, but Murnane’s discipline, dedication to his craft and
unusual talent deserves more from us than slack psychologising, and the distinctive aspects of his
fiction should be cherished instead of dismissed as ‘weird’ or ‘slightly autistic’.

Several of Murnane’s friends spoke with me when I profiled him for the Australian Book Review,
largely out of eagerness to repay his and Catherine’s kindnesses over the years. (Catherine died in
2009.) Chris Gregory felt compelled to point out that, ‘Being a good writer is one thing, but being a
good human being that people say nice things about is another thing as well.’ Gregory values
Murnane’s human qualities over his literary achievements, as do many of the people I spoke with.
But there is another side to Murnane. As Gregory explains, ‘He takes uninhibited pleasure in the
misfortunes of people he doesn’t like, particularly writers and critics.’

Murnane’s personal generosity and decency extends only so far; in his view, fiction is a serious
business. He demands the highest standards of writing and thinking from colleagues and critics
alike, and if a book is poorly written or a review is thoughtlessly composed, it deserves to be
criticised – etiquette or politeness be damned. Because of this, Murnane is not universally beloved
in the Australian literary world, where his honesty or insensitivity has occasionally offended fellow
writers, publishers and critics.

In a letter to Imre Salusinszky, on 3 Dec 1985, Murnane confesses: ‘I think I am at heart more
cheerful than gloomy, but whenever something of mine has been published I tend to overlook the
praise it receives and to dwell on the harsh or stupid things that people write about my work. Worse,
I feel a childish spite towards any writer who seems to be enjoying the sort of popularity that I –
monster of selfishness – believe is right.’

While lecturing in creative writing in the 1980s and early 1990s, Murnane enjoyed changing the
names of characters and settings of a prize-winning work of fiction by one of Australia’s best-
known writers. He would then ask his students to edit the piece. After they found numerous errors
he would reveal the name of the author. His students, Murnane says, were usually surprised to learn
the origin of the pages. Peter Craven recalls Murnane saying, during the 1980s, that when he visited
bookshops he liked to pick out a page by one or another celebrated Australian novelist and read
until he came upon a sentence that was badly written; he would then sigh in satisfaction and put the
book down.

Murnane’s strong views about other writers are matched only by his certainty that his own
published fiction is of the highest quality. In the same letter to Salusinszky Murnane thanks him for
praising the story, ‘The Battle of Acosta Nu’, then writes:

On the night when I wrote the last line of the last draft of that story I said to myself that I had just
finished the best piece of fiction that I had ever written. In the years since then, I have read the story
many times, something I don’t usually do with my writing. Each time I’ve read it I’ve been filled
with a strange sort of admiration, as though I were reading the work of someone else. Today I share

7
the opinion of one of the men of Norstrilia Press [his publisher at the time]: ‘The Battle of Acosta
Nu’ is one of the best pieces of short fiction ever written in Australia.

In a recent interview in 3:AM magazine Murnane waxed lyrical about the excellence of his own
sentences:

You mention the craftsmanship of my writing. I wouldn’t dare give myself a ranking among my
contemporaries in any field other than craftsmanship. And in that field I’d rank myself first. My
sentences are the best-shaped of any sentences written by any writer of fiction in the English
language during my lifetime. The previous sentence is a fair average sample of my prose.

Coupled with this sure sense of his own abilities as a writer, Murnane demonstrates a keen
willingness, even within his fiction – and particularly in A Million Windows – to deride superficial
and careless narration or habituated critical biases in favour of his own ‘considered’ approach
(characterised by a strong narrator who avoids abstract language, overused phrasing and hostile
self-reflexivity). Murnane’s narrator tells us: ‘I’ve lived long enough to see that critics are affected
by fashion’ and mocks the ‘renegades’ who ‘seem to have learned long ago the advantages of
evasiveness or, perhaps, of using expressions such as beautifully written or moving or powerful in
order to hide their ignorance of the craft of fiction.’

Some readers or critics or judges of literary prizes might resent having their acuity or competence or
literary tastes questioned within a work of fiction. Others may bristle at having their roles usurped
by a writer who seeks to define the terms upon which his fiction should be judged. Perhaps this is
partly why A Million Windows is yet to win an award in Australia: alongside its other qualities, the
novel is a barely veiled assault on a literary culture that seems, to Murnane, to lack critical rigour.

Murnane’s fiction has always represented a challenge to conventional tastes. It unsettles readers’
worldviews and easy assumptions. To read and understand his sentences requires steady
concentration and an appreciation of syntactic, conceptual and emotional nuances, and inhabiting
his fiction demands a willingness to immerse oneself in an unfamiliar landscape, attuned to an
alien-seeming logic. In addition, since the publication of Velvet Waters (1990) Murnane’s
frustrations as a writer, and his sense of neglect, have been embedded his work. Murnane has
occasionally emphasised, and in some cases sought to justify, his various fictional quirks and
directly challenged more accepted literary habits. The following passage from A Million Windows –
in which the narrator describes the author’s use of images in his fiction – is a good example:

He, our author, is likely to be aware of not more than a few clustered images or even one image.
Sometimes, the image may be complex and may seem to yield some of its meaning almost at first
sight, as, for example, an image of a castle with each room occupied by a character from some or
another film; sometimes, the image may be simple and may seem to be of scant meaning as, for
example, an image of a window-pane coloured gold by the afternoon sunlight. Whatever sort of
image the author has in mind, he feels a certain feeling seeming to emanate from the image. The
feeling is persistent, intense, and sometimes troubling, and yet, at the same time, promising. When
the author first becomes aware of this feeling, he might seem to receive the same sort of wordless
message that sometimes reaches him from some or another image-person or image-object in some
or another dream. He seems to receive wordlessly the message: Write about me in order to discover
my secret and to learn what a throng of images, as yet invisible, lie around me. (Is even the least
discerning reader surprised to learn how different are our methods from those of the numerous
group that we call, contemptuously, the paraphrasers of yesterday’s newspaper headlines: those who

8
write, often with what is praised as moral indignation or incisive social commentary, about matters
that none of us in this building has ever understood, let alone wanted to comment on?)

Murnane has been as forthright as a writer can be about what he strives to achieve in his fiction, and
what he hopes to avoid. Here is a man who, when he was a creative writing instructor and lecturer,
fashioned the most rigorous, concrete and transparent grading system he could devise, and would
often spend hours evaluating each of his students’ stories. Murnane wasn’t concerned with objective
merit so much as transparency: he wanted his students to know exactly what he expected from them
and to understand precisely how their work was being judged. As someone with a working class
background who attended a Catholic school with no library and a largely incompetent and untrained
teaching staff, and as someone who felt alienated during his early years at university because the
conventions of tertiary education were obscure to him, Murnane has always sought transparency
and fairness. The rules of the game should be clear to everyone, and they should be scrutinised.
Those who are familiar with the workings of a prize panel at any level will know how difficult it is
to build the consensus required to award a writer of unusual fiction a major literary prize (I assume
‘slightly autistic’ fiction hasn’t caught on as a descriptor of Murnane’s work), but that there could be
a broad agreement to exclude Murnane from every Mile Franklin shortlist he has been eligible for,
and then to exclude him from this year’s longlist – surely that kind of consensus is also difficult to
build? Is it simply the case that an uncommon level of originality, alongside glimpses of his
idiosyncratic inner life, disqualifies Murnane from such mainstream recognition? Maybe the judges
believe that his best work is far behind him, or that he simply doesn’t sell enough books to warrant
serious consideration?

Murnane’s pronouncements about fictional space and narrative time in A Million Windows are
reminiscent of a deadpan Jorge Luis Borges, and his descriptions of private horse racing games and
a systematised process for composing erotic fiction will bemuse many readers, but perhaps the most
awkward and idiosyncratic aspect of his recent novels is their reiteration of a mystical conception of
fiction. Murnane generally shies away from direct confessions of a mystical sensibility, but it is a
vital part of his major fiction from Inland onwards, despite the seeming reluctance of critics to
acknowledge or engage with it.

Early in A Million Windows we learn that the novel’s most cautiously introduced Murnane-like
figure (“a certain male personage”) has a firm belief in the fictional afterlife:

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 had pored over it…. In
the years when he would have been called an adolescent, certain personages who owed their
existence to his having read certain details into certain works of fiction seemed not only closer to
him than any of his family or his friends but closer even than the divine or sanctified personages
that he believed to be watching his every deed and thought. Not only did the fictional personages,
so to call them, seem closer than the religious, so to call them, but whereas the religious seemed
ready always to judge him or to censure him, the fictional world seemed to want no more from him
than that he should side with them rather than with the religious, even though his doing so would
earn him not eternal salvation but the right to live with them, the fictional ones, for perhaps no more
than a few days of their peculiar, immeasurable version of time.

If this is a confession it is a radically displaced one, presented through a series of narrative filters:
an implied author’s narrator’s account of a fictional-personage’s childhood reading experience. We
can pretend to take the authorial intention to heart and avoid fully equating the ‘certain male
personage’ with Murnane, but discerning and undiscerning readers alike will privately guess that

9
this was the flesh-and-blood author’s experience of fiction as a child, and that it is probably
ongoing.

When I asked Murnane about his mystical side, he reiterated what he once said in an essay: ‘I’d be
likely to offend readers more if I said that I had a belief in another world than if I said I voted for
John Howard and Tony Abbott, which I didn’t, or that I’d had a conviction for some kind of sexual
deviancy.’

Despite Murnane’s wariness, his latest novel gives voice to a mystical sensibility. A Million
Windows reaffirms his reputation for scrupulous literary semanticism, on the one hand, but its final
pages also traverse fictional and remembered landscapes, culminating – with impossible subtlety
and uncanny power – in something approaching a mental stigmata. It might be tedious to claim that
it is among the best books published anywhere in the last decade, but a note I made on the final
page of my reviewer’s copy a year ago still seems true to me now: There is no more astonishing
work of fiction than this.

Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf is as idiosyncratic as anything Murnane has written
to date, but it is also a radical departure from what he calls ‘true fiction’. Focussing on his lifelong
passion for horse racing, the memoir features a series of straightforward personal recollections and
accounts of his interest in seemingly marginal aspects of the sport. As Murnane explained to me:
‘The horse book was the easiest thing I’ve ever written. I wasn’t as fussy about semantics. I used
language as though I was writing an article for a newspaper. I’m still very pleased with it but I
haven’t fussed over it in the same way. It’s not hard to read. No one will stop and think, now I have
to read that sentence again.’

Murnane’s mysticism comes to the fore again in one of the collection’s best stories, ‘Reward for
Effort’, which is partly about a miraculous horse race. This account is drawn from a larger store of
inexplicable personal experiences, all of them recorded and collected in Murnane’s Csodák
(‘Miracles’) folder, which is stored in his Chronological Archive.

When I asked about that folder and his belief in an invisible world, Murnane was initially reticent.
‘It’s not our business to bother too much about whatever is waiting for us after our death,’ he said. ‘I
don’t see it as our business to wonder. Our business it to mow the grass and do the dishes, to get our
haircut every few weeks and talk to each other and keep institutions going. The world’s work is a
lovely expression. I like to think that we should spend more time on the world’s work than on these
speculations. Anything I’ve written in my Csodák folder has been written under compulsion. I’ve
observed something that I can’t not record. There are about forty or fifty such episodes. I don’t like
talking about them because they only make sense to me. I wouldn’t want anyone to feel that I was
trying to convince them of anything, but I feel safe in saying that these recorded episodes – the
miracles – have persuaded me that death isn’t the end of things, and we might even discover after
death that this immense and manifold thing that we call reality was just a visible trace of a much
larger, ongoing development.’

The recursiveness of Murnane’s fiction seems, therefore, to have as much to do with authorial
discretion as formal prohibition or play. Murnane has preferred to reveal those parts of himself – the
purer parts – only indirectly. With Something for the Pain, Murnane abandons this wary approach.
Within it’s pages he addresses readers not through the prism of a highly developed and patterned
fiction, but in something closer to his everyday voice. In his memoir we meet the man I spoke with
in the Goroke Hotel; in his fiction we encounter a figure from another world entirely.

10
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/gerald-murnane-an-idiot-in-the-greek-sense/

***

Essay: Luke Carmanon Gerald Murnane

In the Room with Gerald Murnane

You academic types sure know how to make a simple thing complicated.
Gerald Murnane, Goroke, December 2017

At a recent and highly irregular literary conference, a silver-haired professor explained that he had
come to acquire his reputation by making of books ‘what others had made of religion.’ The
conference at which the silver-haired professor made this utterance was unusual for a number of
reasons – the most obvious being that it was taking place at a small golf club in rural Victoria, and
that Gerald Murnane was working the bar. Adding to the strangeness of Murnane’s presence, within
the boxed confines of the club’s bar, was the fact that the author’s work was the central subject of
the event’s presentations. Each academic who stood behind the Rotary Club lectern to give their talk
would have to handle the intense activity of the author, busying himself in the background with the
club’s ledger, cleaning glasses, and helping the ladies in the kitchen prepare the scones and jam.

Gerald, as attendees adjusted to calling the author, attempted to ease the tension of the situation by
having the convener, another professor from Sydney, read the following announcement before the
event’s commencement:

Gerald Murnane wishes to inform you that he will be available to listen to some of the papers
today, but he does not feel obliged to be present for all the presentations, and may come and go at
varying intervals. He would like it to be known that he is licensed to serve alcoholic and non-
alcoholic drinks, and that the bar will be open for both from 12 noon onwards, with the bar’s license
permitting service until midnight. Anyone wishing to purchase an alcoholic drink will be required to
sign the club’s ledger located on the bar. While there, Gerald would like to invite you to read a three
thousand word palindrome that he has composed, located on the opposite side of the bar.

With the tension in the atmosphere of the room thus eased for the assembled fifty or so conference
attendees (the golf club’s maximum occupancy being somewhere close to this number), a series of
talks began on the many intricacies of an author whose reputation was such, that he had managed to
draw at least those fifty pilgrims from every corner of the country to a town four hours’ drive from
the nearest major airport.

The night before the conference I slept in a cabin outside a hotel in a town best known for its sizable
rock, and ate a parmigiana larger than the plate on which it was served. At the table with me were
three academics who had just arrived from Sydney and Perth, respectively. One of them, a lecturer
from Sydney University who had met Murnane once before, claimed that the ecological structures
beneath Murnane’s writing were largely influenced by an early religious education, despite the
implied author’s assertion in the works themselves that this aspect of his mental imagery had long
ago lapsed into a kind of incidental apprehension. By the end of our meals, as the bistro filled with
families and the barking from the high-ceilinged bar began to grow intrusive to our chatter, we
discovered that all four of us were Catholics of various degrees of practice, though we each went to
our cabins without further comment on this coincidence.

11
Toward the end of the conference, a bearded academic with an American accent pointed out that
most critical responses to Murnane’s latest (and rumoured final) publication, Border Districts, had
missed the obvious connection between its opening paragraph and the opening of The Plains, the
author’s most canonical work.

Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard
my eyes, and I could not think of going on with this piece of writing unless I were to explain how I
came by that odd expression.

This opening pledge to explain a resolution, the bearded academic with the American accent
pointed out, is unmistakably a self-reference to the opening lines of The Plains, but with the
essential difference that the latter begins with the narrator resolving to ‘keep (his) eyes open’, rather
than guarded. The opening of Border Districts, the bearded academic argued, was in a sense a
revision of The Plains, and this implied that, despite the author’s insistence that there had been no
overarching intent behind the trajectory of his works, there might be an inexhaustible form of
intention at work in his oeuvre, retrospectively repurposing the themes and images of the earlier
publications.

Well before hearing this complex analysis, I had decided my own presence at the conference was an
error of judgment. For one thing, I’d taken the place of an academic who’d dropped out late in the
proceedings, and had subsequently supplied my name as an interested party. The academic who’d
dropped out was aware of several books by Murnane stacked in a pile by my bedside, but what the
academic did not know was that the earmarks and annotations in the books she had observed rarely
progressed all the way from cover to cover. Efficiency is not my forte as a reader – I am cursed with
the inability to finish the books wherein I find the greatest pleasure. The writing I most enjoy tends
to get me so exercised by its effects that I am soon deep in a fugue state of mind, a kind of
dissociative wandering from which I am required to return before I can come back to the page
which started me off in the first place. No sooner have I read a sentence or two of this stimulating
prose, which seems to awaken some novelty of consciousness in me, than I find that I have spent
the afternoon hours pacing back and forth about the house, the book which started the whole thing
in motion having been long abandoned on a bench in the hallway.

In academic circles this does not count as an acceptable defence for canonical negligence, which is
no small failure to be sure. Among the Styrofoam and scones, one attendee asked another the name
of Murnane’s favourite racehorse, and the filly’s name rolled off her tongue in response, no
hesitation. Another asked me if I’d seen ‘the church’ while driving through town.

‘What church?’ I asked.

‘Isn’t that your copy of Border Districts?’ she asked me, pointing to an uncorrected proof I’d been
clutching through the afternoon. ‘The one in the book,’ she said, somewhat unnecessarily.

There’s nothing superior about a critic who does not know their material, and there’s no excuse for
professional readers whose memories for fiction are faulty, but I’d hoped my usual need to plaster
over lapses in attention would be less laborious in the company of readers who’d come together to
celebrate the work of a writer whose implied author freely admits a failure to ‘follow plots and
comprehend the motives of characters’ in the novels he’d read, a trait he once again asserts in the
early pages of Border Districts, and one which endeared the author to me for all eternity when I first
came across it in Barley Patch, where the narrator justifies his own haphazard textual memory by
explaining that ‘a person who claims to remember having read one or another book is seldom able

12
to quote from memory even one sentence from the text. What the person probably remembers is
part of the experience of having read the book: part of what happened in his or her mind during the
hours while the book was being read.’ For the narrator of Murnane’s latest work, the ‘image-world’
of his ‘inner seeing’ during the act of reading is ‘often only slightly connected with the text in front
of my eyes; anyone privy to my seeming-sights might have supposed I was reading some barely
recognisable variant of the text, a sort of apocrypha of the published work.’ Doubly so, Murnane’s
narrator explains, when it comes to the texts and books that intend to explain the inner workings of
‘the mind’ through ego, id and archetype. To these ‘drab’ attempts to understand the mental plane,
Murnane’s narrator responds that he suspects his own mental territories must surely be ‘paradise by
comparison.’

When the bearded academic with the American accent asked my thoughts on the work from which
I’ve quoted above, I could only respond that Murnane’s writing seemed to me an extension of
lapsed religious liturgy – though it was hard to explain what I meant by that.

On the drive home from the conference, I passed through a flurry of migrating butterflies erupting
from the yellow grasses by the roadside. While their white bodies burst against the windscreen like
puffs of chalk I realised that I could not give even a partial account of the ecstatic sense of
Murnane’s writing, as it seems to me, without beginning somewhere else altogether.

Many months ago, before I had the good sense to scrub myself clean of all social media, I came
upon a post by an apprentice writer who was already well-known in local literary circles. Like all
digital media the post was a complex arrangement of coloured pixels populated by a root logic of
zeros and ones. I admit to knowing almost nothing about this esoteric relationship of numbers and
colours, or the process by which they are transmitted over networks of copper or fibre optics – in
this instance, the divisions of the zeros and ones and their transmission over the vast networks of
cables and ethereal waves assembled on the small screen of my smartphone, in the form of thin
black letters grouped into words, which were themselves ordered by an unseen intelligence abiding,
from a distance, by the rules of our universal language, as dictated by the English strain of its
external expression. These English words were transposed within a space beneath a square
indicating the so-called ‘profile’ area of meaning on the electronic page, within which was
displayed an image of a digital photograph of the apprentice writer’s face. The transmitted display
of this photograph-image appeared to have been captured outside, originally, in the golden light of a
warm afternoon, and the qualities of the subject’s beauty were evident even within the limitations of
the square at the uppermost corner of the borders of my little screen. She appeared to be caught in a
moment of joy – her mouth open and her bronze skin bathed in the gold-rust glow of the afternoon’s
fall.

The square in which her image was contained was arranged next to a rectangular border of apposite
meaning, itself an arrangement in relation to a series of similarly boxed arenas of formal order, all
of them containing their own transmissions of words and images through the electric alchemy of
esoteric zeros and ones. In the rectangle adjacent to the image of the apprentice writer’s face,
indicating a kind of authorship over any nearby properties, the following observation was
transmitted in tiny black letters within the rectangular confines displayed on the square of my little
screen: ‘Writers obsess with writers, and thereby forego an ever more interesting world.’ Beneath
this transmission, according, as I surmised, to a three-digit number displayed inside a box within the
rectangle containing the words quoted above, were several hundred similar rectangles, all currently
invisible, containing what promised to be transmissions of messages sent in response to the first
message. These rectangles of response were not visible on my little screen because the logic of the
system was designed for maximum usability, and so in order to make these ancillary message

13
rectangles appear, I would be required to touch with my fingertip, a small arrangement of zeros and
ones depicting an arrow lodged beneath the three-digit number displayed in the corner of the
rectangle containing the original remark, at which, the arenas of meaning displayed on my little
screen would rearrange their complex borders so that several screen-lengths containing
transmissions of similar rectangles in a dialogical proximity to each other would instantaneously
appear underneath the original rectangle, with transmissions of faces in boxes beside the replies in
keeping with the formal authorial indices with which the first message was likewise appropriated.

For reasons which I could not at the time of encountering this transmission explain, reading the
message about ‘writers obsessed with writers’, in a rectangular display bordered beside a box
containing an image of an apprentice writer caught in the fine golden light of an afternoon
experiencing a moment of apparently unselfconscious joy displayed on the digital slate of my little
screen, caused in me a kind of psychic distress, an intense eruption of angst. Many months since
having encountered this transmission, I now suspect I know what it was that caused such a strong
emotional reaction to what might, to the next person, seem no more than an innocent observation on
the condition of writing and writers in relation to the wider world. It is not easy, however, to
translate my suspicion about my reaction, except that the internal upheaval I experienced on reading
the transmission about writers’ obsessions and the world at large is one related to a deep internal
circuitry in me associated with the concept of blasphemy – an encounter with something
ontologically profane despite its intent – though I would not have been able to conceive of it as such
at the time.

Even now, after many months of reflection, I am not sure how to articulate the relationship between
blasphemy and the idea of literature without providing another earlier experience of the sort of
dissonant dread which I now consider the result of encountering what I then understood to be
unholy profanity. In a bookshop in Newtown, seven years since I’d left the inner-city to live in the
outer suburbs, I stepped into a bright, orderly shop called ‘Better Read Than Dead’ to see what
books were being promoted by the staff who worked there. I had visited this clean, narrow shop
with its calm, blue-green storefront many times before during the years when I lived in the inner-
west. Always I entered the store with the same intention: to learn the opinions of the store’s staff on
the particular books they were at that time promoting, and to check those opinions with my own
response to the first few lines of those books. Learning the opinions of the store’s staff on the books
being promoted involved no direct human intercourse, something which would have rendered me
mute with depths of anxiety – it was, rather, a simple matter of reading the handwritten reviews that
the staff members had signed and placed beneath the books on the promotional shelf. On the same
shelf, above the books the staff had read and reviewed were the books that had sold well that week,
with numbered squares on top of the shelves indicating which books had sold the best, with the
number (1) indicating the biggest seller of the week’s big sellers, and the number (10) being the
lowest of the week’s best sellers. On the occasion I entered this bookshop, many years after having
left the inner city for the outer suburbs, I picked from these shelves a book containing a
compendium of short stories written by students enrolled in the University of Technology Sydney’s
creative writing department. The collection was titled The UTS Writers Anthology. I cannot now
remember whether this book was located on the bestseller shelf, or whether I was opening it to
compare my own reaction to its contents to an account written and lodged beneath the book by the
store’s staff.

In the opening pages of the book I found an introduction by a writer who was at the time very
popular, and who had recently won several awards for her latest work, though, as I’m sitting in the
outer suburbs writing this account, I cannot recall either her name or the name of her award-
winning collection. At the end of her introduction, most of which I have forgotten, the following

14
remark was printed on the rough recycled paper of the anthology: ‘Reading fiction is perhaps one of
the few remaining secular paths to transcendence—that elusive state in which the distance between
self and universe shrinks, long symbolised in literature and philosophy by a blue flower.’

Reading these words some years after I left the inner city for the outer suburbs, where I am now
writing this account, I can recall a vague sense of the sickening looseness I experienced, in the
distance between myself and the rough recycled page on that particular afternoon in the narrow
neatness of the bookshop; a kind of motion-sickness in the still confines before the borders of the
neat, blue shelves. Such was the intensity of the feeling that it seemed I had to reach a long way to
put the book back in its place. I felt as though I might lose my footing in the reach. It is by no
means obvious to me now, reflecting on the words from which this reaction was provoked, where
precisely, in those thin lines printed upon the rough page, the source of that disorienting shock
might be located, but I recall that I felt, vaguely, at the time, that the author of those words about the
blue flower had taken some mental image of a sacred doorway between one world and another, and
had pressed it between the pages of her introduction, so that some impression of its diffused essence
had lifted from the materiality of the page and wounded my sense of reality, stranded as I was,
momentarily, between the world of the page and the real.

Sitting in my old house on the hill in the western suburbs, in the heat of a twenty-first-century
summer, with the rotating fan shaking the wilted leaves of the pot plants by the back door, I cannot
recall how I dealt with my encounter with the words about the blue flower, written in the collection
I have mentioned discovering in the narrow confines of the Newtown bookshop many years ago.
When I run through the many clipped reels of memories linked to the mental image of the narrow
store and the words on the page and the cyan shelves, in search of lost time, all my attempts to
follow the reader I once was, as he retreats from the book he has placed back upon the shelf, begin
to unravel. I see him, thinner and fuller of hair, as he passes beyond the glass doors of the store, and
the mental projection of what that afternoon might have looked like, leaps up and turns the memory
to fiction, a scene assembled from cinematic clichés, of a slow rising-away from the busy pedestrian
parade of Newtown’s streets, the parapets of shops built beyond living memory, and the reader who
I once was, lost in the bright crowd forever passing along King Street, into the train station and the
cafés, the hotels and bazaars.

Far easier, less fictional to recall, is my own reaction to the more recent encounter with the social
media message I began this odd divergence by addressing: I came upon this transmission as I was
sitting on the couch in the lounge-room, and as the distress provoked by the post about ‘writers
obsessing about writers’ flooded my being, I leapt from the couch, tossed the offending phone into
the cushions, and fled to the bedroom, where I sought sanctuary behind the always-closed blinds, to
consider the ‘ever more interesting world’ the young author had described. I hazarded a peek
between the blinds of my dark little room, and took the time to examine the unlettered streets of my
mountain town atop the outskirts of our city – in which, both city and room – I had spent the
majority of my life, excepting some brief and foolish sojourns in the east.

Through the blinds the street was satisfactorily uninteresting. Directly outside the window a curved
strip of road ran sharply across the top of our molehill suburb. For many years the curve of the road
meant that it was customary for me to wake in the night to a sound not unlike an explosion just
outside my window, to pull open the blinds in half-wakefulness and observe cars overturned in a
wreck of broken wire fences and savaged tree trunks, the halos of headlights pointing directly into
the windows of our house, the wheels still slowly spinning in the darkness as someone crawled out
of the twisted door onto sheets of broken glass, their limping figure disappearing into the night
while the neighbours turned on their porch lights and waited in their pyjamas and singlets for the

15
police and tow-trucks to come and clear the air with their blue and red lights and their searching
torches.

The street I observed through the blinds after reading the comment from the young writer on social
media contained no such drama. It was a mild afternoon in September, and I observed only a few
features of that familiar territory: the hood of a white Hyundai parked on the lawn coroneted with
jacaranda blooms, thick oleander stems lurching in the breeze with their knotted brown heads out of
flower, and beyond them the sepulchral grey and brown concrete slabs of homes that inner-city
critics would call McMansions, with spiked-steel gates and fences around their borders like
barbican defences extending to the edge of the curb. Passing through this suburban scenery was an
ancient man on a motorised chair, rolling down the sloped curve of the road at what seemed to me a
demented abandonment to speed, the little red flag on the back of his vehicle fluttering atop the
bending antenna, his long red socks high on his corrugated calves.

Having observed nothing in particular of interest through the window, apart from the old man on his
motorised chair, I felt reconciled to the impression that there was something mistaken about the
claim I had read from the young author, that the world outside words, the so-called real world, was
perpetually increasing in its degree of interestingness. The absence of interesting elements outside
permitted me to give a nervous shrug to no one, and to turn my attention to the stunted walls of
books that I had stacked about the room. I looked at the covers and assorted shapes of the novels
and collections assembled and stacked into strange totems about the room, that I had been unwilling
to see when I entered, as though to look at them with troubling associations in my mind before
checking on the outside world, would introduce an uncomfortable impurity into their materials,
which it might later be difficult or impossible for me to expunge.

The piles of books are like the stones placed at the points of a septagram star, warding evil from the
borders of my bed. In the dust of childhood, in the room where I slept in the bunk beneath my
younger brother, watching the springs of his mattress tick and clink as he moved fitfully in the
night, I lay awake in an insomniac’s decade-long pervigllium, retreating from sleep to escape the
night-terror paralysis that plagued bed times, fretful always of my mother’s teaching that a stray
devil crept about the house in the dark, and could strangle us in our sleep were we to lose our wits.

Sleeplessness was my defence against this in-between world of sleep and terror, inhabited as it was
by the threat of opportunistic demons. As any hyper-insomniac can attest, the upper limits of long-
time exhaustion are also peopled by diabolical figures – shadow men most common of all,
appearing in the deprived vision at the periphery of sight in those who reject rest. Otherworldly
phenomena also accrue in weeks without sleep – walls slant and rotate, lights begin to gesticulate,
stars seen from the window seem to move at the will of mental command, sounds increase their
sharpness among other oddities of misapprehended experience. The strangest of all was the sense
that would impress itself upon me at the height of all exhaustion, a feeling of great emotional
presence accompanied by the sensation that what was uniting all things, in some unspeakable
dreadfulness, was a structure of immense proportions balanced delicately upon the most fragile
spindles, like a great castle seen from the sky, thick at its towers and thin along its walls, suspended
sideways in an infinitude of empty space. The feeling this image provoked ran simultaneously
through my fingers and throat and wrung such heavy tears from me as to leave me sobbing in the
sheets.

When Kafka writes, ‘It is not alertness but self-oblivion that is the precondition to writing’, I
suspect I understand what he means. When I first began to read, which is itself a kind of writing, it
was to escape the immense wasteland of sleeplessness. There were no smart-phones or tablet

16
devices to numb the disorientations of the mind then, and so I turned to the forgiveness of my
stepfather’s book collection. Fantasy, for the most part, made up the supply – each novel more alike
than the last: an elf, a dwarf, and a man with a sword and a romance subplot. One series, whose
name I have long since forgotten, followed a band of wizard-folk who waged a guerrilla war to save
their lands from an evil sorcerer. For the most part, they camped out in the forest and cooked
skinned rabbits over an open fire, and made stews in pots with salted meats, while the bearded old
wizard argued with his witch-wife, their bickering inevitably ending with the wizard sighing and
saying ‘Yes dear’ while the companions smirked knowing smiles. For a child of a broken home,
who had no reason to disbelieve the scripture teachers who said that we would not see our parents in
heaven if they failed to uphold the sanctity of marriage, these fictional marital disputes were a
torturous distraction.

On these endless nights with the strange square device of the paperback pressed into the pillow,
body bent over it like some ascetic yogi frozen in meditative prayer, I traced the thin shapes of the
letters on the page and felt the images of the novel’s story running through my mind like a film,
while I edited these images into a secondary story, on the fly; one in which I inserted myself into the
narrative and changed its destiny. At the campsites, with the rabbits roasting on their ad hoc spits,
I’d enter from the dark of the woods, a powerful wizard myself, and admonish the magical married
couple for their petty bickering, ‘The world is at war!’ I’d screech at them both with a booming
voice, eyes glowering with a great wizard’s obvious potency, ‘Can’t you see your real enemy is out
there – not here between each other!’

When the writer of this series of novels, the title of which I have long ago forgotten, eventually
revealed that he had co-written the books with his wife, adding her name to the cover of all
subsequent releases, I felt an enormous sense of betrayal. All this time, the marital tensions of these
magical characters had been a surrogate for the supposedly real relationship of the author and his
wife. It had all been a fake, a meaningless device! To discover such cheap self-insertions passed off
as genuine fantasy disgusted this young reader, and I turned my back forever on the kind of fiction
that Murnane calls ‘film-script fiction’, that vein of fiction that is solely aimed at creating in the
mind of its readers a certain series of imaginary scenes. It was a sin, I decided, to bear false witness,
even in a world of pure imagination.

All of this, these unimportant eccentricities of an early readership, I would never have allowed
myself to remember were it not for the work of Gerald Murnane and the permission that his acclaim
grants to all that he has deemed to record in his volumes.

When the narrator of Munane’s Barley Patch recalls a mystery novel called Brat Farrar that he read
as a child, the images of its green paddocks and part of a homestead shaded by trees, he recalls that
he likewise felt ‘as though I moved among the characters.’ Though he could not, as I had done in
my own interjections into the world of fantasy, alter the events of the novels he read, he was ‘free to
take advantage of the seeming gaps in the narrative.’ The ‘unreported whole days, months, years
even’, which are conventionally skipped in any given novel, were open territory for Murnane’s
narrator to occupy at will with a version of himself, free to ‘observe and admire’ the landscapes
those fictions offered.

The narrator of Border Districts, as the bearded academic with the American accent would likely
have noticed in his reading of the book, expands on this image of a narrator reading a version of
himself into the novels he encounters – this time with the narrator not remembering the experience
directly, but rather imagining a man who is remembering himself as young reader. The portrait
supplied by the narrator is of a man who recalls that, from an early age, he began to experience the

17
snatches of fiction he glimpsed in the many novels his parents left by their bedside, as parts of a
never-ending book made up from apparently disparate fictions. The books his parents borrowed
from the local shopping centre library were all connected to the one imaginative space, ‘a far-
reaching landscape of pale-green meadows interspersed with patches of dark-green woodland’.

Each meadow was bordered with flowering hedgerows. In each woodland were paths leading
past banks overgrown by wildflowers with appealing names. Here and there in the landscape were
large houses of two and more storeys and with numerous chimneys. Each house was surrounded by
a spacious formal garden at the far end of which was a park with an ornamental lake. Each large
house was occupied for the time being not only by several of the latest generations of the family
that had owned the house for several centuries but also by a sort of floating population of youngish
men and women who were distant relatives of the owners of the house or who had been
recommended to the owners by some or another friend of a distant relative in a city that might have
been named London and was no more than a conjectured smoky blur far away past the furthest of
the pale-green meadows.

Despite the various and differing populations of this ever-present landscape, the man the narrator of
Border Districts imagines to be remembering his youthful reading can recall only two: ‘a young
male character and a young female character.’ Anyone else has been forgotten.

These ‘reports’ of a narrator who imagines a man who remembers dimensions of fiction are
themselves not fictions – the narrator of Border Districts insists that we are reading an account of
‘seemingly fictional matters’ rather than a formal fiction per se. The narrator assures his readers of
this in the context of failing to remember a quote from Proust ‘purporting to explain why the bond
between reader and fictional character is closer than any bond between flesh-and-blood persons.’
Unable to uncover the quotation from his files, the narrator offers us his own explanation:
‘sometimes, while reading a work of fiction, I seem to have knowledge of what it would be to have
knowledge of the essence of some or another personality.’

Murnane’s narrator seems in the above passages of Border Districts to argue for a profound
truthfulness in fiction, but also places the narration itself outside fiction’s confines, and so it is
somewhat unclear if the truthfulness of fiction through a series of ‘seeming knowledge’ is also
claimed by Murnane’s own work.

The conference in the golf club in rural Victoria ended with an address from Gerald Murnane titled
‘The Still-Breathing Author’, in which he described himself as a ‘technical writer’. Although
Murnane is a pedantic grammarian, it is not clear to me in what sense his work is ‘technical’, and
the author’s own explanation of this label, ‘I mean by this that my work as a writer is to search for
the sentences that will most accurately describe the mental imagery that is my only available
subject-matter’, seems perversely idiosyncratic. Whether or not the reader believes the narrator of
Border Districts, that his work is about ‘seemingly fictional matters’, there is no doubt that the ideal
of an essential truth is central to an understanding of the author’s work. As evidence for this, there is
the author’s own assertion that it was Jack Kerouac who gave him the technical capacity to move
from a reader of grand internal landscapes to an author of such spaces. Here is Murnane, in an essay
from Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, describing his first encounter with On the Road:

The book was like a blow to the head that wipes out all memory of the recent past. For six
months after I first read it I could hardly remember the person I had been beforehand.

18
 For six months I believed I had all the space I needed. My own personal space, a fit setting for
whatever I wanted to do, was all around me wherever I looked…my space coincided at last with the
place that was called the real world. But the world was much wider than most people suspected. I
saw this because I saw as the author of On the Road saw. Other people saw the same streets of the
same Melbourne that had always surrounded them. I saw the surfaces of those streets cracking open
and broad avenues rising to view. Other people saw the same maps of Australia or America. I saw
the coloured pages swelling like flower buds and new, blank maps unfolding like petals.

Is it mere coincidence that it was Kerouac, the most Catholic of Great American Writers, whose
ecstatic landscapes opened the imaginative plains to Murnane? Kerouac himself suffered deeply
from an authorial uncertainty until he deigned that his duty toward writing was to tell, directly, the
truth as he lived it. It was some conception of the Truth that drove Kerouac to write his novel about
‘Two Catholic buddies in search of God’ in On the Road, a work on his experiences traversing
America in the forties. It is the characteristically ornate aesthetic of Catholicism that permeates the
work of both these great writers, an aesthetic that is in essence an attempt to express the experience
of an infinite, divine creativity present in the material world. Both Murnane and Kerouac attempt in
their works to distil the unfathomable depths of finite matter through an ecstasy of revelation and
praise.

In its logic this aesthetic is compatible with the pantheist conception of the world that Murnane
aligned himself with in his talk at the end of the conference in the golf club in rural Victoria. Where
Kerouac was ecstatically open to the passionate embrace of everything and everyone, the great ‘IT’
of a Dionysian Christ – punctuated by depths of confessional sorrow and suffering – Murnane’s
passionate witnessing is, as Border Districts begins by attesting, performed with saint-like
constraint. While On the Road ends with a climactic bacchanalian orgy in a Mexican bordello, the
jukebox playing so loud that the walls shake and the actors are drenched in sweat, the crescendos of
Border Districts, by contrast, are purer, peripheral discoveries of surprising interconnectedness. In
one of the most intensely focused accumulations in the book, Murnane manages to connect a
marble, an eye, a book cover and a kaleidoscope with a ray of light – pinning these elements
together with such gathered emotional intensity that its sudden culmination in a series of names of
colours verges on an imagistic symphony. The minute dimensions of these ordinary objects are
explored with such tenacious and elemental prose that the relational meaning they bring together,
pierced by a ray of light, is a clear expression of an interconnected and complex transcendental
plane. The narrator who witnesses this act of relational meaning is the curator of the guarded eye,
the mystic who can gather the heralding of apparently meaningless parts into an infinite whole.

This climax into the purity of colours, ‘Crimson lake, burnt umber, ultramarine…deep cadmium,
geranium lake, imperial purple, parchment…’, is immediately followed by a counterpoint transition
in the narrative, into a long discussion of the link between patterns of colour and the specificity of
particular moods. Certain shades of red, forgotten, represent, so the narrator of Border Districts tells
us, a loss of whole associations in memory and experience. It is in this passage too that we learn
that our narrator has long understood maturity as something to do with conforming to boundaries,
however arbitrary. He tells us how, as a child, he had sought to impress his elders by conceiving of
certain parts of his immediate environment as categorically out of bounds. Soon the narrative breaks
again, and we are told the narrator has just returned to his writing having spent some time in the
city. The journey from the city to the border town is itself a temptation of associations – the
narrator, failing to guard his eye, is caught up in an immense digression of connectedness: images
related to landscape are dislocated by street signs, and these ensnare him in an unsolicited chain of
thoughts, leading to the recitation of the names and heraldry of racing families and their various
geographical connections structured in a manner reminiscent of certain biblical genealogical lists. It

19
is only another return, to the calm purity of colour, which is able to interrupt this propagation of
uninvited associations: the narrative flow of these thoughts is soothed by the narrator’s admiration
for ‘any person who could rely on a single colour or shade to represent him and his family.’ It is this
simplicity and purity which holds the narrator in thrall:

I knew something of heraldry. I had studied in colour plates in books numerous images of coats-
of-arms. But none of these complex patterns had affected me as did the assertion by some or
another so-called aristocrat that he needed no chevron or fess nor any quarterings of gules or vert or
argent; that he challenged any inquirer into the nuances and subtleties of his character or his
preferences or his history to read those matters from a jacket and a pair of sleeves and a cap of
defiant simplicity.

In part the pleasure this purity gives to the narrator is the thought that he might himself one day
‘light upon one or another shade or hue that would declare to the world as much I cared to declare
of my own invisible attributes.’

It is this principled pleasure in purity and simplicity which divides the Catholic Kerouac from the
‘technical’ Murnane. Kerouac – who drank himself to death at the age of 47, whose final work was
perhaps the longest suicide note ever published, who could not live the life he affirmed in his work
– believed he found God on his travels. Murnane, by contrast, when asked at the conference by the
silver-haired professor how it was that he had poured so much imagery into the plains and yet they
remained largely empty, explained his conception of his inner imaginary in terms not unlike these:
‘Within a house on the plains, there is a man downstairs in a large room reading a book that is part
of a long series of books. A woman is there too, and she is reading the same series, but she is
reading so intently that she has not noticed the man’s arrival.’

‘How’s that for an answer?’ Murnane says to the professor.

For Murnane, it seems enough to be in the same room, even unnoticed, by some ideal other, let
alone to see the face of God.

At the conference, a young biographer discussed the pleasures of being given access to Murnane’s
famous archives, and in a recent essay, this same young biographer wondered how it could be that
his subject had garnered so little acknowledgement from the literary establishment in the form of
awards and titles. Was there, the young biographer suggested, some conspiracy of refusal behind the
neglect Murnane had suffered through his career? I suspect that the truth is that there is something
essential to the work itself that repels the threat of acknowledgement from any award or honour.
When some or another guru called Kerouac ‘The Christ from Duluoz’, the author called it
blasphemy, and it was in this moment that the title for the beat writer’s final, fatal novel The Vanity
of Dulouz was born.

The conference, with its pilgrims and their words of praise, was the culmination of a writerly life
lived in faith. Border Districts, beginning with a resolution to keep faith, ends in strict observance
of this tenet. The narrator, explaining a distaste for the poet Shelley as ‘fatuous and affected’,
explains that he nonetheless ‘foresaw, soon after I begun to write this report, that I would be
compelled to include in it a certain two lines from some or another poem by Shelley: lines that I had
once found merely decorative and without meaning but have remembered for more than fifty years
in spite of myself.’ Murnane’s narrator supplies the lines, a poet quoting another, as Kerouac
insisted Christ became on the cross, when he quoted a Psalm of David ‘like a poet remembering it
by heart.’

20
The sun set over the flat sandy greens of the golf course as Murnane’s lower lip quivered and he
thanked the speakers for their words, and spoke of the spirit that had kept him writing when he
thought nothing on earth could compel him to continue. There was a strange change in the air, and
the author admitted to feeling it too: ‘I didn’t expect you to win me over today…and basically you
have.’ With that he retreated to the confines of the bar, to a round of applause, and for an hour or so,
sold drinks and signed books. I stepped into the queue for a Carlton Draught with a copy of A
Million Windows, and overheard a critic with a shaved head say, ‘I wonder if we will one day
understand what we have here, in this man.’

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/in-the-room-with-gerald-murnane/

***

Interview: Gerald Murnane

Fiction as Alchemy: An extract from an interview with Gerald Murnane

This is an extract from an interview that took place on 23 June 2014.

I thought I’d start by asking you about A Million Windows because it is your most recent book, and
I feel it was a special book for you in some ways.

Well, taking just bald arithmetical facts, I wrote it faster than I have written any other book – in
about six months, seven or eight months at the longest. Only one draft. And there are other books of
mine that would have taken three or four years to write, and three or four drafts to write. The other
thing is that I sat down in one afternoon and wrote the plan of it: the titles and the rough contents of
every section. I did what I often do, I wrote the title of each section on a card and got down on the
carpet here on the floor and played around with the order. I get a lot of fun doing that, deciding
which piece will be followed by which piece. And once I had done that, I just sat down at my desk
and at every available bit of time I could find I just wrote it. That’s it.

Is there some reason for that? The urgency of the subject matter?

No. The completeness. The sheer pleasure I got. I mean, writing is not much fun for me. And there
are days, there were weeks and months with other books, that I’ve had to drag myself to the table,
the desk and start writing. With this one, I couldn’t get back to it quick enough because, as I said, I
seemed to know what I was doing.

When you mentioned the subject matter, even though – I have to correct something slightly – even
though I knew from the titles and the brief outline, I knew what was in each section, there are things
in the finished book that are there, but I didn’t know they were going to be there when I was
halfway through. A little example: when I was writing about the blue, the indigo and silver dressing
gown, one of the – we’ll call them chief characters, there’s one narrator but there are a number of
chief characters, each is an inhabitant of some or another room in the house of a million windows –
when I was reporting the existence of that dark blue and silver dressing gown, I had no notion that I
would mention later in the book the dark blue and silver kingfisher bird that flew across the clearing
in the forest. That sort of discovery, or the hope of that sort of discovery, is really almost the chief
motivation when I am writing something like A Million Windows, and I got an endless number of
lifts and boosts during the writing of it.

21
The kingfisher in the clearing in the forest leads to another element which possibly also wasn’t part
of the original plan, and that is the ending of the book about the mother of the chief personage.

Well, that incident was there, but I didn’t see the connection between the forests and the, um … it’s
based on a few things that I know about, and I didn’t recall when I first decided to put it into the
book that the mother’s rape took place in a forest, in fact the same forest where the bird had flown
past many years earlier, a forest which I have also written about in Emerald Blue – the Heytesbury
forest.

But I was thinking the other day, I know very little about the visual arts, but I understand that there
is a time in the history of the visual arts when what we call scholars or critics wrote much about the
composition of a painting. Not just the subject matter alone, but the way that the painting, the
details or items in the painting, were arranged or composed. And I’d never thought of it before, but I
thought that what I’ve just been talking about in relation to A Million Windows could be called the
composition, and I get tremendous satisfaction from discovering what the composition will be, and
then satisfaction afterwards in just standing back and admiring the composition.

So the composition is what, the arrangement of images?

How things fit together, and particularly the order in which they come and hopefully, to use a
slightly mixed metaphor, the reverberation or echoes. I used to use the word ‘strand’, or sometimes
I’ve used the word ‘theme’, but that’s a bit pretentious. My work, my fiction, all of my fiction, each
work consists of strands – now I’ve come up with the word ‘composition’. And of course for me, I
happen to be a very visual person. Another way to talk about it is just the visual imagery, or simply
the imagery. And colour and shape have a lot to do with it. See, I’ve already got fixated on the blue
and the silver of the bird and the dressing gown.

But I feel that your way of working with images suggests that there’s always more in the image than
you’re aware of. There is a strong sense that the image contains more than you’ve written about,
that there is always something more to be said, or to return to. Is that what you are referring to by
what I would call ‘resonance’ actually?

Yes, I wouldn’t claim any special prowess or ability in this respect because I’ve often performed a
sort of mental exercise and just now as I was about to – I’ve interrupted myself and my thoughts are
actually doing what I was about to describe.

In the book Inland, there’s a sentence, a little musical phrase almost, that repeats: one thing is
always more than one thing. And one image is always more than one image. Not necessarily images
in a book of fiction by Gerald Murnane, but I’ve performed this mental exercise, as I call it, of
focusing mentally on some detail or other – let’s call it an image – and it doesn’t stay in view. It
relates or links up or it unfolds or it breaks apart and reveals another image. I mean, people
probably call that free association, stream of consciousness, many terms have been used. I just
simply call it the behaviour of the – it the nature of images to behave in that way. And it seems to
me when I write that the subject matter, the potential subject matter of what I am writing about is
almost infinite.

And then, of course, selection come into it. I don’t – I would be horrified to think that anybody
would suppose I wrote from simply freely associat[ing], or did any such thing. The matter of
selection is of tremendous importance and things have to be rejected because, interesting or pretty

22
as they might seem, they don’t really relate to the main strands or the main framework or the main
composition.

I think you wrote somewhere, I’m not sure exactly where, that the images for you are like villages
on the plain, or towns on the plain, and the roads connecting them are like feelings.

That was in the first piece in Emerald Blue, ‘In Far Fields’. Fictitious. The author, the narrator, is
described as being a teacher of writing and using manilla folders and throwing them around,
scattering rather, on the floor of his office. I don’t know that I ever did such a thing, but I could
readily imagine that I could do such a thing, as a way of explaining how I wrote. There’s another
image – yes, the roads. Since I am a great lover of maps and someone who peruses maps far more
readily than he travels, the imagery of maps comes readily to mind. The other thing is the little
diagram I used to draw on the chalkboard or the whiteboard when I was a teacher of writing. It
started with a little polygon in the centre, and it took on a – I think years ago I saw a diagram of a
snowflake, or some sort of crystalline substance, and the central polygon is surrounded by eight to
ten other polygons, and rays or connecting lines link them up. Not just the central one to the others,
to each of the others, but each of the others to each of its fellows. And I like, it encourages me when
I am writing, to think of the shape as – certainly not linear, I don’t think. There are passages in my
books that follow a sort of linear progression, but most of my books are arranged, composed of
small sections, which as I said earlier, could have taken other orders, or could have been arranged in
other orders. And time – I don’t see any, I’m not over-ruled or over-concerned with the demands of
a temporal progression. I can write something early in the book from the fictional future of the
book, and something later in the books from the fictional beginnings or the early time.

Those connections between images or between the same image in different contexts are across
works too, not just in the one work of fiction, but there is a high degree of return and repetition with
variation across your whole writing, isn’t there?

Critics have said that, and I’ll take it as praise and they meant it as praise, I’ve done an amazing
amount with a very small amount. That for someone whose experience is not terribly wide, never
having travelled extensively, or not being part of any sort of political activity or having fought in
any battles or that sort of thing, led a fairly quiet life, I’ve written upwards of a dozen books using
and reusing, and using in different ways, a limited amount of material. They’ve gone on, the same
people, sometimes to try and name the items. Start with grassy landscapes and distant views of
females and so on, but I’ll leave that to others. Oh, horse racing of course.

That’s why I suggested that in some ways the image for you resonates, and has more than can be got
from it at any one go, so that you keep coming back to the same image.

The well is almost bottomless. The thing unfolds and it unfolds like some sort of, like those fast
shots people used to take – they were novelty films in the early days when I used to be a kid going
to films. The speeded-up views of flowers opening and the buds turning into flowers. There are
images – I suppose that the Heytesbury forest – there are images I would venture to say haven’t
yielded up yet all the meaning that they potentially contain.

You mentioned the well. That image of the girl who drowns herself in the well, who leaps into the
well, the peasant girl, which you take originally from the Birds of the Puszta, which appears in a
number of works, most notably I think in Inland, but it’s also in A Million Windows as well. And
then when it leads to the clearing in the forest and the rape of the mother, suddenly you feel there’s

23
an aspect to the image which in some ways explains its recurrence. But it hadn’t been there until
then.

Well, fiction is a kind of magic or alchemy. I was sitting on a suburban train. I can’t recall –
somewhere in those archives over there would be the answer to that, but never mind – it was a date
somewhere in the ‘80s, and I was reading an English translation of the Hungarian – it’s not a novel,
it’s a book of sociology I suppose – Puszta Népe, which means people of the Puszta. It was written
in the 1930s. And I read a section about the oppression, the sexual oppression of the girls on the
great estates by the – not by the owners and the aristocrats who owned the estates, but by the lesser
officials who were only jumped up peasants anyway: the overseers and the farm supervisors. And
then I read the pages – the cowherds pulled her out when they watered the cattle at dawn – and I
think my life changed at that point. Something, I knew something was afoot. I couldn’t have
imagined the way that piece of reading would change my life and my fiction.

Of all the images that I have in mind, that one has probably has yielded the most and has perhaps
even still the most to yield. It caused me to learn the Hungarian language, for one thing, and to be
able to quote the whole of that passage in Hungarian. [Speaks Hungarian] – that’s the cowherds
pulled her out when they watered the cattle at dawn section. And I wrote the book Inland and the
well just keeps occurring – I don’t go looking for it, it comes looking for me. And it occurs in
numerous places, as you’ve said, in other books and things I have written.

So I can’t – you didn’t raise the matter and not many people would have raised the matter. But
sometimes I get to know of writers who – I’ll just speculate about the reasons why people have
written fiction. I used to have a contemptuous expression I used as a teacher about people who
chose their fictional subject matter from yesterday’s headlines. Not for me to condemn anyone in
the wide world of fiction, but I could never even contemplate looking out, putting my hand to my
forehead and looking out for the subject matter of my next piece or book. I think Isaac Bashevis
Singer said: it comes looking for me, I don’t have to look. It’s there already, and it’s just a new
development in my own life.

So I can say in all honesty and sincerity that I can’t tell the difference between my fiction, my
thinking about my fiction, and my life. It’s as important to me as almost anything else in my life.
And as I jokingly said years ago to somebody – it was in connection with literature board grants.
Somebody said it must be nice to have a literature board grant – this was back in the 1970s – it must
be nice to have a literature board grant now, you’ll able to go on with your writing. I said, I’d go on
with my writing if they fined me for writing, instead of giving me seven thousand a year or
whatever it was. If they made me pay that amount. So long as I could find the money I would go on
writing, that’s how important it was to me. And in the face of a certain amount of unfavourable
criticism, which I have had from some quarters. It would have no effect on me whatever because I
am just one of those people who just had to write, even if it’s not for publication. The evidence is
around us as we sit here.

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/interview/fiction-alchemy-interview-gerald-murnane/

***

Reading Gerald Murnane

Context N°23

24
Nicholas Birns

In one sense, Gerald Murnane is the most Australian of writers. Unlike most of his countrymen,
who are inveterate travelers, instinctual cosmopolitans, Murnane has never left Australia. Indeed, he
has largely confined himself to the Australian state of Victoria, visiting Tasmania once, New South
Wales a few times, South Australia now and again, and rarely if ever witnessing “the far sunlight of
Queensland” (as he says in his collection Landscape with Landscape). Like a good many
Australians, Murnane is of Irish background and had a Roman Catholic upbringing. For many years
Murnane lived a quiet suburban existence with his family, and has now retired to a small town in
the west of Victoria. His greatest hobby is the characteristically Australian one of horse racing.
Moreover, Murnane writes in a vein of Australian “realism” initiated by the garrulous anti-realism
of the early twentieth-century novelist Joseph Furphy, whose vernacular erudition and love of
having sport with his reader contribute to Murnane’s vision as much as does Patrick White’s high
style and braiding of language and loss. If a writer like Peter Carey, with his inventiveness, verve,
and prescience, is the outward face of Australian literature, Murnane is its inward face:
contemplative, deeply humane, dedicated above all to craft.

But in other ways Murnane is the least Australian of writers. Homebody though he may be in real
life, in his fiction he has traveled to Hungary and to Paraguay, to Romania and to the grasslands of
South Dakota. He is an erudite writer who is massively well read though owing true debts only to a
select body of peers: Proust, Emily Brontë, Hardy, Nabokov, Borges, Calvino, Halldor Laxness, and
Gyula Illyés. Moreover, like many of these peers, the places mentioned in his fiction do not really
correspond to reality, even though they sometimes have names we recognize. Repetition plays a key
role in Murnane’s fiction, which is often very abstract and lacking the detailed descriptions and
settings we have come to expect in not only traditional but much innovative fiction. In Murnane’s
hand, a passage like this, which would be the beginning of a conventional novel:

On a certain afternoon in the early 1950s with a hot sun in a clear sky but with a cool breeze
blowing from the near-by sea, a man aged about thirty years was riding on horseback towards a
swampy area overgrown with tea-tree and with other sorts of dense scrub. The swampy area was
near the centre of a low-lying island within sight of the mainland of south-eastern Victoria. (Barley
Patch)

is here an elaborate decoy, just the sort of obvious narrative reward one is not going to get from
anyone who, as Murnane likes to put it, would be the “chief character” in one of his novels.
Murnane’s texts teach their reader to stifle routine narrative urges, to search harder and more
exactingly along the paths of imagination. As David Musgrave notes, Murnane, though on the one
hand richly creative, also asks of his readers a “renunciation of imagination,” even as Murnane is
incontestably, in Musgrave’s words, “Australia’s most innovative writer of fiction.”

Gerald Murnane was born in 1939 in the Victorian suburb of Coburg—the resemblance to Proust’s
beloved Cabourg is intriguing—just old enough to remember the war years and grow up during the
1950s. Murnane’s boyhood was passed in a fervently Catholic atmosphere, and Murnane grew up
thinking he might be a priest. A loss of faith not dissimilar to James Joyce’s—later written about in
Murnane’s novel A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), not dissimilar to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man—brought him, after several uncertain years, to the literary life. The story “In Far Fields” from
his collection Emerald Blue shows how uncertain his entry into the realm of high literature was,
how ridiculously disconcerting he at times found it. Murnane’s first novel, Tamarisk Row (1974),
gives first sighting of some of Murnane’s obsessions—horse-racing, images as gnomic clues to

25
destinies, migration, the brief exaltation of a Christian hope that becomes impalpable, chimerical.
Clement Killeaton is a third-person point-of-view character much resembling the young Murnane.
In his next book, A Lifetime on Clouds, Murnane complicates this by having his similar protagonist,
Adrian Sherd, veer off into fantasies: of America as a land of sexual allure and, conversely, of a
priesthood at once a refuge from the chaos of sexuality and a way to strangely consecrate it.
Repeatedly compared not only to Joyce’s novel of growing up in Dublin but to Philip Roth’s
Portnoy’s Complaint, A Lifetime on Clouds also gestures toward the later work of both Joyce and
Roth, by giving creativity—beyond the manifest, surface life—a privileged role in not only suturing
the gaps in reality but voyaging beyond them into a distant field of the imagination. Both the
conservatism of the ’50s and the new stirrings of the ’60s—always represented for Murnane by Jack
Kerouac, whose works, especially On the Road, gain a strange new aura when seen through
Murnane’s eyes—still continue to inform Murnane’s worldview. Even in his latest novel, Barley
Patch (2009), Murnane returns to the period of his boyhood and youth in order to plumb memory,
desire, and the mysteries of life that become more explicable, but no more masterable, with age.
Unusually, Murnane is as interested in the surface indicator as he is the deep structure, especially in
the names of people and places, which he lingers over, toys with, mulls. The Plains (1982) is
defiantly abstract, clearly a fable about the very possibility of fable, a tribute to the impossible but
irresistible task of finding a meaning beyond the visible. Murnane postulates a remote counter-
Australia away from the known societies of the coasts, a place that is a kind of diorama of his own
imagination where a young filmmaker quests for love and inclusion on the permanent cultural
record in a realm that is utopian and gossamer. The theme of the absent woman, seen in Lifetime as
a palpable object of desire, is transmogrified in this book into the paragon of an epistemological
hope:

Then I want to bring to light the plain that she remembers—that shimmering land under a sky that
she has never quite lost sight of. And I mean to see still other lands that cry out for their explorer—
those plains that she recognizes when she gazes out from a veranda and sees anything but a familiar
land.

The Plains is superbly successful on its own terms. What is interesting, though, is that Murnane’s
subsequent works do not stay at this level of abstraction, but turn back inward to reality, much as
Cézanne turns back to the object after Impressionism. This does not mean resuming the realism of
the first two novels, but chronicling lived circumstances amid imaginary tableau. Inland (1988),
perhaps Murnane’s greatest work, is filled with both displacement and pathos, of lost loves re-
sought but never secured, of mirror-image collaborations as perilous as they are audacious, and of
repeated geographical mantras that achieve both a Whitmanesque breadth and enjoy a modernist
irony. This era is also the time when much of Murnane’s great short fiction is written, appearing in
Landscape with Landscape (1985), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). Ranging from
meaty, ramifying novellas to taut parables, these experimental fictions reveal their narrators both
weeping for the world and dismissing it as a mirage.

Murnane is fully aware of the non-objective tradition in which he writes. Yet his literary education
was autodidactic in nature and did not coalescence until his late twenties. Part of the key to
Murnane is that he was both a late bloomer and someone who, just at the moment he had begun to
make his reputation in his late thirties, began to withdraw from the hum and buzz of the literary
scene. Murnane was a revered teacher of writing at Deakin University. His former students,
including Tim Richards, Christopher Cyrill, and Tom Cho, are among the major figures in the next
generation of Australian writers. But Murnane never wrote with the mentality of an academic or an
active legislator in the Republic of Letters. Murnane has never courted publicity, though certainly
he has never engaged in any melodrama trying to avoid it. Because Murnane was in so many ways

26
self-educated (he was not a literature major as an undergraduate, but, astonishingly, concentrated in
Arabic), Murnane’s self-reference is rough-hewn, runs in its own authorial grain, is rife with
eccentric quibbles and ramifications.

Many assumed Murnane had given up fiction with “The Interior of Gaaldine,” the last story in
Emerald Blue, both because it trailed off into a series of concocted horse-racing details that seemed
in its own inconspicuous way valedictory and because Murnane published no fiction for almost
fifteen years afterward. One says “published” and not “written,” because Murnane is known to write
long manuscripts that he does not choose to publish for personal reasons. Moreover, he has
produced many letters, diaries, and accounts of his life and his preoccupations, which are not
strictly speaking works of fiction, but to which he devotes much time as a part of his mental labor.
Famously able to write in his living room even as his three sons, when young, bustled about in great
commotion, Murnane is a born writer who has produced so much that what his readers can see is
only the tip of the iceberg.

Perhaps encouraged by the enthusiasm of his editor at Giramondo Publishing, the energetic Ivor
Indyk, Murnane embarked on a new period of creativity in the twenty-first century. His selected
essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2006. With their reflections on Proust, Kerouac,
and the challenges of learning Hungarian, they brought Murnane’s vision to a far wider readership.

Why has Murnane spent much of his later adult life trying to learn Hungarian? Part of it is the
Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the impact that the refugees coming to Australia made on the
seventeen-year-old Murnane. Part of it is the Magyar presence as a bit of Central Asia in Middle
Europe, the sense of an external voice, the other within the same. Part of it is simply the need for a
sacred language, sacred not in the sense of scriptural but in being secret.

Barley Patch is an intensely personal book, but also one rigorously engaged with the making of
fiction. In the opening pages of the book, the narrator looks back on his experience as an adolescent,
discovering a doll’s house in the second story of a relative’s house. This is evocative on a tangible
level, but also carries symbolic connotations of a surplus of meaning, of meaning, as it were, having
a second story, an additional layer not immediately explorable. Furthermore, the boyhood reading of
the chief character, especially his reading of Josephine Tey’s detective thriller Brat Farrar, with its
themes of mistaken identity, courtship, and horse-racing, relate to the narrative not just archival but
experientially. Reading becomes experience, or, as Murnane often seems to indicate, the richest
experience can be had only through reading, not just the immediate engagement with the text but
the residue, the aftermath, of images that hover and abide. Barley Patch is also a dirge for the
inaccessibility of a landscape never fully occupied. Murnane both cites and avoids his own name,
describing a two-word sign posted by a landmark:

The second word is Bay. The first word is the surname of my paternal great-grandfather followed by
the possessive apostrophe.

Your paternal great-grandfather is likely to bear the surname that is also yours, and indeed there is a
real Murnane’s Bay in southwestern Victoria. Yet one must not believe Murnane himself is speaking
to us. There is nothing that direct. It is only through the filter of a chief character that dialogue with
the reader is negotiated. The Swedish critic Karin Hansson, one of an influential group of professors
and translators who have argued for Murnane to win the Nobel Prize, has stated that “like Husserl
and other phenomenologists he considers the study of the potentialities and functions of
consciousness, mind, and memory as a primary task in his writing. His attention is directed towards
cognitive processes rather than demonstrating the veracity of external conditions.” But the one

27
theorist Murnane has ever overtly lauded is the far more hardscrabble American, Wayne C. Booth,
whose The Rhetoric of Fiction is a text to which Murnane constantly refers. Booth’s idea of the
“implied author,” the author the reader gets from the text—being different from both the more
apparent “narrator” and the real-life “breathing author”—has been central to how Murnane
understands his own work.

There is a temptation to compare Murnane with W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño, two writers who,
like Murnane, were both dry and passionate, both writing out of their own historically delimited
world but asking the ultimate questions. Murnane differs from these writers, though, in at least two
respects. First, he is alive; he is fond of referring to himself as “the breathing author,” as per Booth’s
theories. While Sebald and Bolaño accrued much of their truly global fame after their deaths,
Murnane seems determined to do it while he is still with us. Secondly, at least part of the
importance of Sebald and Bolaño had to do with politics. Murnane is not incapable of political
thought—his story “Land Deal” is a searing depiction of the white settlement of Australia as a
nightmare from which Aboriginal dreamers are determined to awake—but he is not primarily
political. Wrongly cast by certain Australian critics as an aesthetic mandarin, Murnane is hardly
that. He is indeed a proletarian sage, immersed in Australian daily life, admiring the mansions of the
wealthy magnates depicted in The Plains but knowing he will never be anything more than an
object of their patronage. Murnane is dedicated to fiction above all, to its imaginative manifestation
as fable and gesture. But this dedication is not meant to be a mere foil to reality. The narrators of
Murnane’s fictions are, indeed, powerless to do anything but follow the lead of the images that
festoon their minds; their volition is contingent; they are led by their own fascinations. Creating art
is less an exercise of will than an inadvertent grace.

Murnane is a very personal writer. Or, to put it another way, as Booth’s narratological theories
would suggest—the implied author of Murnane’s texts is an intensely personal one. This makes the
implied reader of these texts a highly personal one too. We put our own selves into Murnane’s work
partially because their systemic awareness asks that we make a reciprocal investment tantamount to
that which has been made by our authorial interlocutor. Thus, it is not a will o’ the wisp that critics
have read Murnane so subjectively. Yet none of the established critical guides to Murnane,
including the present writer, should be allowed to have the final word. Murnane is a writer to be
experienced individually, as each reader embarks on their own journey in quest of, as the narrator of
“Sipping the Essence” (Landscape With Landscape) put it, “something richly colored like
Queensland that was not quite within my grasp.”

https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/reading-gerald-murnane/

***

Responses (1)
What are your thoughts?
Judy Borenin
Judy Borenin
over 2 years ago

As a former bookseller, a favorite customer wanted to special order, Stream System. Of course,
researching it caused me to order it for myself. My first introduction to Gerald Murnane. This book
will be on the staff recommends at a bookstore in Port ...

Read More

28
10
Another World in this One: Encountering Gerald Murnane in Goroke
Blair Mahoney
Jan 19, 2018 · 14 min read

Goroke (pop. 623) is a town in the Wimmera region of Western Victoria, close to the South
Australian border. It has been home to the writer Gerald Murnane since 2009. He is the secretary
and bar manager of the Goroke Golf Club.

Murnane is not someone to provoke instant name recognition amongst most people, even readers of
literary fiction, yet he is one of Australia’s greatest writers, a serious contender for the Nobel Prize
for Literature. Since his first novel, Tamarisk Row (1974), he has published another twelve books.
He has said that Border Districts, published this year, is his last book, but there are some other
publications slated for the next few years.

I first read Murnane’s 1982 novel The Plains maybe a decade ago. It was a revelation, one of the
few books that I’ve read that redefined my understanding of fiction and what it was possible to
achieve with it. I raved about it to anyone who would listen. Since then I’ve explored his work in
greater depth and while there are some of his works that I am yet to read, I can confidently assert
that he is one of my favourite writers.

The opening lines of The Plains are remarkable:

Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in
the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.

Murnane’s search for meaning in the world and in the landscape of his mind is something that he
has explored in the fascinating body of work that he has developed over the years. His voice is
utterly unique.

It was with some excitement, therefore, that I discovered there was going to be a conference on
Murnane’s work this year. Unlike your usual academic conference, this one was being held in
Murnane’s home town, in the apparently rather prosaic location of the Goroke Golf Club. The
conference was part of a larger ARC-funded project called Other Worlds: Forms of World
Literature, a joint project between Western Sydney University and The University of Adelaide.

Now Goroke is a four and a half hour drive from Melbourne, so this wouldn’t be an easy
undertaking, but I figured I had to give it a whirl, and luckily my colleague and friend Sam was also
a fan and interested in going, so we decided to make a road trip of it and share the driving. We set
out on Wednesday afternoon and navigated our way past the Giant Koala in Dadswell’s Bridge to
the regional centre of Horsham, where we would stay the night.

We stayed at the Royal Hotel in Horsham, which was very nice and would no doubt be the place
where Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would stay if they were ever in Horsham and fancied a
chicken parma and a game of pool.

Sam, by the way, turns out to be a gun pool player. Or maybe it was the fact that I was drinking beer
and he wasn’t. Or maybe it’s just that I’m really bad at pool. At any rate, we called it quits after
about four games, none of which I won, and went for a stroll down the rather quiet streets of
Horsham.

29
The next morning, we set out for the Goroke Golf Club, another fifty minutes drive from Horsham,
through the plains of the Wimmera and past the scenic Mount Arapiles. This was definitely the
place that Murnane was writing about in Border Districts:

During the hours while I drove from the capital city to this township and back again, I tried to
observe as much as possible of my surroundings. I hoped that my constantly glancing at the
countryside, especially the long views available from hilltops and plateaus, would enable me later to
arrange in my mind an approximation of a topographical map of the terrain between the city where I
had lived for nearly sixty years and the township where I intended to spend the last years of my life.
(76–77)

When we arrived at the golf club we were a little apprehensive, but we were greeted with tea and
biscuits and mingled a little with the small crowd, who all turned out to be very friendly and
approachable, several of the speakers taking the time to come over and introduce themselves. There
would have only been about 25 people there all up, including the eight presenters, which is
understandable given the remoteness of Goroke from major centres. I did recognise among the
‘crowd’ the writer Alexis Wright, who is part of the larger Other Worlds project, and the publisher at
Text, Michael Heyward, who publishes some of Murnane’s work.

The event got underway with a bit of an introduction from Anthony Uhlmann, Director of the
Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University and one of the organisers of the
event. We also had a brief word from Gerald Murnane, who said he didn’t feel obliged to stick
around for the whole event, and a reporter from the local paper (“Gerald thinks I’m more important
than I really am”) tried to get him to smile for a photo (she failed).

The first segment featured two papers on Murnane’s most recent novel, one by Anthony Uhlmann
(‘Report on the Mind in Border Districts’) and one by Emmett Stinson called ‘Intention and
Retrospective Revision in Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts’). I was impressed that the two had
been able to put together academic papers on this novel that had only been out for about a month.
Uhlmann commented on the way the narrator in Murnane’s novel seeks to extract meaning for
himself while at the same time creating it for his readers. He extrapolated on the short quote from
Shelley’s poem ‘Adonais’ which closes the novel:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity

Uhlmann observed that the narrator gathers together the fragments of coloured glass that are his
memories and is in some sense the opposite of Shelley in this respect. I also was struck by his
observation that the picture of the mind in Murnane’s work resonates with the Stoics (a particular
interest of mine over the past few years) and the image of a signet ring imprinting into wax as well
as with Spinoza and the cognitive scientist Antonio Damasio.

Emmett Stinson, from the University of Newcastle, took a very different approach to Uhlmann,
observing that most of Murnane’s ‘post-break’ works refer back to his earlier works in different
ways. He saw this as a kind of self-reflexivity, revising the earlier work. He said that he wanted to
make the ‘obviously stupid’ claim that there was a larger coherence to Murnane’s body of work.
The stupidity lies in the fact that Murnane had little control over the published form of his earlier
work, much of which was mutilated from his original conceptions. But Stinson saw Murnane’s
oeuvre as an authorial attempt to give coherence to contingency, retrospectively making the

30
incoherent coherent. He gave examples of a number of the correspondences between Border
Districts and the earlier works, including the echoes in the opening sentences:

Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in
the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances. (The Plains)

Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard
my eyes, and I could not think of going on with this piece of writing unless I were to explain how I
came by this odd expression. (Border Districts)

In the later book the narrator is still looking for meaning behind appearances but by a different
method, looking out the sides of his eyes instead of directly.

After a morning tea of scones and cakes, chats with more of the presenters and a look at a couple of
items that Murnane had provided, it was time for the next group of presentations. I was excited to
learn that the next presenter, Shannon Burns, is writing a literary biography of Murnane, to be
published by Text in a couple of years. His fascinating talk, ‘Truth, Fiction and “True Fiction”:
Approaching a Biography of Gerald Murnane,’ looked at the fluid boundary between fiction and life
in Murnane’s work. He mentioned that academic critics usually caution against conflating the
apparently autobiographical elements in Murnane’s novels with the life of the author, while non-
academic critics usually read the novels as being obviously autobiographical. He observed that
Murnane often uses lists, maps and other cues to arrive at a satisfying pattern before embarking on a
work. He also suggested that a biography of Murnane, such as the one he is writing, needs to take
into account his imagined life as well, as this is so important to him.

Suzie Gibson, in her talk titled ‘What Lies Between,’ concentrated on The Plains, observing that
plains imply egalitarianism and a lack of hierarchies. Australian cities are located on the coast and
look outward to Europe and the Americas instead of inward, to the plains. She suggested that one of
the messages of the novel is that physical travel does not lead to wisdom but internal (mental) travel
does.

The third speaker in this section was writer Luke Carman. A very entertaining speaker, he started
with an anecdote about his publisher (not named in the talk, but he was referring to Ivor Indyk at
Giramondo, who was in the room) trying to encourage him to read Gerald Murnane and not getting
around to it for years but then having his mind blown. He returned to his publisher saying this guy
writes just like me, only to be told, no, you’re nothing like Murnane. Carman’s speech was a much
more personal response to Murnane’s work and a very welcome addition to the program.

The lunch break meant more time to mingle and chat with the speakers and attendees, including
getting Murnane himself to serve me a beer from behind the bar(!). I asked him about a radio
interview with him that we’d heard the day before, where he referred to critics not having the
confidence in their own opinions, and he named the critics he’d been referring to, giving some more
background on the poor reception of some of his earlier works. I also mentioned that I’d written a
brief capsule review of A History of Books, but that it was a very favourable one… I also chatted
with Ivor Indyk about the overseas publication of Murnane’s work, saying I knew a number of
people online (via The Fictional Woods) who lived in Europe and the United States who were
besotted with him as a writer. Indyk said that he had just found a UK publisher for Murnane and
was perplexed that a publisher like Faber had recently agreed to publish Shaun Prescott’s The Town
(which I recently read and enjoyed) but had always turned down Murnane, who was clearly in
another league from Prescott.

31
Indyk himself was the next speaker, with his talk entitled, ‘What Kind of Literary History is A
History of Books?’ He described A History of Books as a dematerialisation of books, as they
become just traces of thought or memory rather than physical objects. He discussed Murnane’s
avoidance of direct speech in his work, which he said Murnane calls ‘junk mail.’ He suggested that
the structural complexity of Murnane’s work encloses an intense emotional charge that isn’t always
recognised and talked about the nodal points in A History of Books: the square, the hot afternoon,
the blue hills, and the intricate working of motifs.

The other speaker in this section was Brigid Rooney from the University of Sydney, whose talk was
titled ‘Stream System, Salient Image and Feeling: Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch.’ She cited
Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and talked about Murnane as a ‘textual poacher.’

It was time for afternoon tea (and another beer from Murnane). I managed to get a photo with him
as well, after he signed my books for me (I restricted myself to four: two of my favoutite older ones
(The Plains and Inland) and two recent ones (A Million Windows and Border Districts)). Thanks to
Sam for the photo!

We got to talking about book covers and Murnane expressed the opinion that the Giramondo
designer was excellent when it came to the internal layout and design of the books but a complete
incompetent when it comes to book covers. He said he even gave up when it came to Barley Patch
and Indyk just stuck a stock photo of barley on it:

He was also disaparaging of what he came up with for the new novel, Border Districts, describing it
as looking like ‘an omelette’ when he’d suggested something with coloured glass (I told him that
when I’d bought a copy at Readings the bookseller had actually praised the cover as being very
striking):

He said the cover for Border Districts by his new US publisher, MacMillan, was the best one he’d
ever had (I managed to bring it up on my phone despite the dodgy reception in Goroke):

Sam got his books signed as well and Murnane commented on the rarity of Emerald Blue, which he
said was pulped by the publisher rather than remaindered, meaning it’s comparatively difficult to
come by (I actually managed to pick up a cheap second hand copy a few weeks later).

Finally it was time to hear from the man himself in an address he titled ‘The Still Breathing Author.’
He started off by saying that he hadn’t intended to stick around for all the talks and had meant to go
home for a nap, but he’d actually found them very interesting and hadn’t disagreed with what he’d
heard said about his work. He mentioned that friends in Goroke had asked him what this bunch of
academics were going to say for an entire day about his work and he responded that academics were
very good at making simple things sound complicated. He also observed that Something For the
Pain, his memoir about horse racing, was the only book of his that the locals were interested in
reading.

Here are some scattered observations of other things he talked about.

Murnane says he has given up writing for publication, although there are some already-written
books which are still to come out. These include a book of poetry, Green Shadows and Other
Poems, to be published by Giramondo in 2018, and a four part work of fiction called A Season on
Earth, which will be published by Text. Murnane’s second novel, A Lifetime on Clouds (which is

32
published as a Text Classic) was one of the four parts of this longer work, which will now see the
light of day in its entirety.

Murnane said that he gave a similar address in Newcastle in 2001, when he had also decided he
would no longer write for publication, something that Ivor Indyk convinced him (thankfully for us)
to go back on, but this time he really had stopped, which he feels untroubled by. He quoted Thomas
Hardy: ‘I have been delivered of my books.’

Murnane said he has never done any research when writing a work of fiction and doesn’t care if his
memories match up with the facts or not. He trusts his own recollections to have a sort of power.

He mentioned lessons he’d learned from other writers, including Proust (‘learn to read’) and Alfred
Jarry: ‘A poet must have a very poor opinion of his own mind if he has to tell it what to pay
attention to.’

Murnane said he doesn’t have any belief in the unconscious mind and suggested that he hasn’t
approached the boundaries of his vast mind. His mind is a landscape yet to be adequately mapped.

He draws diagrams of his work and showed an example of his spatial approach, but said that such
diagrams were only for short fiction and couldn’t encompass a whole novel. He said the central
image of a work usually comes first but is sometimes missing when he does diagrams. Meaning for
Murnane is connection.

He mentioned that he’d had treatment for prostate cancer earlier in the year and had planned to use
the time to read all of his own books but couldn’t bring himself to do it, observing that he feels a
sense of weariness at the prospect of reading his own work.

He started using a mobile phone recently, which his sister finds so amusing that she takes photos of
him using it (‘like a dog reading a book’).

The Plains is the only title in his works to contain the definite article and it’s something that he has
an intense dislike of in titles. The original title of The Plains was Landscape with Darkness and
Mirage and it was part of a longer work called The Only Adam (I don’t believe there are any plans
to publish this).

He would call himself a ‘technical writer’ and rejects labels like postmodernism for his work. He
said he writes ‘true fiction’ which he describes as a true account of the contents of his mind, not
necessarily of events in the world.

He had an instinctive fear of going to university, mainly because he hated the idea that he’d have to
use other people’s language to talk about reading and writing.

He hasn’t watched a film or a play for 40 years and is also opposed to reading what he calls
‘theatrical fiction’ where the narrator is not evident. In any case, when he moved to Goroke he left
most of his books in Melbourne and only has his books in Hungarian, his racing books and the work
of three poets who he rereads: Thomas Hardy, John Clare and the Australian poet Lesbia Harford.

He described his own fiction as ‘considered narration’ and said his memory is ‘phenomenal but
erratic.’ He also described himself as an erratic reader.

33
In terms of his beliefs he said he has no religious beliefs but sometimes describes himself as an
animist or a pantheist or a follower of Richard Jefferies on census forms. He was very adamant that
he is not a materialist and described the works of Darwin (!) and Freud as baseless speculation.

He said, ‘Every one of my books had to be written.’ His subject matter always sought him out. He
said he once conceived of a book called Thirst that would have been derivative of Hamsun’s Hunger
but the compulsion left him. He also said, ‘Don’t think I wrote my books because I was in any way
wise. I was utterly ignorant and did not understand my own experience.’

His wife thought when he was writing his first novel, Tamarisk Row, that it would be a nice hobby
to stop him drinking so much.

He finished with a reading of his poem ‘Green Shadows’ and said he wrote the 45 poems in the
collection in 12 months.

That just left us with the long drive back to Melbourne that evening. The whole event was an
incredible experience and thanks to everyone involved with making it happen, not least Gerald
Murnane himself. And huge thanks to Sam for accompanying me on the trip: it wouldn’t have been
the same without you!

***

34