Gerald Murnane

For fans of postmodern novels with a meta-evocation of the act of writing, this must be the cream of the crop. Murnane hides behind a few personae (following Pessoa?) to do what he loves: writing at a table, looking out of the window and contemplating the grassland, successively in Hungary, South Dakota and Australia. It seems as if this book starts over every 30 pages, each time with the sentence “I'm writing…”. It gives an elliptical effect, which is fascinating, but also annoys (at least to me). Fortunately, there are the humorous elements, such as the Institute of Prairie Studies, or the writer who calls himself a 'scientist of grasslands'. As mentioned, postmodernists would love this. While I was quite taken with The Plains, I'm starting to think Murnane might be a one-trick pony. And from the rare interviews with him, I gather that he thinks so too.… (mer)

I was finishing off an 800 (flawed but fascinating) biography of Napoleon: A life by Andrew Roberts when a friend recomended I read Murnane's 137 page Border Districts. So I opened it with relief at the prospect of brevity. Perhaps it was the constricted type-face of the And Other Stories 2019 edition that I read but it just didn’t appeal to me - even though it touched on several areas (landscapes of the mind and their enchantments) that interest me. I’m wondering if I can explain why I didn’t take to it? My type-face test was to read passages out-loud and suddenly, like a fresh breeze, the writing seemed to improve. But by taking a shorter form of a Proustian monologue (without Proust’s elegance) and using Slessor’s glass imagery to elucidate, in the words of Richard Jeffries, soul-thought, I think I wanted to find something richer or deeper. I found the repetitive phrasing by the scrupulous monologist irritatingly tedious. From the outset, I felt the twitch of a lip-curling reaction to what I thought might turn out to be yet another lapsed-Catholic purgation. But by page 15, as the monologist begins to explain his use of the term guard my eyes and how he employs the edge of vision as a border between memory and reality my interest was piqued enough to continue. And I did appreciate the resonances of the image of the church window smashers and his attempt to look through the photographs. If it is possible to distinguish between Murnane and his contrived monologist, the book made me feel like he was wearing his underwear over his clothes as he slipped back and forth between one after another paragraph and afterthought; from one after another window glass to return veranda and one after another tentative qualification to tentative realisation. Sorry to say that by the end the layers of repetitive phrasing (not just one after another) got in the way and, maybe because of it, this scrupulous man seemed to me to have little or nothing to say that interested me.

…I am therefore free to think of her as waiting for insight on the far side of one after another wall of amber-coloured stone behind one after another return veranda of one after another house that I see from the sides of my eyes in one after another border district. p. 126.

As an afterthought, just like him, secondary school left me with just a fragment of Latin (Catullus) that I have repeated to myself ever since:

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
(I hate and I love. Why do I do this, you may ask.
I don't know, but it happens, and it bothers me.)

… (mer)