by Luke Carman
Far easier, less fictional to recall, is my own reaction to the more recent encounter with the social media message I began this odd digression by addressing. I had come upon this transmission as I was sitting on the couch in the loungeroom, 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, except for 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 of the car 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 police and towtrucks 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 with what seemed to me a demented abandonment to speed, the little red flag fluttering atop the bending antenna on the back of his vehicle, his long red socks standing 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 by 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 my room. I looked at the covers and assorted shapes of the novels and collections assembled and stacked into strange totems about the room, which 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 pervigilium, retreating from sleep to escape the night-terror paralysis that plagued my 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 my eyes 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 smartphones or tablet 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, 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,’ as the companions smirked knowingly. For a child of a broken home, who had no reason to disbelieve the scripture teachers when they 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 rectangular device of the paperback pressed into the pillow, and my 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 potency, ‘Can’t you see your real enemy is out there – not here between you!’
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 selfinsertions 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 narra
tor of Munane’s Barley Patch recalls a mystery novel called Brat Farrar that he read as a child, and 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 a young reader. The portrait supplied by the narrator is of a man who recalls that, from an early age, he began to experience the 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 or 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 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 figures: ‘a young male character and a young female character’. Anyone else has been forgotten.
These ‘reports’ of a narrator who imagines a man who recalls the 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 being 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.
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 towards 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, based 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 significance they bring together, pierced by a ray of light, is an expression of their interconnectedness on a complex transcendental plane. The narrator who witnesses this act of relational significance is the curator of the guarded eye, the mystic who can gather the heralding of apparently meaningless parts into an infinite whole.
This climax with its purity of colours, ‘Crimson lake, burnt umber, ultramarine…deep cadmium, geranium lake, imperial purple, parchment…’, is immediately followed by a 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 the narrator tells us he has just returned to his writing after spending 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 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.