A History of Books

by Gerald Murnane

  Sometimes the young woman mentioned, having read to the end of one or another reading book, turned to the wall beside her and tried to read from one or another of the pages fastened there. (On the remote island, the inner walls of many houses were decorated with pages from illustrated magazines or even from newspapers. The remote island had no regular mail service, but ships called from time to time and the men from the island went aboard in order to exchange goods or foodstuffs from the island for anything of use to the islanders – even illustrated magazines for lining the walls of their houses.) The young woman tried to read the captions under the illustrations around her and the subheadings in the columns of text around her but she seldom succeeded. Sometimes the young woman became angry after she had failed to read one or another caption or subheading. Sometimes, in her anger, she rebuked or insulted the young man who had been sitting silently a little way in from the door for as long as he had been in the house.

  The man filling his travelling bag would not have claimed to remember anything that was reported to have happened between the young woman who was eager to read and the young man her teacher while he was preparing to leave Tristan da Cunha at the end of his term of duty. The man seemed to remember, however, that he had read, in the last pages of the book that he had packed in his travelling bag, a report by the author, who had never returned to Tristan da Cunha after his term of duty there, of his having seen certain images of some or other islanders in some or another illustrated magazine published after the Second World War in England, or it may have been South Africa. The author had been sorry to learn from an article in the magazine that a commercial company had set up a plant on Tristan da Cunha for processing fish caught by the islanders and that currency was by then in use among the islanders, many of whom bought clothing and foods from abroad. However, before the man had learned these things from the text of the article he had searched among the images of female persons in the nearby illustrations for an image of dark hair and of a face with a faintly olive complexion. After he had found these images, he had learned from a nearby caption that the young woman whom he had taught to read had since become the wife of a young man other than the young man who had sat silently during evening after evening a little way in from the door of her parents’ house.

  After his thirty-seventh year, a certain man would sometimes catch sight of a certain few volumes on one of his bookshelves or would see in some or another book review or literary essay the name of a certain writer in the German language and would then remember one or another moment from the many hours that he had spent in reading one or another volume of a certain unfinished work of fiction by the writer.

  Of the several hundreds of thousands of words in the English translation of the work of fiction mentioned, the man had forgotten, soon after he had read them, all but nine. The man remembered, however, his state of mind on many an occasion while he had been reading the work or while he had paused in his reading.

  The man mentioned could have said that the long work mentioned was the most difficult work of fiction that he had tried to read. The man could have said that he had had to read many a passage and even many a sentence twice and more before he seemed to understand it. During the few moments after he had seemed to understand such a passage or such a sentence, the man felt entitled to consider himself an intellectual. And yet, whenever he had tried afterwards to report in his own words what he had understood he had been unable to do so.

  Of the nine that were the only words remembered by the man soon after he had read the long work mentioned, four comprised the title of a chapter or a section far into the work while the other five were part of a sentence in that chapter or section. Often, while the man struggled to understand the earlier parts of the work, he looked at the words The lunatics hail Clarisse and felt relieved. He expected that he would readily understand the chapter or the section that bore this title. He even looked forward to finding one or more humorous passages in that chapter or section. The man found the character of Clarisse impossible to comprehend, let alone to like or to admire. The passages reporting her fictional thoughts and feelings were among the densest in the long work of fiction. It seemed to the man that the fictional character Clarisse was concerned mostly with abstractions or with states of mind impossible to describe or even to suggest in plain words, and he hoped that her being hailed by an assembly of fictional lunatics would give rise to a passage of less exacting prose.

  How Clarisse came to meet up with the lunatics the man mentioned never afterwards remembered, although he seemed to recall that she had sometimes expressed a desire to study the extremes of human experience and that she had sometimes discussed certain lunatics with a doctor who worked in a certain asylum. Surely Clarisse would have been reported in the long work of fiction as having met up with a number of lunatics during what would surely have been a conducted tour of some or another asylum, and surely the word hail would have denoted a variety of behaviour. Nevertheless, the man who had once read the fictional report of the visit by the character Clarisse to some or another fictional asylum could remember soon afterwards only that one of the male fictional lunatics, when Clarisse had approached him, had set about masturbating like a caged monkey.

  A certain man who was aged nearly seventy years was making notes for a work of fiction that he expected never to write. The man had made notes for many works of fiction during many of the previous fifty years. Some of those works he had gone on to write, and some of the works that he had written had later been published. During the previous ten years, however, on the few occasions when the man had felt urged to write fiction he had relieved his urge by making notes for one or another work that he expected never to write.

  In one of the published works of fiction by the man mentioned was a report of a fictional man’s having read a certain book: a translation into the English language of a book written in the Hungarian language and first published in Hungary three years before the birth of the man mentioned. Even though the man’s published book was fiction, any reader might have learned that the existence of the book mentioned in the fictional narrative was a fact and that the book itself purported to be a book of non-fiction. (Why did I write just then the expression a book of non-fiction? Why is the expression a factual book so seldom used? Is this our way of acknowledging that most seeming-facts are, in fact, fiction? And, if books of fiction are not called non-factual books, is this because we understand that most matters reported in books of fiction have a factual existence?)

  Although it was never reported in the published work of fiction mentioned in the previous paragraph, the chief character of the work mentioned wished often that some of the purported facts in the translated book mentioned had not been facts: that certain events reported as having happened in the world where he had sat while he read the translated book had not in fact happened. In particular, the chief character wished that a certain young woman, the daughter of farm servants on a large estate in Tolna County, in the Kingdom of Hungary, had not been compelled, on a certain frosty evening in the first decade of the twentieth century, to visit the quarters of the assistant bailiff of the estate; or, if the young woman had been thus compelled, that she had not decided, at some time during her visit, to run from the bedroom of the assistant bailiff without even pulling on her boots; or, if the young woman had decided so to run, that she had run towards the long thatched building where she lived with her parents and her siblings in one of the many cramped apartments and not towards the well that stood among the out-buildings of the estate; or, if the young woman had run towards the well, that she had not vaulted over the low wall and had not fallen into the freezing water, afterwards to have her corpse hauled out at first light by cowherds and laid on the nearby grass, there to be observed later in the morning by a party of children on their way to school, one of which children, thirty years later, would include his report of what he had seen in a book that would be translated, during his lifetime, into twenty languages, one of them English, but
had stared into the water, in which reflection of stars had appeared as pale rays on a dark background that included, perhaps, an image of the face and the upper body of a young woman.

  The man who was aged nearly seventy years was making notes for a work of fiction in the belief that the power of fiction was sometimes able to resist, if not to overcome, the power of fact. The man understood that a fact could never be other than a fact, even though it might be reported in a work of fiction, but he believed that any fictional event or any fictional character might be said to have acquired a factual existence as soon as the event or the character had been reported in a published text.

  The man mentioned had to accept as a fact that a certain young woman had drowned in a certain well in a certain foreign country thirty and more years before he had been born, but he was able to accept as an image-fact that a certain young image-woman stared into an image-well where pale image-rays appeared on a dark image-background in the mind of a man who was making notes for a work of fiction that he expected never to write.

  The man who was aged nearly seventy years left off making notes and felt as he had sometimes felt during the past fifty years whenever he had left off writing some or another work of fiction or even some or other notes. The man felt as though writing fiction was too easy. It seemed to the man the easiest of tasks to report image-deeds done by image-persons in image-scenery or even to report the image-thoughts of the image-persons. It had been too easy, for example, for him to report many years before in a certain work of fiction that a certain image-man had read a report of a certain young woman’s having drowned in a certain well. It had been too easy for him to report the image-details in his mind as though they were no more than actual details in some or another actual scenery that surrounded him continually. A more demanding and a more worthy task would have been for him to write as though the report he had read had been part of a work of fiction: as though the young woman who had drowned was a fictional young woman, one of those entities likely to become an image-entity in his mind and whose image-fate it would be useless for him to wish changed.

  An image of a stern-faced man, aged about forty years, appeared in the mind of a man of about the same age who was writing the last paragraph of a long work of fiction. The words that this man was writing were the same words that comprised the last paragraph of the work of fiction in which the chief male character was a stern-faced man. This work had been first published ninety-two years before the birth of the man who was writing, and the author of the work had died a year later. The man who was writing was therefore under no obligation to seek permission to include the last paragraph of the work in his own work. In fact, the provenance of its final paragraph was not mentioned anywhere in the text of the man’s work or in the preliminary pages of any edition of the published work, although the text of the man’s work included, in separate passages, the title of the earlier book, the name of its author, and a summary of part of its contents.

  The man’s book was reviewed and noticed in various publications and was even the subject of a few essays and so-called scholarly articles. Some reviewers and commentators approved of the man’s book and some did not, but none mentioned that the man had used for the ending of his book the ending of a famous book from the previous century. Perhaps the reviewers and commentators considered that the man’s having appropriated the ending of the famous book was so obvious as to need no comment. The man suspected, however, that the reviewers and commentators, even though they wrote fluently and at length about what they called the subject matter or the themes or the meaning of book after book, were like himself in that they were unable to remember any more than a few words or phrases from the text of any book that they had read.

  The man in whose mind was an image of a stern-faced man had been hardly more than a boy when he had first read the famous book mentioned above. He had read the famous book twice more during his adult years. If anything, the later readings lessened rather than increased the sum of his recollections of the book, which is to say the words and sentences of the text. At the same time, the later readings seemed to give rise in his mind to numerous images, a few of them attributable to passages in the text but most seemingly arising from the man’s need to have in his mind images of undulating treeless countryside and of some or another young female person who chose often to frequent such countryside and even to consent to being accompanied there by a certain young male person.

  The stern-faced image-man mentioned in the first sentence of this section of the present work of fiction kept mostly to an image-room at one side of an image-house built of image-stone. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the image-company of the other image-persons in the image-house, or perhaps he preferred his image-room because an image-window there overlooked a wide image-view of undulating treeless image-countryside where he had spent much image-time during his image-childhood in the company of a certain young female image-person.

  The writer of a book the last paragraph of which had been taken from a certain famous book was nearly seventy years of age before he understood that a single image-person might owe his or her image-existence to more than one passage from one or another book or even from more than one book. The writer came to understand this after he had begun to observe that the image of the stern-faced man mentioned earlier appeared less often before an image-window and more often at an image-desk. The writer could only suppose that the image-man was writing at the image-desk and could only suppose that what he was writing was an image-work of image-fiction. The writer could only suppose that the image-fiction was such as he himself would have written if he himself had been at the image-desk near the image-window overlooking the treeless image-countryside. What he would have written would have seemed to him a report of scenes and events in a country adjoining a country named Gondal which country the author of the famous book mentioned earlier had written about throughout her lifetime, although none of what she wrote had been published as any sort of book, and which country was the native country of the female entity, so to call her, who later became, as it were, a famous female character in a famous work of fiction.

  The goddesses had left the dining room, and the gods were about to sip their brandy and to puff on their cigars. Before the conversation had begun to grow raucous, a few of those seated at the far end of the room heard the same faint sound that a few of the others had claimed to have heard on the previous evening: perhaps the same sound that some of the goddesses had claimed during dinner to have heard while they were reclining naked beside their bathing pool during the quiet hours of the afternoon.

  The residents of heaven were, by definition, unable to be troubled or irritated, but they were able to be piqued by curiosity, and even a distant knocking, until its source was discovered, might well have seemed to the more sensitive deities to gainsay their reputation for omniscience.

  An archangel from the household staff was ordered to investigate. He reported that he himself had seemed to hear what their lordships and ladyships had seemed to hear. He was well aware, so he said, that he and his employers were residents of a realm where nothing could be said to be impossible; even so, their having heard a knocking sound was hardly to be believed. What he and they had seemed to hear seemed to have sounded from the far side of the outer wall of the building. He begged their lordships and their ladyships to recall that they were dining for the time being in the farthest west wing of the farthest west of the many mansions in that part of the universe, and as he and they well knew, the farthest west mansion adjoined on its farther side the country known to many of its inhabitants as Earth, between which and their own country there had been no communication since the universe in its present form had come into existence.

  In short, reader, the gods and goddesses, or as many as took an interest in such matters, were obliged to address a disquieting possibility. The fabric of the universe as they knew it might not have been seamless. Some less than immortal being from a much less than heavenly zone of the universe was cla
iming their attention or, at the very least, was signalling to them that he or she had learned their address.

  Even so disconcerting a development could not keep the divinities from their usual pleasures. While the would-be intruder, presumably, went on knocking throughout the next day, the gods, and many of the goddesses, attended race-meetings, rode to hounds, and took part in or watched as spectators a variety of sports and contests. Those who preferred to stay indoors played one or another of a variety of board games or card games praised by their admirers, with laborious humour, as being fiendishly or diabolically complicated.

  The reader may have expected to read that the divine personages spent their days in vast art galleries contemplating magnificent paintings and sculpture, in concert halls listening to sublime music, or in libraries reading profound literature. In the heaven described here, no art galleries or concert halls or libraries existed. No one painted or sculpted or composed music or wrote literature because no one was urged to find so-called meaning behind so-called appearances. Where the everyday was the ultimate, there was nothing to do but play.

  I have to correct an earlier statement. A small reference library existed in a comparatively modest mansion in an out-of-the-way district of heaven. The contents of most of the books there might have seemed to you and me, reader, a sort of astronomy except that they lacked the speculation that characterises the subject as we know it. The other books were dry reading indeed, being a sort of annal or chronicle except that each volume reported the events of an aeon rather than a year.