A Million Windows

by Gerald Murnane

  While I was writing the previous paragraph, I remembered an illustration that I saw as a child on the cover of some or another history textbook. The illustration was of a book resting vertically with its spine rearward, its covers parted so as to form almost a right angle, and many of its pages standing slightly apart. In the foreground appeared the nearest of a throng of crowned kings and queens, knights in armour, and persons in robes or tunics or animal skins. Behind these, in the middle ground, more such figures were advancing from between the pages of the book while further off, in the background, were rudimentary figures or mere blurs only partly detached as yet from the lines of text that had given rise to them and to all those ahead of them. A child might have supposed, from the faces and the bearing of the foremost figures, that they were pleased and relieved to have fulfilled at last their true destiny: to have escaped from the confines of printed pages and to have arrived in the actual, visible world where they could shed their former mysteriousness and could deal as equals with those who were previously able only to read about them.

  I have sometimes tried to explain what I consider a widespread confusion about the nature of what I call fictional personages. I have sometimes supposed that too many readers – and writers also – expect the reading of fiction to yield the sort of experience seemingly provided by the watching of films. I have sometimes supposed that those same readers and writers have been too much influenced by certain theories devised during the twentieth century to explain the workings of the mind. But these are mere suppositions, and they seem doubtful indeed when I recall what little I can recall from my having read long ago some of the fiction by Charles Dickens or George Eliot or William Thackeray, who were writing long before the development of the cinema or the dissemination of the theories of Sigmund Freud. (Am I right to have omitted Emily Brontë from the few that I named just now and to take satisfaction from my never having watched any of the several films titled Wuthering Heights or from my never having understood why any of the characters, so to call them, in the book of the same name behaved as they are reported to have behaved?)

  I was probably foolish to have tried just now to account for beliefs and expectations so different from my own. I am surely entitled to do no more than to report my informed speculations as to what happens sometimes in this corridor, in those rooms where a certain sort of fictional personage might be said to come into being.

  The next section of this work of fiction will comprise a report of the dealings, during a period of no less than sixty years, between a certain occupant of this corridor and a certain fictional personage, so to call her. What follows here is a summary of many drunken debates in the common room of this wing and almost as many sober discussions on far-reaching pathways in the grounds around, or on shaded seats by sequences of trickling pools in secluded ferneries. The sort of writer most likely to find his way to the corridors hereabouts and to consider our ways congenial – that sort of writer has seldom tried to fit into any system the jumble of beliefs and suppositions and presentiments and instinctive preferences acquired during a lifetime, but we are able to agree on some matters. Most of us agree, for example, that we were too timid as young writers and too respectful of custom, so that our earlier works of fiction include reports of deeds done or words said or daydreams entertained by entities likely to be taken for characters by most readers. The most eloquent of this majority, although we share many of his beliefs, nevertheless wearies even us with his constant railing, as I may be about to weary the reader with my report of it. He, the eloquent one, can never begin a discussion about what he calls the ghosts above the pages without first belittling those readers or commentators who speak or write about Tess Durbeyfield or Catherine Earnshaw or Maggie Verver or others of their kind as though they are beings hardly different from you, whatever sort of reader you may be, or from me, the writer of these words, or from our next-door neighbours or the persons who served us yesterday in our local shops: persons of flesh and blood who breathe, digest food, sweat, and break wind. He professes to despise those who read fiction for no better purpose than to learn what they might more easily learn by listening to their neighbours’ quarrels or by getting drunk with their workmates. A so-called character from fiction, he says, struggling, so I always suppose, with terms that have no meaning for him – a so-called character belongs by definition in the invisible world, and no dweller in that world is perceptible to more than one dweller in this, the visible world. The eloquent one, as I called him, has told us more than once that a certain now-famous writer of fiction, at his desk in an upstairs room on the far side of the globe, would once have had in mind a certain image-personage. Nearly a hundred years later, he, the eloquent one, had happened to read certain sentences the import of which seemed to be that a certain young woman, hardly more than a girl, and bearing the name Tess Durbeyfield, might be supposed to have lived, at some or another time now passed, at some or another site in some or another visible world...He has told this to us often but has always broken off at the same point in his argument, as if he demeaned himself by explaining what was surely obvious to the dullest reader of fiction.

  He calls them, this occasionally drunken and voluble but mostly sober and taciturn man – he calls them sometimes, as I wrote earlier, ghosts above the pages or, sometimes, casters of fictional shadows. He has said more than once that these presences, which is another of his names for them, are to him what their deities and saints are to the followers of religions. He speaks often as though, from some ultimate vantage-point, his ghosts or presences might prove to be the actual and we who try to write or to read about them the shadowy. I recall my asking him one evening, when the common-room was suddenly in gloom after the last shafts of sunlight had passed from the nearby panes – I recall my asking him how he could dare to seem to limit or to diminish the beings he so venerated by writing fiction in which semblances of them could be said to be recognisable. He evaded my question but gave me an answer that silenced me, even so. He asked me to recall some or another recent dream of mine in which some or another dream-character or dream-personage had behaved contrary to my wishes or my expectations. I was able at once to recall such a dream and such an instance as he had described. Then, while I was still in somewhat the same mood of confusion and disappointment that would have overcome me when I awoke from the dream itself, he declared that he or she who had angered me or had disappointed me or had consoled me bore the same relationship to the agent truly responsible for my mood as a so-called character in a work of fiction bears to the personage who seems to stand beside the writer while he or she writes or beside the reader while he or she reads.

  During all the time while I was writing the previous six paragraphs, some or another image has appeared to me from among the sequences of images that would first have appeared to me twenty-five years ago, while I was reading for the first time a piece of short fiction sent as an unsolicited contribution to a periodical that employed me for several years to help select fiction for publication. Before I had finished even my first reading of the piece, I had decided to recommend it for publication, and it was later published. Of all the other pieces that I would have thus recommended I recall only a few titles, a few authors’ names, and a few imprecise images that would have occurred to me while I read the pieces, which I usually read only once. In connection with the piece of fiction mentioned just now, I cannot claim to recall what happened during my first reading for the reason that I have been drawn to read the piece a number of times during the twenty-five years since, so that the images brought to my mind and the feelings linked to the images have been often augmented or renewed and I am often able to recall whole sentences from the text itself. The title of the piece is ‘The Characters of Nineteenth-Century Fiction’, and the author is Louise Davenport. The text, which comprises fewer than a thousand words, begins with the sentence ‘She wanted to squash the characters she read about in nineteenth-century fiction.’ The remainder of the text reports that the chief characte
r kept many of the characters of nineteenth-century fiction in matchboxes; that on a certain day she killed the characters one after another in her parents’ bedroom – not by squashing them but by breaking their tiny bodies with a toy axe; that she then took the matchboxes full of the dead, broken bodies of the fictional persons out into the sunshine and carried them to a shallow irrigation channel on the boundary of her parents’ property in the north-central district of the state where I sit writing these words; that she waded into the channel and emptied the matchboxes into the muddy water among clumps of bulrushes; and that she afterwards returned home and began to rake the grass-cuttings left by her brother, who was mowing their parents’ lawn.

  Her name is Torfrida, and he has never during the past fifty years thought of her as any sort of character from any sort of fiction, he being the occupant of some or another room not far from this room. (If the doors after doors along the dim corridors hereabouts had nameplates or even numerals on them, I could be more precise, but when once I tried to suggest such a system I was told, somewhat pompously, it seemed to me, that bright lighting and unambiguous labelling would be not at all in keeping with the tasks undertaken in this part of the building, which tasks have always been agreed to possess a certain mysteriousness, or so I was told.) He claims that no word in the language denotes the class of being that she belongs to. Sometimes, for the sake of convenience, he calls her a ghost, but he ought rather, he tells us, to use the odd-sounding term haunter, given that the verb to haunt comes close to defining her dealings with him. While he admits that certain passages in a certain work of fiction were in some way connected with his becoming aware of her, if he were to set about making notes – here, in this very corridor and on this very afternoon – for a fictional account of her connection with him, he would surely begin by mentioning not only a certain book but certain places, a certain piece of music, and even a certain weather, as though to allow for the possibility that she might have appeared to him, so to speak, at a certain time and in a certain place no matter what fictional text happened to be in his hands.

  He was mostly deprived of books during his schooldays. The few books in his parents’ house were of little interest to him. No school that he attended was equipped with a library. Even his secondary school, in a suburb that would have been called middle-class, had not even a shelf of books in any classroom. In his fifteenth year, he learned that a circulating library for young persons had been recently established in an upstairs room in the shopping centre near his school. When he registered himself as a borrower, he was made uneasy by several prominent signboards announcing that the library was a project of the ladies’ committee of the local branch of the Liberal Party. He understood that his parents voted for the Labor Party, as had their parents, and regarded the Liberals as the party of the oppressors, and so he felt obliged to tell his father who it was who had made available the books that he, the borrower, had begun to bring home. His father was at once suspicious and for some weeks inspected every book but decided in time that they were harmless. Even he, the borrower, was at first wary of the mostly white-haired women who registered his borrowings and returnings and was relieved that they did not preach to him on political topics.

  The library was quite unlike any of the places that go by that name nowadays. It occupied a large room above a shop in a street of shops. The only items of furniture were the table where the white-haired women sat and the shelves around the walls where books were stored. There was nowhere any sort of poster or what might be called nowadays a promotional display. He, the chief character of these paragraphs, could not recall in later years having seen any picture books or non-fiction books in the library, although this may be due to his having been interested only in the collection of fiction. This comprised many hundreds of titles, all with cloth covers and all second-hand. Despite his feeling in great need of books, he mostly struggled to find a volume of interest to him. He believes nowadays that he visited the library for only a few months before deciding that he had read every book with a claim on him. He recalls having read every volume he could find with Robert Louis Stevenson as its author and still recalls a few of his experiences as a reader of them. He recalls likewise several books by Charles Dickens. He recalls the fact of his having read Lorna Doone, by an author whose name he long ago forgot, but of his experience as a reader of the book he recalls nothing, although he seems to recall, from the few hours after he had borrowed the book but before he had begun to read it, his looking forward to reading about the setting, so to call it, of the narrative, which setting, or so he believed, was remote moorland. Finally, he recalls his having read a number of books by an author whose name appeared on the books as D.K. Broster and who may have been a woman, or so he was told by someone many years afterwards. From the many hours that he must have spent in reading those books, all of which he believes to have been of the kind often called historical fiction, he recalls only a few moments that he has sometimes recalled during the sixty years since those moments passed. He seems to recall that he was reading at the time a book with the title The Flight of the Heron. He certainly recalls that the historical setting, so to call it, of the book in question was the Vendean War, so to call it, which took place in the south-west of France during the first years after the Revolution. He recalls that the chief character of the book was a young man, probably an aristocrat and certainly a devout Roman Catholic, as were most of the rebels taking part in the so-called war. He, the man recalling, felt little sympathy that he can recall for the chief character, who seemed to him too virtuous and proper. And yet, after sixty years during which he forgot all else that he may have experienced while reading several books by D.K. Broster, he still recalls his reading, towards the end of the book, a report of the chief character’s learning from a letter, and at a time when the Vendean forces were hard pressed, that the young woman with whom he had been for long in love and with whom he had had, or so he supposed, an understanding – the young woman had married or had betrothed herself to another man. From one or another of the pages of text towards the end of the book, he, the man recalling, is able to recall an actual phrase. The third-person narrator, claiming to have access to the thoughts and feelings of the chief character, and using almost the very technique that I called earlier double voicing, reports that the young woman mentioned had for long been to the young man his guiding star, or it may have been his shining star.

  And yet, along with the few fragments that are all he has preserved from the many hours when he looked along shelf after shelf in the drab upper room, first taking down and then looking into and then mostly replacing the one after another of the books in their dull-coloured cloth-and-boards, from the many hours when he sat or stood in some or another railway carriage, staring at the opened pages in front of him or glancing, whenever he turned a page, at some or another young woman, hardly more than a girl, who sat or stood nearby but always looking back at the pages before she returned his glance, and from the many hours of an evening after he had washed or dried the tea dishes with his brother and had done his homework at the wooden kitchen table with linoleum glued to its top and had sat until his bedtime at the same table with his library book open in front of him – along with those few fragments, he has been aware during the past sixty years of a certain personage, so to call her, who first appeared to him while he was reading a certain book of fiction borrowed from the upper room: a personage worthy to be called, if he were to use the language of false poetry such as was used by D.K. Broster, his own guiding star or shining star.

  I would be misleading the reader if I were to report that Torfrida is a character in a work of fiction with the title Hereward the Wake by Charles Kingsley. I am able to state as a fact that he who deals, of course, not in facts but in fictional truths once read the book of that name, which book, so he seems to recall, even contained a duotone reproduction of a portrait of a fair-haired female person, which portrait was intended, surely, to suggest to the reader what would have been the
appearance of a female character, so to call her, mentioned often in the adjacent pages of text if that character had been an actual person. But I am able to state as well that the personage known to him during the past sixty years as Torfrida appears to him as a young woman, hardly more than a girl, with dark hair and lacking altogether the fictional history of the fictional character in the work of fiction by Charles Kingsley.

  What does he, researcher among works of fiction never published or never even projected – what does he recall from his having read the work of fiction Hereward the Wake? He recalls that Hereward the Wake is the leader of a band of English rebelling against the Normans soon after their conquest of England; that the stronghold of the rebels is in the fen districts; that Hereward marries Torfrida when both are young but that he later has another woman as his consort, after he and Torfrida have separated. He, the researcher, as I call him, believes he recalls also that Torfrida has her first sight of Hereward when she looks down at him from the window of an upper room. Of all that must have passed through his mind during the many hours while he read the hundreds of pages between the maroon-coloured covers of the bulky borrowed book, he recalls nothing more. And yet, at some time while he read, he became acquainted, as it were, with the image of a dark-haired female ghost-above-the-pages who was to haunt him during the remainder of his life, to use the terms most favoured by the writer mentioned in the previous section of this work of fiction.