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The Plains
On their vast estates, the landowning families of the plains have preserved a rich and distinctive culture. Obsessed with their own habitat and history, they hire artisans, writers and historians to record in minute detail every aspect of their lives, and the nature of their land. A young film-maker arrives on the plains, hoping to make his own contribution to the elaboration of this history. In a private library he begins to take notes for a film, and chooses the daughter of his patron for a leading role.
Twenty years later, he begins to tell his haunting story of life on the plains. As his story unfolds, the novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, 'a mirage of landscape, memory, love and literature itself'.
Twenty years later, he begins to tell his haunting story of life on the plains. As his story unfolds, the novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, 'a mirage of landscape, memory, love and literature itself'.
111 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
220 people are currently reading
6,827 people want to read
About the author
Gerald Murnane
31books365followersMurnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence. Both are composed largely of very long but grammatical sentences.
In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005, and a new work of fiction, Barley Patch, was released in 2009. All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction.
Murnane is mainly known within Australia. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004 (New Issues Poetry & Prose), and where Dalkey Archive Press has recently issued Barley Patch and will be reprinting Inland in 2012. In 2011, The Plains' was translated into French and published in France by P.O.L, and in 2012 will be published in Hungarian.
In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005, and a new work of fiction, Barley Patch, was released in 2009. All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction.
Murnane is mainly known within Australia. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004 (New Issues Poetry & Prose), and where Dalkey Archive Press has recently issued Barley Patch and will be reprinting Inland in 2012. In 2011, The Plains' was translated into French and published in France by P.O.L, and in 2012 will be published in Hungarian.
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April 10, 2023
Life is a journey: some travel through the plains, some � through the books, some � through their dreams�
The novel The Plains is this sort of journey. By its ultimate futility the story reminded me of by but painted in the hues of The Library of Babel by .
Endeavouring to find the answers and achieve his purpose the main character spends his time in a library that resembles a department of the Library of Babel and which is big enough to stay there for the entire life reading books�
The nameless protagonist just fritters his days away trying to sieve out the endless nuances of sounds, tints, emotions, patterns and impressions.
And after the years of toil he understands that beyond all his dreams there is nothing but darkness.
Do all our travels through life end there?
And the man who travels begins to fear that he may not find a fitting end to his journey. I’ve spent my life trying to see my own place as the end of a journey I never made.
The novel The Plains is this sort of journey. By its ultimate futility the story reminded me of by but painted in the hues of The Library of Babel by .
Endeavouring to find the answers and achieve his purpose the main character spends his time in a library that resembles a department of the Library of Babel and which is big enough to stay there for the entire life reading books�
In this library I have come across whole rooms of works speculating freely on the nature of the plainsman. Many of the authors inhabit systems of thought that are bizarre, bewilderingly unfamiliar, perhaps even wilfully removed from common comprehension. But no writer I have yet found has tried to describe a plainsman as bound by the vicissitudes of his flesh � and certainly not those misfortunes that afflict each body in the years before the heart can properly sustain it.
The nameless protagonist just fritters his days away trying to sieve out the endless nuances of sounds, tints, emotions, patterns and impressions.
And after the years of toil he understands that beyond all his dreams there is nothing but darkness.
Do all our travels through life end there?
Read
January 21, 2023This book has startled me.
Nothing I have read prepared me for it.
And yet it contains many notions that are familiar; it is the angle of the viewpoint that is new.
My mind was teeming with a host of questions from the beginning of the reading: who or what is the exact nature of the narrator? what does the word ‘plains� mean in this piece of writing? who in truth are the plainsmen and women?
Not a soul in this district knows who I am or what I mean to do here...not one has seen the view of the plains that I am soon to disclose.
So the novel begins with mystery. I had to read to the end, and then reread the beginning before I could interpret coherently the revelation the narrator planned to disclose, a view of which I had begun to glimpse about half way through. But similarly to the narrator's, my view of the plains is perhaps one which no one has ever seen. There is nothing to confirm that what I saw exists anywhere except in the darkness of my mind, and the revelation I experienced is already hazy today, only one day after finishing the book. I’m trying to write this review before I lose sight of the view, like the man who would never take even the one road that led away from his isolated farmhouse for fear that he would not recognise the place if he saw it from the distant vantage that others used.
That sentence, while illustrating perfectly the fragility of my grasp of the themes, also reveals the clarity and beauty of Murnane’s writing. Yet when strung together, his sentences become less distinct, the meaning shimmering and blurring like the line of the horizon, transforming gold to blue-green and back again. I needed to focus really hard to make out the exact form of his intention and even then, I was never sure what it was I was seeing: was it what I thought it was or was it simply the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the farthest distance.
If it was nothing more than that which I saw, I am still happy with the vision, and I will read Murnane again in the hope of reliving this type of reading experience.
So, what form does my revelation take?
The picture is indistinct but I think I see the narrator as a writer, even as all writers; he might also represent all artists and musicians. The plains are the book/art/music which the narrator is disclosing, and the plains people are the patrons and readers an artist or writer needs to court. He selects them carefully only seeking to aim his work at those he feels will truly understand it, those with the right background, who will bring to the reading something unique in their own history. Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes - one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily.
I understood ‘books/art� to be the abundance of level land and the abstract or realist nature of experimental writing and art as the two landscapes.
Murnane also underlines the importance of the 'landscapes' that have formed the writer, all of the reading he himself has done, reading such as: the comparative study of scenes recalled by one observer after he had acquired the skill to attempt a fitting description of them, a reference which spoke clearly to me of Proust.
I see Murnane’s writing as part philosophy, part allegory, part metafiction, the reader merging with the book as in Calvino’s . But Murnane doesn’t directly cite any works such as Calvino’s or Proust’s: To quote from works of literature would go against the spirit of the gathering although every man would have read any book that I named. He knows that the readers towards whom he is aiming his words will pick up all the allusions he has inserted, and that there is no need to mention names.
Afterthought: Another mystery.
Female figures are described in hieratic terms; they are as untouchable as statues, the folds of their garments as if cut from stone. But similarly to the plains themselves, colour illumines the cold clarity of those female portraits:
As he walks slowly towards her he sees this aura, this globe of luminous air, under the parasol, which was silk, of course, and a pale yellow or green, and translucent.
I'm reminded of a favorite painting from the National Gallery, Dublin, by William John Leech, 'The Sunshade', c. 1913, where the figure is looking towards a landscape the viewer can't see:
A further afterthought: My edition of this little book is itself a work of art, with a font that seems to draw light into the spaces between the words, and a cover by Errin Ironside that is simply exquisite.
This review dates from 2014
Edit: January 2o23. I've just been reading Gerald Murnane's thoughts about The Plains in his most recent book, from 2022. One of the many interesting things he shares with the reader is that his own title for this 1982 book was Landscape with Darkness and Mirage but the publishers rejected it in favour of The Plains. I like to think I saw something of that darkness and something of that mirage when I read this book back in 2014.
Nothing I have read prepared me for it.
And yet it contains many notions that are familiar; it is the angle of the viewpoint that is new.
My mind was teeming with a host of questions from the beginning of the reading: who or what is the exact nature of the narrator? what does the word ‘plains� mean in this piece of writing? who in truth are the plainsmen and women?
Not a soul in this district knows who I am or what I mean to do here...not one has seen the view of the plains that I am soon to disclose.
So the novel begins with mystery. I had to read to the end, and then reread the beginning before I could interpret coherently the revelation the narrator planned to disclose, a view of which I had begun to glimpse about half way through. But similarly to the narrator's, my view of the plains is perhaps one which no one has ever seen. There is nothing to confirm that what I saw exists anywhere except in the darkness of my mind, and the revelation I experienced is already hazy today, only one day after finishing the book. I’m trying to write this review before I lose sight of the view, like the man who would never take even the one road that led away from his isolated farmhouse for fear that he would not recognise the place if he saw it from the distant vantage that others used.
That sentence, while illustrating perfectly the fragility of my grasp of the themes, also reveals the clarity and beauty of Murnane’s writing. Yet when strung together, his sentences become less distinct, the meaning shimmering and blurring like the line of the horizon, transforming gold to blue-green and back again. I needed to focus really hard to make out the exact form of his intention and even then, I was never sure what it was I was seeing: was it what I thought it was or was it simply the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the farthest distance.
If it was nothing more than that which I saw, I am still happy with the vision, and I will read Murnane again in the hope of reliving this type of reading experience.
So, what form does my revelation take?
The picture is indistinct but I think I see the narrator as a writer, even as all writers; he might also represent all artists and musicians. The plains are the book/art/music which the narrator is disclosing, and the plains people are the patrons and readers an artist or writer needs to court. He selects them carefully only seeking to aim his work at those he feels will truly understand it, those with the right background, who will bring to the reading something unique in their own history. Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes - one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily.
I understood ‘books/art� to be the abundance of level land and the abstract or realist nature of experimental writing and art as the two landscapes.
Murnane also underlines the importance of the 'landscapes' that have formed the writer, all of the reading he himself has done, reading such as: the comparative study of scenes recalled by one observer after he had acquired the skill to attempt a fitting description of them, a reference which spoke clearly to me of Proust.
I see Murnane’s writing as part philosophy, part allegory, part metafiction, the reader merging with the book as in Calvino’s . But Murnane doesn’t directly cite any works such as Calvino’s or Proust’s: To quote from works of literature would go against the spirit of the gathering although every man would have read any book that I named. He knows that the readers towards whom he is aiming his words will pick up all the allusions he has inserted, and that there is no need to mention names.
Afterthought: Another mystery.
Female figures are described in hieratic terms; they are as untouchable as statues, the folds of their garments as if cut from stone. But similarly to the plains themselves, colour illumines the cold clarity of those female portraits:
As he walks slowly towards her he sees this aura, this globe of luminous air, under the parasol, which was silk, of course, and a pale yellow or green, and translucent.
I'm reminded of a favorite painting from the National Gallery, Dublin, by William John Leech, 'The Sunshade', c. 1913, where the figure is looking towards a landscape the viewer can't see:
A further afterthought: My edition of this little book is itself a work of art, with a font that seems to draw light into the spaces between the words, and a cover by Errin Ironside that is simply exquisite.
This review dates from 2014
Edit: January 2o23. I've just been reading Gerald Murnane's thoughts about The Plains in his most recent book, from 2022. One of the many interesting things he shares with the reader is that his own title for this 1982 book was Landscape with Darkness and Mirage but the publishers rejected it in favour of The Plains. I like to think I saw something of that darkness and something of that mirage when I read this book back in 2014.
December 2, 2024
�They saw the world itself as one more in an endless series of plains.�
There is a basic human instinct to look for meaning in life, to open the door of reality in hopes to find of an elaborate clockwork beneath it all which we can investigate in an attempt at comprehension. This quest for meaning tends to be a journey trod through metaphysical landscapes more so than a shoulder to the wheel, making Art a valuable avenue for an abstract expedition into the heart of reality. If any of our art and philosophical probings have given us a finite answer to life’s greatest mysteries is up for debate, but it must be said that one of art’s greatest assets is the finding more and more beautiful ways to ask the questions. Gerald Murnane’s The Plains does just this by chronicling the journey of a filmmaker who has aims to look �for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances� as he travels deep into the plains of Australia. The plains, elusive �vistas of vistas� seem to endlessly flow into one another on an eternal path towards the center of Australia. While the story of this slim novel is simple—the unnamed narrator arrives in town with a fistfull of research to woo a patron into funding an aesthetic endeavour to unlock mysteries of the plains in new ways and his subsequent years there—there is a lush landscape of ideas as vast and mysterious as the plains themselves to explore. The novel is never bogged down by the philosophical meanderings and is eminently engaging and satisfying like water from the canteen of a desert traveler. The Plains is an extravagant and multi-interpretable toybox of ideas framed as a parable on the quest for meaning through art and all its aspects while our place in the world when it’s structure is viewed through the abstract, all of which is orchestrated through a brilliant prose style which marches far and wide like a heroine or hero on an epic journey.
�I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret�
There is a Spanish term, Vacilando, which doesn’t exactly translate into English but encompasses the idea of a trip made for the purpose of the journey and not the destination. The Plains is that sort of novel, concerning itself more with the attempts to reach a new understanding of the reality of the plains rather than a successful breakthrough and solution. Not much happens plot-wise beyond the lengthy and full of suspenseful screw turning scene of landowners sitting around �the labyrinths of saloon bar� to hear out the envisioned endeavours men have planned in order to analyze the life of the inner plains. The scene is gripping in the way one waits and waits and waits for weeks to hear word if their poem or story or what-have-you has been accepted or declined for publication. Much of the first act isn’t spent on pushing the ball of story forward but stepping back and world-building an elaborate history or artistic struggles and arguments that seem to play out in dramatic (and occasionally violent) action the way philosophical schools of thought would refute one another while simultaneously capturing their own ideas. What is eminently thrilling is the way artistic opinions are made large like sporting adversaries in a way that envisions art as a life-or-death-like matter of importance. It would seem the inner plainsman have a long history or interpretation of the plains around them and the horizon they can chase but never catch, and these varying interpretations are as polarizing as politics.
�How did I expect to find so easily what so many others had never found � a visible equivalent of the plains, as though they were mere surfaces reflecting sunlight?�
Flash forward to the present where the war of plains-interpretation is but settling dust. Now a new wave of visionaries wishes to interpret the plains anew. Murnane offers mostly comical but thought-provoking artistic voyages such as an orchestra with each instrument played quietly and at great enough spatial distance from the other instrument so that the listener must wander the room of musicians hearing only one instrument at a time—and hardly so—to �draw attention to the impossibility of comprehending even such an obvious property of a plain as the sound that came from it.� In fact, much of the novel focuses on impossibility and unattainability. We have art that reaches but cannot grasp, and aloof women the narrator can never reach, and even his film which has yet to begin filming ten years later. The process of attempts and thought formation are what matter, and it seems even the best laid plans often go awry or fail to fruition, because what is sought after will forever be beyond our reach like the horizon on the plains. We can never fulfill an answer, but only ask the question in evermore unique and breathtaking ways; the methods and awareness of a question to be asked that explores every deep and dark facet is the more fascinating story than the release of a climactic conclusion. It’s the sort of thing that puts a fire in our guts to go out and forge our own path. �[T]he man who travels,� theorizes one of the landowners, �begins to fear that he may not find a fitting end to his journey.� We must not fear failure and press on regardless, a hero/ine is made by their journey, without which they could never hope to achieve their crowning act.
�We’re disappearing through the dark hole of an eye that we’re not even aware of.�
While the use of art as an exploratory device beats loudest in the novel’s chest, it is just a muscle to bring to life the larger theme of the novel. �Every man may be travelling towards the heart of some remote, private plain,� says the narrator. All of us are traveling inward, like the narrator across the seemingly endless Australian plains, seeking an understanding of ourself and the world around us. The plains, mentioned multiple times per page, are the chief object here, but what stand-in they serve in the novel’s parable is widely open to interpretation. This multiple interpretative quality of every aspect of the novel is its greatest glory, giving a meta-fictional flair as the meaning is as elusive as the the meaning behind the quest for meaning is in the book.
�All talk of a nation presupposed the existence of certain influential but rarely seen landscapes.�
The plains are often compared to mirrors, launching a gleefully cyclical thought pattern about how we reflect the world and how the world reflects us. There is much emphasis on how different the inner plains are than the outer plains, and an investigation if inner Australian constituted a vastly different community and ideology than general Australia. �The boundaries of true nations were fixed in the souls of men,� says the narrator, asking the reader to consider the abstract ideas that are borders, both physically and metaphysically. The struggle is not between inner Australia and outer Australia, but any individual or idea and the grand wide-sweeping scale of existence and transferable to any form of this scenario that the reader chooses to use as a basis of interpretation.
Murnane has an exquisite prose style that launches into a lengthy and healthy stroll through the linguistic countryside. �One of my greatest pleasures as a writer of prose fiction,� , �has been to discover the endlessly varying shapes that a sentence may take.� This leads us on a wonderful path full of philosophical sightseeing through the examinations on the varying shapes of reality. Within the world of The Plains, everything is pregnant with the potential for meaning like a clam nearly bursting open might or might not be so from a massive pearl inside. Yet, we may only be able to posit about the clam because, try as we might, the clam can never be opened. This is not cause for sadness or defeatism, but for joy as we can forever theorize and ponder what lies within. Art is a road paved in gold towards a destination of meaning that will forever be elusive but we can take endless comfort and satisfaction at the euphoric �vistas of vistas� we pass along the way.
4.5/5
�I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.�
There is a basic human instinct to look for meaning in life, to open the door of reality in hopes to find of an elaborate clockwork beneath it all which we can investigate in an attempt at comprehension. This quest for meaning tends to be a journey trod through metaphysical landscapes more so than a shoulder to the wheel, making Art a valuable avenue for an abstract expedition into the heart of reality. If any of our art and philosophical probings have given us a finite answer to life’s greatest mysteries is up for debate, but it must be said that one of art’s greatest assets is the finding more and more beautiful ways to ask the questions. Gerald Murnane’s The Plains does just this by chronicling the journey of a filmmaker who has aims to look �for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances� as he travels deep into the plains of Australia. The plains, elusive �vistas of vistas� seem to endlessly flow into one another on an eternal path towards the center of Australia. While the story of this slim novel is simple—the unnamed narrator arrives in town with a fistfull of research to woo a patron into funding an aesthetic endeavour to unlock mysteries of the plains in new ways and his subsequent years there—there is a lush landscape of ideas as vast and mysterious as the plains themselves to explore. The novel is never bogged down by the philosophical meanderings and is eminently engaging and satisfying like water from the canteen of a desert traveler. The Plains is an extravagant and multi-interpretable toybox of ideas framed as a parable on the quest for meaning through art and all its aspects while our place in the world when it’s structure is viewed through the abstract, all of which is orchestrated through a brilliant prose style which marches far and wide like a heroine or hero on an epic journey.
�I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret�
There is a Spanish term, Vacilando, which doesn’t exactly translate into English but encompasses the idea of a trip made for the purpose of the journey and not the destination. The Plains is that sort of novel, concerning itself more with the attempts to reach a new understanding of the reality of the plains rather than a successful breakthrough and solution. Not much happens plot-wise beyond the lengthy and full of suspenseful screw turning scene of landowners sitting around �the labyrinths of saloon bar� to hear out the envisioned endeavours men have planned in order to analyze the life of the inner plains. The scene is gripping in the way one waits and waits and waits for weeks to hear word if their poem or story or what-have-you has been accepted or declined for publication. Much of the first act isn’t spent on pushing the ball of story forward but stepping back and world-building an elaborate history or artistic struggles and arguments that seem to play out in dramatic (and occasionally violent) action the way philosophical schools of thought would refute one another while simultaneously capturing their own ideas. What is eminently thrilling is the way artistic opinions are made large like sporting adversaries in a way that envisions art as a life-or-death-like matter of importance. It would seem the inner plainsman have a long history or interpretation of the plains around them and the horizon they can chase but never catch, and these varying interpretations are as polarizing as politics.
�How did I expect to find so easily what so many others had never found � a visible equivalent of the plains, as though they were mere surfaces reflecting sunlight?�
Flash forward to the present where the war of plains-interpretation is but settling dust. Now a new wave of visionaries wishes to interpret the plains anew. Murnane offers mostly comical but thought-provoking artistic voyages such as an orchestra with each instrument played quietly and at great enough spatial distance from the other instrument so that the listener must wander the room of musicians hearing only one instrument at a time—and hardly so—to �draw attention to the impossibility of comprehending even such an obvious property of a plain as the sound that came from it.� In fact, much of the novel focuses on impossibility and unattainability. We have art that reaches but cannot grasp, and aloof women the narrator can never reach, and even his film which has yet to begin filming ten years later. The process of attempts and thought formation are what matter, and it seems even the best laid plans often go awry or fail to fruition, because what is sought after will forever be beyond our reach like the horizon on the plains. We can never fulfill an answer, but only ask the question in evermore unique and breathtaking ways; the methods and awareness of a question to be asked that explores every deep and dark facet is the more fascinating story than the release of a climactic conclusion. It’s the sort of thing that puts a fire in our guts to go out and forge our own path. �[T]he man who travels,� theorizes one of the landowners, �begins to fear that he may not find a fitting end to his journey.� We must not fear failure and press on regardless, a hero/ine is made by their journey, without which they could never hope to achieve their crowning act.
�We’re disappearing through the dark hole of an eye that we’re not even aware of.�
While the use of art as an exploratory device beats loudest in the novel’s chest, it is just a muscle to bring to life the larger theme of the novel. �Every man may be travelling towards the heart of some remote, private plain,� says the narrator. All of us are traveling inward, like the narrator across the seemingly endless Australian plains, seeking an understanding of ourself and the world around us. The plains, mentioned multiple times per page, are the chief object here, but what stand-in they serve in the novel’s parable is widely open to interpretation. This multiple interpretative quality of every aspect of the novel is its greatest glory, giving a meta-fictional flair as the meaning is as elusive as the the meaning behind the quest for meaning is in the book.
�All talk of a nation presupposed the existence of certain influential but rarely seen landscapes.�
The plains are often compared to mirrors, launching a gleefully cyclical thought pattern about how we reflect the world and how the world reflects us. There is much emphasis on how different the inner plains are than the outer plains, and an investigation if inner Australian constituted a vastly different community and ideology than general Australia. �The boundaries of true nations were fixed in the souls of men,� says the narrator, asking the reader to consider the abstract ideas that are borders, both physically and metaphysically. The struggle is not between inner Australia and outer Australia, but any individual or idea and the grand wide-sweeping scale of existence and transferable to any form of this scenario that the reader chooses to use as a basis of interpretation.
Murnane has an exquisite prose style that launches into a lengthy and healthy stroll through the linguistic countryside. �One of my greatest pleasures as a writer of prose fiction,� , �has been to discover the endlessly varying shapes that a sentence may take.� This leads us on a wonderful path full of philosophical sightseeing through the examinations on the varying shapes of reality. Within the world of The Plains, everything is pregnant with the potential for meaning like a clam nearly bursting open might or might not be so from a massive pearl inside. Yet, we may only be able to posit about the clam because, try as we might, the clam can never be opened. This is not cause for sadness or defeatism, but for joy as we can forever theorize and ponder what lies within. Art is a road paved in gold towards a destination of meaning that will forever be elusive but we can take endless comfort and satisfaction at the euphoric �vistas of vistas� we pass along the way.
4.5/5
�I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.�
March 18, 2022
L’ORIZZONTE, DOPO TUTTO
Pianure d’Australia
Cercavo, in quel paesaggio, qualcosa che sembrasse accennare a un significato complesso, oltre le apparenze.
Qual è il senso di questa breve opera? Il suo significato complesso, oltre le apparenze? Cosa nasconde?
C’� sotto una grande metafora? Di cosa parla effettivamente? Come decrittare i simboli?
Non lo so. E non me ne importa granché. Leggerla è stata comunque una gioia e un continuo alternarsi di meraviglia e stupore.
Però, provo ugualmente a raccogliere qualche pensiero, a mettere un paio di riflessioni in croce.
Australia Plains
L’io narrante - che non è davvero il protagonista della vicenda, perché vicenda non c’� e perché si assume essenzialmente il ruolo di narratore più che di attore - è un giovane regista che sta scrivendo la sceneggiatura per un film che si intitolerà “Nell’interno� e che tratterà delle pianure.
Quelle australiane.
Che sono nell’interno del continente, lontane dal mare.
E fin qui ho pensato intensamente a Wim Wenders e a tanti suoi film (che una volta erano belli, ora mi sembrano invece abbastanza ridicoli), perché come qui sono giochi di rimando e incastro.
Poi, quando il narratore si affaccia sul balcone dell’albergo, fuori è sera, guarda lontano, e pensa, ho visto Sam Shepard su quel balcone, lo Shepard che con Wenders di film ne ha fatti più di uno.
Le pianure australiane
Questo regista incontra i proprietari terrieri, qui chiamati sempre latifondisti: gente che oltre possedere centinaia, e forse migliaia di ettari di terra, possiede case che sono magioni che sono castelli, con centinaia di stanze, e biblioteche così grandi da contenere centinaia di stanze, e sezioni per argomento, tipo quella più citata, “Tempo�.
Il regista si presenta ai latifondisti, che hanno un talento particolare, sono in grado di bere whisky per ore e di smaltire la sbronza bevendoci sopra e andare avanti a farlo per giorni. A loro, il regista spiega il suo progetto. Uno dei latifondisti se lo porta a casa, lo ospita, gli mette a disposizione la sua biblioteca, le sue pianure, e sua figlia che potrebbe essere l’attrice che il regista cerca.
Pianure desertiche d’Australia, che non sono quelle raccontate in queste pagine.
Il regista, che non ha nome, come non ce l’ha nessun altro personaggio, sono tutti chiamati per categoria e professione (i latifondisti, i pittori, il musicista, eccetera), rimane ospite per un tempo spropositato, dieci anni e più. E qui m’� venuto in mente Robert “Noodles� DeNiro che mischia il caffè e dilata il tempo (c’� talmente poca storia da seguire che i salti di fantasia del lettore sono incoraggiati).
Ci vuole poco a capire che il film non si realizzerà.
Ci vuole poco a capire che le pianure sono uno stato mentale prima che uno spazio geografico.
Pianure d’Italia nell’arte di Franco Fontana.
Nella sua bella e intelligente prefazione Ben Lerner dice che
Questo è un libro dedicato ai piani del reale e del possibile, alla loro reciproca interazione, a come l’uno perseguiti l’altro..
E poi dice che il romanzo è palesemente ecfrastico.
Considerato che l’ecfrasi, da definizione del dizionario, è la descrizione di un oggetto, di una persona, di luoghi e di opere d’arte fatta con stile virtuosisticamente elaborato in modo da gareggiare in forza espressiva con la cosa stessa descritta, il lettore è messo sull’avviso, sa cosa aspettarsi.
Pianure d’Italia nell’arte di Franco Fontana: Basilicata (1987).
E quindi, cosa può aspettarsi il lettore da queste cento paginette?
Una melodia sottile come dei fili d’erba strofinati insieme.
Il panorama dei sogni.
Una gran bella scrittura, elegante, scorrevole anche se molto elaborata, poesia in prosa dice Lerner, e aggiunge che all’interno delle frasi si dipanano delicati cambiamenti di luce e ombra e intensità.
Lerner dice anche che:
Le frasi di Murnane sono piccole dialettiche di tedio e bellezza, piattezza e profondità..
Ecco qui un buon esempio:
La donna potrebbe quindi aver considerato, come il vantaggio principale di aver trascorso tanti anni tra pianure non cercate, e con un uomo che non si era ancora spiegato, proprio l’antica possibilità di ipotizzare l’esistenza di una donna il cui futuro comprendesse anche la prospettiva, per quanto improbabile, di trascorrere metà della vita tra pianure non cercate, e con un uomo che non si sarebbe mai spiegato.
Hartmut Toepler: Mundi Mundi Plains.
E il lettore può aspettarsi che parlando di pianure, nel modo adottato da Murnane, impenetrabile, misterioso, magnetico, evocativo, si parli e ragioni di letteratura e arte in genere, sulle possibilità e sui suoi limiti nel rappresentare noi e il mondo che ci circonda. L’arte tutta - non solo la letteratura, ma anche quelle citate con esempi specifici come la pittura e la musica � l’arte e l’artista non riescono a comprendere né il nostro “interno� né il nostro esterno, né visibile né invisibile, né il terreno inquietante dello spirito né le pianure.
L’eroe del mio film vedeva, ai limiti estremi della propria consapevolezza, una pianura inesplorata. Quando poi cercava dentro di sé ciò di cui era più sicuro, non trovava nulla di più definito delle pianure. Il film era la storia della ricerca, da parte di quest’uomo, dell’unico terra che potesse trovarsi al di là o all’interno di tutto ciò che avesse mai visto.
Pianure d’Italia nell’arte di Luigi Ghirri: Formigine (1985).
Pianure d’Australia
Cercavo, in quel paesaggio, qualcosa che sembrasse accennare a un significato complesso, oltre le apparenze.
Qual è il senso di questa breve opera? Il suo significato complesso, oltre le apparenze? Cosa nasconde?
C’� sotto una grande metafora? Di cosa parla effettivamente? Come decrittare i simboli?
Non lo so. E non me ne importa granché. Leggerla è stata comunque una gioia e un continuo alternarsi di meraviglia e stupore.
Però, provo ugualmente a raccogliere qualche pensiero, a mettere un paio di riflessioni in croce.
Australia Plains
L’io narrante - che non è davvero il protagonista della vicenda, perché vicenda non c’� e perché si assume essenzialmente il ruolo di narratore più che di attore - è un giovane regista che sta scrivendo la sceneggiatura per un film che si intitolerà “Nell’interno� e che tratterà delle pianure.
Quelle australiane.
Che sono nell’interno del continente, lontane dal mare.
E fin qui ho pensato intensamente a Wim Wenders e a tanti suoi film (che una volta erano belli, ora mi sembrano invece abbastanza ridicoli), perché come qui sono giochi di rimando e incastro.
Poi, quando il narratore si affaccia sul balcone dell’albergo, fuori è sera, guarda lontano, e pensa, ho visto Sam Shepard su quel balcone, lo Shepard che con Wenders di film ne ha fatti più di uno.
Le pianure australiane
Questo regista incontra i proprietari terrieri, qui chiamati sempre latifondisti: gente che oltre possedere centinaia, e forse migliaia di ettari di terra, possiede case che sono magioni che sono castelli, con centinaia di stanze, e biblioteche così grandi da contenere centinaia di stanze, e sezioni per argomento, tipo quella più citata, “Tempo�.
Il regista si presenta ai latifondisti, che hanno un talento particolare, sono in grado di bere whisky per ore e di smaltire la sbronza bevendoci sopra e andare avanti a farlo per giorni. A loro, il regista spiega il suo progetto. Uno dei latifondisti se lo porta a casa, lo ospita, gli mette a disposizione la sua biblioteca, le sue pianure, e sua figlia che potrebbe essere l’attrice che il regista cerca.
Pianure desertiche d’Australia, che non sono quelle raccontate in queste pagine.
Il regista, che non ha nome, come non ce l’ha nessun altro personaggio, sono tutti chiamati per categoria e professione (i latifondisti, i pittori, il musicista, eccetera), rimane ospite per un tempo spropositato, dieci anni e più. E qui m’� venuto in mente Robert “Noodles� DeNiro che mischia il caffè e dilata il tempo (c’� talmente poca storia da seguire che i salti di fantasia del lettore sono incoraggiati).
Ci vuole poco a capire che il film non si realizzerà.
Ci vuole poco a capire che le pianure sono uno stato mentale prima che uno spazio geografico.
Pianure d’Italia nell’arte di Franco Fontana.
Nella sua bella e intelligente prefazione Ben Lerner dice che
Questo è un libro dedicato ai piani del reale e del possibile, alla loro reciproca interazione, a come l’uno perseguiti l’altro..
E poi dice che il romanzo è palesemente ecfrastico.
Considerato che l’ecfrasi, da definizione del dizionario, è la descrizione di un oggetto, di una persona, di luoghi e di opere d’arte fatta con stile virtuosisticamente elaborato in modo da gareggiare in forza espressiva con la cosa stessa descritta, il lettore è messo sull’avviso, sa cosa aspettarsi.
Pianure d’Italia nell’arte di Franco Fontana: Basilicata (1987).
E quindi, cosa può aspettarsi il lettore da queste cento paginette?
Una melodia sottile come dei fili d’erba strofinati insieme.
Il panorama dei sogni.
Una gran bella scrittura, elegante, scorrevole anche se molto elaborata, poesia in prosa dice Lerner, e aggiunge che all’interno delle frasi si dipanano delicati cambiamenti di luce e ombra e intensità.
Lerner dice anche che:
Le frasi di Murnane sono piccole dialettiche di tedio e bellezza, piattezza e profondità..
Ecco qui un buon esempio:
La donna potrebbe quindi aver considerato, come il vantaggio principale di aver trascorso tanti anni tra pianure non cercate, e con un uomo che non si era ancora spiegato, proprio l’antica possibilità di ipotizzare l’esistenza di una donna il cui futuro comprendesse anche la prospettiva, per quanto improbabile, di trascorrere metà della vita tra pianure non cercate, e con un uomo che non si sarebbe mai spiegato.
Hartmut Toepler: Mundi Mundi Plains.
E il lettore può aspettarsi che parlando di pianure, nel modo adottato da Murnane, impenetrabile, misterioso, magnetico, evocativo, si parli e ragioni di letteratura e arte in genere, sulle possibilità e sui suoi limiti nel rappresentare noi e il mondo che ci circonda. L’arte tutta - non solo la letteratura, ma anche quelle citate con esempi specifici come la pittura e la musica � l’arte e l’artista non riescono a comprendere né il nostro “interno� né il nostro esterno, né visibile né invisibile, né il terreno inquietante dello spirito né le pianure.
L’eroe del mio film vedeva, ai limiti estremi della propria consapevolezza, una pianura inesplorata. Quando poi cercava dentro di sé ciò di cui era più sicuro, non trovava nulla di più definito delle pianure. Il film era la storia della ricerca, da parte di quest’uomo, dell’unico terra che potesse trovarsi al di là o all’interno di tutto ciò che avesse mai visto.
Pianure d’Italia nell’arte di Luigi Ghirri: Formigine (1985).
December 6, 2016
Can you imagine a film that would capture the inner and outer landscape of a remote region that only exists in the minds of its inhabitants?
To have this definite film produced is the upmost aspiration of the narrator of this enigmatic tale when he arrives at the borderless lands of The Plains.
Twenty years go by and the young filmmaker, secluded in the vast library of his patron and obsessed with the idea of revealing a landscape that nobody has ever seen, debates against himself whether plainsmen are shaped by the colors, sounds and swaying shapes of the plains or whether they are only the bearers of their authentic but intangible essence.
Murnane’s allegoric, almost oneiric narrative is an ode to that blind spot that keeps alive the mystery of visibility and representation, the hazy line between reality and impression.
The filmmaker fails at his endeavor because he ends up being swallowed by the infinity of his project, by the monsters of time or lack of time, silence and mute communication, by the estrangement from a land that makes an outcast of himself. But what if lack of tangible artistic output implies a permanent work in progress that mutates and transforms along with the inner landscapes of the artist?
What if the essence of the plains is not what transpires in them but what remains in the silent, secret language of their landscape? In the existentialist trip that takes place in the remote lands of the subconscious? In the common ground that reader and artist shape together?
Then the filmmaker’s defeat enables the writer’s success and “The Plains� becomes to Murnane what the “Invisible cities� meant to Calvino or the “hydraulic press� to Bohumil Hrabal. An ode to aesthetics, to beauty crafted through poetry diluted in prose and a malleable universe that each reader will mould accordingly to his particular state of mind.
To me, Murnane spoke about the exile the artist is sentenced to when he tries to seize the complexity of the cultural and ideological landscape of his time to compose a universal piece that will transcend the barriers of language or any other sort of organized system of representation.
The result of such titanic struggle is a peculiar tapestry of philosophical density, latent musicality and evocative lyricism that only the reader can unlock when the writer’s vision blends with countless landscapes of thousands of minds choosing the less trodden paths of the deserted plains that lead nowhere� or everywhere. It’s really up to you, the reader, who are the real protagonist of every story.
To have this definite film produced is the upmost aspiration of the narrator of this enigmatic tale when he arrives at the borderless lands of The Plains.
Twenty years go by and the young filmmaker, secluded in the vast library of his patron and obsessed with the idea of revealing a landscape that nobody has ever seen, debates against himself whether plainsmen are shaped by the colors, sounds and swaying shapes of the plains or whether they are only the bearers of their authentic but intangible essence.
Murnane’s allegoric, almost oneiric narrative is an ode to that blind spot that keeps alive the mystery of visibility and representation, the hazy line between reality and impression.
The filmmaker fails at his endeavor because he ends up being swallowed by the infinity of his project, by the monsters of time or lack of time, silence and mute communication, by the estrangement from a land that makes an outcast of himself. But what if lack of tangible artistic output implies a permanent work in progress that mutates and transforms along with the inner landscapes of the artist?
What if the essence of the plains is not what transpires in them but what remains in the silent, secret language of their landscape? In the existentialist trip that takes place in the remote lands of the subconscious? In the common ground that reader and artist shape together?
Then the filmmaker’s defeat enables the writer’s success and “The Plains� becomes to Murnane what the “Invisible cities� meant to Calvino or the “hydraulic press� to Bohumil Hrabal. An ode to aesthetics, to beauty crafted through poetry diluted in prose and a malleable universe that each reader will mould accordingly to his particular state of mind.
To me, Murnane spoke about the exile the artist is sentenced to when he tries to seize the complexity of the cultural and ideological landscape of his time to compose a universal piece that will transcend the barriers of language or any other sort of organized system of representation.
The result of such titanic struggle is a peculiar tapestry of philosophical density, latent musicality and evocative lyricism that only the reader can unlock when the writer’s vision blends with countless landscapes of thousands of minds choosing the less trodden paths of the deserted plains that lead nowhere� or everywhere. It’s really up to you, the reader, who are the real protagonist of every story.
September 20, 2019
I feel like the most appropriate response to The Plains would be to study it forever, re-reading it over and over again, forsaking all other books while taking copious notes for my ‘review�, which I will never actually write.
July 21, 2014
A man can know his place and yet never try to reach it.
Plains, Plains, everywhere...
To admire the beauty, to love the words, to enjoy the journey, to respect a talent and to retain the hope of finding a rare visual on the endless stage of nature is what one can aim for after reading a book like this. With every alternate sentence I encountered a sublime combination of bewildering revelation and an unremitting mystery that is usually found in the divine creations of the cosmos but what is seemingly impossible to define by others is possibly achieved by Murnane here. Dreams are given the form of ambitions, ambitions have perpetuated the revival of myths and myths have further carried the task of being an invincible mediator between past and future that yields not transparent but translucent negatives when exposed to the twilight of present. An ownership of interpretations is claimed somewhere while a willful renunciation of one’s history is reciting its own fable. A hazy view on celluloid. It’s all one glorious chaos but I’m not complaining. Everything is unconventional with these Plains except that Man and that Woman.
She would surely have read, I thought, at least one of those accounts of a man and woman who met only once and accepted that so much was promised to them by the decorous looks and words they exchanged that they should not meet again.
The imagination at work here is astonishing and incredibly astonishing is the truth that is quietly nestled in the spaces penetrated by some incisive reflections. Talks of irreversible destinies, of possible relationships belonging to a parallel world and love? How lovely everything is in this book but I can be wrong or quite simply, I’m wrong. Everything I have stated is a mere summation of my imaginary, one-sided conversation with the writer who didn’t utter a single word but gave a modest smile in return to my gushing praises for his work. But I promise to meet you again, Mr. Murnane and hopefully I'll post an interesting dialogue next time.
That scene is the only scene as I recall the poem. Two hundred stanzas on a woman seen from a distance.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
An informative link:
Plains, Plains, everywhere...
To admire the beauty, to love the words, to enjoy the journey, to respect a talent and to retain the hope of finding a rare visual on the endless stage of nature is what one can aim for after reading a book like this. With every alternate sentence I encountered a sublime combination of bewildering revelation and an unremitting mystery that is usually found in the divine creations of the cosmos but what is seemingly impossible to define by others is possibly achieved by Murnane here. Dreams are given the form of ambitions, ambitions have perpetuated the revival of myths and myths have further carried the task of being an invincible mediator between past and future that yields not transparent but translucent negatives when exposed to the twilight of present. An ownership of interpretations is claimed somewhere while a willful renunciation of one’s history is reciting its own fable. A hazy view on celluloid. It’s all one glorious chaos but I’m not complaining. Everything is unconventional with these Plains except that Man and that Woman.
She would surely have read, I thought, at least one of those accounts of a man and woman who met only once and accepted that so much was promised to them by the decorous looks and words they exchanged that they should not meet again.
The imagination at work here is astonishing and incredibly astonishing is the truth that is quietly nestled in the spaces penetrated by some incisive reflections. Talks of irreversible destinies, of possible relationships belonging to a parallel world and love? How lovely everything is in this book but I can be wrong or quite simply, I’m wrong. Everything I have stated is a mere summation of my imaginary, one-sided conversation with the writer who didn’t utter a single word but gave a modest smile in return to my gushing praises for his work. But I promise to meet you again, Mr. Murnane and hopefully I'll post an interesting dialogue next time.
That scene is the only scene as I recall the poem. Two hundred stanzas on a woman seen from a distance.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
An informative link:
September 12, 2017
“Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes � one continually visible but never accessible, and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily.�
Attempting to describe the magnificence of Murnane’s The Plains using language is futile.
Murnane writes of “bewildering vistas of vistas�. His protagonist casts a spooling line attempting to snare meaning; his catch is an illusion that can’t rightly be named. “I’m trying to piece together a plain where nothing exists but what artists claim to have seen,� he says. Does he succeed? Wrong question.
Because I can’t use words to explain the beauty of this book, I will point to another artist for simile: Murnane is like Rothko. As an observer of either Murnane’s literature or a Rothko’s painting one can’t be told or instructed how to react. If an observer looks at a Rothko and thinks, “It’s just a bunch of paint on a canvas. I could do that� � the wonder of The Plains will remain a mystery. But if you’ve ever stared teary-eyed at a Rothko, have gotten lost in the canvas and found an undiscovered part of your soul in its inky depths, then you must read this novel.
No. 8, Mark Rothko
August 7, 2022
“I wondered whether all my investigations so far had been mere glances at the deceptive surfaces of plains.�
Holy moly, what was that? Anyone who thinks that with this book he/she is embarking on a literary exploration of the Australian interior (the writer's homeland) is going to be thoroughly deceived. You end up in a surrealistic story, with a storyteller fascinated by the unique character of the (Australian) interior and its inhabitants (for the sake of clarity, not the aborigines, clearly the white colonizers). In particular, the storyteller is a filmmaker who plans to shoot a groundbreaking film to uncover the true character of that interior once and for all.
So the story seems to start fairly straightforward, especially since our filmmaker overwhelms us with all kinds of precise details about his arrival - 20 years earlier - in a town deep in the interior. But instead of descriptions of the plains, the narrator mainly focuses on the endless discussions of the "plainsmen" when they try to express what distinguishes them from others. It turns out that these plainsmen are not ordinary people, but a motley collection of aristocratic landowners, artists, architects, archivists and so on, who are constantly at odds with each other and found their own movements, and sometimes even violent conflicts erupt. There’s an odd 19th century feel attached to this setting.
After a while, you realize that Murnane's plains is actually a fictional space, and for lack of a more prosaic image, for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to call that fictional space "reality". Here, Murnane masterfully plays with the different connected and opposite meanings of words like "the plains", "the interior" and "plain". In other words, he offers a pastiche of people's intense, but ultimately fruitless attempts to grasp the core reality around them, by unfolding a thousand possible imaginations. It's a typical postmodernist viewpoint.
Our filmmaker-storyteller endlessly zooms in on the different views on the "plains", in a rather high pitched intellectual style. He uses very sophisticated sentences that you often have to reread two or three times to understand just a little bit of what it is about, although the real meaning does not seem so important. Here’s a � rather simple - example: “Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes � one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily. � It's the succession of lots of sentences like this one that also makes this story into a 'plains' of its own, where sense and meaning are lost in the endless variation of words.
Another feature: this thin book contains a striking number of scenes in which the narrator or others observe things from behind glass: the plains itself, or the wife of a landowner, who is reading in the library and in turn stares out through a glass window. Incumbent light (from the plains of course, but sometimes also simply the reflection on the wine glasses) is repeatedly cited as an important situation-element. Windows and glass here function as a kind of deforming membrane through which we necessarily have to look at things, but can never grasp them. With all this the importance of the momentary, the uniqueness of the moment of time and the hyper-subjective of each experience, of perception is emphasized, and therefore also the fleeting, intangible and unreachable nature of reality. Another postmodernist stance.
I can imagine that, reading this review, you get a slightly confused feeling. Well, that is exactly the experience you have as a reader of Murnane's booklet, both during the read and afterwards. You wonder what exactly it was you read and what its message was, and even after you finished it, you aren't sure. It is plainfully masterful how Murnane gets us out of balance in that way and confronts us with a reality that ultimately is unfathomable. I can understand that for a lot of people, this is a rather upsetting and unsatisfying reading experience, but it is a succinct one if you're open for it.
(rating 3.5 stars)
Holy moly, what was that? Anyone who thinks that with this book he/she is embarking on a literary exploration of the Australian interior (the writer's homeland) is going to be thoroughly deceived. You end up in a surrealistic story, with a storyteller fascinated by the unique character of the (Australian) interior and its inhabitants (for the sake of clarity, not the aborigines, clearly the white colonizers). In particular, the storyteller is a filmmaker who plans to shoot a groundbreaking film to uncover the true character of that interior once and for all.
So the story seems to start fairly straightforward, especially since our filmmaker overwhelms us with all kinds of precise details about his arrival - 20 years earlier - in a town deep in the interior. But instead of descriptions of the plains, the narrator mainly focuses on the endless discussions of the "plainsmen" when they try to express what distinguishes them from others. It turns out that these plainsmen are not ordinary people, but a motley collection of aristocratic landowners, artists, architects, archivists and so on, who are constantly at odds with each other and found their own movements, and sometimes even violent conflicts erupt. There’s an odd 19th century feel attached to this setting.
After a while, you realize that Murnane's plains is actually a fictional space, and for lack of a more prosaic image, for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to call that fictional space "reality". Here, Murnane masterfully plays with the different connected and opposite meanings of words like "the plains", "the interior" and "plain". In other words, he offers a pastiche of people's intense, but ultimately fruitless attempts to grasp the core reality around them, by unfolding a thousand possible imaginations. It's a typical postmodernist viewpoint.
Our filmmaker-storyteller endlessly zooms in on the different views on the "plains", in a rather high pitched intellectual style. He uses very sophisticated sentences that you often have to reread two or three times to understand just a little bit of what it is about, although the real meaning does not seem so important. Here’s a � rather simple - example: “Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes � one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily. � It's the succession of lots of sentences like this one that also makes this story into a 'plains' of its own, where sense and meaning are lost in the endless variation of words.
Another feature: this thin book contains a striking number of scenes in which the narrator or others observe things from behind glass: the plains itself, or the wife of a landowner, who is reading in the library and in turn stares out through a glass window. Incumbent light (from the plains of course, but sometimes also simply the reflection on the wine glasses) is repeatedly cited as an important situation-element. Windows and glass here function as a kind of deforming membrane through which we necessarily have to look at things, but can never grasp them. With all this the importance of the momentary, the uniqueness of the moment of time and the hyper-subjective of each experience, of perception is emphasized, and therefore also the fleeting, intangible and unreachable nature of reality. Another postmodernist stance.
I can imagine that, reading this review, you get a slightly confused feeling. Well, that is exactly the experience you have as a reader of Murnane's booklet, both during the read and afterwards. You wonder what exactly it was you read and what its message was, and even after you finished it, you aren't sure. It is plainfully masterful how Murnane gets us out of balance in that way and confronts us with a reality that ultimately is unfathomable. I can understand that for a lot of people, this is a rather upsetting and unsatisfying reading experience, but it is a succinct one if you're open for it.
(rating 3.5 stars)
February 2, 2023
CRITIQUE:
"The Man in My Mind Who Sits in the Fields of Grass"
It's arguable that both this novella and its narrator inhabit the mind of the novella's author (namely, Gerald Murnane himself):
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Plainsmen Fiction"
This is a beautifully written novella. Every sentence has been carefully and lovingly crafted. You don't often encounter writing as good as this.
Only it contains within it a hoax of magnificent proportions, one that Alan Sokal would be proud of:
"Hoaxes! How I love them!" (Gerald Murnane: "Chronological Archive")
It might seem like a sympathetic piece of metafiction, but I smell a rat.
I suspect that one of the aims of this highly intelligent writer and novella is to interrogate the world of Post-Modernism it purports to inhabit and to aggravate its adherents, practitioners and benefactors.
It is, at heart, deeply conservative, politically and culturally. In this sense, it reminds me of the contemporary response to the work of Patrick White.
Of course, its conservatism is no reason to refrain from reading it.
By all means, read and enjoy it (I've rated it four stars), but I suspect it's a Trojan horse that has made its way into the forecourt of the citadel of Post-Modernism.
As a web-savvy Virgil might have warned, beware of geeks bearing gifts.
"A World of His Own"
There are a few precise beautiful descriptions of the Australian Outback. But the Plains are something metaphysical beyond the Outback.
The Plainsmen don't exist, except in Murnane's mind, and he has created them, in equally precise and beautiful prose, in order to undermine, criticise and parody them.
The Plainsmen do not constitute an imagined or imaginative world that is intended to be inspirational or aspirational for the author or for the reader. They are there to be questioned and attacked. This is an eloquent political tract, a satire of Swiftian scale and achievement.
Although the Plainsmen are intellectual and sophisticated, they represent a culture that threatens the personal, creative or social world that Murnane has grown used to (even if that culture wasn't fully-formed in Australia at the time - it was the end of the conservative Fraser government - he saw it coming, almost prophetically).
"Less Concrete Concerns"
Here, later, an interview with Murnane describes his relationship with this culture:
A Space of My Own
Read Murnane for the beauty of the text, his sentences (they are not only flawless, but consistent) and the innovative skills needed to construct his "elaborate daydream world", but don't assume that he is sympathetic to the world of Post-Modernism that he plays with and against.
He is an exquisite formalist, at best an old-fashioned, patrician Modernist, in the style of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
He is primarily metaphysical, and then only secondarily metafictional, perhaps because he has always been interested in the method of writing, at least his method, the nature of the craft, sometimes so he can teach others:
Driven to Abstraction
I infer from this description of his craft that Murnane is writing about "phenomena" in his mind, rather than the "noumena" that exist in the outside world.
To this extent, his approach and work could potentially be described as phenomenological.
However, it's quite something else to infer that Murnane's style derives from or is influenced by the philosophy of phenomenology or that his work consciously investigates its implications.
Rather, I suspect that he has intuitively arrived at a similar understanding of how his own mind and writing process work to that of the phenomenologists, and that he is simply exploring his own personal phenomena in his fiction, as opposed to plumbing the depths of the philosophy.
Ironically, Murnane eschews the concrete of external "noumena" in favour of the abstraction of the "phenomena" of his own mind, even though it was the less concrete concerns of literary theory that motivated him to retire from tertiary education.
Presumably, there are different degrees or qualities of abstraction. Unless it's as simple as, my abstraction is better than your abstraction. And what, after all, could be more subjective than abstraction?
"To Write is to Go in Search" (Jacques Derrida)
If my suspicion is right, it is even more remote from the truth to argue that Murnane's work is self-consciously Post-Modernist or Post-Structuralist.
This is an argument arrived at from the outside rather than from the inside.
It probably reflects the tendency of Post-Modernism and Post-Modernists to appropriate practices used in the past as if they were precursors to the concerns of Post-Modernism, rather than practices that existed in their own right and emerged out of totally different historical and cultural contexts:
[Herbert Read, "English Prose Style" as quoted by Gerald Murnane in "Why I Write What I Write".]
The difference is twofold: first, Murnane's work doesn't have to be construed in terms of any ostensible Post-Modernism, and second, he might actually not relate to Post-Modernism in any particularly meaningful way.
Murnane might relate to somebody like Derrrida to the extent that he writes in order to search the images in his mind. However, that doesn't mean that he has read Derrida more than superficially or bought his philosophy wholesale.
Both Artisan and Partisan
Rather, I'd argue that Murnane approaches Post-Modernism from the opposite perspective, in other words, critically, as both artisan and partisan. To make greater claims of his Post-Modernism is to confuse reality with an image of him. It's just a trick of the light.
Still he writes beautifully within the constraints he has set himself, within the private, imagined space that he has made his own and that he, in turn, offers to us.
CONTEXT AND SUB-TEXT
I've added some personal views on the context and sub-text of the novel here:
/review/show...
VERSE [A TRIBUTE TO A HOAX WELL EXECUTED]:
[Apologies to Harold Stewart and James McAuley]
The Obliquity of the Darkening Ecliptic
Civilisation remains
Just a black swan of trespass
On such remote inland plains.
The Love Life of Ern Malley, Poet, Post Restante the Wimmera
A secret book,
Discreetly bound,
Out on the plains,
Lilac and black,
In the library
Does now abide.
If you do look,
It might astound,
For it contains
Plans of attack
To seduce, ably,
My patron’s bride.
My Life as a Fake Plainsman
Why not decry
These writers, not
Unlike Murnane,
Ruminating
Incessantly,
If not curious,
About boundless plains,
Who’re yet to set
A foot on them,
As if they’re just
Illusory
And spurious?
A Telegram from Herbert Read
"I TOO WOULD HAVE BEEN DECEIVED BY ERN MALLEY BUT HOAXER HOISTED BY OWN PETARD HAS TOUCHED OFF UNCONSCIOUS SOURCES INSPIRATION WORK TOO SOPHISTICATED BUT HAS ELEMENTS GENUINE POETRY"
SOUNDTRACK ("YOU WANNA BE THERE, BUT YOU DON'T WANNA TRAVEL"):
The Triffids - "A Trick Of The Light"
"Well the rim of her mouth was golden
Her eyes were just desert sands
But that's not her!
That's just the light
It's only an image of her
It's just a trick of the light."
The Triffids - "Wide Open Road"
"The sky was big and empty
My chest filled to explode
I yelled my insides out at the sun
At the wide open road."
Dave Graney 'n' the Coral Snakes - "You Wanna Be Loved"
Good old Mount Gambier boy! It's further away than the Plains!
Dave Graney 'n' the Coral Snakes - "I'm Gonna Release Your Soul"
Sanctum Theatre - "The Plains" 2008
"Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternatively of exploring two landscapes one continually visible but not accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily."
Gerald Murnane - Melbourne Prize for Literature 2009
Gerald Murnane - "The Writing Room" (ABC)
Gerald Murnane - "The literary life of Gerald Murnane" (Radio National Book Show)
Click on "Download" on the right.
"The Man in My Mind Who Sits in the Fields of Grass"
It's arguable that both this novella and its narrator inhabit the mind of the novella's author (namely, Gerald Murnane himself):
"I watch the man in my mind writing with his pencil in his notebook while he sits in the fields of grass."
Gerald Murnane, "In Far Fields", 1995
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Plainsmen Fiction"
This is a beautifully written novella. Every sentence has been carefully and lovingly crafted. You don't often encounter writing as good as this.
Only it contains within it a hoax of magnificent proportions, one that Alan Sokal would be proud of:
"Hoaxes! How I love them!" (Gerald Murnane: "Chronological Archive")
It might seem like a sympathetic piece of metafiction, but I smell a rat.
I suspect that one of the aims of this highly intelligent writer and novella is to interrogate the world of Post-Modernism it purports to inhabit and to aggravate its adherents, practitioners and benefactors.
It is, at heart, deeply conservative, politically and culturally. In this sense, it reminds me of the contemporary response to the work of Patrick White.
Of course, its conservatism is no reason to refrain from reading it.
By all means, read and enjoy it (I've rated it four stars), but I suspect it's a Trojan horse that has made its way into the forecourt of the citadel of Post-Modernism.
As a web-savvy Virgil might have warned, beware of geeks bearing gifts.
"A World of His Own"
There are a few precise beautiful descriptions of the Australian Outback. But the Plains are something metaphysical beyond the Outback.
The Plainsmen don't exist, except in Murnane's mind, and he has created them, in equally precise and beautiful prose, in order to undermine, criticise and parody them.
The Plainsmen do not constitute an imagined or imaginative world that is intended to be inspirational or aspirational for the author or for the reader. They are there to be questioned and attacked. This is an eloquent political tract, a satire of Swiftian scale and achievement.
Although the Plainsmen are intellectual and sophisticated, they represent a culture that threatens the personal, creative or social world that Murnane has grown used to (even if that culture wasn't fully-formed in Australia at the time - it was the end of the conservative Fraser government - he saw it coming, almost prophetically).
"Less Concrete Concerns"
Here, later, an interview with Murnane describes his relationship with this culture:
"Perhaps surprisingly for someone so self-contained, [Murnane] taught creative writing for many years at Prahran Teachers College, now absorbed into Deakin University.
"He took early retirement from teaching, disillusioned, he says, by the shift from text to other, less concrete concerns, such as literary theory...
" 'The unit I dealt with was the sentence. It was where I started: no theoretical talk about meaning, theme, character, social relevance or any such thing.' "
A Space of My Own
Read Murnane for the beauty of the text, his sentences (they are not only flawless, but consistent) and the innovative skills needed to construct his "elaborate daydream world", but don't assume that he is sympathetic to the world of Post-Modernism that he plays with and against.
He is an exquisite formalist, at best an old-fashioned, patrician Modernist, in the style of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
He is primarily metaphysical, and then only secondarily metafictional, perhaps because he has always been interested in the method of writing, at least his method, the nature of the craft, sometimes so he can teach others:
"I would then go on to tell my student that my mind consisted only of images and feelings; that I had studied my mind for many years and had found in it nothing but images and feelings; that a diagram of my mind would resemble a vast and intricate map with images for its small towns and with feelings for the roads through the grassy countryside between the towns."
Driven to Abstraction
I infer from this description of his craft that Murnane is writing about "phenomena" in his mind, rather than the "noumena" that exist in the outside world.
To this extent, his approach and work could potentially be described as phenomenological.
However, it's quite something else to infer that Murnane's style derives from or is influenced by the philosophy of phenomenology or that his work consciously investigates its implications.
Rather, I suspect that he has intuitively arrived at a similar understanding of how his own mind and writing process work to that of the phenomenologists, and that he is simply exploring his own personal phenomena in his fiction, as opposed to plumbing the depths of the philosophy.
Ironically, Murnane eschews the concrete of external "noumena" in favour of the abstraction of the "phenomena" of his own mind, even though it was the less concrete concerns of literary theory that motivated him to retire from tertiary education.
Presumably, there are different degrees or qualities of abstraction. Unless it's as simple as, my abstraction is better than your abstraction. And what, after all, could be more subjective than abstraction?
"To Write is to Go in Search" (Jacques Derrida)
If my suspicion is right, it is even more remote from the truth to argue that Murnane's work is self-consciously Post-Modernist or Post-Structuralist.
This is an argument arrived at from the outside rather than from the inside.
It probably reflects the tendency of Post-Modernism and Post-Modernists to appropriate practices used in the past as if they were precursors to the concerns of Post-Modernism, rather than practices that existed in their own right and emerged out of totally different historical and cultural contexts:
"Good writing exactly reproduces what we should call the contour of our thought."
[Herbert Read, "English Prose Style" as quoted by Gerald Murnane in "Why I Write What I Write".]
The difference is twofold: first, Murnane's work doesn't have to be construed in terms of any ostensible Post-Modernism, and second, he might actually not relate to Post-Modernism in any particularly meaningful way.
Murnane might relate to somebody like Derrrida to the extent that he writes in order to search the images in his mind. However, that doesn't mean that he has read Derrida more than superficially or bought his philosophy wholesale.
Both Artisan and Partisan
Rather, I'd argue that Murnane approaches Post-Modernism from the opposite perspective, in other words, critically, as both artisan and partisan. To make greater claims of his Post-Modernism is to confuse reality with an image of him. It's just a trick of the light.
Still he writes beautifully within the constraints he has set himself, within the private, imagined space that he has made his own and that he, in turn, offers to us.
CONTEXT AND SUB-TEXT
I've added some personal views on the context and sub-text of the novel here:
/review/show...
VERSE [A TRIBUTE TO A HOAX WELL EXECUTED]:
[Apologies to Harold Stewart and James McAuley]
The Obliquity of the Darkening Ecliptic
Civilisation remains
Just a black swan of trespass
On such remote inland plains.
The Love Life of Ern Malley, Poet, Post Restante the Wimmera
A secret book,
Discreetly bound,
Out on the plains,
Lilac and black,
In the library
Does now abide.
If you do look,
It might astound,
For it contains
Plans of attack
To seduce, ably,
My patron’s bride.
My Life as a Fake Plainsman
Why not decry
These writers, not
Unlike Murnane,
Ruminating
Incessantly,
If not curious,
About boundless plains,
Who’re yet to set
A foot on them,
As if they’re just
Illusory
And spurious?
A Telegram from Herbert Read
"I TOO WOULD HAVE BEEN DECEIVED BY ERN MALLEY BUT HOAXER HOISTED BY OWN PETARD HAS TOUCHED OFF UNCONSCIOUS SOURCES INSPIRATION WORK TOO SOPHISTICATED BUT HAS ELEMENTS GENUINE POETRY"
SOUNDTRACK ("YOU WANNA BE THERE, BUT YOU DON'T WANNA TRAVEL"):
The Triffids - "A Trick Of The Light"
"Well the rim of her mouth was golden
Her eyes were just desert sands
But that's not her!
That's just the light
It's only an image of her
It's just a trick of the light."
The Triffids - "Wide Open Road"
"The sky was big and empty
My chest filled to explode
I yelled my insides out at the sun
At the wide open road."
Dave Graney 'n' the Coral Snakes - "You Wanna Be Loved"
Good old Mount Gambier boy! It's further away than the Plains!
Dave Graney 'n' the Coral Snakes - "I'm Gonna Release Your Soul"
Sanctum Theatre - "The Plains" 2008
"Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternatively of exploring two landscapes one continually visible but not accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily."
Gerald Murnane - Melbourne Prize for Literature 2009
Gerald Murnane - "The Writing Room" (ABC)
Gerald Murnane - "The literary life of Gerald Murnane" (Radio National Book Show)
Click on "Download" on the right.
June 10, 2016
Standing between the towering buildings of Musil"s two volumes of The Man Without Qualities I sat on a stone staircase . Having just finished the first volume I yearned for the second. I thought of a break, not due to boredom but as a matter of pacing, refreshment, so as to retrieve all the treasures awaiting me in volume two. I chose the thinnest novel off my shelves. A hundred and ten pages. A two day read.
I had not read Murnane before except for GR Friends M. Sarki's and Proustitutes intelligent reviews and updates. Nor had I ever heard of Murnania.
The front cover is, a deep blue sky fading to lighter shades of blue, into a white haze at the horizon and transitioning into varying shades of a sand-brown verging on gold. In block print blue lettering was the title, "The Plains", and just below it, "A Novel," and at the bottom right hand corner the author's name. It is quite beautiful at first look. As I stared at it my eyes slowly mesmerized into loss of perspective. I found myself in the haze of the horizon which pushed endlessly on in neither gain or loss. Attached to and part of the front cover is an inward flap to, place bits of notes to simplify a complexity, store pages read since they are already past and this book deals in time, meaning, or an ornament to distract me? The first page is solid black, forbidding or a kind of warning.
I haven't even begun-or have I-and already, instead of a break I am involved in circuitous thinking and its endless parallels and perils. Stepping out onto this inner area of a plains, not even being clear when I did, or did I, cross a line leaving outer Australia (The true Australia?) and entering the inner Australia, with a man who wants to shoot a film of this parched endless area that in its desolation has the possibility of meanings to be discovered, I understood the inner flap. The pages tucked into the flap, already read, had no further presence squirreled away. It was in Murname's past, my past, no longer of consequence. What then had consequence was turning onto the next page, the present, awaiting soon to (though I am a notoriously slow reader) be pressed under the flap. Yes, the first page and I am already figuring out …but it is only the first page and no further into Murname's pointing out the loss of time's meanings, measurements, the meanings sought by the wealthy landowners populating the town, our film producer, me (Mr. Murname I am looking for a short break from Musil's towering thoughts. See if I put you up on my favorites shelf. It ain't gonna happen.) only to be found in absences, between existences and moments, this testimony to the miracles or cumbersome weight of the true mysteries laying tantalizing just beyond our reach.
As in all great literature form not only coincides with content but forces the reader through the experience of the meaning the content is expressing. This is true of, The Plains, but is secreted away beneath the Walserian, Sebaldian, elegance of simplicity in its style. I quickly gave up the quick-read in order to lavish in the words, the language. This is part of the genius, beneath the calm beatific style, in the absence of the chaos, lies the multiple interpretations, indeed the impossibility of any interpretation but one's own and then not to attempt to express it to anyone else. Any attempt in words, intellectualizing, philosophizing, creates it own problem which it then tries to solve. It is the not trying, the bold acceptance that the mysteries are beyond grasp, beyond the haze of the horizon in the black dark, that is strength.
This book is renowned for being open to multiple interpretations and contradicting its contradictions, at times making it a frustrating read. My interpretation is that yes, it can be at times frustrating but a deliberate part of Murnane's style. His point is that there are no interpretations to life, reality, via any known vehicle we have so far invented. Words, ideas, speculations, philosophies, religions, raise their own synthetic problem which they then offer solutions, respond to these solutions then respond endlessly but seemingly intelligently to these responses. The solutions are endless due to the original problem not existing in reality, reality being the dark expanse beyond humans grasp. Reality is only something we have defined therefore is not. Therefore is Murnania.
Is Murnania curable? Let's hope not. Is this book disturbing? Yes. But, and I think it is the eloquence of his prose and substance of his thinking, it was difficult to put down and I eagerly looked forward to picking it up and reading further.
After finishing I knew something profound had happened but I didn't know what. My soul paced up and down the hallway until it dawned upon me. The book both told and showed me that all my attempts at grasping reality through intellectual or spiritual pursuits were fraught with egoism and predictable disappointment. Not only have I been absurd but Murnane is saying his work itself might be absurd. There may be at least eight counter arguments to my interpretation which could in the end support my interpretation?
If I were to know this is true, that factually it is found indisputably that Murnane is right I will still continue searching for the dark beyond the plains, the mysteries; through thought, reading writing. Searching is so enjoyable, it leads me to further discover myself, within the center of myself lies something universal, and within something universal...
I had not read Murnane before except for GR Friends M. Sarki's and Proustitutes intelligent reviews and updates. Nor had I ever heard of Murnania.
The front cover is, a deep blue sky fading to lighter shades of blue, into a white haze at the horizon and transitioning into varying shades of a sand-brown verging on gold. In block print blue lettering was the title, "The Plains", and just below it, "A Novel," and at the bottom right hand corner the author's name. It is quite beautiful at first look. As I stared at it my eyes slowly mesmerized into loss of perspective. I found myself in the haze of the horizon which pushed endlessly on in neither gain or loss. Attached to and part of the front cover is an inward flap to, place bits of notes to simplify a complexity, store pages read since they are already past and this book deals in time, meaning, or an ornament to distract me? The first page is solid black, forbidding or a kind of warning.
I haven't even begun-or have I-and already, instead of a break I am involved in circuitous thinking and its endless parallels and perils. Stepping out onto this inner area of a plains, not even being clear when I did, or did I, cross a line leaving outer Australia (The true Australia?) and entering the inner Australia, with a man who wants to shoot a film of this parched endless area that in its desolation has the possibility of meanings to be discovered, I understood the inner flap. The pages tucked into the flap, already read, had no further presence squirreled away. It was in Murname's past, my past, no longer of consequence. What then had consequence was turning onto the next page, the present, awaiting soon to (though I am a notoriously slow reader) be pressed under the flap. Yes, the first page and I am already figuring out …but it is only the first page and no further into Murname's pointing out the loss of time's meanings, measurements, the meanings sought by the wealthy landowners populating the town, our film producer, me (Mr. Murname I am looking for a short break from Musil's towering thoughts. See if I put you up on my favorites shelf. It ain't gonna happen.) only to be found in absences, between existences and moments, this testimony to the miracles or cumbersome weight of the true mysteries laying tantalizing just beyond our reach.
As in all great literature form not only coincides with content but forces the reader through the experience of the meaning the content is expressing. This is true of, The Plains, but is secreted away beneath the Walserian, Sebaldian, elegance of simplicity in its style. I quickly gave up the quick-read in order to lavish in the words, the language. This is part of the genius, beneath the calm beatific style, in the absence of the chaos, lies the multiple interpretations, indeed the impossibility of any interpretation but one's own and then not to attempt to express it to anyone else. Any attempt in words, intellectualizing, philosophizing, creates it own problem which it then tries to solve. It is the not trying, the bold acceptance that the mysteries are beyond grasp, beyond the haze of the horizon in the black dark, that is strength.
This book is renowned for being open to multiple interpretations and contradicting its contradictions, at times making it a frustrating read. My interpretation is that yes, it can be at times frustrating but a deliberate part of Murnane's style. His point is that there are no interpretations to life, reality, via any known vehicle we have so far invented. Words, ideas, speculations, philosophies, religions, raise their own synthetic problem which they then offer solutions, respond to these solutions then respond endlessly but seemingly intelligently to these responses. The solutions are endless due to the original problem not existing in reality, reality being the dark expanse beyond humans grasp. Reality is only something we have defined therefore is not. Therefore is Murnania.
Is Murnania curable? Let's hope not. Is this book disturbing? Yes. But, and I think it is the eloquence of his prose and substance of his thinking, it was difficult to put down and I eagerly looked forward to picking it up and reading further.
After finishing I knew something profound had happened but I didn't know what. My soul paced up and down the hallway until it dawned upon me. The book both told and showed me that all my attempts at grasping reality through intellectual or spiritual pursuits were fraught with egoism and predictable disappointment. Not only have I been absurd but Murnane is saying his work itself might be absurd. There may be at least eight counter arguments to my interpretation which could in the end support my interpretation?
If I were to know this is true, that factually it is found indisputably that Murnane is right I will still continue searching for the dark beyond the plains, the mysteries; through thought, reading writing. Searching is so enjoyable, it leads me to further discover myself, within the center of myself lies something universal, and within something universal...
December 21, 2022
Notes to the review of “The Plains� that I might not ever write.
It so happened I read Murnane’s oeuvre backwards. It so happened I would never read his books in order he has written them. I would never know whether it would feel any different that way.
This book is less abstract compared to what I got used to with him. In a way, it references more concrete Australia vs more imaginary “complementary� anti-Australia�
This book is a post-modern elegant self-referential and illusive game. In later works, he moved to more astute, less playful more austere style. In those works he has found his “plain�. “What distinguishes a man after all but the landscape where he finally found himself?� I prefer those later works. In them, I find it so fascinating how he manage to write and, at the same time to show his process of thinking and writing�
But there is a lot of wonder in the pages of this book too. Every time I read those sentences I see something different in my head. A springboard for thoughts?
Film shows in his head. He travels inside his own mind. Film shows in the reader’s head. Film shows in a window.
Echoes of other authors on these pages
with the transition from visible only to a mind towards visible to other people. “I had sometimes thought of The interior as a few scenes from much longer film that could only be seen from a vantage point that I knew nothing of.�
(In the comment below, Daniel has actually pointed out that Fosse is working on translation of exactly this book into Norwegian. It was an exciting piece of news for me as I did not know they knew of each other work. I've made a little research and it is appeared that Fosse, the younger of the two for 20 years, finds Murnane unique and indeed translates "The Plains":
"I feel that Murnane has a quite unique voice and way of seeing. I’ve never read anything like “The Plains,� but it resembles my writing—this sense of distance and closeness. We are writing in different ways, but I can tell that there’s a similar way of seeing that’s behind it."
The quote is from .)
with the libraries and books in libraries containing everything about any possible book; the first part of “The Plains� is a piece of non-fiction about a fictional country imagined for this.
, the writer who takes “private labyrinths of Time as the settings for their � works.�
Architecture
Geometry of his written sentences is a geometry of his thoughts - an array of the mirrors arranged in a way to make a message to come back to the starting point after bouncing against them for a while:
“I see not solid land but a wavering haze that conceals a certain mansion in whose dim library a young woman stares at a picture of another young woman who sits over a book that sets her wondering about some plain now lost from sight.�
Time: Is it a game?
“People here conceive of a lifetime as one more sort of plain. .. they allude constantly to a Time that converges on them or recedes from them like some familiar but formidable plain.� So observes the narrator. And he seems joining the game when a woman personage seems to be the same age with him, but at the beginning it is the daughter of his patron, then - his wife. And later, there is a granddaughter of his patron as a younger girl. It certainly adds to the impression that Time is not linear in this place.
“self defeating proposition that Time can have no agreed meaning for any two people;� all our statements about it are designed to fill up an awesome nullity in our plains…�
The sentence above would be perfect in relation to Language as well as Time. Everyone perceives time differently. But with the language is even harder: so much potential of being misunderstood using the same words. For example, what is “the plains�?
“Some men dedicated to prove that the plains are not what many plainsman take them for. They are not, that is, a vast theatre that adds significance to the events enacted within it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.�
Time=Plain=Metaphor=Language=Meaning? A chase. A post-modern elusiveness at its best for those who like such games. Is there a deeper level here? I am not sure apart from the message that it won’t be sufficient to travel on the surface with big themes.
“So I keep away nowadays from the volumes in which Time itself is made to appear as one more sort of plain. I have no wish to be seen, even by that silent woman among those lengthening vistas of provocative titles:
as a man in sight of Time, the invisible Plain,
or approaching Time, the Plain beyond reach,
or finding his way back from Time, the Pathless Plain,
or even surrounded by Time, the Boundless Plain.
I split the sentence over the lines to make it easier to see. Is it irony? Does he talk here about an abstract metaphors or he refers literally to the titles of those volumes and his physical spatial movements between the shelves of those volumes? I think the latter. And It works and it is a cool play here.
However, there is yet another profound idea in this novel about Time. It is connected to our understanding what memory is. Pablo Neruda, in , asks:
"Where is the child I was,
still inside me or gone?
Does he know that I never loved him
and that he never loved me?
Why did we spend so much time
growing up only to separate?
Why did we both not die
when my childhood died?
Those questions fascinates Murnane's narrator as well. A personage in "The Plains" believes that his younger self is somewhere our there at the same Time as he is. It is just that their plains can barely touch each other. They are still connected but through this zone that cannot be penetrated easily from both ends. It seems Murnane was fascinated all his creative life with this question expressed by Neruda so poetically. And, in his final work " he seemed to resolved it for himself more directly than in "The Plains":
I was reassured yet again of the truth of the claim that no such thing as ‘Time� exists; that we experience only place after place; that remembering, as we call it, is no sort of rediscovery or recollection but an act performed for the very first time somewhere in the endless place known as the present.
I can so much relate to this statement. Also, it has reminded me a theory about the existence of 'Episodic' and 'Diachronic' (narrative) self-experience and the article about it . Murnane seems to be an "episodic" type. But I'd better stop here for now before I digress too far.
Possibilities
A possibility vs reality (“actuality� in his language) is the heart of this book.
On the one level it is a possibility of love. Especially the phenomenon that a possibility of a romance is often more powerful than what follows. The author masterfully intervenes three love stories. And none of them actually happened. The narrator fells for the wife of his patron. He sees her often in the library but they never exchanged a word. She, in her case spent a half-life with her husband who has “never explained� himself:
“The woman might therefore have considered the chief advantage of
so many years spent among unlocked-for plains,
with a man who had still not explained himself,
to be that it has once allowed her to postulate
the existence of a woman whose future included even the unlikely prospect
of half a lifetime spent among unlocked-for plains
with a man who would never explain himself. �
Before even diving for the meaning it worthwhile looking the architecture of this sentence. I’ve spliced it into seven lines - it is easier to see this geometry of mirrors again. And the meaning - isn’t it a high price to spend a half-life with someone to imagine an unlikely possibility of such life?
The wife and the patron was the love story number one.
Also, “She would surely have read at least one of those accounts of a man and a woman who met only once and accepted that so much was promised to them by the decorous looks and words they exchanged that they should not meet again.�
That would be the second love story. I’ve recognised from my reading Murnane’s “The history of books�, that she might have read a book called by George Borrow.
And the third story - the narrator and the same woman. In her experience:
Years of disquiet is only sequel appropriate to the moment when a young woman saw as he might never appear again a man who saw as he might never appear again.�
And in his:
“When I entertained even the vaguest thoughts of the two of us as a man and wife I had to allow that even such people could not have existed without a possible world to counterbalance what was for them the actual. And in that possible world were a couple who sat silently in separate bays of a library. �
So nothing happens between them or, on the contrary everything takes place in the one of those possible worlds.
Many people will find it ironic. But I actually found it very poignant and a little sad. Without the defence of irony, one can find so many cases in one’s life when a beautiful possibility of a romance has become its opposite when realised.
That is love; but Murnane goes wider in his search. His imaginary thinkers “disregard the question whether a possibility� may seem one day to correspond to some meagre arrangements of events. They give all the attention to the possibility itself and esteem it according to its amplitude and to the length of time for which it survives just beyond reach of the haphazard disposition of sights and sounds which is called, in careless speech, actuality, and has been considered, perhaps even by a few plains men to represent the extinction of all possibilities.�
I do not know whether Murnane was familiar with quantum physics when he was writing it, but if not, his scholars have reinvented it in this passage. Nowadays everyone knows about suffering Schrödinger's cat. The animal physically exists in the world of possibilities. He might be dead and alive at the same time. That is until the point when someone observes him. At this point, he jumps into the actuality and takes one state.
But it does not need to happen in the world of our imagination. It does not need to happen in the world of a novel either.
In the , Kundera said:
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man* can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility. But� to exist means “being-in-the-world.� Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities�
Therefore, in a good novel the possibilities, even the contradictory ones, do not have to be resolved into “actuality�. They can happily exist there in the multiple dimensions of the plains. A love story that never happened but exist somewhere on the plains. A film that never was scripted or shot but exist somewhere on the plains too� And an observer, otherwise known as a reader could approach this box of a book multiple times, open the cover and, each time find a new cat in a new state.
It so happened I read Murnane’s oeuvre backwards. It so happened I would never read his books in order he has written them. I would never know whether it would feel any different that way.
This book is less abstract compared to what I got used to with him. In a way, it references more concrete Australia vs more imaginary “complementary� anti-Australia�
This book is a post-modern elegant self-referential and illusive game. In later works, he moved to more astute, less playful more austere style. In those works he has found his “plain�. “What distinguishes a man after all but the landscape where he finally found himself?� I prefer those later works. In them, I find it so fascinating how he manage to write and, at the same time to show his process of thinking and writing�
But there is a lot of wonder in the pages of this book too. Every time I read those sentences I see something different in my head. A springboard for thoughts?
Film shows in his head. He travels inside his own mind. Film shows in the reader’s head. Film shows in a window.
Echoes of other authors on these pages
with the transition from visible only to a mind towards visible to other people. “I had sometimes thought of The interior as a few scenes from much longer film that could only be seen from a vantage point that I knew nothing of.�
(In the comment below, Daniel has actually pointed out that Fosse is working on translation of exactly this book into Norwegian. It was an exciting piece of news for me as I did not know they knew of each other work. I've made a little research and it is appeared that Fosse, the younger of the two for 20 years, finds Murnane unique and indeed translates "The Plains":
"I feel that Murnane has a quite unique voice and way of seeing. I’ve never read anything like “The Plains,� but it resembles my writing—this sense of distance and closeness. We are writing in different ways, but I can tell that there’s a similar way of seeing that’s behind it."
The quote is from .)
with the libraries and books in libraries containing everything about any possible book; the first part of “The Plains� is a piece of non-fiction about a fictional country imagined for this.
, the writer who takes “private labyrinths of Time as the settings for their � works.�
Architecture
Geometry of his written sentences is a geometry of his thoughts - an array of the mirrors arranged in a way to make a message to come back to the starting point after bouncing against them for a while:
“I see not solid land but a wavering haze that conceals a certain mansion in whose dim library a young woman stares at a picture of another young woman who sits over a book that sets her wondering about some plain now lost from sight.�
Time: Is it a game?
“People here conceive of a lifetime as one more sort of plain. .. they allude constantly to a Time that converges on them or recedes from them like some familiar but formidable plain.� So observes the narrator. And he seems joining the game when a woman personage seems to be the same age with him, but at the beginning it is the daughter of his patron, then - his wife. And later, there is a granddaughter of his patron as a younger girl. It certainly adds to the impression that Time is not linear in this place.
“self defeating proposition that Time can have no agreed meaning for any two people;� all our statements about it are designed to fill up an awesome nullity in our plains…�
The sentence above would be perfect in relation to Language as well as Time. Everyone perceives time differently. But with the language is even harder: so much potential of being misunderstood using the same words. For example, what is “the plains�?
“Some men dedicated to prove that the plains are not what many plainsman take them for. They are not, that is, a vast theatre that adds significance to the events enacted within it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.�
Time=Plain=Metaphor=Language=Meaning? A chase. A post-modern elusiveness at its best for those who like such games. Is there a deeper level here? I am not sure apart from the message that it won’t be sufficient to travel on the surface with big themes.
“So I keep away nowadays from the volumes in which Time itself is made to appear as one more sort of plain. I have no wish to be seen, even by that silent woman among those lengthening vistas of provocative titles:
as a man in sight of Time, the invisible Plain,
or approaching Time, the Plain beyond reach,
or finding his way back from Time, the Pathless Plain,
or even surrounded by Time, the Boundless Plain.
I split the sentence over the lines to make it easier to see. Is it irony? Does he talk here about an abstract metaphors or he refers literally to the titles of those volumes and his physical spatial movements between the shelves of those volumes? I think the latter. And It works and it is a cool play here.
However, there is yet another profound idea in this novel about Time. It is connected to our understanding what memory is. Pablo Neruda, in , asks:
"Where is the child I was,
still inside me or gone?
Does he know that I never loved him
and that he never loved me?
Why did we spend so much time
growing up only to separate?
Why did we both not die
when my childhood died?
Those questions fascinates Murnane's narrator as well. A personage in "The Plains" believes that his younger self is somewhere our there at the same Time as he is. It is just that their plains can barely touch each other. They are still connected but through this zone that cannot be penetrated easily from both ends. It seems Murnane was fascinated all his creative life with this question expressed by Neruda so poetically. And, in his final work " he seemed to resolved it for himself more directly than in "The Plains":
I was reassured yet again of the truth of the claim that no such thing as ‘Time� exists; that we experience only place after place; that remembering, as we call it, is no sort of rediscovery or recollection but an act performed for the very first time somewhere in the endless place known as the present.
I can so much relate to this statement. Also, it has reminded me a theory about the existence of 'Episodic' and 'Diachronic' (narrative) self-experience and the article about it . Murnane seems to be an "episodic" type. But I'd better stop here for now before I digress too far.
Possibilities
A possibility vs reality (“actuality� in his language) is the heart of this book.
On the one level it is a possibility of love. Especially the phenomenon that a possibility of a romance is often more powerful than what follows. The author masterfully intervenes three love stories. And none of them actually happened. The narrator fells for the wife of his patron. He sees her often in the library but they never exchanged a word. She, in her case spent a half-life with her husband who has “never explained� himself:
“The woman might therefore have considered the chief advantage of
so many years spent among unlocked-for plains,
with a man who had still not explained himself,
to be that it has once allowed her to postulate
the existence of a woman whose future included even the unlikely prospect
of half a lifetime spent among unlocked-for plains
with a man who would never explain himself. �
Before even diving for the meaning it worthwhile looking the architecture of this sentence. I’ve spliced it into seven lines - it is easier to see this geometry of mirrors again. And the meaning - isn’t it a high price to spend a half-life with someone to imagine an unlikely possibility of such life?
The wife and the patron was the love story number one.
Also, “She would surely have read at least one of those accounts of a man and a woman who met only once and accepted that so much was promised to them by the decorous looks and words they exchanged that they should not meet again.�
That would be the second love story. I’ve recognised from my reading Murnane’s “The history of books�, that she might have read a book called by George Borrow.
And the third story - the narrator and the same woman. In her experience:
Years of disquiet is only sequel appropriate to the moment when a young woman saw as he might never appear again a man who saw as he might never appear again.�
And in his:
“When I entertained even the vaguest thoughts of the two of us as a man and wife I had to allow that even such people could not have existed without a possible world to counterbalance what was for them the actual. And in that possible world were a couple who sat silently in separate bays of a library. �
So nothing happens between them or, on the contrary everything takes place in the one of those possible worlds.
Many people will find it ironic. But I actually found it very poignant and a little sad. Without the defence of irony, one can find so many cases in one’s life when a beautiful possibility of a romance has become its opposite when realised.
That is love; but Murnane goes wider in his search. His imaginary thinkers “disregard the question whether a possibility� may seem one day to correspond to some meagre arrangements of events. They give all the attention to the possibility itself and esteem it according to its amplitude and to the length of time for which it survives just beyond reach of the haphazard disposition of sights and sounds which is called, in careless speech, actuality, and has been considered, perhaps even by a few plains men to represent the extinction of all possibilities.�
I do not know whether Murnane was familiar with quantum physics when he was writing it, but if not, his scholars have reinvented it in this passage. Nowadays everyone knows about suffering Schrödinger's cat. The animal physically exists in the world of possibilities. He might be dead and alive at the same time. That is until the point when someone observes him. At this point, he jumps into the actuality and takes one state.
But it does not need to happen in the world of our imagination. It does not need to happen in the world of a novel either.
In the , Kundera said:
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man* can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility. But� to exist means “being-in-the-world.� Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities�
Therefore, in a good novel the possibilities, even the contradictory ones, do not have to be resolved into “actuality�. They can happily exist there in the multiple dimensions of the plains. A love story that never happened but exist somewhere on the plains. A film that never was scripted or shot but exist somewhere on the plains too� And an observer, otherwise known as a reader could approach this box of a book multiple times, open the cover and, each time find a new cat in a new state.
July 15, 2022
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold
(I tell myself, sans humility or any trace of originality),
and many goodly states and kingdoms seen
(though most do seem to be struggling a bit at present),
Round many settled islands have I been
Which England and her rivals bought and sold.
(But that's a story for another day!)
Of an Outback Sublime had I been told
Where deep-brow'd Gerald ruled as his demesne;
(Well, he didn't travel himself much, except through stories...)
Yet never did I breathe the pure serene
Till Murnane spoke, quiet but bold
(to me just now, over the past week, I read slow)
Then I felt like...
Well, not like some "watcher of the skies, watcher of all," no, but...an eavesdropper, maybe, on some dictée taking place, in a not-quite-foreign language, in the heart of the heart of some idiosyncratic, imagined community of one?
Actually I cannot describe the experience except via more lame analogies: it's perhaps as if Cormac McCarthy's Suttree sat down to explore + translate Calvino's Invisible Cities (or something), but was limited to just one city, on the mythical, and just a wee bit abstracted "Plains" of some possible parallel inner "Australia," and when he gets there (though he never really goes anywhere and has always been there), you find he's taken you with him, and you find yourself nodding over his impossible maps and believing every single word that he dictates as you you repeat them uncomprehendingly in your head, as if understanding a blessed thing were almost beside the point...
Like some stout Cortez then?
(no, just one of his men, but still)
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Many thanks to Sean of YT TravelThroughStories fame and his recent discussion of GM for the impetus to get a book of his, and to Murnanephile Christopher Robinson for his thoughts on which to start with)...
****
Edit: Days after finishing this, novelist Gary Amdahl convinced me (on Twitter!) to read Murnane's first two books next, and a few days later discovered that he had published this essay on GM's second novel, , which was recently expanded into a new version, :
(I tell myself, sans humility or any trace of originality),
and many goodly states and kingdoms seen
(though most do seem to be struggling a bit at present),
Round many settled islands have I been
Which England and her rivals bought and sold.
(But that's a story for another day!)
Of an Outback Sublime had I been told
Where deep-brow'd Gerald ruled as his demesne;
(Well, he didn't travel himself much, except through stories...)
Yet never did I breathe the pure serene
Till Murnane spoke, quiet but bold
(to me just now, over the past week, I read slow)
Then I felt like...
Well, not like some "watcher of the skies, watcher of all," no, but...an eavesdropper, maybe, on some dictée taking place, in a not-quite-foreign language, in the heart of the heart of some idiosyncratic, imagined community of one?
Actually I cannot describe the experience except via more lame analogies: it's perhaps as if Cormac McCarthy's Suttree sat down to explore + translate Calvino's Invisible Cities (or something), but was limited to just one city, on the mythical, and just a wee bit abstracted "Plains" of some possible parallel inner "Australia," and when he gets there (though he never really goes anywhere and has always been there), you find he's taken you with him, and you find yourself nodding over his impossible maps and believing every single word that he dictates as you you repeat them uncomprehendingly in your head, as if understanding a blessed thing were almost beside the point...
Like some stout Cortez then?
(no, just one of his men, but still)
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Many thanks to Sean of YT TravelThroughStories fame and his recent discussion of GM for the impetus to get a book of his, and to Murnanephile Christopher Robinson for his thoughts on which to start with)...
****
Edit: Days after finishing this, novelist Gary Amdahl convinced me (on Twitter!) to read Murnane's first two books next, and a few days later discovered that he had published this essay on GM's second novel, , which was recently expanded into a new version, :
October 28, 2013
I have read superb reviews on this book and it is a wonderful description of life in Australia but it is not for me. Purely words I'm afraid. Perhaps it is the stage of life I'm going through at the moment in that I'm not ready for it and maybe in the future?
I've tried skim reading through the book looking for that magical literary utterance but I'm unable to find it. Sad, especially for me as I was really looking forward to reading this book.
To me, there are words and a further collection of words with no soul and without any meaning whatsoever to me.
An apology for not liking this book which I'm sure is excellent but...Well what more can I say?
I've tried skim reading through the book looking for that magical literary utterance but I'm unable to find it. Sad, especially for me as I was really looking forward to reading this book.
To me, there are words and a further collection of words with no soul and without any meaning whatsoever to me.
An apology for not liking this book which I'm sure is excellent but...Well what more can I say?
July 7, 2014
This is a hard book to write about, and that is a good thing. There are some wonderful reviews up here already and I suggest you turn to them for more of a sense of the text. I seem to be unable to do much but ramble a bit about the thinking it inspired for me, and this thinking (which is ongoing) has taken up more time than the reading itself. This is, once again, a good thing.
"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.
My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret. "
"Listening to the plainsmen, I had a bewildering sense that they wanted no common belief to fall back on: that each one of them became uncomfortable if another seemed to take as understood something he himself claimed for the plains as a whole. It was as though each plainsman chose to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain."
…I saw that what had sometimes been described as the arrogance of the plainsmen was no more than their reluctance to recognize any common ground between themselves and others…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."
These quotes from the first half of the book stimulate so many sympathetic neurons it is mildly disorientating.
Most importantly for me are the echoes of Celan and Heidegger � both in the idea of the "clearing" (Lichtung - with its suggestions of the plain-light shimmering through the emptiness � though Celan plays with the term often, and most sorrowfully with "Finsterung") and Celan's "Meridian".
"In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting... Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are."
Martin Heidegger 1971 (1935): 53
And Celan
"I am looking for all this with my imprecise, but nervous finger on a map � a child’s map, I must admit. None of these places can be found. They do not exist. But I know where they ought to exist especially now, and…I find something else."
“A poem—under what conditions!—becomes the poem of someone (ever yet) perceiving, facing phenomena, questioning and addressing those phenomena; it becomes conversation—often despairing conversation.�
I think of the complex relationship between the singular "clearing" of each Dasien, and the unitary nature of Being, despite this plurality. So too, there is one Plain and many Plains, and the one Plain both contains and is contained within the many. That this is possible is due to the haze, the lack of clarity, sharpness, precision, delineation. Of course, were two Plainsmen to sit and discuss the Plain, the details would differ, and yet there would still be that Plain-ness to which they both referred, off in the distance, heat-blurred, diffused. An Ultimate, an Eternal Plain, or so the narrator names it.
So the dispute between the two groups of Plain-theorists becomes between the individualised micro and the universal macro. With each claiming the other side to be subsumed within its own. For if we can see the world in a grain of sand we can also, of course, postulate the presence of a grain of sand within the world.
Dasien uncovers, discloses, sheds light upon, the space needed for knowing. This process is difficult for it. The way is hard, the conditions inhospitable as the Australian interior. There is sand, rock:
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
The clearing is hard to sustain. The coastal cities encroach further and further inland. Their culture is dense and overwhelming. How do we sustain ourselves here at this thinning edge?
And how does the artist scatter flickering photons into that opening space? If language is the house of Being, is it the Writer's duty to draw out, to draw forth this Being? In speaking of the Plains can we finally speak authentically?
I will be re-reading this wonderfully dense and subtle novel, and will write more when I do..
"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.
My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret. "
"Listening to the plainsmen, I had a bewildering sense that they wanted no common belief to fall back on: that each one of them became uncomfortable if another seemed to take as understood something he himself claimed for the plains as a whole. It was as though each plainsman chose to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain."
…I saw that what had sometimes been described as the arrogance of the plainsmen was no more than their reluctance to recognize any common ground between themselves and others…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."
These quotes from the first half of the book stimulate so many sympathetic neurons it is mildly disorientating.
Most importantly for me are the echoes of Celan and Heidegger � both in the idea of the "clearing" (Lichtung - with its suggestions of the plain-light shimmering through the emptiness � though Celan plays with the term often, and most sorrowfully with "Finsterung") and Celan's "Meridian".
"In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting... Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are."
Martin Heidegger 1971 (1935): 53
And Celan
"I am looking for all this with my imprecise, but nervous finger on a map � a child’s map, I must admit. None of these places can be found. They do not exist. But I know where they ought to exist especially now, and…I find something else."
“A poem—under what conditions!—becomes the poem of someone (ever yet) perceiving, facing phenomena, questioning and addressing those phenomena; it becomes conversation—often despairing conversation.�
I think of the complex relationship between the singular "clearing" of each Dasien, and the unitary nature of Being, despite this plurality. So too, there is one Plain and many Plains, and the one Plain both contains and is contained within the many. That this is possible is due to the haze, the lack of clarity, sharpness, precision, delineation. Of course, were two Plainsmen to sit and discuss the Plain, the details would differ, and yet there would still be that Plain-ness to which they both referred, off in the distance, heat-blurred, diffused. An Ultimate, an Eternal Plain, or so the narrator names it.
So the dispute between the two groups of Plain-theorists becomes between the individualised micro and the universal macro. With each claiming the other side to be subsumed within its own. For if we can see the world in a grain of sand we can also, of course, postulate the presence of a grain of sand within the world.
Dasien uncovers, discloses, sheds light upon, the space needed for knowing. This process is difficult for it. The way is hard, the conditions inhospitable as the Australian interior. There is sand, rock:
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
The clearing is hard to sustain. The coastal cities encroach further and further inland. Their culture is dense and overwhelming. How do we sustain ourselves here at this thinning edge?
And how does the artist scatter flickering photons into that opening space? If language is the house of Being, is it the Writer's duty to draw out, to draw forth this Being? In speaking of the Plains can we finally speak authentically?
I will be re-reading this wonderfully dense and subtle novel, and will write more when I do..
October 19, 2008
I started this in the mid-1980s and have finally finished it. You might think that this must be a very long book � whereas it is a very short novella. Murnane writes sentences. He writes one sentence, then he reads over that sentence to ensure it is as good as he can make it, then he writes another sentence.
Given that White Australia is a little over 200 years old it is probably not surprising that Australians aren’t terribly sure what it means to be Australian. Americans have had much the same problem. The land was their’s before they were the land’s � as one of their poets might have mentioned. Over here it is hard not to also wonder where we recent arrivals fit in. The 40 � 60,000 years of Aboriginal history simply isn’t ‘ours�. If anything that only makes us feel guilty and when people feel guilty they generally also feel resentful.
There are lots of strange facts about Australia. Firstly, we are one of the most urbanised nations in the world. Yet when I was growing up the main image of ‘Australia� we received from our education was of the Bush Man. Think Man from Snowy River, think Swagman, think man on horse with a stock whip, think MAN. Virtually none of Australia’s myths are female and the only one that is (Lawson’s Drover’s Wife) has been deconstructed to such a point that it is virtually unrecognisable.
That isn’t something that Murnane changes, it must be said. His world is also remarkably male and remarkably in-land. The fact that he moves his world back into the interior of Australia is interesting in that it is the opposite direction to the direction in which most Australian literature has moved. Think of one of those terrible corporate ads on television in which one man is walking against a tide of people in peak hour and that is Murnane. Robert Drewe sums up this motion from the bush to the sea in his work of short stories, The Body Surfers. Australians at the end of the 20th Century felt much more comfortable on the beach.
That is definitely not true of Murnane, but that does not mean that Murnane is harking back to the bush poets of the 19th Century. Murnane’s world is not at all like that of Paterson or Lawson � or even Barbara Baynton’s equally disturbing bush world. Murnane’s world is the landscape of his mind. It is a landscape that is dominated by plains. Those plain are populated by people who are obsessed with understanding what it means to be a person that spends their life on the plains. So much so that the rich men who own the large properties on the plains employ people to help them see the country as it really is. They employ specialists who paint images or better still, write stories about the plains, who write genealogies and histories of the great families, who write poetry about women only just glimpsed in the failing light of early evening. Rich men who employ film-makers, not because they expect the film-maker to ever make a film worth watching about the plains, but ‘film-makers� who will spend decades writing a film script that everyone, including the film-maker, knows he will never complete.
This is the story of that film-maker. It is about how he became involved in working for one of the plainsmen who employed him on what the plainsmen already had decided would be a pointless task. The plainsman is interesting in that he takes photographs of people and events on the planes that he also knows will never capture the true essence of the plains. In fact, this would be quite impossible, as whatever is important about the plains is not what you can see.
My mate Plato would have banned artists from his ideal republic. Murnane would do the exact opposite. It is clear that to Murnane it is the artists who are the only ones capable of letting us understand what it is to live in this land. In Murnane’s ideal republic there would be artists who spend lifetimes studying what would seem to most people incredible minutiae but which would over time provide the background materials we need to define who we are and even what we are. This is not geographical determinism � although it would be easy to construe it as such � what this is is the spiritual determinism of a landscape of the soul (for want of a better word).
I wasn’t very happy with the idea of the letter the main character doesn’t write to the wife of the house. I found all this a little too much. But I absolutely loved the idea of the main character building a model of himself so as to go down from the library and look back up so as to see what the daughter of the house would have seen as she looked up at the window the main character was looking out at her through.
This is a complex little novel. I probably preferred Tamarisk Row, but this is renowned as his major work. Many of Murnane’s obsessions are here � though that is hardly telling you anything. As a writer who believes the only writing worth reading is what is written out of obsession, what else could one expect?
And so I should end with a quote:
“Since none of these men has ever spoken or written a work to explain his preferring to live unobserved and untroubled by ambition in some modestly furnished rear suite of his unremarkable house, I can only say that I sense about each of them a quiet dedication to proving that the plains are not what many plainsmen take them for. They are not, that is, a vast theatre that adds significance to the events enacted within it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.�
And I couldn’t have summed up this book better myself.
Given that White Australia is a little over 200 years old it is probably not surprising that Australians aren’t terribly sure what it means to be Australian. Americans have had much the same problem. The land was their’s before they were the land’s � as one of their poets might have mentioned. Over here it is hard not to also wonder where we recent arrivals fit in. The 40 � 60,000 years of Aboriginal history simply isn’t ‘ours�. If anything that only makes us feel guilty and when people feel guilty they generally also feel resentful.
There are lots of strange facts about Australia. Firstly, we are one of the most urbanised nations in the world. Yet when I was growing up the main image of ‘Australia� we received from our education was of the Bush Man. Think Man from Snowy River, think Swagman, think man on horse with a stock whip, think MAN. Virtually none of Australia’s myths are female and the only one that is (Lawson’s Drover’s Wife) has been deconstructed to such a point that it is virtually unrecognisable.
That isn’t something that Murnane changes, it must be said. His world is also remarkably male and remarkably in-land. The fact that he moves his world back into the interior of Australia is interesting in that it is the opposite direction to the direction in which most Australian literature has moved. Think of one of those terrible corporate ads on television in which one man is walking against a tide of people in peak hour and that is Murnane. Robert Drewe sums up this motion from the bush to the sea in his work of short stories, The Body Surfers. Australians at the end of the 20th Century felt much more comfortable on the beach.
That is definitely not true of Murnane, but that does not mean that Murnane is harking back to the bush poets of the 19th Century. Murnane’s world is not at all like that of Paterson or Lawson � or even Barbara Baynton’s equally disturbing bush world. Murnane’s world is the landscape of his mind. It is a landscape that is dominated by plains. Those plain are populated by people who are obsessed with understanding what it means to be a person that spends their life on the plains. So much so that the rich men who own the large properties on the plains employ people to help them see the country as it really is. They employ specialists who paint images or better still, write stories about the plains, who write genealogies and histories of the great families, who write poetry about women only just glimpsed in the failing light of early evening. Rich men who employ film-makers, not because they expect the film-maker to ever make a film worth watching about the plains, but ‘film-makers� who will spend decades writing a film script that everyone, including the film-maker, knows he will never complete.
This is the story of that film-maker. It is about how he became involved in working for one of the plainsmen who employed him on what the plainsmen already had decided would be a pointless task. The plainsman is interesting in that he takes photographs of people and events on the planes that he also knows will never capture the true essence of the plains. In fact, this would be quite impossible, as whatever is important about the plains is not what you can see.
My mate Plato would have banned artists from his ideal republic. Murnane would do the exact opposite. It is clear that to Murnane it is the artists who are the only ones capable of letting us understand what it is to live in this land. In Murnane’s ideal republic there would be artists who spend lifetimes studying what would seem to most people incredible minutiae but which would over time provide the background materials we need to define who we are and even what we are. This is not geographical determinism � although it would be easy to construe it as such � what this is is the spiritual determinism of a landscape of the soul (for want of a better word).
I wasn’t very happy with the idea of the letter the main character doesn’t write to the wife of the house. I found all this a little too much. But I absolutely loved the idea of the main character building a model of himself so as to go down from the library and look back up so as to see what the daughter of the house would have seen as she looked up at the window the main character was looking out at her through.
This is a complex little novel. I probably preferred Tamarisk Row, but this is renowned as his major work. Many of Murnane’s obsessions are here � though that is hardly telling you anything. As a writer who believes the only writing worth reading is what is written out of obsession, what else could one expect?
And so I should end with a quote:
“Since none of these men has ever spoken or written a work to explain his preferring to live unobserved and untroubled by ambition in some modestly furnished rear suite of his unremarkable house, I can only say that I sense about each of them a quiet dedication to proving that the plains are not what many plainsmen take them for. They are not, that is, a vast theatre that adds significance to the events enacted within it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.�
And I couldn’t have summed up this book better myself.
January 21, 2023
WE ARE ALL PLAINSMEN
It felt as if Gerard Murnane had a lot of fascinating things to communicate to me, truly profound thoughts and observations, but for some reason, he decided to swaddle them tightly with swirling bandages of sentences without end. My mission was to unwrap these truths. From time to time, I got entangled and it was suffocating.
On the surface, The Plains (1982) is an unusual and creative attempt at a narrative of exploration, as the author puts it, and at alternative history, maybe even alternative geography. It is a cross between a fictional travel memoir and a metaphorical philosophical parable with the central symbol of the plains which can be interpreted in many ways. Gerard Murnane gives us some hints:
We’re all plainsmen, always claiming that everything in sight is a landmark of something beyond it. But do we know what our own bodies are leading us towards?
…]
I want to venture into the plain that even she is not sure of—the places she dreams of in the landscape after her own heart.
…]
I suspect that every man may be travelling towards the heart of some remote private plain.
…]
People here conceive of a lifetime as one more sort of plain.
…]
Time itself is made to appear as one more sort of plain.
Gerard Murnane encourages us to decipher this symbol on our own: the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret.
The message of this book is not optimistic. There is a dichotomy: the world of plains is juxtaposed with darkness, mentioned ten times in the novel. It is another important symbol: ‘The Great Darkness. Isn’t that where all our plains lie? In the last sentence of the novel, the narrator mentions darkness, calling it the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself. A propos, my reading of The Plains was like moving clumsily in the murk, groping the words blindly, anxiously trying to make sense, looking for answers and eventually accepting the fact that definite ones do not exist.
There were some other symbolic images, like for example unforgettable quails and bustards, whose recurring appearances gave the story an addictive rhythm. I do not feel enthusiastic about the way Gerard Murnane portrayed women. The female characters are scarce and their role is ornamental. I do not think any woman spoke a word in this novel. They just look beautiful and wander around. When Murnane characterizes any female character, there is always an assessment of her beauty and/or age. They are pretty and young by default, always depicted in relation to males � their unnamed wives and daughters.
Undoubtfully, The Plains is one of the most extraordinary and original books I have ever read. If I had to describe the taste of my literary associations, it would be a bizarre combination: Calvino (especially Invisible Cities) mixed with Conrad. Shaken, not stirred. I am extremely grateful to Fionnuala for her inspiring and stunning reviews of Gerard Murnane’s books which made me reach for this novel. It was an incomparable reading experience. At times I felt delighted, at times exasperated, at times puzzled. Never indifferent.
I confirm that this author's writing style demands absolute concentration and determination to grasp the meaning of his meandering sentences. If you let your thoughts ebb away from this novel, even for a few seconds, you are sure to lose your way in The Plains at once and do not count on the narrator to lead you back to the trail then. You will be left to your own resources. When I started reading this book, I immediately thought ‘swim or sink�. I guess one of the reasons I did not drown was Murnane’s acrid sense of humour.
I did not get the impression that Murnane was getting intoxicated with his own words or that his eloquence was for show. Not even once. The beauty of some passages took my breath away but at the same time, some were much too dense and hermetic for my liking. When I think of The Plains, I see a never-ending parade of words, marching proudly before my eyes, and myself, observing them closely with anxiety, desperately trying not to miss anything.
Plain, Theodore Rousseau.
It felt as if Gerard Murnane had a lot of fascinating things to communicate to me, truly profound thoughts and observations, but for some reason, he decided to swaddle them tightly with swirling bandages of sentences without end. My mission was to unwrap these truths. From time to time, I got entangled and it was suffocating.
On the surface, The Plains (1982) is an unusual and creative attempt at a narrative of exploration, as the author puts it, and at alternative history, maybe even alternative geography. It is a cross between a fictional travel memoir and a metaphorical philosophical parable with the central symbol of the plains which can be interpreted in many ways. Gerard Murnane gives us some hints:
We’re all plainsmen, always claiming that everything in sight is a landmark of something beyond it. But do we know what our own bodies are leading us towards?
…]
I want to venture into the plain that even she is not sure of—the places she dreams of in the landscape after her own heart.
…]
I suspect that every man may be travelling towards the heart of some remote private plain.
…]
People here conceive of a lifetime as one more sort of plain.
…]
Time itself is made to appear as one more sort of plain.
Gerard Murnane encourages us to decipher this symbol on our own: the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret.
The message of this book is not optimistic. There is a dichotomy: the world of plains is juxtaposed with darkness, mentioned ten times in the novel. It is another important symbol: ‘The Great Darkness. Isn’t that where all our plains lie? In the last sentence of the novel, the narrator mentions darkness, calling it the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself. A propos, my reading of The Plains was like moving clumsily in the murk, groping the words blindly, anxiously trying to make sense, looking for answers and eventually accepting the fact that definite ones do not exist.
There were some other symbolic images, like for example unforgettable quails and bustards, whose recurring appearances gave the story an addictive rhythm. I do not feel enthusiastic about the way Gerard Murnane portrayed women. The female characters are scarce and their role is ornamental. I do not think any woman spoke a word in this novel. They just look beautiful and wander around. When Murnane characterizes any female character, there is always an assessment of her beauty and/or age. They are pretty and young by default, always depicted in relation to males � their unnamed wives and daughters.
Undoubtfully, The Plains is one of the most extraordinary and original books I have ever read. If I had to describe the taste of my literary associations, it would be a bizarre combination: Calvino (especially Invisible Cities) mixed with Conrad. Shaken, not stirred. I am extremely grateful to Fionnuala for her inspiring and stunning reviews of Gerard Murnane’s books which made me reach for this novel. It was an incomparable reading experience. At times I felt delighted, at times exasperated, at times puzzled. Never indifferent.
I confirm that this author's writing style demands absolute concentration and determination to grasp the meaning of his meandering sentences. If you let your thoughts ebb away from this novel, even for a few seconds, you are sure to lose your way in The Plains at once and do not count on the narrator to lead you back to the trail then. You will be left to your own resources. When I started reading this book, I immediately thought ‘swim or sink�. I guess one of the reasons I did not drown was Murnane’s acrid sense of humour.
I did not get the impression that Murnane was getting intoxicated with his own words or that his eloquence was for show. Not even once. The beauty of some passages took my breath away but at the same time, some were much too dense and hermetic for my liking. When I think of The Plains, I see a never-ending parade of words, marching proudly before my eyes, and myself, observing them closely with anxiety, desperately trying not to miss anything.
Plain, Theodore Rousseau.
October 29, 2024
A young artist arrives on the plains to produce a film describing the region.
“I'm trying to piece together a plain where nothing exists but what artists claim to have seen. And when I've fitted those landscapes together into one great painted plain, then I'll step outside one morning and begin to look for a new country. I'll go in search of the places that lay just beyond the painted horizons; the places that the artists knew they were only able to hint at.�
He finds that the landowners have their own understanding of the plains, often differing from one another.
“Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes-one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily.�
He has acquired a patron and starts giving lectures on his observations, having been unsuccessful in completing his film.
“They supposed that their tinted papers (photographs) showed something of what a man saw apart from himself- something they called the visible world. But they had never considered where that world must lie�.that all the while the great tide of daylight was ebbing away from all they looked at and pouring through the holes in their faces into a profound darkness? If the visible world was anywhere, it was somewhere in that darkness� an island lapped by the boundless ocean of the invisible.�
The novel ends with the man, now much older, turning the camera around and placing the len up to his own eye. The possibilities of the plains and human imagination, even consciousness itself, remain endless and unquantifiable.
“…I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.�
In the novel, a husband views the plains outside his house from one room and the wife from another. Gazing out the windows for hours and for many days, neither can form the words to describe what they are feeling, what the plains mean to them. Because, at times, our very language fails us.
In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the first point states that the world was made up of the totality of facts. After this philosophical breakthrough, Wittgenstein meets with his teacher and fellow philosopher, Bertrand Russell, to discuss the Tractatus. Confused, Russell draws three dots on a page and asks Wittgenstein if now three dots exist in the world. To which Wittgenstein replies back that three dots on the page held before his eyes exist at this point in time. Reality and our experience of reality are hard to quantify.
From Last Letter to a Reader by Gerald Murnane-
“I wanted the book to be called Landscape with Darkness and Mirage. The publishers wanted The Plains, and I eventually gave way, which is something I still sometimes regret.�
“I'm trying to piece together a plain where nothing exists but what artists claim to have seen. And when I've fitted those landscapes together into one great painted plain, then I'll step outside one morning and begin to look for a new country. I'll go in search of the places that lay just beyond the painted horizons; the places that the artists knew they were only able to hint at.�
He finds that the landowners have their own understanding of the plains, often differing from one another.
“Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes-one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily.�
He has acquired a patron and starts giving lectures on his observations, having been unsuccessful in completing his film.
“They supposed that their tinted papers (photographs) showed something of what a man saw apart from himself- something they called the visible world. But they had never considered where that world must lie�.that all the while the great tide of daylight was ebbing away from all they looked at and pouring through the holes in their faces into a profound darkness? If the visible world was anywhere, it was somewhere in that darkness� an island lapped by the boundless ocean of the invisible.�
The novel ends with the man, now much older, turning the camera around and placing the len up to his own eye. The possibilities of the plains and human imagination, even consciousness itself, remain endless and unquantifiable.
“…I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.�
In the novel, a husband views the plains outside his house from one room and the wife from another. Gazing out the windows for hours and for many days, neither can form the words to describe what they are feeling, what the plains mean to them. Because, at times, our very language fails us.
In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the first point states that the world was made up of the totality of facts. After this philosophical breakthrough, Wittgenstein meets with his teacher and fellow philosopher, Bertrand Russell, to discuss the Tractatus. Confused, Russell draws three dots on a page and asks Wittgenstein if now three dots exist in the world. To which Wittgenstein replies back that three dots on the page held before his eyes exist at this point in time. Reality and our experience of reality are hard to quantify.
From Last Letter to a Reader by Gerald Murnane-
“I wanted the book to be called Landscape with Darkness and Mirage. The publishers wanted The Plains, and I eventually gave way, which is something I still sometimes regret.�
December 3, 2016
Formal Review
My more formal review of this novel is here:
/review/show...
Overview
The purpose of these notes and comments (and they are really nothing more than that) is to help build a picture of the intellectual, cultural and political context and subtext of this unique and uniquely Australian novel, so that readers not familiar with the landscape or culture of Australia can get some additional insight into the novel.
Despite or regardless of its Australian origins, the novel transcends national boundaries.
Hopefully, a discussion of the following issues will help unlock the merits of the novel beyond the beauty of its writing.
Location
The narrator refers to the remote central districts (presumably of Victoria). (4)
The only coastal city mentioned is Melbourne.
The Individualism of the Narrator and the Plainsmen
The narrator develops a belief that only he can interpret the plains:
"I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret. (3)"
This individualism seems to be something he developed from proximity to the plainsmen.
They don't value a common belief. They are not trying to create an agreed tradition:
"Listening to the plainsmen, I had a bewildering sense that they wanted no common belief to fall back on: that each of them became uncomfortable if another seemed to take as understood something he himself claimed for the plains as a whole. It was as though each plainsman chose to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain. And even when a man spoke of his particular plain, he seemed to choose his words as though the simplest of them came from no common stock but took its meaning from the speaker’s peculiar usage of it. (9)"
This individualism is reflected in their use of language. There is a sense in which even the words, the signifiers, are individual, rather than social. Needless to say, the signified is peculiar to the individual plainsman.
The plainsmen are not collectivists. The community of tastes and values is seen as a virus that can be contagious to the individual:
"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 cultures. A plainsman…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. (9)"
The individualism of the plainsmen seems to be opposed to the tradition of mateship and egalitarianism in Outer Australia.
The Plainsmen
The narrator meets up with a group of plainsmen in the bar of the hotel where he is staying.
They are townsfolk. They are different from the Landowners.
Unlike the townsfolk in the coastal cities, they are all referred to as "intellectuals and custodians of the history and lore of the district."
Two Intellectual Movements
Historically, at first, there were two intellectual movements among the plainsmen:
* the Horizonites (15); and
* the Haremen (15).
These groups emerged out of a "cautiously expressed manifesto signed by an obscure group of poets and painters". (27)
This could be an allusion to the role the Surrealist Manifesto played in the early stages of Modernism.
Horizonites
The Horizonites are identified in terms of a more metaphysical approach to culture:
"They may well have intended no more than to provoke the intellectuals of the plains to define in metaphysical terms what had previously been expressed in emotional or sentimental language. (28)"
They are less concerned with actuality. Their art contains:
"…few renderings of actual places on the plains (29)
"What moved them more than wide grasslands and huge skies was the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the distance. (29)"
"Talked of the blue-green haze as though it was itself a land � a plain of the future, perhaps, where one might live a life that existed only in potentiality on the plains where poets and painters could do no more than write or paint. (29)"
Their pivotal art work is the poem, “The Horizon, After All� (27).
There could be some allusion to the use of the concept of the "horizon" by Husserl.
Their colour is Blue-green.
Their political party is the Progressive Mercantile Party (which aims to "establish new industries and build railway lines between the plains and capital cities".) (36)
It is possible that this party might be based on the Australian conservative coalition. However, this could be overly simplistic, especially because the Haremen political party does not equate obviously with the left-wing Australian Labor party.
The Horizonites consider themselves to be men of action (35)
They think of themselves as "true plainsmen, ready to push back the limits of pasturage into regions too long neglected." (35)
Their polo team is the Outer Plains (sea-green uniform).
Haremen
The Haremen are named after a marsupial plains-hare:
It is noted for its stubborn foolishness (31):
"It was obliged to cling for safety to its barren surroundings; to persist in seeing the shallow grass of the plains as a fortress against intruders.� (32)
The Haremen "wanted the people of the plains to see their landscape with other eyes; to recover the promise, the mystery even, of the plains as they might have appeared to someone with no other refuge." (32)
Their pivotal art work is Decline and Fall of the Empire of Grass. (30)
Their colour is weathered gold or yellow (32)
Their political party is the Plains First League (“Buy Local Goods�). (36)
The Haremen insisted that "they were the practical ones, contrasted their own realistic plans for closer settlement with their opponents� grand plans for populating a desert." (35)
This party does not seem to relate to the traditional Australian left. Instead, it seems to anticipate more conservative, nationalistic Australia First-type parties.
There even seems to be a suggestion of a White Australia policy, which was embraced by the Australian Labor Party in its early stages.
Their polo team is the Central Plains (yellow uniform).
Third Intellectual Movement
Later, a third unnamed movement starts. It is described as a "new absurdity".
However, its tenets are not identified in any detail.
This movement ironically unites the other two in opposition:
"They discredited it finally on the simple grounds that it was derived from ideas current in Outer Australia. (33)"
It sounds existentialist.
Overview of Three Intellectual Movements
The three intellectual, cultural and artistic movements can possibly be differentiated on the following basis:
* Metaphysical/idealist vs
* Naturalist/Realist vs
* Existentialist.
These are very approximate summations of the movements, and could well be totally inaccurate.
However, they might start a discussion of the substance of Murnane's writing on these issues.
I also feel that these concerns place him within a Modernist tradition, rather than a Post-Modernist tradition, even if he explores metafictional concerns.
Secret Societies
After the decline of these intellectual and political movements, two secret societies formed.
Murnane doesn't give much detail about these societies, other than to say that they engaged in brawls.
It's not clear whether or how they were aligned with the above movements. It's possible that they crossed boundaries.
Brotherhood of the Endless Plain
This society elaborated a scheme for "transforming Australia into a Union of States whose seat of government was far inland and whose culture welled up from its plains and spiraled outwards."
The Union would incorporate Outer Australia.
This is closer to the type of federalism that Outer Australia did embrace.
League of Heartlanders:
This society proposed a separate Republic of the Plains.
The Republic would exclude Outer Australia. Thus, the continent of Australia would be split into different nations.
Landowners
The great landowners "kept aloof from politics."
They come across as powerful mandarins to whom the other plainsmen kowtow.
They engage the townsfolk to provide cultural services to their families.
The processes by which they select plainsmen to provide these services resemble the grants process adopted by the Australia Council (formerly the Arts Council).
While the process must ultimately be subjective, a whole bureaucracy surrounds the administration of the financial support.
A Post-Structuralist Diversion
Many artists would argue that decisions of the Australia Council are not solely made on merit. As far as I am aware, it took Murnane many years of unsuccessful applications before he received any funding.
He did however receive an Australia Council emeritus award in 2008. The other recipient that year was:
The Chair of the Australia Council’s Literature Board at the time was Dr Imre Salusinszky, who wrote a critical study of Murnane in 1993:
The monograph was based on interviews Salusinzski conducted at the University of Newcastle:
This news item mentions a Film Australia documentary called "Words and Silk", which was made by Philip Tyndall:
Salusinzski has been described, perhaps unfairly, as "an ultra-Right political columnist for the Australian".
He was an editorial adviser to "Quadrant", a conservative literary and cultural journal similar to "Encounter" (some might recall the allegations that the funding it received from the Congress for Cultural Freedom was sourced from the C.I.A.).
He has been a lecturer at Yale University, I gather, while on a Fulbright Scholarship. He is keenly interested in the Canadian critic Northrop Frye and the French philosopher/critic Jacques Derrida, and has written about "Yale School" Post-Structuralism, which is reflected in many of the interviews found in this text:
Salusinzski was born in Hungary. This might explain Murnane's decision to learn Hungarian late in life.
Murnane has quoted the title of an essay by Derrida in one of his own essays. However, I suspect that he doesn't have much time for Derrida, and might have first learned about him from reading the Times Literary Supplement, rather than from Salusinzki.
Despite the fact that Salusinzki has played a large role in promoting Murnane, I am not sure whether Murnane endorses everything Salusinzski says about his work. I have a fleeting recollection that I might have read that the two had fallen out.
For an example of the Culture Wars that occur in Australia (mentioned in my other review), see the transcript of the debate between Peter Craven and Ken Gelder below (note the centrality of Gerald Murnane):
Ken Gelder wrote a monograph on David Ireland, who I would juxtapose against Gerald Murnane as an explorer of the Australian psyche, although not to the exclusion of either.
Peter Craven is a prominent Australian literary critic. He co-founded the literary magazine, "Scripsi", with Michael Heyward, who is the publisher at Text Publishing, which has re-printed works by both Murnane and Ireland under its "Text Classics" imprint.
Heyward also published a book on the "Angry Penguins Hoax", which is the basis of Peter Carey's "My Life as a Fake".
The Temperament of the Plainsmen
The narrator identifies a "basic polarity in the temperament of the plainsman: anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes � one continually visible but never accessible, and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily." (45)
The Seven Landowners
The first dialogue in the novel appears at pages 61 to 75. It consists of snippets of conversation or speeches by seven Landowners. There is a continuity to their views on the subject matter. However, it might also be possible that each Landowner has discrete views. I didn’t really pursue an attempt to determine these views after re-reading the dialogue a few times.
One issue is the complexion, pallor or colour of the skin of the plainsmen, especially their ideal woman including their wives and daughters. They place great value on white skin and delicate golden tans.
The complexion of the women is preserved by the use of silk blouses and parasols, which provide a screen between the real world and the object of a male’s love.
This practice is recorded in a 200 stanza poem called ”A Parasol at Noon�. Ironically, the poem captures ”the posture of men forever looking into the distance.� Like their vision of the plains, the features of the object are never quite distinguished. It remains an unreachable ideal.
Another goal of the plainsmen is the exploration of the plains and what lies beyond.
The seventh Landowner remarks, ”a man can know his place and yet never try to reach it.�
Ironically, despite the narrator’s own journey of exploration, he takes up a role with this Landowner.
Words and Film
The narrator’s film [“The Interior”] will be ”the story of this man’s search for the one land that might have lain beyond or within all that he had ever seen…the Eternal Plain…What distinguished a man after all but the landscape where he finally found himself?�
For Murnane, the quest of the artist, like that of any man, is to find himself: ”Every man may be travelling towards the heart of some remote private plain.�
For the narrator, his film will be ”concerned with memories and visions and dreams, …and the last sequence of ‘The Interior� would bring to light the strangest and most enduring of my dreams.�
The novel is necessarily made of words. However, the narrator’s task is to make a film.
Ironically, the plainsmen have ”a scant interest in films and…claim that a camera merely multiplied the least significant qualities of the plains � their colour and shape as they appeared to the eye.�
What matters to them is the narrator’s words, ”a form of writing…which came near to defining what was indefinable about the plains.�
They are interested in what lies beyond the light of the plains, which happens to be darkness.
Ultimately, Murnane believes that man must be the source of his own light. What lies beyond man’s own light is darkness.
The Australian Cultural Cringe
For a long time, Australia had a cultural cringe, an inferiority complex about its own intellectual and cultural status. Indeed, it’s arguable that we still have one.
In the 60’s, many writers and artists left the country to seek inspiration and recognition overseas. Examples of such expatriates are Germaine Greer, Clive James, Robert Hughes and Richard Neville.
Politically, this was a conservative period. Many people on the Left would argue that, only when the Whitlam Labor Government was elected in 1972, was there a cultural resurgence and a greater self-confidence in our creativity.
It meant a lot to Australia that Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, even if many of the Left hadn’t read or liked his novels up to that point.
Not only did we consume more local talent domestically, but we exported it as well. However, equally importantly, with greater self-confidence, we opened up to new ideas from outside.
We had always fed off British and American culture. However, we were now more open to European culture, including Continental Philosophy, which contributed to the radicalization of University Arts Faculties.
The Role of Gerald Murnane
Gerald Murnane, who has recently been considered a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize, stands adjacent to, but not wholly within, this recent tradition.
He has consciously never travelled outside Australia, even though he has read widely and recently learned Hungarian in order to read that country’s literature.
Still, he has played a major role in addressing the cultural cringe, at least at a personal level.
Apart from his teaching roles, I would argue that he pursues his goals individualistically and idiosyncratically.
In ”The Plains�, he journeyed into Inner Australia, not just to find what was there, but to turn his back on what was in Outer Australia, i.e., the urbanations on the coastal fringe.
By heading towards the centre, I suspect he was better able to see and understand Outer Australia in his rear vision mirror.
I don’t think he feels much in common with the Australian culture he is witness to.
This is not necessarily to denigrate him or Australian culture.
I would say he has to be one of the most self-contained writers and artists anywhere on the planet.
It doesn’t matter that he looks beyond the horizon and sees darkness.
The important thing for him and for us, is that he looks within and finds light, and he harnesses that light, so that those of us, particularly Australians, who are willing might be enlightened.
Strange Bedfellows
For as long as Murnane continues to write, I’m confident that he will build on the personal vision he has constructed.
To the extent that this brings him success, it’s possible that many academics in Australia will jump on his bandwagon.
In my other review, I’ve argued that there is an element of hoax in the novel.
If I’m wrong in this opinion, it is at least a declaration of independence from those who would claim him as their own (e.g., post-structuralism and post-modernism).
This isn’t meant to detract from the uniqueness and distinction of his writing.
I think that in this novel he is playing a game with his audience in the same way that Nabokov played with his readership.
For all of his earnestness, I suspect that this solitary man, Gerald Murnane, is also a Great Australian Ratbag. I admire all of these qualities in him.
SOUNDTRACK:
Neil Diamond - "Solitary Man"
Johnny Cash - "Solitary Man"
My more formal review of this novel is here:
/review/show...
Overview
The purpose of these notes and comments (and they are really nothing more than that) is to help build a picture of the intellectual, cultural and political context and subtext of this unique and uniquely Australian novel, so that readers not familiar with the landscape or culture of Australia can get some additional insight into the novel.
Despite or regardless of its Australian origins, the novel transcends national boundaries.
Hopefully, a discussion of the following issues will help unlock the merits of the novel beyond the beauty of its writing.
Location
The narrator refers to the remote central districts (presumably of Victoria). (4)
The only coastal city mentioned is Melbourne.
The Individualism of the Narrator and the Plainsmen
The narrator develops a belief that only he can interpret the plains:
"I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret. (3)"
This individualism seems to be something he developed from proximity to the plainsmen.
They don't value a common belief. They are not trying to create an agreed tradition:
"Listening to the plainsmen, I had a bewildering sense that they wanted no common belief to fall back on: that each of them became uncomfortable if another seemed to take as understood something he himself claimed for the plains as a whole. It was as though each plainsman chose to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain. And even when a man spoke of his particular plain, he seemed to choose his words as though the simplest of them came from no common stock but took its meaning from the speaker’s peculiar usage of it. (9)"
This individualism is reflected in their use of language. There is a sense in which even the words, the signifiers, are individual, rather than social. Needless to say, the signified is peculiar to the individual plainsman.
The plainsmen are not collectivists. The community of tastes and values is seen as a virus that can be contagious to the individual:
"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 cultures. A plainsman…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. (9)"
The individualism of the plainsmen seems to be opposed to the tradition of mateship and egalitarianism in Outer Australia.
The Plainsmen
The narrator meets up with a group of plainsmen in the bar of the hotel where he is staying.
They are townsfolk. They are different from the Landowners.
Unlike the townsfolk in the coastal cities, they are all referred to as "intellectuals and custodians of the history and lore of the district."
Two Intellectual Movements
Historically, at first, there were two intellectual movements among the plainsmen:
* the Horizonites (15); and
* the Haremen (15).
These groups emerged out of a "cautiously expressed manifesto signed by an obscure group of poets and painters". (27)
This could be an allusion to the role the Surrealist Manifesto played in the early stages of Modernism.
Horizonites
The Horizonites are identified in terms of a more metaphysical approach to culture:
"They may well have intended no more than to provoke the intellectuals of the plains to define in metaphysical terms what had previously been expressed in emotional or sentimental language. (28)"
They are less concerned with actuality. Their art contains:
"…few renderings of actual places on the plains (29)
"What moved them more than wide grasslands and huge skies was the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the distance. (29)"
"Talked of the blue-green haze as though it was itself a land � a plain of the future, perhaps, where one might live a life that existed only in potentiality on the plains where poets and painters could do no more than write or paint. (29)"
Their pivotal art work is the poem, “The Horizon, After All� (27).
There could be some allusion to the use of the concept of the "horizon" by Husserl.
Their colour is Blue-green.
Their political party is the Progressive Mercantile Party (which aims to "establish new industries and build railway lines between the plains and capital cities".) (36)
It is possible that this party might be based on the Australian conservative coalition. However, this could be overly simplistic, especially because the Haremen political party does not equate obviously with the left-wing Australian Labor party.
The Horizonites consider themselves to be men of action (35)
They think of themselves as "true plainsmen, ready to push back the limits of pasturage into regions too long neglected." (35)
Their polo team is the Outer Plains (sea-green uniform).
Haremen
The Haremen are named after a marsupial plains-hare:
It is noted for its stubborn foolishness (31):
"It was obliged to cling for safety to its barren surroundings; to persist in seeing the shallow grass of the plains as a fortress against intruders.� (32)
The Haremen "wanted the people of the plains to see their landscape with other eyes; to recover the promise, the mystery even, of the plains as they might have appeared to someone with no other refuge." (32)
Their pivotal art work is Decline and Fall of the Empire of Grass. (30)
Their colour is weathered gold or yellow (32)
Their political party is the Plains First League (“Buy Local Goods�). (36)
The Haremen insisted that "they were the practical ones, contrasted their own realistic plans for closer settlement with their opponents� grand plans for populating a desert." (35)
This party does not seem to relate to the traditional Australian left. Instead, it seems to anticipate more conservative, nationalistic Australia First-type parties.
There even seems to be a suggestion of a White Australia policy, which was embraced by the Australian Labor Party in its early stages.
Their polo team is the Central Plains (yellow uniform).
Third Intellectual Movement
Later, a third unnamed movement starts. It is described as a "new absurdity".
However, its tenets are not identified in any detail.
This movement ironically unites the other two in opposition:
"They discredited it finally on the simple grounds that it was derived from ideas current in Outer Australia. (33)"
It sounds existentialist.
Overview of Three Intellectual Movements
The three intellectual, cultural and artistic movements can possibly be differentiated on the following basis:
* Metaphysical/idealist vs
* Naturalist/Realist vs
* Existentialist.
These are very approximate summations of the movements, and could well be totally inaccurate.
However, they might start a discussion of the substance of Murnane's writing on these issues.
I also feel that these concerns place him within a Modernist tradition, rather than a Post-Modernist tradition, even if he explores metafictional concerns.
Secret Societies
After the decline of these intellectual and political movements, two secret societies formed.
Murnane doesn't give much detail about these societies, other than to say that they engaged in brawls.
It's not clear whether or how they were aligned with the above movements. It's possible that they crossed boundaries.
Brotherhood of the Endless Plain
This society elaborated a scheme for "transforming Australia into a Union of States whose seat of government was far inland and whose culture welled up from its plains and spiraled outwards."
The Union would incorporate Outer Australia.
This is closer to the type of federalism that Outer Australia did embrace.
League of Heartlanders:
This society proposed a separate Republic of the Plains.
The Republic would exclude Outer Australia. Thus, the continent of Australia would be split into different nations.
Landowners
The great landowners "kept aloof from politics."
They come across as powerful mandarins to whom the other plainsmen kowtow.
They engage the townsfolk to provide cultural services to their families.
The processes by which they select plainsmen to provide these services resemble the grants process adopted by the Australia Council (formerly the Arts Council).
While the process must ultimately be subjective, a whole bureaucracy surrounds the administration of the financial support.
A Post-Structuralist Diversion
Many artists would argue that decisions of the Australia Council are not solely made on merit. As far as I am aware, it took Murnane many years of unsuccessful applications before he received any funding.
He did however receive an Australia Council emeritus award in 2008. The other recipient that year was:
The Chair of the Australia Council’s Literature Board at the time was Dr Imre Salusinszky, who wrote a critical study of Murnane in 1993:
The monograph was based on interviews Salusinzski conducted at the University of Newcastle:
This news item mentions a Film Australia documentary called "Words and Silk", which was made by Philip Tyndall:
Salusinzski has been described, perhaps unfairly, as "an ultra-Right political columnist for the Australian".
He was an editorial adviser to "Quadrant", a conservative literary and cultural journal similar to "Encounter" (some might recall the allegations that the funding it received from the Congress for Cultural Freedom was sourced from the C.I.A.).
He has been a lecturer at Yale University, I gather, while on a Fulbright Scholarship. He is keenly interested in the Canadian critic Northrop Frye and the French philosopher/critic Jacques Derrida, and has written about "Yale School" Post-Structuralism, which is reflected in many of the interviews found in this text:
Salusinzski was born in Hungary. This might explain Murnane's decision to learn Hungarian late in life.
Murnane has quoted the title of an essay by Derrida in one of his own essays. However, I suspect that he doesn't have much time for Derrida, and might have first learned about him from reading the Times Literary Supplement, rather than from Salusinzki.
Despite the fact that Salusinzki has played a large role in promoting Murnane, I am not sure whether Murnane endorses everything Salusinzski says about his work. I have a fleeting recollection that I might have read that the two had fallen out.
For an example of the Culture Wars that occur in Australia (mentioned in my other review), see the transcript of the debate between Peter Craven and Ken Gelder below (note the centrality of Gerald Murnane):
Ken Gelder wrote a monograph on David Ireland, who I would juxtapose against Gerald Murnane as an explorer of the Australian psyche, although not to the exclusion of either.
Peter Craven is a prominent Australian literary critic. He co-founded the literary magazine, "Scripsi", with Michael Heyward, who is the publisher at Text Publishing, which has re-printed works by both Murnane and Ireland under its "Text Classics" imprint.
Heyward also published a book on the "Angry Penguins Hoax", which is the basis of Peter Carey's "My Life as a Fake".
The Temperament of the Plainsmen
The narrator identifies a "basic polarity in the temperament of the plainsman: anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes � one continually visible but never accessible, and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily." (45)
The Seven Landowners
The first dialogue in the novel appears at pages 61 to 75. It consists of snippets of conversation or speeches by seven Landowners. There is a continuity to their views on the subject matter. However, it might also be possible that each Landowner has discrete views. I didn’t really pursue an attempt to determine these views after re-reading the dialogue a few times.
One issue is the complexion, pallor or colour of the skin of the plainsmen, especially their ideal woman including their wives and daughters. They place great value on white skin and delicate golden tans.
The complexion of the women is preserved by the use of silk blouses and parasols, which provide a screen between the real world and the object of a male’s love.
This practice is recorded in a 200 stanza poem called ”A Parasol at Noon�. Ironically, the poem captures ”the posture of men forever looking into the distance.� Like their vision of the plains, the features of the object are never quite distinguished. It remains an unreachable ideal.
Another goal of the plainsmen is the exploration of the plains and what lies beyond.
The seventh Landowner remarks, ”a man can know his place and yet never try to reach it.�
Ironically, despite the narrator’s own journey of exploration, he takes up a role with this Landowner.
Words and Film
The narrator’s film [“The Interior”] will be ”the story of this man’s search for the one land that might have lain beyond or within all that he had ever seen…the Eternal Plain…What distinguished a man after all but the landscape where he finally found himself?�
For Murnane, the quest of the artist, like that of any man, is to find himself: ”Every man may be travelling towards the heart of some remote private plain.�
For the narrator, his film will be ”concerned with memories and visions and dreams, …and the last sequence of ‘The Interior� would bring to light the strangest and most enduring of my dreams.�
The novel is necessarily made of words. However, the narrator’s task is to make a film.
Ironically, the plainsmen have ”a scant interest in films and…claim that a camera merely multiplied the least significant qualities of the plains � their colour and shape as they appeared to the eye.�
What matters to them is the narrator’s words, ”a form of writing…which came near to defining what was indefinable about the plains.�
They are interested in what lies beyond the light of the plains, which happens to be darkness.
Ultimately, Murnane believes that man must be the source of his own light. What lies beyond man’s own light is darkness.
The Australian Cultural Cringe
For a long time, Australia had a cultural cringe, an inferiority complex about its own intellectual and cultural status. Indeed, it’s arguable that we still have one.
In the 60’s, many writers and artists left the country to seek inspiration and recognition overseas. Examples of such expatriates are Germaine Greer, Clive James, Robert Hughes and Richard Neville.
Politically, this was a conservative period. Many people on the Left would argue that, only when the Whitlam Labor Government was elected in 1972, was there a cultural resurgence and a greater self-confidence in our creativity.
It meant a lot to Australia that Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, even if many of the Left hadn’t read or liked his novels up to that point.
Not only did we consume more local talent domestically, but we exported it as well. However, equally importantly, with greater self-confidence, we opened up to new ideas from outside.
We had always fed off British and American culture. However, we were now more open to European culture, including Continental Philosophy, which contributed to the radicalization of University Arts Faculties.
The Role of Gerald Murnane
Gerald Murnane, who has recently been considered a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize, stands adjacent to, but not wholly within, this recent tradition.
He has consciously never travelled outside Australia, even though he has read widely and recently learned Hungarian in order to read that country’s literature.
Still, he has played a major role in addressing the cultural cringe, at least at a personal level.
Apart from his teaching roles, I would argue that he pursues his goals individualistically and idiosyncratically.
In ”The Plains�, he journeyed into Inner Australia, not just to find what was there, but to turn his back on what was in Outer Australia, i.e., the urbanations on the coastal fringe.
By heading towards the centre, I suspect he was better able to see and understand Outer Australia in his rear vision mirror.
I don’t think he feels much in common with the Australian culture he is witness to.
This is not necessarily to denigrate him or Australian culture.
I would say he has to be one of the most self-contained writers and artists anywhere on the planet.
It doesn’t matter that he looks beyond the horizon and sees darkness.
The important thing for him and for us, is that he looks within and finds light, and he harnesses that light, so that those of us, particularly Australians, who are willing might be enlightened.
Strange Bedfellows
For as long as Murnane continues to write, I’m confident that he will build on the personal vision he has constructed.
To the extent that this brings him success, it’s possible that many academics in Australia will jump on his bandwagon.
In my other review, I’ve argued that there is an element of hoax in the novel.
If I’m wrong in this opinion, it is at least a declaration of independence from those who would claim him as their own (e.g., post-structuralism and post-modernism).
This isn’t meant to detract from the uniqueness and distinction of his writing.
I think that in this novel he is playing a game with his audience in the same way that Nabokov played with his readership.
For all of his earnestness, I suspect that this solitary man, Gerald Murnane, is also a Great Australian Ratbag. I admire all of these qualities in him.
SOUNDTRACK:
Neil Diamond - "Solitary Man"
Johnny Cash - "Solitary Man"
June 29, 2020
Dietro il visibile
“Abbiamo passato la maggior parte della nostra vita frustati dal vento. Abbiamo visto l'ombra delle nuvole smarrirsi per miglia e miglia nella nostra erba. Ciascuno di noi se lo ricorda, però, non è vero, quel pomeriggio su una veranda dove la luce del sole quasi non filtrava tra le foglie dei rampicanti, o in un salotto dove le tende restavano chiuse dall'inizio della primavera fino al tardo autunno? C'erano mesi in cui le pianure sembravano lontane e noi sedevamo all'interno ogni pomeriggio, contenti di guardare un certo volto pallido�.
Gerald Murnane è uno scrittore australiano finora inedito in Italia, maestro di narrativa e stile nel mondo delle lettere anglosassone. Le Pianure è stato scritto nel 1982 ed è un inimitabile caso di vera letteratura, uno splendido viaggio intellettuale e lirico nel paesaggio mitico e geografico del territorio australiano. Il protagonista giunge dall'Australia esterna, quella delle città costiere, con il progetto di una sceneggiatura per un film, che finalmente catturi lo spirito indefinito e imprendibile delle pianure. Viene accolto in una comunità di latifondisti, con le loro terre, le case, le mogli e le figlie. E i bar dove i mecenati, orgogliosi e sognanti, bevono fino a tornare sobri: luoghi di racconti poi nascosti in libri antichi e ricercati, luoghi di leggende mai dimenticate, ma sempre oscure. Un tempo c'è stata la questione dei colori: la rivalità tra un gruppo esiguo di poeti e pittori, chiamati “gli orizzontisti� e rappresentati dal verde-azzurro, caratteristico della linea di prospettiva, e gli “uomini Lepre�, con simbolo il giallo dell'erba, che nasconde i tipici animali di quelle praterie. Questi due gruppi ebbero dispute e conflitti e giunsero a formare i due principali partiti delle pianure, non che le squadre di polo e le associazioni culturali. Il giovane artista viene coinvolto nelle loro discussioni filosofiche e viene incaricato come consigliere estetico da uno dei proprietari terrieri, presso il quale vivrà come osservatore, unendosi ai rituali permanenti della società locale. Le pianure sono la metafora numerosa e immaginaria, tanto che se ne ode il suono lieve mentre si respira la loro essenza minerale, e al lettore appare chiaro perché ci si perda così fatalmente, come in una cognizione fantastica.”Nessuno dei loro abitanti era mai sorpreso di sentire che comprendevano una regione che non aveva mai visto�. Il mondo è solo una serie infinita di pianure e compito vitale per il protagonista diventa dare sostanza di mito a un panorama così monotono: esiste quindi una pianura attraversabile a fianco di una inaccessibile, la terra natia percorsa dai banditi e recitata dagli attori , che sceglie la pace tra esplorazioni e risse, emblemi e alberghi, rivelazioni e religioni. Parola per parola, le pianure si scoprono per ciò che sono: una nazione che non è mai esistita. Ma è stata così preziosamente pensata, cantata, studiata, rappresentata. Tanto che quella terra ora sembra un sogno, un paese abitabile ma sbagliato, una zona oscura, non occupata da nessuno. E adesso, cosa mi rimane da fare?, si chiede il giovane eroe del testo, ormai così simile ai nativi, che lo hanno educato e accompagnato. Tradendo la persona che avrebbe voluto essere, lo scrittore si mimetizza nel paesaggio metafisico e eterno, si dedica all'ossessivo studio del Tempo, come dimensione di inganno e reclusione, crepuscolo di una realtà che prevede l'estinzione di ogni possibilità: la pianura Eterna, la pianura Opposta, la pianura senza Confini.“Questa biblioteca contiene un'altra delle solite oscure alcove, consacrata stavolta alle opere di quegli studiosi assai poco letti che di rado sono stati adeguatamente ricompensati per i loro sforzi: gli uomini che rinunciarono alla soddisfazione di studiare le autentiche discipline o le innumerevoli domande senza risposta che nascono dalle pianure per scegliere, invece, come proprio territorio le pianure immaginarie o apocrife, descritte e addirittura apprezzate da gente che non aveva mai visto nulla che si avvicinasse a una pianura�. Così, Murnane avvolge il lettore con l'ambiguità segreta della sintassi, sviluppando una storia magnetica con molteplici e ripetute figure narrative e conoscitive, ma sostanzialmente senza trama, dove il possesso è solo illusione, dove la posizione acquisita viene svelata da nuove dialettiche, da inesauste sfumature poetiche. La ricerca utopica di Murnane ha in sé un senso di contemplazione e di perdita, ma questo non comporta che la sottrazione, sviluppata nella visione, si traduca in un vuoto infelice. Forse, invece, attraverso quel vuoto, e buio dentro, si possono guardare le altre persone, in modo originale e nuovo, più naturale e umano.
“Seduto in mezzo a quegli uomini al crepuscolo, capisco che il loro silenzio afferma che il mondo è un'altra cosa rispetto a un paesaggio. Mi domando se qualcosa che ho visto sia un soggetto adatto all'arte. E mi sembra che i più perspicaci siano proprio quelli che distolgono lo sguardo dalle pianure. Eppure, l'alba del mattino seguente allontana questi dubbi, e nel momento in cui non riesco più a guardare quell'orizzonte che mi abbaglia decido che l'invisibile è solo ciò che è troppo illuminato�.
“Abbiamo passato la maggior parte della nostra vita frustati dal vento. Abbiamo visto l'ombra delle nuvole smarrirsi per miglia e miglia nella nostra erba. Ciascuno di noi se lo ricorda, però, non è vero, quel pomeriggio su una veranda dove la luce del sole quasi non filtrava tra le foglie dei rampicanti, o in un salotto dove le tende restavano chiuse dall'inizio della primavera fino al tardo autunno? C'erano mesi in cui le pianure sembravano lontane e noi sedevamo all'interno ogni pomeriggio, contenti di guardare un certo volto pallido�.
Gerald Murnane è uno scrittore australiano finora inedito in Italia, maestro di narrativa e stile nel mondo delle lettere anglosassone. Le Pianure è stato scritto nel 1982 ed è un inimitabile caso di vera letteratura, uno splendido viaggio intellettuale e lirico nel paesaggio mitico e geografico del territorio australiano. Il protagonista giunge dall'Australia esterna, quella delle città costiere, con il progetto di una sceneggiatura per un film, che finalmente catturi lo spirito indefinito e imprendibile delle pianure. Viene accolto in una comunità di latifondisti, con le loro terre, le case, le mogli e le figlie. E i bar dove i mecenati, orgogliosi e sognanti, bevono fino a tornare sobri: luoghi di racconti poi nascosti in libri antichi e ricercati, luoghi di leggende mai dimenticate, ma sempre oscure. Un tempo c'è stata la questione dei colori: la rivalità tra un gruppo esiguo di poeti e pittori, chiamati “gli orizzontisti� e rappresentati dal verde-azzurro, caratteristico della linea di prospettiva, e gli “uomini Lepre�, con simbolo il giallo dell'erba, che nasconde i tipici animali di quelle praterie. Questi due gruppi ebbero dispute e conflitti e giunsero a formare i due principali partiti delle pianure, non che le squadre di polo e le associazioni culturali. Il giovane artista viene coinvolto nelle loro discussioni filosofiche e viene incaricato come consigliere estetico da uno dei proprietari terrieri, presso il quale vivrà come osservatore, unendosi ai rituali permanenti della società locale. Le pianure sono la metafora numerosa e immaginaria, tanto che se ne ode il suono lieve mentre si respira la loro essenza minerale, e al lettore appare chiaro perché ci si perda così fatalmente, come in una cognizione fantastica.”Nessuno dei loro abitanti era mai sorpreso di sentire che comprendevano una regione che non aveva mai visto�. Il mondo è solo una serie infinita di pianure e compito vitale per il protagonista diventa dare sostanza di mito a un panorama così monotono: esiste quindi una pianura attraversabile a fianco di una inaccessibile, la terra natia percorsa dai banditi e recitata dagli attori , che sceglie la pace tra esplorazioni e risse, emblemi e alberghi, rivelazioni e religioni. Parola per parola, le pianure si scoprono per ciò che sono: una nazione che non è mai esistita. Ma è stata così preziosamente pensata, cantata, studiata, rappresentata. Tanto che quella terra ora sembra un sogno, un paese abitabile ma sbagliato, una zona oscura, non occupata da nessuno. E adesso, cosa mi rimane da fare?, si chiede il giovane eroe del testo, ormai così simile ai nativi, che lo hanno educato e accompagnato. Tradendo la persona che avrebbe voluto essere, lo scrittore si mimetizza nel paesaggio metafisico e eterno, si dedica all'ossessivo studio del Tempo, come dimensione di inganno e reclusione, crepuscolo di una realtà che prevede l'estinzione di ogni possibilità: la pianura Eterna, la pianura Opposta, la pianura senza Confini.“Questa biblioteca contiene un'altra delle solite oscure alcove, consacrata stavolta alle opere di quegli studiosi assai poco letti che di rado sono stati adeguatamente ricompensati per i loro sforzi: gli uomini che rinunciarono alla soddisfazione di studiare le autentiche discipline o le innumerevoli domande senza risposta che nascono dalle pianure per scegliere, invece, come proprio territorio le pianure immaginarie o apocrife, descritte e addirittura apprezzate da gente che non aveva mai visto nulla che si avvicinasse a una pianura�. Così, Murnane avvolge il lettore con l'ambiguità segreta della sintassi, sviluppando una storia magnetica con molteplici e ripetute figure narrative e conoscitive, ma sostanzialmente senza trama, dove il possesso è solo illusione, dove la posizione acquisita viene svelata da nuove dialettiche, da inesauste sfumature poetiche. La ricerca utopica di Murnane ha in sé un senso di contemplazione e di perdita, ma questo non comporta che la sottrazione, sviluppata nella visione, si traduca in un vuoto infelice. Forse, invece, attraverso quel vuoto, e buio dentro, si possono guardare le altre persone, in modo originale e nuovo, più naturale e umano.
“Seduto in mezzo a quegli uomini al crepuscolo, capisco che il loro silenzio afferma che il mondo è un'altra cosa rispetto a un paesaggio. Mi domando se qualcosa che ho visto sia un soggetto adatto all'arte. E mi sembra che i più perspicaci siano proprio quelli che distolgono lo sguardo dalle pianure. Eppure, l'alba del mattino seguente allontana questi dubbi, e nel momento in cui non riesco più a guardare quell'orizzonte che mi abbaglia decido che l'invisibile è solo ciò che è troppo illuminato�.
Read
January 18, 202310/10
A non-review of something which eluded me in whole, though not in part; chasing some thoughts which continue to develop, and which lead me across the prairies, if not the plains, chasing the wind that cannot be seen.
When I started this book, I longed to return, as fast as I could, to -- the plains, the type of prairies that I understood. Those plains weren't as esoteric as these plains, because they were something I could grasp, and hold, and know something about in a way that I couldn't know Murnane's plains.
But, this book so intrigued me, that like Murnane's narrator, I wanted to prove that I was already attuned to their ways; that I was prepared to put aside all else and devote an hour or a day to speculative thinking.
I liked that some of the plainsmen, knew as little about [their] own skin, as I did, for it made us travellers on the same plain, in a manner of saying. I felt some comfort there, and a little less panic.
I felt comfort that some plainsmen read books and poetry as I did, and that some of it was as cryptic for them as it was for me.
I took comfort in how they understood and knew their land and their landscape, reading the wind as easily as they read the topography over which they walked.
They understood the wind, the same wind I understand, because they'd spent most of [their] lives out in the wind, as I have. [They'd] seen the shadows of whole clouds lost on the miles of [their] grass.
They were, like me, explorers who were born too late to be the conventional sort of explorer, and who, like me, spent hours, days, months, years, drawing the most detailed maps of conventional things, which were locked away for years, and which one day would be discovered by those with unconventional eyes and be drawn into the seductive maelstrom of exploration, all over again, as I was.
Where would we meet? At what point would our lives intersect? Our visions and imaginations parallel, but not the same, for each exists on a different plain, 'though each is separated by barely a Planck length.
Each of us, in his heart, is a traveller of boundless landscapes.
I was led to Murnane by following Fionnuala's footsteps, over the plains.
The better reader lives here: Fionnuala's Review
A non-review of something which eluded me in whole, though not in part; chasing some thoughts which continue to develop, and which lead me across the prairies, if not the plains, chasing the wind that cannot be seen.
When I started this book, I longed to return, as fast as I could, to -- the plains, the type of prairies that I understood. Those plains weren't as esoteric as these plains, because they were something I could grasp, and hold, and know something about in a way that I couldn't know Murnane's plains.
But, this book so intrigued me, that like Murnane's narrator, I wanted to prove that I was already attuned to their ways; that I was prepared to put aside all else and devote an hour or a day to speculative thinking.
I liked that some of the plainsmen, knew as little about [their] own skin, as I did, for it made us travellers on the same plain, in a manner of saying. I felt some comfort there, and a little less panic.
I felt comfort that some plainsmen read books and poetry as I did, and that some of it was as cryptic for them as it was for me.
I took comfort in how they understood and knew their land and their landscape, reading the wind as easily as they read the topography over which they walked.
They understood the wind, the same wind I understand, because they'd spent most of [their] lives out in the wind, as I have. [They'd] seen the shadows of whole clouds lost on the miles of [their] grass.
They were, like me, explorers who were born too late to be the conventional sort of explorer, and who, like me, spent hours, days, months, years, drawing the most detailed maps of conventional things, which were locked away for years, and which one day would be discovered by those with unconventional eyes and be drawn into the seductive maelstrom of exploration, all over again, as I was.
Where would we meet? At what point would our lives intersect? Our visions and imaginations parallel, but not the same, for each exists on a different plain, 'though each is separated by barely a Planck length.
Each of us, in his heart, is a traveller of boundless landscapes.
I was led to Murnane by following Fionnuala's footsteps, over the plains.
The better reader lives here: Fionnuala's Review
November 17, 2024
There's nothing I like more than a nebulous story of vague philosophical investigations regarding the often pointless nature of the human condition. Actually, there's one thing I do like more -- anebulous story of vague philosophical investigations regarding the often pointless nature of the human condition... that's fun to read. And this is where the book fell down quite badly for me. Otherwise, it's a mildly interesting piece.
The book is narrated by a young man who intends to make a film about the plains (vast, seemingly never ending space fascinating to artists and townsfolk alike). He eventually gets a patron, one of the many landowners, moving into his house and fixating on the apparent inability of art to capture a meaningful description of the plains. To accomplish this, Murnane writes a lot of VERY obscure, almost ethereal nonsense that goes nowhere, floating pixie dust upon an oily rainbow, writing for writing's sake, mesmerised by the debilitating unknown weight of existence itself, a slew of word salad, fluffy-bunny madness and obtuse, ragingly indistinct blurs, that demands to be something you invest in (if you're so inclined) until you can become fully intoxicated. In theory, this ought to have appealed to me but as I said, it just never became something I enjoyed reading. By the time we get to the landowners conversation I was fast losing interest. Then the library at the house dealing with time. That felt painfully on the nose for a book that had, up to that point, maintained a more subtle approach (in fact, I would have preferred it if he'd never mentioned Australia and allowed the plains to be even more obscure). But anyway.
There are sections where the writing is almost comical in its endeavour to sustain the established swirl of warm water that pours over you. You can barely catch the meaning of any sentence such is the style, the blurred meandering attempt to sound profound, even simply coherent, enough to encourage a sense of reward for your continued reading. Take this for example:
Putting the use of ten words where three will do to one side, this kind of writing is hard to engage with when there's very little to invest in regarding characters or the development of a specific idea. It's all just... interpretation. The plains represent this, the filmmaker that, the landowner this, the Bustards that. Fine, but again... I repeat... when do I get to be entertained by any of this? It's a shame because I generally love vague (life is a pointless horizon of never-ending plains) stories, but this one never came close to reaching me.
I liked the idea, I understood what he was trying to do. But I just didn't like it. There was even one moment where I wondered if Murnane was actually playing a game with his readers. It seemed far too telling to be a coincidence, too immensely on the nose. And I laughed out loud...
The book is narrated by a young man who intends to make a film about the plains (vast, seemingly never ending space fascinating to artists and townsfolk alike). He eventually gets a patron, one of the many landowners, moving into his house and fixating on the apparent inability of art to capture a meaningful description of the plains. To accomplish this, Murnane writes a lot of VERY obscure, almost ethereal nonsense that goes nowhere, floating pixie dust upon an oily rainbow, writing for writing's sake, mesmerised by the debilitating unknown weight of existence itself, a slew of word salad, fluffy-bunny madness and obtuse, ragingly indistinct blurs, that demands to be something you invest in (if you're so inclined) until you can become fully intoxicated. In theory, this ought to have appealed to me but as I said, it just never became something I enjoyed reading. By the time we get to the landowners conversation I was fast losing interest. Then the library at the house dealing with time. That felt painfully on the nose for a book that had, up to that point, maintained a more subtle approach (in fact, I would have preferred it if he'd never mentioned Australia and allowed the plains to be even more obscure). But anyway.
There are sections where the writing is almost comical in its endeavour to sustain the established swirl of warm water that pours over you. You can barely catch the meaning of any sentence such is the style, the blurred meandering attempt to sound profound, even simply coherent, enough to encourage a sense of reward for your continued reading. Take this for example:
"Even in the inmost rooms of the library, on the third storey of the north-east wing, I sometimes heard, across courtyards shaded from the late afternoon sunlight or swept by the flight of bats at dusk, the first, and then, after an interval almost exactly predictable, the second of the immoderate roars that marked the dual climax of some revelation by a client whose final achievement had been to suggest, through the difficult medium of his particular craft, some detail of a plain paradoxically apart from, and yet defining further, the land revealed moments afterwards between the ponderously parting curtains."
Putting the use of ten words where three will do to one side, this kind of writing is hard to engage with when there's very little to invest in regarding characters or the development of a specific idea. It's all just... interpretation. The plains represent this, the filmmaker that, the landowner this, the Bustards that. Fine, but again... I repeat... when do I get to be entertained by any of this? It's a shame because I generally love vague (life is a pointless horizon of never-ending plains) stories, but this one never came close to reaching me.
I liked the idea, I understood what he was trying to do. But I just didn't like it. There was even one moment where I wondered if Murnane was actually playing a game with his readers. It seemed far too telling to be a coincidence, too immensely on the nose. And I laughed out loud...
"I too have admired the tortuous arguments and detailed elaborations, the pointing-up of tenuous links and faint reverberations, and the final triumphant demonstrations that something of a motif has persisted through an immense body of digressive and even imprecise prose."
June 14, 2020
I am not sure what I have just read. This is a very strange little novel, plotless, but with writing that is astonishingly clever and at times very witty. Somewhere in Australia is a place called The Plains with descriptions written that gave this reader a sense of wide open spaces, the colours of sunlight and sprawling meticulously well-kept homesteads inhabited by wealthy patriarchal lovers of the arts who live for philanthropy.
Recommended to the esoteric and philosophically minded.
Recommended to the esoteric and philosophically minded.
October 19, 2023
Seré sincero con mi reseña. Le reconozco méritos incuestionables a esta novela: se trata de una buena composición, peculiar y armónica, además de original. Sin embargo lo he leído sin conectar casi en ningún momento, y al final lo terminé de forma un poco atropellada, saltando párrafos y sin disfrutarlo apenas.
Este libro es una “rara avis�, un elemento curioso: arranca de una forma aparentemente realista y estándar, para ir transformándose al cabo de unas pocas páginas en una especie de zona mitológica situado sobre territorio australiano. Parece un sueño lírico. No existen nombres de personajes, ni de ciudades, ni de hoteles, ni de parajes. No existe plano temporal, ni apenas definición espacial. No hay pasado ni futuro de los protagonistas. Como tampoco hay referencias familiares o lazos emocionales ni de ningún otro tipo. ¿Logra atraparte? El algún momento inicial sí, en otras ocasiones en cambio se hace muy pesado. Tal vez me falte sensibilidad.
Despertó mi curiosidad como para terminarlo y ver como evolucionaba la novela Murnane y el final que le daba, aunque realmente diría que no hay final, ni principio como tal. Por otro lado no le niego su originalidad incuestionable y que existen descripciones bellas.
Parece que todo el relato estuviera rodeado de una bruma como fantástica, irreal: terratenientes y grandes propietarios divagando en eternas conversaciones durante días como si se tratara de auténticos popes, empapados en alcohol y como investidos de un aura divina, profesiones de lo más variopinto a la espera de recibir cita de los llaneros: músicos y pintores utópicos, creadores de religiones, creadores de blasones genealógicos familiares, etc.
Parece como si todo el mundo estuviera narcotizado para mantener el tono de conversaciones (pocas conversaciones) en ocasiones delirantes y en apariencia cultas. Por momentos me recordaba a Pynchon, donde no sabes exactamente de donde parte el autor, ni a donde quieren llegar sus protagonistas; es como si usaran un código indescifrable, al menos para mí. Por momentos me recordaba también a Kafka y ese deambular de los personajes sin objetivos alcanzables (salvando las distancias con ese monstruo, claro).
Como resumen un poco burdo, debo decir que me pareció una novela solemnemente aburrida.
Este libro es una “rara avis�, un elemento curioso: arranca de una forma aparentemente realista y estándar, para ir transformándose al cabo de unas pocas páginas en una especie de zona mitológica situado sobre territorio australiano. Parece un sueño lírico. No existen nombres de personajes, ni de ciudades, ni de hoteles, ni de parajes. No existe plano temporal, ni apenas definición espacial. No hay pasado ni futuro de los protagonistas. Como tampoco hay referencias familiares o lazos emocionales ni de ningún otro tipo. ¿Logra atraparte? El algún momento inicial sí, en otras ocasiones en cambio se hace muy pesado. Tal vez me falte sensibilidad.
Despertó mi curiosidad como para terminarlo y ver como evolucionaba la novela Murnane y el final que le daba, aunque realmente diría que no hay final, ni principio como tal. Por otro lado no le niego su originalidad incuestionable y que existen descripciones bellas.
Parece que todo el relato estuviera rodeado de una bruma como fantástica, irreal: terratenientes y grandes propietarios divagando en eternas conversaciones durante días como si se tratara de auténticos popes, empapados en alcohol y como investidos de un aura divina, profesiones de lo más variopinto a la espera de recibir cita de los llaneros: músicos y pintores utópicos, creadores de religiones, creadores de blasones genealógicos familiares, etc.
Parece como si todo el mundo estuviera narcotizado para mantener el tono de conversaciones (pocas conversaciones) en ocasiones delirantes y en apariencia cultas. Por momentos me recordaba a Pynchon, donde no sabes exactamente de donde parte el autor, ni a donde quieren llegar sus protagonistas; es como si usaran un código indescifrable, al menos para mí. Por momentos me recordaba también a Kafka y ese deambular de los personajes sin objetivos alcanzables (salvando las distancias con ese monstruo, claro).
Como resumen un poco burdo, debo decir que me pareció una novela solemnemente aburrida.
July 12, 2023
“Hace veinte años llegué a las llanuras con los ojos bien abiertos, atento a cualquier elemento del paisaje que pareciera insinuar algún significado complejo más allá de las apariencias.
Mi viaje a las llanuras fue mucho menos arduo de cómo lo describí más tarde. Y ni siquiera puedo decir que en un momento dado me percatara de haber abandonado Australia. Pero sí recuerdo claramente una serie de días en los que el paisaje llano que me rodeaba me parecía cada vez más un lugar que solo yo era capaz de interpretar.�
Voy a ser breve porque he terminado esta novela de Gerald Murnane sin saber cómo clasificarla y aunque en un principio me quedé descolocada y no supe que pensar, ahora creo que voy viendo la luz. Reflexionando sobre ella horas después, me doy cuenta, que la novela no es lo que en un principio creí que era o creí que estaba leyendo y tiene otra capas más profundas, infinitas quizás, que se me van revelando ahora y quizás, con esta interpretación que todavía tengo en una especie de neblina, ahora o dentro de poco tiempo, debería releerla para desentrañar esas otras lecturas. Recién terminada me fui de nuevo al principio, y justo esta cita se corresponde con el primer párrafo de la novela, así comienza, y al releer este comienzo, ya tenía otro significado, nada que ver con lo que yo había entendido en un principio. Un viaje a las llanuras australianas que es también un viaje en sí mismo para el lector, que tiene que interpretar todo lo que va surgiendo de ese monólogo interior del narrador sin nombre.
“Era evidente que sentían por las llanuras el mismo amor apasionado que artistas y profetas habían profesado tan a menudo. Y, no obstante, quienes leían sus poemas o contemplaban sus pinturas encontraban reflejados en ellos pocos lugares reales de las llanuras. Los miembros del grupo parecían insistir que lo que los conmovía de verddad, mucho más que las vastas praderas y la inmensidad del cielo, era aquella fina franja de bruma donde la tierra y el cielo se fundían en la más lejana distancia."
Esta novela apenas tiene argumento y sus personajes no tienen nombre, aunque también se podría decir que sus personajes a veces parecen fantasmas... En este aspecto mientras la leía me recordaba a las películas que dirigió Marguerite Duras, no sé por qué, porque esta novela transcurre en Australia, y sus vastas llanuras y su fisicidad no tiene nada que ver con ese entorno etéreo tan francés del cine de la Duras, pero si que me lo recuerda en lo referente a lo sonámbulo de la atmósfera y de sus personajes porque los personajes de Las Llanuras son como abstracciones que se mueven en una especie de neblina mientras son observados por el narrador. El narrador sin nombre llega a un pueblo remoto porque quiere rodar una película a la que quiere llamar El Interior; se aloja en un hotel mientras va trabando relación con los terratenientes locales; este narrador busca un mecenas con la esperanza de que le avale para que pueda hacer su película. Finalmente lo encuentra y lo aloja en su gran finca de las llanuras donde no solo tiene a su disposición la enorme biblioteca de su mecenas sino además puede observar a su esposa e hija, quizás con la esperanza de incluirlas en su película. Este es el argumento, no hay más y toda la novela es un largo monólogo interior de este narrador en el que habla del paisaje, de la tierra, de la gente del entorno y de su futura película.
“Así pues, la mujer podría haber considerado que la principal ventaja de haber pasado tantos años en unas llanuras que no había visto, con un hombre que todavía no se había explicado, era que en su día le había permitido postular la existencia de una mujer cuyo futuro incluía incluso la improbable perspectiva de pasar toda la vida en unas llanuras que no vería, con un hombre que nunca llegaría a explicarse.�
Aunque claramente, se esté hablando de Australia y de sus vastas y casi infinitas llanuras, realmente a veces parece que esta Australia de la que habla es una abstracción o una tierra mitica que se ha inventado Gerald Murnane para hablar de algo que va más allá e incluso llego a captar un sentido del humor algo soterrado comparándola a la Australia real, pero no conozco suficiente de este país para captarlo del todo, y sin embargo, hay momentos que me hicieron sonreir pero entiendo que Murnane va mucho más allá de este argumento aparente y nos está hablando quizás de la creación artistica, tal como hacia David Markson en La Soledad del lector y en sus tres obras restantes que conforman su tetralogía sobre el arte. En mi caso creo que va a ser inevitable volver a releer esta obra en la que la cadencia de sus frases largas y casi laberínticas, ejercen una especie de fascinación que no nos llevará a cuestionarnos nada,pero sí justo en su final. Una novela que ha ejercido sobre mí una extraña fascinación y que estoy deseando releer para interpretar esas capas subterráneas que se han ido revelando mientras la terminaba. Una novela circular que intuyo se hará más grande a medida que la relea.
“Logré recordar una nota que había escrito en el margen del artículo: Yo, como cineasta, estoy admirablemente preparado para explorar este paisaje y revelárselo a los demás.�
July 21, 2014
God I love y'all. Only on ŷ could a book like this one, from Australia, from the 80s, having almost no plot (and certainly no resolution), and mostly long forgotten, enjoy a minor resurgence. I actually have people to talk to about this obscure and elusive book.
Speaking of which, this is one of the most elusive books I've ever read. Consider that it is an allegory/parable and yet of what we will never know for sure, though there are some very strong theories. Consider also its slightly mocking tone, and yet who is being mocked? It seems he is mocking towards the plainsmen at times (including the narrator), and towards the landowners at other times as well. But at the same time I feel like there is a warmth towards the plainsmen and landowners as well. And also a seriousness towards their plight/dreams, though also a resignedness. Its elusiveness does not get in the way of the pleasure of its sentences. In fact it's the very opposite. It's pleasurable precisely because of its elusive vagueness, because inside of that vagueness of higher meaning there is an exactness of lower language. Exactly like the plains it describes.
I'll probably read this one again in a couple of weeks. It's short enough and intriguing enough to call for it.
Speaking of which, this is one of the most elusive books I've ever read. Consider that it is an allegory/parable and yet of what we will never know for sure, though there are some very strong theories. Consider also its slightly mocking tone, and yet who is being mocked? It seems he is mocking towards the plainsmen at times (including the narrator), and towards the landowners at other times as well. But at the same time I feel like there is a warmth towards the plainsmen and landowners as well. And also a seriousness towards their plight/dreams, though also a resignedness. Its elusiveness does not get in the way of the pleasure of its sentences. In fact it's the very opposite. It's pleasurable precisely because of its elusive vagueness, because inside of that vagueness of higher meaning there is an exactness of lower language. Exactly like the plains it describes.
I'll probably read this one again in a couple of weeks. It's short enough and intriguing enough to call for it.
January 17, 2023
The Sun in Australia Performs Strange Tricks on Words
Only a few weeks ago, I had a chat with a friend’s mother and she wanted to talk about her days as a young woman when she arrived in the Western Districts of Victoria during the late 1950s. These districts are the gentle rolling, rich farmlands west of Melbourne that were settled by 19thC squatters who became extremely rich from agriculture. My friend’s mother talked about the young male scions of these rich landowners who courted her with rides on private airplanes and racy two-seater sports cars and visits to inspect the vast farmlands that provided the family wealth. Think of them as sheep and wool barons, along the lines of oil barons. From these people we get the portmanteau ‘squattocracy�.
I hadn’t connected these people and places as one of the possible origins of the plainsmen and the plains of Murnane’s book until this conversation on a deck at the beach drinking coffee with a view of not so verdant or fertile soils in the paddock behind her home. The sun was harsh, but temporarily illuminating.
And suddenly it was obvious to me, these plainsmen who appear as deeply self-sufficient, taciturn, mercurial monolithic are a kind of mythology. They are unknowable. Their ritualistic activities are the lore that evolves out of time spent in broad open paddocks, and the suffused light that takes on the colour of its timber panelled rooms. When you’re that rich you can after all do and be who you like, such as walk long timber corridors that block out natural light and force an inexpressible interiority. Which is how the narrator, wanting to find his way among them for his project, finds them, only in the strange light inside a labyrinth of rooms in a hotel, a secondary natural habitat. They don’t speak, but they are articulated by the voice of a strange god that may or may not be themselves. You cannot enter the state of the divine as a narrator-observer. You are not a plainsman. The landscape is also unknowable to the narrator, not mystical, but out of bounds of his understanding.
I've always wondered too, since I first read this curious book whether there is a painting of the plains the narrator is referring to, captured in the mind’s eye. One that shows the waves and undulations of wind moving grass and trees, while it all dissolves from understanding under a harsh Australian sun. The sun here is unlike any other, it has the capacity to tear at your skin and force you to face away to save your eyes from it. The prose tells us we can’t capture it in words, no matter how much we try. It is myth. And myth requires its own voice and language, if only to attempt to touch the unknowable. The painting itself would be a mirage of the possible representation of the plains and plainsmen. A hope that pictures might work where words do not.
Like our aspiring filmmaker narrator, who takes the time to immerse himself in the genre of the people he wishes to be part of knowing he never can, reading Murnane is an exercise in believing that literature has some kind of superior hold on us. You are lulled and drawn in to read, even though you can never quite grasp a sentence in its fullest meaning. The joy is in being there, or you miss out. You won’t find a more unusual or compelling Australian writer.
Only a few weeks ago, I had a chat with a friend’s mother and she wanted to talk about her days as a young woman when she arrived in the Western Districts of Victoria during the late 1950s. These districts are the gentle rolling, rich farmlands west of Melbourne that were settled by 19thC squatters who became extremely rich from agriculture. My friend’s mother talked about the young male scions of these rich landowners who courted her with rides on private airplanes and racy two-seater sports cars and visits to inspect the vast farmlands that provided the family wealth. Think of them as sheep and wool barons, along the lines of oil barons. From these people we get the portmanteau ‘squattocracy�.
I hadn’t connected these people and places as one of the possible origins of the plainsmen and the plains of Murnane’s book until this conversation on a deck at the beach drinking coffee with a view of not so verdant or fertile soils in the paddock behind her home. The sun was harsh, but temporarily illuminating.
And suddenly it was obvious to me, these plainsmen who appear as deeply self-sufficient, taciturn, mercurial monolithic are a kind of mythology. They are unknowable. Their ritualistic activities are the lore that evolves out of time spent in broad open paddocks, and the suffused light that takes on the colour of its timber panelled rooms. When you’re that rich you can after all do and be who you like, such as walk long timber corridors that block out natural light and force an inexpressible interiority. Which is how the narrator, wanting to find his way among them for his project, finds them, only in the strange light inside a labyrinth of rooms in a hotel, a secondary natural habitat. They don’t speak, but they are articulated by the voice of a strange god that may or may not be themselves. You cannot enter the state of the divine as a narrator-observer. You are not a plainsman. The landscape is also unknowable to the narrator, not mystical, but out of bounds of his understanding.
I've always wondered too, since I first read this curious book whether there is a painting of the plains the narrator is referring to, captured in the mind’s eye. One that shows the waves and undulations of wind moving grass and trees, while it all dissolves from understanding under a harsh Australian sun. The sun here is unlike any other, it has the capacity to tear at your skin and force you to face away to save your eyes from it. The prose tells us we can’t capture it in words, no matter how much we try. It is myth. And myth requires its own voice and language, if only to attempt to touch the unknowable. The painting itself would be a mirage of the possible representation of the plains and plainsmen. A hope that pictures might work where words do not.
Like our aspiring filmmaker narrator, who takes the time to immerse himself in the genre of the people he wishes to be part of knowing he never can, reading Murnane is an exercise in believing that literature has some kind of superior hold on us. You are lulled and drawn in to read, even though you can never quite grasp a sentence in its fullest meaning. The joy is in being there, or you miss out. You won’t find a more unusual or compelling Australian writer.
February 12, 2019
This will be my first review on ŷ. I hadn’t yet written one for fear of getting it wrong. I’ve decided to start however with reviewing The Plains because my failure of interpreting it seems all but assured and because the experience of reading it was so strangely unsettling. I feel my failure at interpretation assured because The Plains details, as far as I can make out, a failure of the interpretation, encapsulation, representation that art and artists are sometimes supposed and sometimes suppose to do. I feel strangely unsettled for feeling unable to pin down the precise source of my disquiet with The Plains.
The unnamed narrator arrived in the plains some twenty years ago looking “for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances� having journeyed inland from “Outer Australia� while having apparently “left Australia� in the process. Having entered a landscape that “seemed more and more a place that only [he] could interpret� he inveigles his way into the strange world of the Plainsmen � a loose collection of artists and thinkers patronised by a handful of local landowners with a complex history of combative artistic tribes, political movements and bizarre protocol. Our narrator receives the patronage of one of these landowners for the film he came to The Plains and takes up residence with his benefactor. There his screenplay is apparently worked on continuously while the film itself apparently fails to come to fruition.
As a reading experience The Plains is deeply strange and enigmatic even though Murnane’s prose is so seemingly simple. The Plainsmen’s culture is always described straightforwardly while remaining utterly elusive and grows only more so with elaboration or attempted explanations. Meanwhile the plains take on endless metaphorical connotations and resonances � as a blank artist’s canvas, inner mental life, interpersonal distance, cultural psyche, the human face and body, time and space, and just plain old plains. I cannot then finally say what The Plains is about or what I felt reading it, but it was an utterly distinctive book.
The unnamed narrator arrived in the plains some twenty years ago looking “for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances� having journeyed inland from “Outer Australia� while having apparently “left Australia� in the process. Having entered a landscape that “seemed more and more a place that only [he] could interpret� he inveigles his way into the strange world of the Plainsmen � a loose collection of artists and thinkers patronised by a handful of local landowners with a complex history of combative artistic tribes, political movements and bizarre protocol. Our narrator receives the patronage of one of these landowners for the film he came to The Plains and takes up residence with his benefactor. There his screenplay is apparently worked on continuously while the film itself apparently fails to come to fruition.
As a reading experience The Plains is deeply strange and enigmatic even though Murnane’s prose is so seemingly simple. The Plainsmen’s culture is always described straightforwardly while remaining utterly elusive and grows only more so with elaboration or attempted explanations. Meanwhile the plains take on endless metaphorical connotations and resonances � as a blank artist’s canvas, inner mental life, interpersonal distance, cultural psyche, the human face and body, time and space, and just plain old plains. I cannot then finally say what The Plains is about or what I felt reading it, but it was an utterly distinctive book.
February 4, 2025
This was one of those books where you glance at the first page and suddenly the whole book jumps in line ahead of everything else you’re reading. A very exciting discovery.
I’d been hearing of Murnane for a while. For some reason maybe having to do with jacket copy I was never in a hurry to get to him. I am now.
I see the Beckett comparison. This book has that droning weirdness one finds in Beckett’s trilogy, the finely tuned abstraction of approaching some can’t-go-on/must-go-on singularity.
There’s also something here one finds in Borges a lot: men or Tlönian factions of men pursuing abstruse ends, giving themselves over to great feats of probably useless erudition, feats of intellectual endurance that yearn towards but will never reach completeness. Here the men and factions of men were poets, painters, and in the case of the narrator, a “film maker� who never makes films. I love artists who never art. It's a favorite trope of mine.
But the plains and the plainsman sensibility is new. Writers write about the sea all the time, and cities, and forests. These are psychic as well as physical spaces; they give shape to thought. How is it possible, then, that no one I can think of ever wrote about the plains until 1982?
Trying to appreciate and describe their discoveries, the plainsmen had become unusually observant, discriminating, and receptive to gradual revelations of meaning. (12)
It’s a new and, I submit, a philosophically important terrain and probably a very Australian one. (I know almost nothing about Australia). The plains are a landscape of no landscape. There is nothing for thought to fasten to, so it’s a place where the mind can expand to fill up everything, approaching a totality. Gosh, I loved this book. Reading it quieted my mind in a really wonderful way.
OK friends, which Murnane must I read next?
I’d been hearing of Murnane for a while. For some reason maybe having to do with jacket copy I was never in a hurry to get to him. I am now.
I see the Beckett comparison. This book has that droning weirdness one finds in Beckett’s trilogy, the finely tuned abstraction of approaching some can’t-go-on/must-go-on singularity.
There’s also something here one finds in Borges a lot: men or Tlönian factions of men pursuing abstruse ends, giving themselves over to great feats of probably useless erudition, feats of intellectual endurance that yearn towards but will never reach completeness. Here the men and factions of men were poets, painters, and in the case of the narrator, a “film maker� who never makes films. I love artists who never art. It's a favorite trope of mine.
But the plains and the plainsman sensibility is new. Writers write about the sea all the time, and cities, and forests. These are psychic as well as physical spaces; they give shape to thought. How is it possible, then, that no one I can think of ever wrote about the plains until 1982?
Trying to appreciate and describe their discoveries, the plainsmen had become unusually observant, discriminating, and receptive to gradual revelations of meaning. (12)
It’s a new and, I submit, a philosophically important terrain and probably a very Australian one. (I know almost nothing about Australia). The plains are a landscape of no landscape. There is nothing for thought to fasten to, so it’s a place where the mind can expand to fill up everything, approaching a totality. Gosh, I loved this book. Reading it quieted my mind in a really wonderful way.
OK friends, which Murnane must I read next?
June 27, 2014
If everything that passed between us existed only as a set of possibilities, my aim should have been to broaden the scope of her speculations about me.
As admirers of Proust, Gerald Murnane, Anne Carson and W.G. Sebald are three of the brightest examples of how Proust's work might look in English in the 21st century. The three are remarkably similar in ambition, their strengths and weaknesses, and I am surprised no one from the major book reviews has pointed this out. But I shouldn't be... what do they know that we don't.
To put it crudely, Murnane is what you'd get from David Foster Wallace without the addictions, the near insane reliance on pop culture for meaning. Each is marked by an unusual sensitivity to the opinions of others, to the response of his own thoughts to himself, which is called "self-consciousness" to those who aren't built that way, but one has a much more sophisticated approach to this, and it isn't the American from the Midwest with the bandana and the tennis racquet. The Australian writes with supreme compression, the instincts of a poet; the American freely associates with whatever comes to mind, a channel-surfer, a victim of endless self-analysis: fans of either might be insulted by the comparison, but philosophically they are of a mind.
The fumbling around with women, the provincialism, the recursiveness, with Murnane these issues actually have something unique to say about Australia. You can write the word "cockatoo" and get something resembling Australian, or you can read Murnane and feel what it's like being trapped on that huge island.
Poetry has left the building in the 20th and 21st centuries and Murnane, Carson and Sebald are acutely aware of this. Like Proust or Joyce, they are poets at heart looking for another means of expression and the novel just happens to be the most flexible form right now.
All three hit their stride in their mid to late forties. Murnane gave up "fiction" for good around the age of fifty-one. Proust caught on late too, and famously had to lock himself in a room to make up for lost time.
Guilt, alienation, embarrassment are at the heart of these three writers, with their throwback inscrutability, their digressiveness, their obsessive fear of falling under any label. Like Proust they are primarily interested in space within spaces, the possibility of other worlds as their thoughts keep tracking back on itself. This instinct is a religious one, and what binds these three together is lapsed Catholicism. For Murnane, Irish Catholicism. Because of anti-Christian bigotry most fanboys and girls of Wallace are loathe to accept/admit this vital aspect of his thinking. Wallace did everything to hide his Catholic roots but his infatuation with Catholic heartthrob Mary Karr tells a different story.
Toward the end of The Plains Murnane meets a mysterious woman in a library. Not meant to be taken literally she is an ideal reader, an ideal lover,
We knew almost nothing of one another and we could not conceive of things happening otherwise without violating the poise of the worlds that surrounded us. To think of ourselves in any other circumstances would betray the people who might have been ourselves.
Sounds like an outstanding description of our virtual reality.
Receiving a sense of intimacy from Murnane, Carson and Sebald, anything non-ambiguous, is next to impossible. In the case of Carson the evasions can be especially aggravating, a game more than a necessity. I am undecided if they are in the vanguard of a new religious order, as Catholicism tries to accommodate the victories of democracy, or represent something regressive. I lean toward the latter. Their work is isolated, which is usually symptomatic of defeat. None of them, for instance, had the good fortune of being born half-Jewish like Proust. I am not sure these three have anything else to offset what has lapsed, unless you count "history" the other half of their mind.
The search for other worlds in the spaces within spaces is really about testing the bounds of faith. This instinct is why Murnane is the best reader of Jack Kerouac, who is completely misunderstood within these fifty states. Murnane's books are On the Road but for the symbolic byways of the soul, the "plains" of this novel. All three interest me the least when they indulge in arcana or ask the question "Why do I write?" Or worse, "What does what I just wrote mean?" Do that on your own time please! But until I can talk myself out of them, I feel they are the best representatives of Proust writing in English going forward.
And I traced all the while whatever had the appearance of a theme in that uncertain region... deciding that whatever seemed to point to some unique perception of a private terrain might suggest in another light that the artist had failed to see the scattered vestiges of what passed for another country with another observer.
As admirers of Proust, Gerald Murnane, Anne Carson and W.G. Sebald are three of the brightest examples of how Proust's work might look in English in the 21st century. The three are remarkably similar in ambition, their strengths and weaknesses, and I am surprised no one from the major book reviews has pointed this out. But I shouldn't be... what do they know that we don't.
To put it crudely, Murnane is what you'd get from David Foster Wallace without the addictions, the near insane reliance on pop culture for meaning. Each is marked by an unusual sensitivity to the opinions of others, to the response of his own thoughts to himself, which is called "self-consciousness" to those who aren't built that way, but one has a much more sophisticated approach to this, and it isn't the American from the Midwest with the bandana and the tennis racquet. The Australian writes with supreme compression, the instincts of a poet; the American freely associates with whatever comes to mind, a channel-surfer, a victim of endless self-analysis: fans of either might be insulted by the comparison, but philosophically they are of a mind.
The fumbling around with women, the provincialism, the recursiveness, with Murnane these issues actually have something unique to say about Australia. You can write the word "cockatoo" and get something resembling Australian, or you can read Murnane and feel what it's like being trapped on that huge island.
Poetry has left the building in the 20th and 21st centuries and Murnane, Carson and Sebald are acutely aware of this. Like Proust or Joyce, they are poets at heart looking for another means of expression and the novel just happens to be the most flexible form right now.
All three hit their stride in their mid to late forties. Murnane gave up "fiction" for good around the age of fifty-one. Proust caught on late too, and famously had to lock himself in a room to make up for lost time.
Guilt, alienation, embarrassment are at the heart of these three writers, with their throwback inscrutability, their digressiveness, their obsessive fear of falling under any label. Like Proust they are primarily interested in space within spaces, the possibility of other worlds as their thoughts keep tracking back on itself. This instinct is a religious one, and what binds these three together is lapsed Catholicism. For Murnane, Irish Catholicism. Because of anti-Christian bigotry most fanboys and girls of Wallace are loathe to accept/admit this vital aspect of his thinking. Wallace did everything to hide his Catholic roots but his infatuation with Catholic heartthrob Mary Karr tells a different story.
Toward the end of The Plains Murnane meets a mysterious woman in a library. Not meant to be taken literally she is an ideal reader, an ideal lover,
We knew almost nothing of one another and we could not conceive of things happening otherwise without violating the poise of the worlds that surrounded us. To think of ourselves in any other circumstances would betray the people who might have been ourselves.
Sounds like an outstanding description of our virtual reality.
Receiving a sense of intimacy from Murnane, Carson and Sebald, anything non-ambiguous, is next to impossible. In the case of Carson the evasions can be especially aggravating, a game more than a necessity. I am undecided if they are in the vanguard of a new religious order, as Catholicism tries to accommodate the victories of democracy, or represent something regressive. I lean toward the latter. Their work is isolated, which is usually symptomatic of defeat. None of them, for instance, had the good fortune of being born half-Jewish like Proust. I am not sure these three have anything else to offset what has lapsed, unless you count "history" the other half of their mind.
The search for other worlds in the spaces within spaces is really about testing the bounds of faith. This instinct is why Murnane is the best reader of Jack Kerouac, who is completely misunderstood within these fifty states. Murnane's books are On the Road but for the symbolic byways of the soul, the "plains" of this novel. All three interest me the least when they indulge in arcana or ask the question "Why do I write?" Or worse, "What does what I just wrote mean?" Do that on your own time please! But until I can talk myself out of them, I feel they are the best representatives of Proust writing in English going forward.
And I traced all the while whatever had the appearance of a theme in that uncertain region... deciding that whatever seemed to point to some unique perception of a private terrain might suggest in another light that the artist had failed to see the scattered vestiges of what passed for another country with another observer.
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