I am often asked which of Gerald Murnane’s novels readers should start with, but there is no easy point of entry (my suggestion, instead, is the short story When the Mice Failed to Arrive, which contains, in miniature, the major themes and techniques that he develops across his work). Responses to Murnane’s work often tend to extremes: many readers, like me, become obsessed, wanting to read everything he has written, while other readers remain bemused or puzzled or worse.
Murnane’s four final novels – Barley Patch, A History of Books, A Million Windows and Border Districts – are exemplary works of late style. The phrase was coined by Theodor Adorno, who notes that late style occurs when an artist’s “subjectivity” is so “ruthlessly proclaiming itself” that it “breaks through the roundedness of form for the sake of expression”. In this account, the artist eschews the formal perfections of their medium to explore, instead, idiosyncratic artistic desires.
The only problem with this claim is that virtually all of Murnane’s novels exhibit these hallmarks of lateness: every work from The Plains onward displays clear tendencies toward withdrawal, mannerism and self-quotation.
This style may, in part, explain why his work has taken decades to find the audience it deserves. He was always destined to be a cult author, because his writing from The Plains onwards is so self-referential and mannered.
I will admit that, despite reading and enjoying The Plains when I first arrived in Australia nearly 20 years ago, I only began to appreciate Murnane’s work fully after reading five of his books. This may sound like literary Stockholm syndrome, but something in those early experiences kept me reading. The devoted reader of Murnane will discover that their enjoyment only increases as they recognise the callbacks, the revisions of earlier scenes, and the belated revelation of withheld connections between earlier and later works.
Murnane’s international recognition has been belated, but the local reception of his work remains divided. Over the several years that I have been writing this book, I have regularly had other scholars and critics make jokes about Murnane’s books being boring or of limited interest: “Gerald Mundane,” said one with a laugh. As someone who primarily reads fiction that could be described as “experimental”, I am both habituated and inured to these sentiments, but I have a hard time imagining any other Australian writer provoking such comments. Nonetheless, it does seem notable that even many of Murnane’s fans register boredom as a crucial part of his aesthetics. Ben Lerner argues that “Murnane’s sentences are little dialectics of boredom and beauty, flatness and depth”, and the pleasure of reading them derives precisely from this oscillation between tedium and visionary splendour. There is a languor in his writing that makes his books both enjoyable and unique – but appreciating this requires readers to be open to unusual literary experiences.
Nicholas Birns has argued that Murnane is both “the most Australian of writers” and “the least Australian of writers”. While Murnane’s content is Australian, his aesthetics comprise a localised, autodidactic variant of the international avant garde, so it is unsurprising that Murnane’s late reception has largely been international. Local enmities have probably been inflamed by international readers’ and institutions’ increasing interest in Murnane.
Australia’s sense of inadequacy about the legitimacy of its culture – a social psychological phenomenon that AA Phillips dubbed the “cultural cringe” – also manifests in the “cringe inverted” or an overcompensatory cultural patriotism that can inspire a resentment of the international mediation of Australian literature. Increasingly, however, the Australian reception of Murnane’s work is, if not entirely irrelevant, then certainly less significant: he has become an international author, and his reputation will be made globally.
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Murnane’s writing inhabits an ambiguous genre that cannot easily be described as either fiction or nonfiction. While his work employs techniques often associated with modernist novels from Europe and Latin America, the content draws on his own experiences which are unconventional and in some ways out-of-step with the way most people now live. His unusual lifestyle and uncommon perspectives on contemporary life are part of what has made international critics so interested in him.
In his essay The Breathing Author, Murnane argues that what a person “has never done” is as revealing as “what he has or wants to do”. Murnane has never travelled in an airplane or left Australia, has never had a sense of smell, does not own a television, rarely watches movies, does not attend galleries or museums, does not wear sunglasses, cannot and does not swim in any body of water, does not know how to use a camera, and has never operated a computer. While Murnane has more recently become an intermittent user of mobile phones (he turns it on only for specific periods of the day and communicates via epistle-length text messages), he still has not used a computer and does not browse the internet, though friends of his do print out online reviews and essays on his work, almost of all of which he reads. What is unique about Murnane is the way that he has managed to craft his fictional works out of his intentionally limited experiences.
His work, rather than being limited by the narrow horizons of Murnane’s own experience, uses those limitations as a means of creating a distinctive and unusual mode of fiction: a localised form of an international, avant garde tradition.
Murnane’s artistic project seeks to represent, in great detail, his specific perspective on the world. Part of Murnane’s achievement lies in his capacity to mythologise the seeming banal fascinations – fetishes, really – that reappear across works: marbles, horse racing, stained-glass windows, the beloved girl on the train who is never spoken to, fear of the ocean, and love for mostly level countryside with trees in the distance, among many others. These fixations appear again and again in oblique ways that lend them new meaning with each repetition.
The artist he most reminds me of is Joseph Cornell, the New York artist famous for creating his detailed boxed assemblages out of found materials sourced from secondhand stores and opportunity shops. Cornell’s assemblages, like Murnane’s writings, are simultaneously homemade and deeply personal – yet also somehow wholly self-sufficient and autonomous creations that make the viewer feel as if they are peering into a new and unknown world. Murnane’s fiction produces a similar effect: the specificity of his narrator’s perspective and the often-overwhelming detail of experience makes the window of his vision narrow, but its horizonal depth feels endless. For all of its strangeness, Murnane’s work is still invested in recognisable and traditional literary notions of the beautiful and the sublime – and he repeatedly suggests that reading and writing are privileged ways for accessing these transcendent moments.
Murnane’s work remains shadowed by a series of strong and persistent criticisms. Murnane may provoke such reactions because – as a homemade avant garde of one – his work is so unusual. His formal education comprised a teaching qualification and later a BA undertaken at night school as a mature student. He had virtually no engagement with literary institutions early in his life, and there was little in the way of local literary culture to support his unusual reading habits. He discusses how he had to read international papers, such as the Times Literary Supplement, to discover new fiction and often had to place these books on special order, also from overseas. But despite these challenges, or perhaps because of them, he has produced a series of works that blur genre distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, and which engage with and respond to each other in complex ways. His books are beautifully written, theoretically complex and emotionally charged in a way that rewards rereading. His style might appear static or formal at times, but this belies the wide range of aesthetic effects that he can produce.
He is without question both the most original and most significant Australian author of the last 50 years, and one of the best writers Australia has produced. This claim will be hotly contested by many – and perhaps most – Australian critics and readers, but I suspect it will become a commonplace sentiment internationally.
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This is an edited extract from Murnane by Emmett Stinson, published 1 August (The Miegunyah Press)
