Gerald Murnane is a most mysterious author of strangely seductive books, and I’m currently reading Inland, first published in 1988 and now reprinted as part of the Australian Classics Library. About 30 pages into the book I had to stop reading to dig out my reading journal (Vol12, p58) to see what I had written about The Plains, which I read back in 2007. I thought I’d publish it here, and hopefully aficionados of Mr Murnane will seize upon my ramblings and set me straight. Not likely, I know, but strange things happen in the LitBlogSphere…
BEWARE: SPOILERS
1.1.07
This is a strange book. Gerald Murnane won the 1999 Patrick White Award for under-recognised writers, and until good old Text republished this 1982 novella, it was out of print. It seems to be a parable or an allegory but of what I am not sure. For some reason it reminds me of Kafka, but I’m not scholarly enough to know why, except for an incident where the young film-maker petitioning the Plainsmen dare not leave his seat for fear of losing his place. After 24 hours he is unshaven and in need of a pee, but it’s ok because it makes the Plainsmen feel superior. This is like K waiting on the bench to sort out his petition.
The Plains is set in an imaginary world where there is inner Australia where the Plainsmen are, and the coast, which has ceased to be important. The young film-maker, along with many other supplicants such as designers of emblems, wait to present their projects to the Plainsmen who come into town every now and again for the purpose of hearing (but mostly rejecting) the petitions.
Is Murnane mocking the university application process? One applicant designs a (PhD gone wrong?) program which analyses the interior decorating choices made since settlement and (in a parody?) makes some kind of sense out of what were random choices so that the Plainsmen can feel superior to the others. The young man wants to make a film out of them, handicapped by his inability to find out the truth about a long-standing (but inane) feud between the Haresmen (gold) and the Horizonutes (blue-green). This bit’s very odd. It’s strangely seductive, however…
The writing becomes yet more opaque. The film-maker is accepted by the one of the landowners and given free rein to research and plan his film. He is being paid too, but after ten years is still debating with himself how to do it! The issue seems to be, how to make the film and its images unique and yet faithful to the ordinariness of the plains. It also mustn’t be tainted by images from Outer Australia. Has the film-maker/narrator been sucked into the odd beliefs of these Plainsmen so that he can no longer be an observer? Is he a lotus-eater? I’m mystified…
One of the conundrums is that an explanation or theory must not be complete. So when the landowner expounds his theory of Time as the Opposite Plain, the film-maker is suspicious that he must be privately really investigating the other populaar theories because the Time theory is too complete. Is Murnane mocking arcane academic theorising here?
The wife of the landowner comes into the library, but they never speak and he knows nothing about her. By the rules of the Plains one entertains possibilities but there is no need to do anything other than explore them. So he decides to write some essays exploring a relationship between them and have it published and reviewed and then placed in the library where she might find it and read it. But then he decides that he only wants her to know that he wrote it for her, not to read it so he worries about how he might get it reviewed without there being any books in existence. For some reason this sequence reminds me of The Shadow of the Wind, about the Last Book. Oh, too odd, I can’t penetrate the ideas behind this book!
The ending is bizarre. Like all the other writers, artists, modellers etc, the film-maker is required to present a ‘revelation’, attended by the locals. He gets up and talks about how he can’t possibly film this or that indefinable aspect of the Plains. They like this, because it’s impossible to make a film about the Plains, so even though the numbers dwindle over the now 20 years he’s been there, he always has an audience. It ends with his patron photographing him filming nothing at all.
***
Now in 2009 when I know about Calvino, I think The Plains is an example of postmodernism…but I’d love to be enlightened further. Over to you, cyberspace!
PS (later) There is someone else out there reading Gerald Murnane! See The Truth about Lies: The Plains.
Author: Gerald Murnane
Title: The Plains
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2000
ISBN: 9781876485443
Source: Personal Library
Availability:
Fishpond: The Plains (Text Classics)
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
Thanks for the link. This was a book that really grabbed me but it definitely needs a second read to appreciate it. He has a new book called ‘Barley Patch’ coming out very soon and a friend says she’ll try and get me a signed copy. She also sent him a copy of my review I’ve just discovered. I have no idea if he liked it or not though.
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By: Jim Murdoch on October 1, 2009
at 4:24 pm
I’ve just realised that I also have Tamarisk Row on my TBR so I’ll be reading that one of these days too….
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By: Lisa Hill on October 1, 2009
at 4:49 pm
People keep discovering Gerald Murnane all the time. I keep meeting people who have independently discovered his books, and see themselves as curators of a deep personal secret; or have been taught writing by Murnane, and have happy or rather unhappy memories of the experience. Alison Goodman is his most successful student so far.
His new book Barley Patch seems (from reading the first twenty pages) even more PoMo then anything he’s done before, except for Inland, since it seems to be about books he hasn’t written yet. Reminds me of Stanislaw Lem’s book of reviews of as-yet-unwritten books, and I think Borges did something similar.
Murnane has nothing but contempt for labels, but his fiction does fit most of those bullet points of PoMo. In fact, the Wikipedia entry on Postmodernism is the first time I’ve seen a useful summary of the movement. I keep editing textbooks by academics (especially in Media Studies) who talk endlessly about postmodernism, but give little idea of what it is, because they don’t really know.
The only author who fits all the PoMo categories is, of course, Philip K. Dick. Lisa, I suggest exploring his books.
PS: I wrote a tribute in Scratch Pad (http://efanzines.com ) to Catherine Murnane when she died at the beginning of this year. Also I’m publishing a special issue, including the eulogy that Gerald gave at Catherine’s funeral, and the story of the year that Catherine spent dying from lung cancer. The first is already on efanzine.com in Scratch Pad 70, and the latter should be up there as Scratch Pad 71 sometime during the next month or so.
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By: Bruce Gillespie on October 2, 2009
at 9:52 am
Hi Bruce, thank you for the link to Scratch Pad, I found it very interesting. So he will move from Macleod, after all this time? I’ve been reading in Inland today the part where his narrator talks about moving to the house where he becomes so settled, and it seems impossible not to identify that narrator with Murnane himself.
It’s odd, on the subject of editing postmodernism…I was chatting with my hairdresser today about Murnane, and read her an excerpt. We wondered about the business of editing Murnane, or any other ‘difficult’ PoMo writer. It would take very special expertise, I suppose, because the characteristics of PoMo are often the very things that an editor might take exception to.
Anyway, if my feeble posts about his work unearth a few more readers of this most interesting writer, that will be great.
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By: Lisa Hill on October 2, 2009
at 6:13 pm
Lisa, she must be one hell of a hairdresser. Great post – I have read The Plains, Tamarisk Row and the essays, and am working my way through Barley Patch.
It is amazing how many bits of The Plains come back to me while reading the latest book though.
In the loose sense I suppose this is post-modern writing, in the sense of writing about the act of writing, about the engagement of the reader, etc. But I’m not well-informed enough about the finer details of that definition to suggest much more than that. And also I haven’t read much of it yet…
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By: genevieve on October 2, 2009
at 7:19 pm
Hi Genevieve, I’m only half way through….and I keep going backwards and forwards and re-reading…and then spinning off with thoughts and ideas of my own that seem to be couched in his kind of circular sentences, as if he has colonised my mind. It is a bizarre experience to read something like this, floundering around trying to work out what’s happening even though it seems unlikely that anything is actually happening.
And yes, my hairdresser is fantastic: she loves reading and talking about books and ideas.
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By: Lisa Hill on October 2, 2009
at 10:24 pm
[…] read The Plains a couple of years ago and found it a curious experience. Inland is the same, and if there were […]
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By: Inland, by Gerald Murnane « ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on October 3, 2009
at 2:06 pm
[…] Australian Literature Cheer up, Liam, I've been reading Murnane too. I've read The Plains The Plains, by Gerald Murnane ANZ LitLovers LitBlog and Inland Inland, by Gerald Murnane ANZ LitLovers LitBlog and there's also some commentary about […]
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By: Matt's Friendly Guide to Reading Contemporary Australian Literature - World Literature Forum on October 3, 2009
at 4:34 pm
I have just read it and was equally baffled and amused. Often it seemed like a dig at the intellectual sterility of the squattocracy and the filmmaker’s naive reading of deep meaning into their boozing and pontificating. Then he would quote something that suggested that there was some deeper meaning. Beats me!
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By: Andrew on June 29, 2012
at 7:01 am
Hello Andrew, and welcome to ANZ LitLovers, I always like to meet new readers who’ve tried Murnane:)
I don’t claim to understand Murnane’s mind (and would be deeply suspicious of anyone who did) but I reckon he’s like James Joyce. The first time you read Ulysses it’s 99% bafflement, and then the next time, something clicks and you understand a little bit. Each time you read it, it makes a little more sense. It’s like learning to solve cryptic crosswords, not something you can do when you are young because you just don’t know enough to do it. But as you get older, and you’ve read more and thought more and had more experience of the world, these mysteries gradually reveal themselves. The pleasure lies in the gradual revelation, and as you say, in the humour. I really like to read Murnane when I’m on holiday, when I can lose myself in his world without having to stop for more mundane things.
He has a new one out, which I’m looking forward to. Maybe I’ll get to it this holidays:)
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By: Lisa Hill on June 29, 2012
at 5:38 pm
[…] read The Plains a couple of years ago (see my naïve review) and found it a curious experience. Inland is the same, and if there were only one word I could […]
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By: Inland, by Gerald Murnane « ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on September 14, 2012
at 11:48 am
[…] Lisa at ANZLitLovers, a Murnane fan, has reviewed The plains […]
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By: Gerald Murnane, The plains (Review) « Whispering Gums on November 29, 2012
at 9:37 am
[…] Sue at Whispering Gums has a lovely review of The Plains penned just the other day, which you can read here. Lisa at ANZ LitLovers is also a fan. […]
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By: Australian Classic: The Plains by Gerald Murnane « Musings of a Literary Dilettante's Blog on December 4, 2012
at 9:48 pm
[…] other takes on this novel, please visit Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers and Tony’s review at Tony’s Reading […]
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By: ‘The Plains’ by Gerald Murnane | Reading Matters on February 19, 2016
at 8:59 am
[…] written and almost defied me to find its final shape. For those of us who’ve read Inland and The Plains, it makes perfect sense, from beginning to […]
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By: ‘Landscape with Freckled Woman’ from Landscape with Landscape, by Gerald Murnane | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on January 15, 2017
at 11:08 pm
[…] is what I wrote in a comment on my post about The Plains, back in 2009 when I was […]
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By: Collected Short Fiction, by Gerald Murnane | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on February 10, 2019
at 12:02 am
[…] revealed his thinking about places. For example, in ‘Ode to Gippsland’ this author of The Plains writes of feeling uneasy in the damp forest when he was more used to the comforting plains of […]
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By: Green Shadows and Other Poems, by Gerald Murnane | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on March 7, 2019
at 7:10 pm
[…] Adrian tests out his four finalists to see which was best at protecting his ‘holy purity’ while he watches what he thinks is a raunchy film. (This is the Fifties, remember, when Hollywood had strict rules about depicting ‘bedroom scenes’.) And significantly, for readers of the mature Murnane, the winner protects him by conjuring a landscape that offers no temptation. Further on, Adrian reads a book called Elected Silence by the American Cistercian monk, Thomas Merton. This classic autobiography of redemption, about the conversion and vocation of a sinner, is transformed by Adrian into film scenes, accompanied by a mighty orchestra playing the climax of a gem from the classics such as Overture 1812 or Capriccio Italien. On the train to Blenheim he realises that non-Catholics had their own version of history and he sees events in history in images. On the northward journey it is dark after they change trains at Albury, and it is not until Part Four when he comes home to be a writer, that he sees the vast plains of western NSW, and the reader remembers how Murnane’s fascination with vast empty spaces becomes the fiction entitled The Plains. […]
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By: A Season on Earth, by Gerald Murnane | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on April 19, 2019
at 1:40 pm
Hi Lisa. A bit beyond me this one.
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By: fourtriplezed on June 14, 2020
at 1:40 pm
Murnane is definitely a challenge. He’s a bit like Brian Castro, he doesn’t expect his readers to understand what’s going on at first reading, or even repeated readings. I just go with the flow, and if I miss something, well, there’s always next time, or somebody else’s review will clarify it, or someone will write an article about him and then I understand.
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By: Lisa Hill on June 14, 2020
at 2:09 pm
I am going to keep reading his work, though in order. I liked his first two novels enormously. I now need to find a copy of Landscape With Landscape. I have read one Castro novel, Birds of Passage and thought it very good.
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By: fourtriplezed on June 14, 2020
at 2:55 pm
I love Castro, I’ve read a few of his, but I’ve still got some more on the TBR so there’s more to look forward to.
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By: Lisa Hill on June 14, 2020
at 3:37 pm