Australian author Gerald Murnane’s work has been compared favourably with Proust’s and his latest novel explores the trust that grows up between writer and reader in a certain kind of fiction. Here are six good reasons to read A Million Windows … even if you suspect it might do your head in!
Redolence of Proust
Proust’s involuntary memory was drawn forth by the taste of a madeleine. Murnane’s, in A Million Windows, is invoked partly by ‘light hitting sunless distant windows like spots of golden oil’— a phrase borrowed from Hal Porter’s autobiographical Watcher on the Cast Iron Balcony.
A boy watches a dark-haired young girl on a train, a dark-haired young woman becomes the lover of a middle-aged man, a two- or three-storey house is looked at and looked out from, a young woman leaps into a well in Hungary … all these images are recalled or revisited and yield meaning.
Murnane told ABC radio Books and Arts presenter Michael Cathcart that he found in Proust the words he needed to explain the theory of fiction he’d instinctively developed in his early writing years. That is: ‘Fiction exists so that people who would not normally might be able to connect with one another, confide in each other, relate to one another. And, I mean by that, I seem to be someone who, when I am writing fiction, can give word or express things that I wouldn’t normally.’
Fine critical thinkers compare Murnane with Proust as a remarkable writer of great distinction. I’ve included a list of Murnane’s works at the end of this post in case you want to further explore what these critics mean.
Recurring imagery
Murnane read Watcher on the Cast Iron Balcony in 1966. The distant window with its sunless spots of golden oil that features in A Million Windows is one image from Porter’s book that Murnane retained from a multitude forgotten.
The image also relates back to a time when Murnane travelled on buses throughout the Western District of Victoria. The houses were set back a long way from the road and the flash of light that was seen in a window was often all that was glimpsed of a whole way of life in a large house.
Murnane believes true fiction comes from men and women who describe the images in their minds and not from confessional writing. In his essay ‘The Typescript Stops Here’ he says, ‘What I call true fiction is fiction written by men and women not to tell the stories of their lives but to describe the images in their minds (some of which may happen to be images of men and women who want to tell the truth about their lives).’
Murnane approaches images of dark-haired girls and women, plains, grasslands, houses with two- or three-storeys, describing them from a number of angles; repeating and re-expressing them to form an intricate network or pattern.
The images that persist mean the most to him.
As Shannon Burns writes in ABR, ‘While sharing the Imagist’s preference for clear and direct expression, Murnane’s treatment of his subject has more in common with ancient cave paintings than literary movements … The question of Murnane’s accessibility hinges on whether or not the image, and the particular grammar of Murnane’s obsession with images, reverberates in the reader.’
Sentences that echo
Murnane’s sentences shimmer like the plains of his obsession and resonate more as you ponder them. Whenever I read his work, a host of other writers (especially me) seem breathless and lacking perception. Chief literary critic for The Australian, Geordie Williamson, says Murnane’s circumlocutory prose can’t disguise his ‘strength of feeling, a stainless honesty’. He also says Murnane’s sentences ‘can only be described as Murnanish’. I agree with his assessment.
Here’s a glinting oil-droplet of a sentence that reveals Murnane’s particular brand of genius.
‘Perhaps each of us is driven most urgently not by his wanting to be the subject of some or another biography and not even by his wanting to be the author of some or another memorable volume but by his wanting to grasp the paradox that has exercised him during much of his lifetime: by his wanting to understand how the so-called actual and the so-called possible — what he did and what he only dreamed of doing — come finally to be indistinguishable in the sort of text that we call true fiction.’
Meaning that cascades
The sort of author written about in A Million Windows, its narrator explains, starts out with the awareness of a few clustered images or perhaps even a singular image. His knowledge is scant and his feeling is that he ought to know much more about the subject/image/image cluster.
For example, the narrator says, the image of a windowpane reflecting the golden afternoon sunlight may, at first, seem simple and to hold little meaning — and yet, for the author, it is an image that emanates feeling. Along with this feeling, the author might also seem to receive wordlessly [from an image-person or image-object] the message, ‘Write about me in order to discover my secret and to learn what a throng of images, as yet invisible, lie around me.’
True fiction, the narrator claims, is likely to include that which was overlooked or barely seen when it first occurred but has come to mind repeatedly over decades, ‘appearing to be part of a pattern of meaning that extends over much of a lifetime’.
Murnane said it was while writing his fifth book, Inland, that he started to express the dictum, ‘Every thing is more than one thing.’ He’d been using a simple mental exercise that involved focusing his thoughts on one image. He soon realised he couldn’t hold this image without it ‘melting into another image or leading me sideways or diagonally into another image.’
From this exercise he realised that ‘things are connected in strange ways that we don’t at first recognise’.
‘My greatest satisfaction as I wrote Inland was in discovering those connections that I hadn’t been aware of when I started,’ he said.
What I glean from this is that, as connections are forged, meaning spills from them, cascades, as golden oil.
Meditative and contemplative resonance
When I read Murnane, it feels like I am reading a kind of wisdom literature. It is deeper and broader than a good deal of fiction produced. The near-repetitiveness and plains-like nature of the work is mesmeric. The writing opens up spaces for mystery and pulses with rich understandings of the visible and invisible worlds that are made accessible through fiction to writers and readers.
Murnane’s narrator talks of having no control over the kind of fictional personage that might appear to him or over what that person might do in the invisible space that surrounds them. The narrator has the hard task of selection, but says he is ‘mostly able, while struggling to keep in mind what I can only call an instinctive desire on my part to arrange the densest possible concentration of meaning on the fewest possible pages — I am mostly able to confine myself to reporting what I, whether as implied author or narrator, see fit to report.’
This concentrated meaning is apparent and appreciable.
J.M. Coetzee writes of Murnane ‘entering into a spiritual tradition that does not contemplate a meaning that pre-exists as an external fact, but as something that is created through the fact of contemplation itself — the fact of the self that reflects the self and does not exactly correspond. That is, the self that is read does not correspond with the self that is written.’
My instinct here is to offer a warning: If you don’t want to think or feel or reflect deeply, you’d best not tackle Murnane.
Connecting the big picture
A Million Windows reminds me that Murnane has been stitching a large and very intricate tapestry during his 30 years of writing. And it’s a tapestry in three dimensions that moves like the shudder of grasses. In the beginning, Murnane may not have been able to see how parts of the tapestry would blend or resonate with other parts of it or how repeated patterns would give zest to the whole picture. Luckily for us, he trusted the process. He has continued to explore the images that persisted in his mind and to seek out their meaning, to try to faithfully reflect their permutations and to share his perceptions about how they contribute to the broader vision.
He writes, ‘I have wanted, for almost as long as I have been a writer of fiction, to secure for myself a vantage-point from which each of the events reported in a work of fiction such as this present work, might seem, at one and the same time, a unique and inimitable entity impossible to define or to classify but also a mere detail in an intricate scheme or design.’
Though no longer a Catholic, Murnane is unable think of the so-called real world as the only world. He writes in ‘The Breathing Author’ in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs that his whole 30 years of writing fiction had been nothing less than the search for a discovery of certain images and connections between images. The discovery had been made while attempting to write passages for a since abandoned novel called O Dem Golden Slippers. By writing these passages, he said, ‘I seemed to have crossed, at last, the country of fiction and to have discovered on its farther side a country no less inviting.’
Peter Pierce recommends buying A Million Windows and reading it like a bible. For those of us obsessed with finding words to understand what happens in the minds of writers when they write and in the minds of readers when they read, I concur. The novel’s scope is vast and its blessings many. It’s a luminous gift from one of Australia’s most accomplished, elegant and intelligent writers.
I’m with you here, Marjory. Murnane’s writing is wonderful. His essays in Invisible Yet enduring Lilacs describe his process well. And he is such a remarkable person, as well. Remarkable for his eccentricities as well as his raw honesty.