The Plains

 

The Plains was once described by Ben Lerner as a ‘strange Australian masterpiece’, a novel that ‘can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed’ (The New Yorker, 29 March 2017).While Gerald Murnane locates the story in the Australian continent, its mythic qualities are such that Lerner recognises the expansive grasslands and unobstructed sky of the Great Plains of North America.  

Wayne MacCauley also makes the case for a wider reading in his introduction to the 2012 Text Publishing edition to Murnane’s 1982 novel, placing it figuratively in ‘the library of alternative Australian fiction’ (vii), a reading experience he compares to ‘anything proposed by Swift, Kafka, Borges or Calvino’ (ix). Indeed, these are appropriate references. From Swift and Calvino, the sense of allegory and fable; from Kafka, the alternative world, dream-like but here more faintly oppressive; from Borges, the labyrinth library of poets, artists and writers endlessly specialising in their unread treatises on the nature of the plains.

The novel opens with a destabilising reference to place and deliberate ontological ambiguity:

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 that 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 success of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place only I could interpret (3).

From the first paragraph, are we to read that the examination for ‘elaborate meaning’ was naïve? If so, does the narrator not caution the reader against a deeper reading of what is to follow? And from the second paragraph, if the journey to the plains was ‘less arduous’ than described, how reliable are the stories to follow? 

Quite brilliantly unsettling.

For anyone unfamiliar with the story (as I was) The Plains follows the arrival of the narrator from ‘outer Australia’. He is a film maker, intent on pitching a project to one of the richer patrons (men with estates and elaborate houses filled with books and art). The idea of capturing the beauty and size of the landscape is (he gradually realises) impossible, and instead the narrator joins the legions of those who in different ways write marginalia or footnotes to books that no one will read. So much for the Great Australian Novel (or its filmic equivalent). Murnane also hints at and then disrupts other traditional forms of narrative development (‘plot’). For example, he is (for a time) intrigued by his patron’s daughter, and his patron’s wife, but comes near to neither. In the library for some time, he thinks he will write a book that might attract the wife’s interest but concludes that it would need to be a singular copy that he could immediately destroy for it to have the intended meaning he desires: the realisation that an alternative life would have been possible but wasn’t and isn’t to be. If I have this incorrectly, it may have just been me looking mistakenly for meaning beyond appearances.

I believe that reading in the digital age is becoming increasingly challenging, and I say this from the experience of how the brain seems to wish to scan where it once read sentence-by-sentence. Because little of consequence happens in The Plains, at times I felt that I had read and not understood a whole page of text, especially if I read at night when tired. This is a book to read on the deck in the winter sun, like philosophy or poetry. I will just leave these thoughts with a few of Murnane’s sentences where I think you can easily sense his brilliance.

‘None of this was any better received than the earlier manifesto in favour of an ‘art of the horizon’ … The painters took to wearing their dull-gold ribbons and debating with the men of the blue-green group’ (32).

(Think Swift’s satire about the size of heels and Tories and Whigs, and remember cultural debates in Australian art, like White versus Kershaw).

‘The view from my balcony – now, like some native plainsman myself, 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’ (83).

(Think Borges and the infinite number of books within the Library of Babel, here texts-within-texts in libraries in the ‘wavering haze’ of the Australian plains).

‘Since none of these men [famous recluses of the plans]has ever spoken or written a word to explain his preferring to live unobserved and untroubled by ambition in some modestly furnished suite of his unremarkable house, I can only sense about each of them a quite dedication to proving 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 with it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who knew that men invent their own meanings’ (141).

(I don’t know – Bush Kafka?).