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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Gerald Murnane is one of Australia’s most important contemporary authors, but for years was neglected by critics. In 2018 the New York Times described him as “the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of” and tipped him as a future Nobel Prize winner.
'Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One coincides with a renewed interest in his work. It includes an important new essay by Murnane himself, alongside chapters by established and emerging literary critics from Australia and internationally. Together they provide a stimulating reassessment of Murnane’s diverse body of work.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Notes
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Contents sourced from online.
Contents
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Scenes from Gerald Murnane’s Golf Club,
single work
column
(p. 9-12)
'The Australian writer Gerald Murnane is a man of profound contradictions. A recluse who craves attention. A Luddite who uses his smartphone to google himself. An author who retired long ago, then went on to produce his richest work. He was recently treated for prostate cancer, and yet he’s still the sprightliest person in the room.' (Introduction)
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To the Untrained Eye,
single work
criticism
(p. 13-28)'My first Murnanian encounter was of a humiliatingly Bloomian stripe. On a visit to my editor’s office to discuss the second draft of what was then a slip of a manuscript, I was offered a long list of books, collections and anthologies he felt were in my interest to investigate. When the question of which of Murnane’s books I had read was raised, I confessed not only to having never read a word Murnane had written, but also to never having heard his name before. To this my editor recoiled as though I’d hocked a golly in his direction. Murnane, my editor informed me, was not only a major author in Australian letters, despite what is often referred to as his “lack of wider recognition”, but more to the point, was one of the brightest stars in my editor’s stable, and as such, my editor had every right to take my inattention to this important author as a personal and embarrassing failing on both our accounts.' (Introduction)
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Truth, Fiction and True Fiction,
single work
criticism
(p. 29-36)The novels and collections of fiction that represent Gerald Murnane’s first major period of writing and publishing (1974-95) portray Murnane-like personages and narrators. Clement Killeaton’s boyhood in Tamarisk Row (1974) mirrors Murnane’s experiences in Bendigo as a child; Adrian Shard’s inner life in A Lifetime on Clouds (1976) approximates Murnane’s adolescent awkwardness and obsessive fantasies; the partial Künstlerromane of several Murnane-like writers in Landscape with Landscape (1985) are drawn from their author’s experiences in his late teens, then as a bachelor in his twenties and as a husband and father; Inland (1988) draws from his epiphanic discovery of Hungarian writer Gyula Illyés’ Puszták népe (People of the Puszta) – a book that had a deep and strange impact on Murnane, stimulating a literal and literary haunting – combined with childhood experiences (and, perhaps, a curious but chaste relationship with his female editor at Heinemann);2 and the stories in Velvet Waters (1990) and Emerald Blue (1995) appear to be increasingly personal and revealing, despite the distancing devices that Murnane employs, which serve to deter readerly presumptuousness. Murnane has teased readers with a series of enduring images and motifs (two-storey buildings, blue and gold coloured reflections, flat grasslands, horseraces, nesting areas, etc.) and this tendency has only intensified since the later phase of his writing career began, with the publication of Barley Patch in 2009.' (Introduction)
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Images and Feelings in a Sort of Eternity” : Gerald Murnane’s Ideal Female Reader,
single work
criticism
(p. 37-44)'The blurb to Gerald Murnane’s A History of Books (2012) states that the main body of work: “is accompanied by three shorter works, ‘As It Were a Letter’, ‘The Boy’s Name Was David’ and ‘Last Letter to a Niece’, in which a writer searches for an ideal world, an ideal sentence, and an ideal reader”.¹ Presuming that the three texts correspond in order to the three aims, “Last Letter to a Niece” presents an important insight into who Murnane writes for and, perhaps, some indications as to why he writes at all. In this essay, I posit that Murnane’s quest for an ideal reader is no less than a quest for his own ideal existence. To validate these claims, I will draw on Murnane’s 2017 address at the Goroke Golf Club, “The Still-Breathing Author”, as well as conduct a reading of “Last Letter to a Niece”, and sections of his wider oeuvre.' (Introduction)
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Retrospective Intention : The Implied Author and the Coherence of the Oeuvre in Border Districts and The Plains,
single work
criticism
(p. 45-62)'This essay examines the dialogic relationship between Gerald Murnane’s final novel, Border Districts (2017), and his third published novel, The Plains (1982), to argue that Murnane’s late works enact a “retrospective intention” that revises the meaning of his earlier works. Murnane’s writings depict a complex relationship between author, intention, text and reader through the notion of the “implied author”, a figure that gives coherence to the total meaning of a work, while also being purely textual in nature. By comparing Wayne C. Booth’s influential definition of the implied author and Murnane’s use of the term, however, I argue that Murnane foregrounds and exploits its internal contradictions for generative purposes. The implied author functions similarly to what I will call retrospective intention.' (Introduction)
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Stream System, Salient Image and Feeling : Between Barley Patch and Inland,
single work
criticism
(p. 63-84)
'In 1988, the year that saw publication of Inland, Gerald Murnane gave a talk to an audience at La Trobe University that was subsequently published as “Stream System”.² The talk opened with a seemingly factual account of its author’s morning walk from his nearby suburban home to the Bundoora campus:
'This morning, in order to reach the place where I am now, I went a little out of my way. I took the shortest route from my house to the place that you people probably know as SOUTH ENTRY. That is to say, I walked from the front gate of of my house due west and downhill to Salt Creek then uphill and still due west from Salt Creek to the watershed between Salt Creek and a nameless creek that runs into Darebin Creek. When I reached the high ground that drains into the nameless creek, I walked north-west until I was standing about thirty metres south-east of the place that is denoted on Page 66A of Edition 18 of the Melway Street Directory of Greater Melbourne by the words STREAM SYSTEM.' (Introduction)
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Gerald Murnane’s Plain Style,
single work
criticism
(p. 85-108)The role of grasslands in Gerald Murnane’s fiction is as sustained and pronounced as his self-stated aversion to the coast and the ocean,² and his uneasy forbearance of mountain ranges. Murnane’s narrative devotion to steppe-like ecologies provokes the question of style and how his narrative strategies might operate dialectically with his chosen geography. When thinking of how geography inflects prose style one might think of “oceanic” or “thalassan” style in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, or John Banville’s The Sea , or even the sea of sand in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Alternately, the mountainous topography in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian mediates allegory and symbolism with the rhetoric of geographical representation. Absent such symbolic inducements, the steppe, plain, grassland – unvaried topography neither desert nor littoral, neither urban nor rural, yet a strangely replenishing source for agriculture, husbandry, and the history of human migrations – provide Murnane’s fictions with a distinct ground from which to produce his complex narrative meditations.' (Introduction)
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Landscape within Landscape : The Intertwining of the Visible and the Invisible in Gerald Murnane and Henry James,
single work
criticism
(p. 109-126)'At the 2017 “Another World in This One” symposium – held at Gerald Murnane’s beloved Goroke Golf Club – I could not pass up the opportunity of asking this Australian writer about Henry James, especially as his book A Million Windows (2014) pays homage to the preface of The Portrait of a Lady. ¹ I was keen to know what Murnane thought about such an influential Victorian novelist. To my surprise, he said that James’ novels “have no landscape”. This comment, presumably meant as a criticism, seemed logical at the time, uttered as it was in the rural context where Murnane was most at home. My immediate response was to agree, since Murnane’s writing contemplates sweeping vistas that contrast sharply with James’ crowded metropolitan spheres. But the more I thought about this comment the more I came to the conclusion that James’ novels do have landscape – just not the kind of terrain that Murnane prefers.' (Introduction)
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Memory, Image and Reading Traces of the Infinite : A History of Books,
single work
criticism
(p. 127-142)'The experience of reading books is integral to the registration of consciousness and memory. The mnemonic traces of a lifetime of reading offer an imaginative reservoir. It can also work as experimental material for fiction writing. From the oral to the written and from reading out loud to silent articulation, reading has always influenced the mode and style of writing. When we read and process the material in a conscious way in order to make sense of the reading, a cognitive collusion takes place between word and image. Writing is yet another engagement of thinking through this word-image complex. As a literary writer, Gerald Murnane is interested in thinking through cognitive images and his fiction presents a dialogue of image and memory, mediated through the experience of reading. As Anthony Uhlmann reflects: “The reader of A History of Books wants books to leave him with images that will persist, that will outlive the books themselves”. What are the images that remain and what resonance urges them to live on long after the reading? These are Murnane’s zones of fascination. In this chapter, I trace the contours of specular thinking in Murnane’s novella A History of Books (2012) in terms of the interaction between the memory of reading traces and the imagery of thought. From Murnane’s network of interconnected reading traces and their images, we will see if thinking in fiction can approach an infinite structure of thought by tapping on the interplay of book as a container and life as a material that is difficult to be contained.' (Introduction)
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Reporting Meaning in Border Districts,
single work
criticism
(p. 143-152)
'As many critics point out, Gerald Murnane challenges how we read, how we think and interpret. The closer one reads him the more profound these challenges appear. I will attempt two things in this chapter. First, I will make some comments on some of these challenges. Second, I will offer a reading of some of the associations of images the work brings together.' (Introduction)
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What Kind of Literary History Is A History of Books?,
single work
criticism
(p. 153-164)
'This is one of those occasions where I feel I am wearing too many hats, and I am not sure what to do with the excess ones. This is because I am speaking of Gerald Murnane in a number of different roles – as a friend, a critic, a publisher, an editor – though I should admit that Murnane doesn’t need much editing, at least in my experience, since what I suggest as an editor tends to get rejected anyway. As he busies himself behind the bar in the room here as I talk now, I cannot be sure whether he’s listening , or whether, like the narrator at the beginning of Border Districts, he has resolved to guard his eyes, so as to be more alert to what might appear at the edges of his attention.1 But perhaps the greater discomfort for me, is to talk as both a publisher and as a critic. As a publisher there’s a sense of excitement when you’re producing a book, a kind of intimacy in the production of it, which as a critic you’re not meant to feel; you keep the book at a distance, the better to form a judgement of it. Nevertheless, when I’m preparing a book for publication I do read it critically and develop ideas about it that I think are significant, and should be conveyed to readers, particularly those who have not read Murnane before. I’m only allowed a little over one hundred words, in the blurb on the back cover, to address the reader directly, and there is not a lot one can say there, though there is a lot one wants to say. I have found, especially being here today, that much of what I wanted to say has now already been said, or is being said, as the critical discourse catches up with Murnane’s works of fiction, and his idiosyncracies as an author. And though this makes me feel proud as a publisher it makes feel humble as a critic, because it’s other people making the points that I would have liked to make, and they are making them more thoroughly than I could have done.' (Introduction(
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The Still-Breathing Author,
single work
essay
(p. 165-180)
'I’ve prepared and delivered this sort of address once before. That was in September 2001, at a conference similar to this in Newcastle, New South Wales. At that time, no book of mine had been published during the previous six years; nor had I written or planned during those years anything that might have gone towards any sort of book. During those six years, the time that I might otherwise have given to writing for publication I had used for adding to my archives. None of the matters mentioned in the previous two sentences was mentioned in my address to the scholars at Newcastle.' (Introduction)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Anthony Uhlmann, Ed., Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 21 no. 1 2021;
— Review of Gerald Murnane : Another World in This One 2020 anthology criticism
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Anthony Uhlmann, Ed., Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 21 no. 1 2021;
— Review of Gerald Murnane : Another World in This One 2020 anthology criticism
