Gerald Murnane's “The Plains” Is a Strange Australian Masterpiece | The New Yorker

Gerald Murnane's “The Plains” Is a Strange Australian Masterpiece | The New Yorker





A Strange Australian Masterpiece


By Ben LernerMarch 29, 2017






Gerald Murnane captures the paradoxical mix of uniformity and mystery, the former producing the latter, in his novel “The Plains”: small differences have an outsized power amid so much sameness.PHOTOGRAPH BY AUSCAPE / UIG VIA GETTY





The Australian writer Gerald Murnane was born in a suburb of Melbourne, in 1939, and has spent his entire life in Australia. His novel “The Plains,” first published thirty-five years ago and reissued next month, is a bizarre masterpiece that can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed.

Having grown up in a small capital city located on the Great Plains of North America, I recognize something in Murnane’s descriptions of expansive grasslands, unobstructed sky. He captures a plain’s paradoxical mix of uniformity and mystery, the former producing the latter: small differences—a hill, a sudden patch of wildflowers—have an outsized power amid so much sameness; they’d fail to stand out among the dramatic natural beauties of California or the overwhelming built spaces of New York. Sometimes, to break up long drives, my dad would pull onto the shoulder of the highway, and we would look for fossils in the limestone that crops out in the road cuts. The traces of ancient invertebrates with astonishing names (crinoids, fusulinids, and so on) were just one of many signs that the landscape my coastal relatives used to mock for its monotony in fact harbored wonders.


In the world of “The Plains,” which both is and isn’t Australia, the plain people and their plain speech also serve to conceal things—elaborate rituals, cosmologies, obscure passions, arcane knowledge. The apparent provincialism of the inhabitants of the plains is actually a kind of camouflage:

A plainsman would not only claim to be ignorant of the ways of other regions but willingly appear to be misinformed about them. Most irritating of all to outsiders, he would affect to be without any distinguishing culture rather than allow his land and his ways to be judged part of some larger community of contagious tastes or fashions.

The cosmopolitan coasts leave nothing to the imagination. For Murnane, for the plainsmen, this obviously apparent richness of the actual is a kind of poverty. To quote the narrator of the short story “Land Deal,” a distant cousin of “The Plains”:

Almost anything was possible. Any god might reside behind the thundercloud . . . The almost boundless scope of the possible was limited only by the occurrence of the actual. And it went without saying that what existed in the one sense could never exist in the other. Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual.

The poet-philosophers of the plains (and every plainsman is one) know that the plains are unknowable in their totality, and are therefore charged with possibility. This is because what at first appears “utterly flat and featureless” reveals, as you learn to look, “countless subtle variations of landscape.” But it is also because there is another plain (or plains) behind this one, “always invisible” even though you’ve “crossed and recrossed it daily.” “The Plains” is a book about the planes of the actual and the possible, about their interplay, how one haunts the other.

Murnane’s sentences are little dialectics of boredom and beauty, flatness and depth. They combine a matter-of-factness, often approaching coldness, with an intricate lyricism; they are measured, both in the sense of “restrained” and in the poetic sense of “metrical,” the former meaning often giving way to the second as you read. Take this sentence, although any of a thousand sentences would serve, from part two of “The Plains”: “None of the scholars I mention can even guess how many successive encroachments of afternoon sunlight on the shadowy corners of libraries will have bleached the glossy inks on the books that they open at last.”

The sentence begins with an anthropological tone, the restricted affect of objectivity, but it transitions, starting with “afternoon sunlight,” into a more romantic register as it slowly zooms in on the letters and their lustre. The grammar here is both plain and elaborate: there is no internal punctuation, just a repetitive chain of prepositions (of, on, of, on), but there are delicate changes of light and shade and scale as the sentence unfolds. Beats fall with considerable regularity within the internal divisions of phrase and clause, so that a sense of poetic rhythm accumulates as you go. (I read it as anapestic and dactylic—the accentual stresses tending to be divided by a pair of unstressed syllables.) Murnane’s mysterious plainsmen pursue the “lifelong task of shaping from uneventful days in a flat landscape the substance of myth.” And this is what Murnane achieves, again and again, through his carefully shaped sentences, the prosaic becoming poetic along their length.

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“The Plains” is an ekphrastic novel, full of descriptions of other works of art. The narrator arrives from “Outer Australia” (“the sterile margins of the continent”), as the people of the plains call it, determined to make a film—he plans to title it “The Interior”—that can capture the evasive truth of the plains. Much of his narrative is taken up with describing attempts in other media to produce art works worthy of the place. There is the controversial painting “Decline and Fall of the Empire of Grass,” for instance, which appears at first full of “deliberately imprecise” shapes, “of no style known from history,” and yet, when you step back, you can see “a painting of plants and soil.” There are poems such as “A Parasol at Noon,” vaguely reminiscent of Wallace Stevens, which imagines “a land apart” that is “neither a plain of old nor yet a dream.” And there is the composer who, in an attempt to find “the musical equivalent of the characteristic sound of his district,” stages a performance that, in Murnane’s telling, sounds like a synthesis of Kafka and John Cage:


the members of the orchestra were stationed far apart among the audience. Each instrument produced a volume of sound that could be heard only by the few listeners nearest it. The audience was free to move around—as quietly or as noisily as they wished. Some were able to hear snatches of melody as subtle as the scraping together of grass-blades or the throbbing of the brittle tissue of insects. A few even found some spot from which more than one instrument was audible. Most heard no music at all.
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The works of art that Murnane describes are failures. The composer responds to critics of his work’s insufficiency by saying that “the purpose of his art was to draw attention to the impossibility of comprehending even such an obvious property of a plain as the sound that came from it.” And yet he hopes that he can capture a “hint of the whole” through his experiments. For this composer, for Murnane, for his narrator, any serious art work will fail, as soon as it becomes actual, to capture the possible; but that failure itself can gesture toward, offer a hint of, the invisible topology that is no less real for being unrepresentable. A hint of the narrator’s unmakeable film survives only by collapsing into this novel.

Gerald Murnane has never been on an airplane. He’s left the state of Victoria few times in his almost eighty years. He suffers from anosmia, the inability to smell, although perhaps “suffers” is the wrong word, as he says it has intensified his experience of color, given him the gift of synesthesia. (“If you were to say to me,” he told an interviewer, “the smell of the lilac was very strong this afternoon, I would see little droplets of lilac-coloured moisture floating through the air.”) To experience one sense in terms of another, to transpose smell onto the plane of vision, is a kind of embodied ekphrasis. Perhaps it adds to the mystery of the world to hear constant talk of a sense you don’t possess, just as refusing to travel might keep the allure of other landscapes intact.

Certainly, Murnane is interested in what part of consciousness—of sensation, of emotion—might be shareable and what part is irreducibly individual, a private territory. This is a concern that scales up in his work from the question of what one person might know of another to larger questions of collectivity, of those “imagined communities”—to borrow Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase—called nations. While a plainsman likes “to appear as a solitary inhabitant of a region that only he could explain,” a nation of one, the plainsmen’s constant debates about art, ornament, architecture, and archive, their rivalries and sports, their concern with differentiating themselves from Outer Australia, betray an obsession with constructing and contesting collective fictions. “Australia” is the name of Murnane’s supreme fiction, the idea that his private landscapes might somehow correspond with those of his countrymen and women, or at least be glimpsed by them, without having to be translated into mere “taste or fashion,” where commonality is purchased at the price of standardization. “The Plains,” as much a prose poem as a novel, is this Australia’s interior, Murnane’s heartland, a realm of possibility, where “the invisible is only what is too brightly lit.”

_This essay was adapted from the introduction to a new edition of “The Plains,” by Gerald Murnane, out in April from Text Publishing. _

Ben Lerner is a MacArthur Fellow. His most recent book is “The Topeka School.”