By Owen Richardson
LITERATURE
Murnane
Emmett Stinson
Miegunyah Press, $18.99
It was 30 years ago that Imre Saluszinsky published the first, ground-breaking study of Gerald Murnane, one of the strangest and boldest writers in Australian or world literature. A lot has happened since then.
After his 1995 collection of short fiction Emerald Blue failed to make a mark, Murnane gave up writing, or rather gave up writing for publication. He then found a sympathetic home with Ivor Indyk at Giramondo and in 2009, he returned to fiction, if that is what it is, with Barley Patch.
He has since brought out the other three works that with Barley Patch are the subject of Emmett Stinson’s thoughtful, well-written monograph: A Million Windows, A History of Books and Border Districts. The other 21st-century writings – the poetry, the book about horse racing, and Murnane’s own retrospect, Last Letter to a Reader, are mentioned in passing. The book is rounded out with a conversation with Murnane that deals mostly with publication and reputation.
That reputation only continues to grow, and he is now admired overseas more than at home. Not that he has become a bestseller; rather, writing courses in the US are apparently now full of students trying to sound like him, and the clan of Murnanians can now boast some widely recognised names. Coetzee set the ball rolling with an appreciative essay-review of Barley Patch and Inland in The New York Review of Books, and hip and super-brainy younger things Ben Lerner and Merve Emre have followed suit with pieces in The New Yorker.
There has also been a profile in The New York Times encapsulating and broadcasting the Murnane legend: the man who has never left Australia, who never flies, who never looks at a computer; the cottage in the tiny western district town and the mysterious archive in the famous filing cabinets. It was after that profile was published that Murnane won the Prime Minister’s Award and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, for Border Districts: now that all those publications with New York in the title had shown their favour, the committees couldn’t ignore him.
Acclaimed author Gerald Murnane.
Stinson’s organising thesis is that the later works speak to the earlier books, creating a retrospective coherence. Barley Patch asks “Must I write?” and devotes its second half to an explication of an uncompleted work of fiction. The opening lines of Border Districts, “Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes”, are a conscious reprise of the opening of The Plains, from 1982: “Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open.” And A Million Windows is “a creative writing manual chiefly useful for producing novels in the style of Gerald Murnane”.
Stinson is an astute and informed critic; also has no trouble acknowledging when Murnane’s work gets the better of learned criticism. He invokes Edward Said’s elaborations of Theodor Adorno’s notion of “late style” – “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradictions … withdrawal from the world, self-quotation, and mannerism” – before throwing up his hands and admitting that Murnane has written like that his whole career, the early and middle phases as well as the late.
Back in 1993, Saluszinsky didn’t trouble himself much with Murnane’s detractors, apart from a few remarks about “male feminists”. Stinson is rather more expansive. He acknowledges the aesthetic criticisms – the obsessiveness and repetitiveness, the stilted, periphrastic style, “Gerald Mundane”, – but doesn’t give too much time to them either. He does, however, spend some pages dealing with and, up to a point, defending Murnane from the bad rap he has had from feminist critics, female and male. Murnane objectifies women, his unattainable girls and ideal women readers are just a version of “suburban Catholic” Mariolatry; his books, even an admirer says, are a “feminist dystopia”.
Stinson’s verdict appears to be that Murnane is guilty of sexism, but the offending is at the lower end of seriousness. For one thing, the male narrators or protagonists, or personages, to use Murnane’s term, don’t come off too well either: they are “often loners, losers, wallflowers, masturbators, perverts, and peeping toms”.
The ambivalence about just how sexist Murnane is, and how much of a deal-breaker it is, manifests in such gingerly constructed formulations as “Many claims of Murnane’s misogyny are reductive and not sufficiently attentive to the complex ways gender is represented in his work, but this does not mean they are incorrect.”
“Misogyny” aside, Stinson’s scholarly discretions don’t keep him from summing up with a value judgment of the most straightforward, flag-flying kind: “without question both the most original and the most significant Australian author of the last 50 years, and the best writer Australia has produced since Christina Stead.” Yes.