Gerald Murnane. the Plains
Journal article by Nicholas Birns; The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 24, 2004
Journal Article Excerpt
Gerald Murnane. the Plains. by Nicholas Birns Gerald Murnane. The Plains. New Issues, 2003. 111 pp. Paper: $14.00. (Reprint) Despite all the achievements of Australian fiction in the past generation, Gerald Murnane is unmatched in his commitment to experimentation, self-reflexivity, and, as the poet Andrew Zawacki says in his introduction to the new American edition of this 1982 work, "idealist metafictions and metaphysics." The plains of the book are a dreamlike inner Australia, not the outback as we know it but its antipode: full of wealthy landowners divided into factions and idly speculating on metaphysics. Our narrator is a young filmmaker from outer Australia--the Australia that seems real to us--who is in the plains on a quest for "some elaborate meaning beyond appearances." The plainsmen prize writing, but find film too obviously visible. But the filmmaker tries to capture the invisible, even as the book we are actually reading tries to bring what cannot be seen before our eyes. That is the presiding trope of the plains--the search for a meaning beyond the visible, the projection of the given onto an indiscernible horizon. This quest may be in vain, or it may actually have an object, albeit occluded and remote. As much as this search beyond visibility is mocked, Murnane's incantatory tones simultaneously privilege it. Murnane evokes grasslands and prairies, prizing their capacity for abstraction and indefiniteness, but the plains are also those of language, the "Interstitial Plain" that exists only as it posits the potentiality of every other plain, or plane, of existence. No names of people, or places, are given or asked for. Searches for possibilities are immured in library catalogs. And the filmmaker never makes the film--though the landowners permit him to linger, taking notes for it. Part science fiction, part gnomic parable, and part travel guide to regions that will be perpetually unvisited, The Plains heralds a vision of imaginative impalpability that postmodern literature cannot do without. [Nicholas Birns] -1- |
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