What is the Real World in Murnane? The Case of the Antipodean Archive of Horse Racing

This is my fifth or sixth time trying to come to terms with Murnane. Here I'll just talk about one of the stories in this collection, "The Interior of Gaaldine."

It's been widely known for several decades now that Murnane's files contain a particular extensive set of notes for imaginary horse races. Mark Binelli's piece in The New York Times Sunday magazine for March 27, 2018 has an excellent description of the files and how they were arranged in Murnane's house. (Or rather, his shed.) It seems likely there will be a printed edition of the horse racing files at some point. I can imagine it done expensively in color facsimile, the way it's been done for Emily Dickinson's envelopes, Robert Walser's microscripts, Nabokov's notecards for "The Original of Laura," and miscellaneous diagrams and lists left behind by Walter Benjamin.

"The Interior of Gaaldine" contains a supposedly fictionalized account of the method and content of the horse racing files. In the story they are a manuscript given to Murnane by an unpublished writer. (I'm calling the narrator "Murnane" to distinguish him from Gerald Murnane.) The woman who delivers the manuscript first tells Murnane about how the man has led an isolated life, not doing more for his job than he needs to, and moving often to avoid having friends (pp. 454-60). Supposedly Murnane doesn't remember her telling him any of this, but that's probably so Gerald Murnane did not have to write dialogue (p. 454). The man's life is very similar, in its benign misanthropy or autistic pleasure in isolation, to Gerald Murnane's and to what we know of "Murnane."

After the woman leaves, "Murnane" peruses the manuscript. It's 2,000 pages written between "the late 1950s" and the present, sometime shortly after 1987. Binelli reports Murnane began his horse racing file "in secret beginning in 1985." If Binelli is right, "The Interior of Gaaldine" is a report on the early days of the file, long before it swelled to however many thousand pages it is now.

The story begins with a line in italics, set off from the text bu a double space:

"A true account of certain events recalled on the evening when I decided to write no more fiction."

At the end of the story, we're given several different reasons why "Murnane" thinks the woman might have wanted him to see the unknown author's text. One is: "the author of the pages wanted to meet me in order to persuade me to write a different sort of fiction in the future."

So on a first reading, "The Interior of Gaaldine" is a fictionalized account of a new kind of writing Murnane had invented, which made him change his mind about how to write. In this way of understanding it, he kept writing fiction, but it was understood differently.

Three things complicate this. The first is a description we get just before "Murnane" starts explaining the details of how horse races are invented and recorded in the file.

"If the pages comprised a work of literature," he writes, "I might report that the first thousand or so comprise an introduction to the work while the other pages are samples chosen at intervals from the narrartive proper."

And then, immediately, an odd repetititon:

"If the pages comprised a work of literature, I might describe that work as a novel with many thousands of characters and a plot of infinite complications." (p. 460)

From what is known about the Antipodean Archive, as Murnane calls the horse racing file, it has nothing in common with the novel form. Even for Georges Perec it would be a stretch to say the jockeys and horses are "thousand of characters" and the racing seasons are "a plot of infinite complications." Identifying the hore racing file as a novel is exactly as incomprehensible as Sartre's comment that "The Family Fool," his 2,600 page nonfiction study of the young Flaubert, was a novel. If this is what Murnane means by not writing fiction—while still writing novels—it's not something he has done.

A second complication is the what happens to literature in the Antipodean Archive, as it is described in this story. "Murnane" says the author buys novels, finds passages that are especially striking, and writes them out, letter by letter, vertically down the columns of his imagined racing forms, so that it's possible to read a series of letters across from each horse's name. Numerical values attached to the letters of the alphabet yield numbers, which indicate the horse's rank at different moments in the race.

This wouldn't matter, except that the author uses Victorian novels because "the profusion of realistic details in Victorian novels gives to the images of horse-racing that they cause to arise in his mind an unsurpassed richness and vividness." He calls this "decoding" Victorian novels. He uses the direct dialogue in Victorian novels in the same way in order to find out the winner of each race, and he calls that "gutting" the novel (pp. 464-65). "Such writers," her says, "suppose that the best fiction is the most life-like."

So the Antipodean Archive is an engine for converting a certain kind of fiction, valued for its realism, into a more realistic world of horse racing. This could be a model for not writing fiction, except that it isn't, because it produces stronger fiction.

And third, there's a passage just after these descriptions in which "Murnane" addresses the reader, who he thinks must be wondering why the author went to such trouble to invent imaginary horses, racecourses, jockeys, and even uniforms, when he could have written about ones that already exist. "Murnane" answers, weirdly, in the first person, as if he's the author (which of course he is!). He wasn't surprised by this, he says, because:

"I have always been interested in what is usually called the real world but only because it provides me with evidence for the existence of another world. I have never written any piece of fiction with the simple purpose of understanding what I might call the real world. I have always written fiction in order to suggest to myself that another world exists." (p. 466)

This is an idea that's pushed much farther in the novel "Barley Patch," in which we're told that what's most interesting in fiction is the fictional lives of the characters, but mainly as they lead them when no one is watching—when they're doing things that aren't described in the novels.

This is a very conventional world-building idea of fiction, compatible with work by Frank Herbert, J.R. Tolkein, or George R.R. Martin: it's the sense that the fictional world continues on when the book is closed, or after the last page. But in Murnane, in my experience, that's never what happens. The artifice is so intense, and in the case of the Antipodean Archive, so dependent on just one person's hermetic self-imposed rules and ideas, that absolutely nothing continues when the book is closed.

What counts as the "real world" in Murnane's fiction? It's something artificially constructed, using rules that the author himself can barely understand, or that he perceives as inevitable, or simply given, or necessary to create realism out of the "decoded" and "gutted" remains of ordinary fiction. They are nothing like Oulipeans' intellectual constraints: they're rules that have to be obeyed in order to make at least provisional, hedged and qualified, sense out of the otherwise meaningless world.

Yes, it is that good, but also not something to read straight through. It's a shame the publishers weren't clearer about where the stories came from, so people could read the original collections one at a time, without trawling through the internets looking for tables of contents. Hey, Justin! Maybe perform a public service? Okay, Justin?

As best as I can tell:

Velvet Waters: pp 3-223.
Emerald Blue: pp 247-436.

'White Cattle of Uppington' and 'The Interior of Gaaldine' are stand-alones.
'Invisible yet Enduring Lilacs,' from the volume of that name.

I think the last three stories are from 'History of Books,' but I can't be bothered going to find my copy and make sure. Perhaps owners of VW and EB can correct me if I've made some mistakes here. ( )

I seldom give up, but I could only get through a quarter of the collection. The stories aren’t traditional in style or construction. While I understood the sentences and actions, they didn’t amount to coherent, substantive, or enjoyable stories for me This one goes to the resale pile. ( )

Collected Short Fiction offers an entrée to Gerald Murnane's fiction for the newbie. I've been reading his books for years now, and am a confirmed enthusiast only too delighted by his more recent prominence both here in Australia and overseas. But I'm no closer to 'understanding' Murnane, only more comfortable with the effect his writing has on me.

(This is what I wrote in a comment on my post about The Plains, back in 2009 when I was reading Inland:

I keep going backwards and forwards and re-reading…and then spinning off with thoughts and ideas of my own that seem to be couched in his kind of circular sentences, as if he has colonised my mind. It is a bizarre experience to read something like this, floundering around trying to work out what’s happening even though it seems unlikely that anything is actually happening.

These days I don't flounder, I surf along whatever wave I can catch. And yes, it's exhilarating.)

The blurb for Collected Short Fiction has this to say:

This volume brings together Gerald Murnane’s shorter works of fiction, most of which have been out of print for the past twenty five years. They include such masterpieces as ‘When the Mice Failed to Arrive’, ‘Stream System’, ‘First Love’, ‘Emerald Blue’, and ‘The Interior of Gaaldine’, a story which holds the key to the long break in Murnane’s career, and points the way towards his later works, from Barley Patch to Border Districts. Much is made of Murnane’s distinctive and elaborate style as a writer, but there is no one to match him in his sensitive portraits of family members – parents, uncles and aunts, and particularly children – and in his probing of situations which contain anxiety and embarrassment, shame or delight.

When the Mice Failed to Arrive' was originally published in the Autumn 1989 edition of a periodical called 'Sport' and then in Velvet Waters (McPhee Gribble 1990). The excruciating depiction of the narrator's childhood anxiety spills into what seems to be a deeply personal account of parental failings and guilty memories from a teaching career. And it's true: even if you're Gerald Murnane and perhaps not temperamentally suited to teaching, it's a career that's like parenthood, it's filled with guilt about the times you failed to meet a need, or weren't prepared, or you lost your temper, or let a child down when they needed you most. Those times do haunt teachers who care...

Guilt also seeps into 'Stream System' which was first published in The Age Monthly Review 8, no 9, December 1988-January 1989:

When my brother first went to school I used to hide from him in the schoolground. I did not want my brother to speak to me in his strange speech. I did not want my friends to hear my brother and then ask me why he spoke strangely. During the rest of my childhood and until I left my parents' house, I tried never to be seen with my brother, If I could not avoid travelling on the same train with my brother I would order him to sit in a different compartment from mine. If I could not avoid walking in the street with my brother I would order him not to look in my direction and not to speak to me.

When my brother first went to school my mother said that he was no different from any other boy but in later years my mother would admit that my brother was a little backward.

My brother died when he was forty-three years old and I was forty-six. My brother never married. Many people came to my brother's funeral, but none of those people had ever been a friend to my brother. I was certainly never a friend to my brother. On the day before my brother died I understood for the first time that no one had ever been a friend to my brother. (p.39)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/02/10/collected-short-fiction-by-gerald-murnane/ ( )

http://shawjonathan.com/2018/08/10/the-book-group-and-gerald-murnanes-collected-... ( )