It may be that Gerald Murnane’s vision of the world is born of astonishment. Herbert Read once quoted Picasso, reflecting on an exhibition of children’s drawings: “It took me many years to learn how to draw like these children.” Reading Murnane, through the essays in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, and the novels Barley Patch and, most recently, Tamarisk Row, I begin to see astonishment not as naiveté, but as a mode of apprehension that resists habituation.
This astonishment carries none of the condescension of so-called childlike wonder. Rather than regress, Murnane opens a way of seeing that remains sophisticated, precise. His attention lingers long enough on surfaces for something below to begin to stir. The effect is not stylistic primitivism, as in Picasso’s idealisation of the primitive; it is a fidelity to the strangeness inherent in ordinary perception, before it is dulled by adult habituation.
In Tamarisk Row, the narrated events, a portion of a boy’s daily life, remain simple, almost elemental. But the vision animating them unsettles simplicity. Murnane recovers the moment before the world was overwritten by interpretation. The familiar is made to shimmer with latent possibilities, as if sight were being learned for the first time.
I plan to read more of Murnane this year, more or less chronologically, tracing the slow evolution of this form of vision. Perhaps interspersed with Clarice Lispector, who works a different spell, but whose stories similarly recompose the seen world around me.
Thank you for this interesting review. I am waiting for your thoughts on his other books. Murnane’s uncategorizable style has immensely captured me.
I am very interested in your response to The Plains when you reach that ineffable landscape.
Coincidentally I realised about an hour ago, it is now the only Murnane (aside from the difficult to obtain Emerald Blue) that I don’t yet own.
It’s impossible to describe or forget, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Emerald Blue in Stream System, the collection of his short fictions released at same time as Border Districts
Oh, cool, thank you.
I read the Plains, but couldn’t make it through the short-story collection. If you’ve ever been to Australia, especially in and around Melbourne, you’ll have a slightly adjusted response to his writing for a number of reasons, the terrain for one, the oddness of the burbs, the heat. I find his writing a little menacing rather than moving; something not quite the ticket just below the surface. But what put me off more than anything else, and to be honest there wasn’t a whole lot of anything else, was the narrowness of his vision, which feels “made up” rather than invented if that makes any sense whatsoever. His long term project – if that’s what it is – could well be titled: Rambling Man or One thing Leads to Another or The First Thing That Popped into my Head, because that, to me, is how it reads.
Thanks for your thoughts. I’ll have to see how I get on as I read through his work. I’ve been to Melbourne a few times, which does add something to reading his work.