The Plains by Gerald Murnane
If I say "postmodern" enough, maybe I can convince myself I know what it means.
Hi y’all,
Here let me acknowledge that I have done a terrible job at consistently writing this blog. Again, I will give no excuses, but I will sit with it, briefly, shamefully, in a moment of humble silence.
Moving on. Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You published last week. I haven’t read it, but I have read her other two novels. Here are my thoughts on Sally Rooney: she is a good writer who writes good books that, after I've finished reading, I've never thought about again. Like literally, if it weren't for the fact that people keep talking to me about Sally Rooney, I would've forgotten the plot of her books within a week or two of reading. I enjoyed the books, but I absolutely do not understand the hype!
That said, it is my absolute pleasure to announce that The Plains is a near-perfect, mind blowing, totally unforgettable book. This is a rave review. This is a review that is almost incoherent with joy. This is a review in which I compare Murnane to the Holy Trinity of Book Notes:1 Italo Calvino, Terence Malick, and New Orleans. Buckle up.
The Plains by Gerald Murnane begins as an unnamed narrator arrives in the plains of central Australia after several days of travel. He spends a few weeks in a hotel, where he and other artists petition the local gentry for positions in their houses as a resident artists. He hopes to make a film about the plains. He secures a patron, and for the next twenty years lives in his house, where he never touches a camera.
That’s the whole book. Sorry for spoilers!
Seriously though, The Plains is not a book to be read for the plot, it hardly has one. Rather, The Plains is about a place and a people, and the relationship between them.
There are so, so, so many things I could say about this book, about home, about gender, about desire, about distance, about nature, about mythology, about magic.
The Plains reminded me of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, in which an imaginary Marco Polo and Kublai Khan discuss the many imaginary cities in Kublai Khan’s empire. Even within the world of the novel, these cities do not “exist,” rather, they are representations of Venice, Marco Polo’s home and “implicit city.”
The Plains has a similar set up. The titular plains both are and are not the plains of central Australia. The novel describes the many attempts of many artists to represent the plains in many different mediums. Like the protagonist, all of these artists fail to capture the plains in its entirety. We know that this too is what Murnane would say about his own book. The plains described in the novel are more magical than the real plains of Australia—except, perhaps, in the eyes of those who have visited the plains.
Murnane and Calvino both fictionalize theory. Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler… is literally just literary criticism turned into a novel, while The Plains repeatedly interprets and reinterprets the different art of the plains (in the introductions, Ben Lerner describes The Plains as “ekphrastic.”)
For example—once the narrator has arrived at a town “far enough“ into the plains, he learns of the decades-long conflict between the Horizonites and the Haresmen. The dispute started as an aesthetic and philosophical argument between artists. Initially, a group of artists who would come to call themselves the Horizonites made art that rarely literally represented the plains, rather, they painted the horizon:
The group seemed to be insisting that what moved them more than wide grasslands and huge skies was the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged farther in the distance.
Members of the group were challenged, of course, to explain themselves. They replied by talking of the blue-green haze as though it were itself a land—a plain of the future, perhaps, where one might live a life that existed only in potentiality…
The group of artists who would become the Haresmen “accused the [Horizonites] of rejecting the actual plains for a landscape that was wholly illusory.” The Haresmen began to create and show paintings mostly consisting of incredibly detailed renditions of plants and soil—so detailed that often they only examined a square yard or two—that revealed (when examined closely) “things quite unconnected with the plains” in the shadows and stems of the grass and flowers.
Murnane puts it a little more simply a few pages later:
Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes—one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily.
This dispute isn’t actually important to the "plot” of the book; but these differing interpretation of the plains and the dichotomy it sets up reoccur throughout the novel. It shows up in politics, in emotions, but especially in art.
Murnane employs this Calvino-esque trick frequently: he presents a natural or observable phenomenon (in this case, the plains), interprets its meaning, and then, soon after, presents a totally contradictory interpretation to which he lends equal authority.2
A much briefer example:
I wonder whether anything I have seen is a fit subject for art. And the truly perceptive seem to me those who turn their faces away from the plains. Yet the next morning’s sunrise dispels these doubts, and at the moment when I can no longer look at the dazzling horizon I decide that the invisible is only what is too brightly lit.
To be clear: I would hate this quality in a critic.3 But in fiction about art, it creates this sort of magical quality, what Calvino would call “lightness.”
In his lecture/essay collection Six Memos for the Next Millennium4 (and this is the last of Calvino’s books I reference, I swear to GOD), Calvino defines his work as an attempt “to remove weight.” He further clarifies exactly what he means by lightness in literature:
First there is a lightening of language whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarefied consistency…
Second, there is the narration of a train of thought or psychological process in which subtle and imperceptible elements are at work, or any kind of description that involves a high degree of abstraction…
And third there is a visual image of lightness that acquires emblematic value…Some literary inventions are impressed on our memories by their verbal implications rather than by their actual words.
Murnane uses all of these techniques in his work.
Lightness is also created by endless possibility, by all the possible paths one could take, all of which can only be taken at the expense of each other. In The Plains, a traveler becomes paralyzed in one place, perhaps even against his own better judgement, while only time (the ultimate destination) moves around him. The explorers of the plains are destined to stay in the same estates, examining the same fields, for their entire lives. They extinguish possibility by attempting to preserve it.
Readers (especially contemporary readers, our busy days, our valorization of work and productivity) might be repulsed by this idea. But this is not indecisiveness, it is not an inability to chose; it’s an unwillingness to chose. In The Plains, there is a nobility, honor and meaning found in inaction.
For the thinkers of that school disregard the question whether a possibility, once entertained, may seem one day to correspond to some meagre arrangement of events. They give all of their attention to the possibility itself and esteem it according to its amplitude and to the length of time for which it survives just beyond the reach of the haphazard disposition of sights and sounds which is called, in careless speech, actuality, and has been considered, perhaps even by a few plainsmen, the represent the extinction of all possibilities.
The people of The Plains seek in vain to represent the plains in art, thereby representing themselves. But—like our narrator who is unable to lift a camera, like the conductor who cannot hear his own symphony—their efforts are always in vain. It is foolish to even try to capture the many contradictions of the plains and of the people within them.
“People here conceive of a lifetime as one more sort of plain,” Murnane’s narrator notes. Is inaction a way someone might truly turn their life into art? Like art, it is a futile attempt to capture contradiction, to preserve possibilities.
…I hoped she might believe her years in this district had a worth such as her favorite authors awarded to all lives that seemed to arrive at nothing… A few of those same philosophers would even argue that the woman’s years of disquiet were, of all conceivable eventualities, the only sequel appropriate to the moment when a young woman saw as he might never appear again a man who saw her as she might never appear again. For them (their works are obscurely placed on a remote shelf, but it was at least possible that she had come across them once in all the years she had spent in this library) a lifetime is no more and no less than an opportunity for proving such a moment utterly unconnected with all those that follow it and is the more to be valued for every uneventful year which emphasizes that proof.
Let me acknowledge—like the plainsmen, I admire the indefensible, the impossible, the Plain Beyond Reach. I could attribute this to many things, to growing up with faith, maybe a certain intellectual laziness, or a girlish obsession with love and magic.
I have wondered at the speculations that lie at the heart of the subject they expound—the conclusions vehemently defended by men who admit them to be indefensible. Like most plainsmen, I have no urge to adopt any of them. To claim that these delicately posed suppositions are somehow proven or compelling would seem to debase them.
And it probably all has something to do with being a New Orleanian, living with endless contraction in a city whose flood protection leaves it at risk of sinking into the Gulf of Mexico, whose economic boom leaves it at risk of becoming a Venetian tourist trap (I could go on). New Orleans is notorious for its faith, laziness, magic, love. And I’m obsessed with writing that is firmly grounded in a place, in a home, in a people who are obsessed with their place and their home and their people. Find New Orleanian who isn’t. I’m not gonna write any more about New Orleans because I won’t do it justice, but you can fill in the blanks.
I sense about each of them a quiet dedication to proving that the plains are not what many plainsmen take them for. They are not, that is, a vast theatre that adds significance to the events enacted within it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.
A final thought before you go.
I tried to visualize the bright window and the figures against it as they would have appeared from somewhere in the vast darkness.
The narrator of The Plains often considers how his actions will appear to an unseen audience and/or a woman. This obviously reminds me of the TikTok “Main Character Syndrome” trend, which I’ve written about at length in an earlier email. Basically, someone who has “main character syndrom” is obsessed with the idea of being observed by an unseen love object, which the video camera becomes a stand-in for.
And this too is the very warped hope of the narrator of The Plains, which is often expressly put in the language of cinema.
Whenever it had occurred to me to envy the plainsmen who drew such strength from their private religions, I had gone upstairs to my hotel room and gravely sat down and added to the notes for my film script as though that was part of my own religious quest that some stranger wondered about.
This stranger, we will come to find out, is, unsurprisingly, a woman. The daughter, or perhaps the wife, of his future patron.
Fans of Terrence Malick have surely noticed by now my liberal use of stills from his movie Days of Heaven (1978) in illustrating this review. Of course, I have no idea if Malick ever watched any Murnane or vice versa, but it’s clear to me that Malick understands the heart of Murnane’s plainsmen. With his camera, he does the work that Murnane’s narrator cannot, reconciling the desires of the Haresmen and the Horizonites, focusing both on the invisible plain at our feet and the impossible plain at the edge of the world.
And a quote:
I know that a distant figure, in all white, in the shadow of an immense house at the height of an afternoon, can give meaning to a hundred miles of grass.
And an image:
The same landowner began to describe other influencers that he felt late at night in the more remote wings of his house. He sensed sometimes the lingering persistence of forces that had failed—of a history that had almost come into being. He found himself looking into corners for the favorite pieces of the unborn children of marriages that were never made.
So much has happened since I last tossed some hot garbage at your feet. A hurricane hit Louisiana on the 16th Anniversary of Katrina. Are you kidding me, God? What the fuck? Anyway, I encourage you to donate to hurricane relief funds by the Helio Foundation, the United Houma Nation, and the people of Isle de Jean Charles, and also to make sure that your home and place of business are powered by green energy. If you are in NYC, here are some instructions. It will take you five minutes to set up. For my apartment, it costs less than $10 extra a month.
Yours forever, slightly deranged,
Book Notes
Not to be confused with the Patron Saints of Book Notes, Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey.
Here again, I show my ass: I feel like there has to be some sort of word or philosophical tradition for this style.
I feel really stupid in the face of literary criticism. Like, my education has all these weird gaping holes in it, most of which come from my own laziness in undergrad, where I took classes like “Social Media Fictions” instead of “Introduction to British Literature.” But honestly, even now I don’t help myself: instead of reading, I dunno, Nicomachean Ethics (which my dad gave me for Christmas two years ago with the solemn assurance: “You need this.” I never cracked open the book to figure out what kind of insult that was), I’m all up on Mark Fisher and Valarie Solanas.
I won’t be too self-flagellating about this though. I’ll just call Murnane and Calvino’s style “postmodern” and move on with my life.
Check out this essay from N+1 about the responsibilities of a critic. Unlike all the other phonies, I tell it how it is. Here at Book Notes we might be uncultured, but we aren’t cowards.
As usual, this link and all links to BookShop will give me a small commission, should you buy the books I’ve linked.