Review published in The Quarterly Conversation: http://quarterlyconversation.com/a-million-windows-gerald-murnane’s-house-of-f... ( )

The title of this novel picks up Henry James's image of the "house of fiction", which Murnane turns into a literal house occupied by an unspecified number of male persons seated at desks behind glowing windows and reading sentences that they have just written. Inevitably, since this is Murnane, the house looks out over level grassland. And equally inevitably, all of these male persons have some kind of involvement in the book we are reading, as characters, narrators or implied authors. And, we suspect, without any authority for such a suspicion, they are all pleasingly contradictory versions of a male person who might or might not be called Gerald Murnane and live in an unnamed Australian state...

Murnane — aided or hindered by some of these implied authors and narrators — engages us in a debate with the authors of various unnamed manuals of creative writing, books on narratology and so-called great works of literature, trying to establish what we really mean by fiction and how it works. False idols like "dialogue", "characters" and "plot" are cast down, "point-of-view" is taken apart and put back together again unrecognisably, dark-haired women from the narrator's real or purported past wander in and out, and Henry James somehow emerges as the only really trustworthy narrator we have ever known. Great fun, in an austere sort of way, but possibly not for the faint-hearted. ( )

Why Reviews of Murnane are Not Adequate, and How Complex Failures Produce Great Literature

I find Gerald Murnane much more perplexing than most readers seem to. In a review of "A Million Windows" in the "New York Times," June 17, 2016, James McNamara sums up Murnane's theory of fiction this way:

"The Australian novelist Gerald Murnane has become known for works of difficult genius, and his latest will only burnish that reputation. An exploration of the mind and of literary creation, it is a book of intricate construction and vast intellectual scope.
Moving between fiction, philosophy and literary theory, 'A Million Windows' investigates and demonstrates the aesthetic of what Murnane calls 'true fiction,' which faithfully records the narrator’s 'invisible world' of the mind. This is distinct from artifice, where the writer consciously creates, and realism, where the reader is prompted to think of characters and places as actually existing. Rather, 'true fiction' conceives of an invisible metaphysical plane that extends infinitely forward, backward, even sideways, into every possible temporal, topical and spatial dimension. In it are autonomous 'fictional personages' (characters), whose existence the writer 'learns of' rather than creates."

This is as succinct and accurate a theory as I have read, and it is substantially correct. There are three things to be kept always in mind:

1. "True fiction" is about the narrator's (and the author's) mind. (Exactly how is about the mind is another question.)
2. "Self-referential" fiction (what McNamara calls "artifice") occurs when narrators posture in front of their readers and "wonder aloud, as it were, what fates to assign to various characters," as in "Tristram Shandy." (p. 34)
3. "Film" (Murnane's preferred term) or "realism" (McNamara's term) occurs when the narrator and author wish to present a fictional world as real.

Murnane's idea of fiction isn't any more intricate than McNamara's summary provided that a reader doesn't try to follow Murnane's arguments. McNamara goes on to say "A Million Windows" "performs the theory it advances," but the book isn't just an example of its concerns: even more than a fiction, it is an investigation. The narrator's voice is consistently affectless and grammatically precise. The book asks to be understood, not just "marveled at" as a sign of "genius" or "intellectual power and originality" (paraphrasing McNamara).

McNamara's three-point summary would be an adequate conceptual schema for reading Murnane, except that the three positions are exposited in an exceptionally unclear, inconsistent, irrational manner. These difficulties do not occur at the level of the fictional stories in the book, which are more or less continuous and ultimately traditional in affect, enabling readers to find their way through the book, and to experience its stories as expressive and moving. The problem is that the book itself--its language, its address, its grammatical precision--gives no sign that the passages on narrative theory are to be skimmed or taken as signs of a poetic evocation of the complexity of memory. On the contrary, they give every sign that they are to be understood and evaluated.

The questions I have about Murnane's fiction require an unusual amount of explication. I recognize the fact that spending 800 words on two sentences, as I am about to do in section 1--without even getting near the book's main topics--puts me way off to one side of the bell curve of reader's responses. Either reviewers and readers are reading too loosely, or my response is as nearly pathological as Murnane's own bedroom full of filing cabinets, which are so well described in Mark Binelli's wonderful piece in the New York Times (tinyurl.com/yd9bf98m).

It's possible to agree with Will Heyward's feeling that "beneath the immaculate surface of his formal, outmoded sentences runs a dark current of hopelessly compressed—hopeless, in that is otherwise inexpressible, and seemingly irrevocable—emotion" and at the same time feel Heyward's reading is entirely too loose and poetic. Reading Murnane, Heyward writes,

"The world can seem... as a maze of as yet unmade phenomenal connections. Navigating this maze, and realizing the connections within it, are part of his preoccupation with the act of writing. In writing, these connections are both invented and discovered. A single, remote phrase might rise to a series of responses, which then, like fractals, multiply again." [Heyward, in "Music and Literature," tinyurl.com/ydcg2ywn]

Fractals aren't the right analogy for Murnane's distinctions, because nothing in Murnane disappears from sight into infinite complexity: everything is carefully named. It's also not enough to note that the book's title comes from "The Portrait of a Lady," and conjures fiction's house of a million rooms, or even to cite, as Heyward does, Murnane saying "I would like to be able to write a text, or create a text, so complicated that I would get lost in it." It's not enough because the book itself asks to be read slowly and carefully.

And I disagree absolutely with Heyward's conclusion: "Given the elliptical and awkward nature of Murnane’s writing," he says, "an easy mistake is to strain to understand him, but his writing is a visual proposition." That is like a review of a physics textbook that proposes readers don't worry about the equations, because physics is to be "marveled at" and praised for its "intellectual power and originality." If those qualities are true, it's because physics has arguments worth attending to--even if some aren't true and others are mistaken.

1
Here is an example. The pages where Murnane's narrator distinguishes his book from "self-referential fiction" open with a description of the phenomenon, and close a page later with the narrators first negative judgment abou "self-referential fiction." The narrator notes that "Tristram Shandy," "some of the fiction of Anthony Trollope," "much of the fiction of Thomas Hardy," and Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller" oppose "writer and reader... as the players on either side of a chessboard." He then says:

"Even the undiscerning reader of this fiction of mine should have understood by now that I, the narrator, would dread to feel that we were separated even by these sentences." (p. 33)

This is both unexpected and apparently poorly aimed as a rejoinder against self-reference in fiction. I might have expected Murnane's first-person narrator to say that the manner in which he makes reference to his fiction differs from the theatrical model in "Tristram Shandy." Or perhaps that he did not find the staging of a contest between reader and author to be persuasive. Instead we're given an unusual and emotional declaration: he would "dread" to be separated from his reader "even by these sentences." Of course he is separated by exactly those sentences, so the sentence itself cannot be the end of the matter--but more important, we have been given no particular reason to think the narrator wants to be close to us (I am echoing the "we" in the passage) at all. It's as if the implied author has suddenly realized why he doesn't like what he calls "self-referential fiction."

(It's an entirely separate question whether we can believe that Murnane himself was unaware of the entire movement of postnmodern metafiction beyond Calvino, and whether he knew that it doesn't rely on opposing "writer and reader"--whether he realized other people had been experimenting with different kinds of self-awareness not at all unlike his own.)

This passage I quoted is only one paragraph from a three-page section on the difference between "A Million Windows" and "self-referential fiction." The following pages just make things even more obscure. At the conclusion he says he's already explained himself, but "for the sake of the undiscerning reader, I shall repeat that I am the narrator of this work and not the author." (p. 35)

This is a common and reasonable position for anyone interested in narration, and when I read it I expected he wuld continue by saying that as the narrator, he cannot play the games of "self-reference" that Sterne or Calvino play. But instead he says this:

"In the matter of my fate, so to call it, I am no more able to exercise choice than is any narrator of any [text]..." (p. 35)

Surely this doesn't address the question. It's self-evident narrators don't have control and so can't play games of the sort Murnane's narrator is imagining. But that has nothing to do with self-referentiality.

2
What matters most in terms of understanding is what Murnane's narrator means by "true fiction." I won't even begin to give arguments as I've done above. Instead I'll just note two salient markers.

First, regarding the narrator's (and implied author's) control of the distance between the events he recounts and the narrator who recounts those events.

Murnane's narrator's distance from his "fictional characters" is variable and unstable. I noted this in my review (on Goodreads and Librarything) of "Barley Patch." In "A Million Windows," the narrator often slips downard, in the direction of what he calls "film," from a starting point that is as abstract and metafictional as he can make it. These slips, I think, are not premeditated, and not wholly in Murnane's control.

A typical section or paragraph might begin like this:

"If ever he had asked himself, during all the years since, how a person might feel on seeming to recognize as a version of himself or herself some or another personage in a work of fiction..." (p. 83)

A half-page later these many qualifications are no longer present:

"Sometimes, in later years, he supposed that... the answer quoted should have shamed and humiliated him..."

The hypothetical, atemporal, ungendered character becomes becomes a generalized, temporalized narrator, who becomes a fictionalized character, who becomes a memory of the narrator's, who becomes a memory of the implied author's.

"A Million Windows," like "Barley Patch," contains a central story--in this case a woman, in "Barley Patch" the narrator's parents. Enframing and infiltrating those stories are metafictional hypotheticals. In both books Murnane (the implied author) can't seem to conrol the degree of separation. It's an expressive quality, this slippage: it's part of the book's interest and pathos, but there is no sign in the narrative that it is intended.

3
Second, regarding the narrator's (and implied author's) theories about the ontology--the mode of being--of his "fictional characters."

As McNamara says, Murnane is concerned with "autonomous 'fictional personages' (characters), whose existence the writer 'learns of' rather than creates." Yet Murnane's narrator (and by implication Murnane, since this phenomenon repeats across several books) has a self-contradictory, or at least a very counter-intuitive, theory about the nature of fictional characters. At one point about halfway through the book he rehearses his complaint that reviewers and critics always discuss characters "as though they are persons living in the world." (p. 94) He says he approves of something Evelyn Waugh said: he had never "entertainedf the least interest in why characters behaved as they did." This, it seems, is an anti-realist position, which wants to let fictional characters behave in any number of ways that people don't. Waugh, Murnane's narrator says, "felt no obligation to try to read the minds of his creatures."

So far so good. But Murnane has a theory, both in "A Million Windows" and in "Barley Patch," that characters in fiction can be understood as leading their own lives. In "Barley Patch" he also imagines characters living "in" the worlds of specific fictions even though the authors don't name them. (And he fails to consistently distinguish those two possibilities.)

The sense in which such "fictional characters" (or characters that are "potentially" available for fictions) are alive without intentionality is entirely obscure. I think the best way to understand this is as a theory ruined by its author's intensely held and mutually incompatible desires: to write about fiction in such a way that it becomes "true" to its author's experience of *writing about* fiction, and at thre same time true to its author's experience of *reading* fiction.

*
At the moment I can't do better than that. For me, Murnane's books fail to construct reliable theory, and the theory fails to prevent the narrators from telling the very human, "realist" stories of love and memory that are at their core. Together those two failures produce texts that are expressive in ways no other author has achieved. Beckett, Calvino, Stein, and other experimental modernists are consistent and controlled by comparison. These are complex failures of authorial intention and control, and they produce great literature.

One of my favorite books, even if I can explain why. ( )

In a city in the north west portion of another country that is not Australia where people also speak, read and write English, there is an apartment in a building of two or perhaps three stories. There are blinds on the windows of the apartment and a discerning reader sits, her back to the blinds, the sunlight filtering through those afore-mentioned blinds illuminates the pages of a narrative which might be or might not be One Million Windows written, if any fiction can be said to be written, by a personage named Gerald Murnane an older man, of whom no one can say he is hardly more than a boy.

The discerning reader will wonder if she is supposed to laugh this much while reading a narrative that is supposed to be fiction and whether it is “true fiction” or “metafiction” and what is or is not a “trustworthy narrator” while reading this text. That’s not all the discerning reader will wonder about, to be frank.

I wondered whether I was missing the point entirely because I enjoyed the book far too much. I shared a few pages with some friends who were horrified by the text and said in no way would they ever read such a book. On the other hand, I shared those same pages with my best friend and she cracked up as much as I did, which is probably why we are best friends. The biggest difficulty in reading One Million Windows is being able to keep reading while laughing. This is why:

One of us, so I happened to learn recently while we two alone were drinking late — one of us had, nearly thirty years ago, the experience of falling in love with an entity, so to call her, who was both an actual female person, one of the sumless inhabitants of the spaces between fictional texts, and also a seeming likeness, if not the embodiment, of a personage who had first appeared to him nearly ten years before while he was reading a work of nonfiction first published nearly ten years before his birth, which person was also a fictional personage in a work of fiction that he was writing at the time when he fell in love, so to speak, with the entity, so to call her.

I offer no apology to any sort of reader for any difficulties that she or he may have had with the previous sentence. Some of us in this topmost story have been, or are still, entangled in such matters as cannot be reported in simple sentences.

The entire book is written in this long monologue that twists and turns in on itself again and again, repeating phrases like “a young woman, hardly more than a girl”, “some or another”, “so to speak” and “two or three stories” and on and on and on to the point of absurdity. And absurdity is the point, isn’t it? To prove that in deft hands a writer can write a novel about not very much at all.

“I react in the presence of a narrator who I suspect of being unreliable or when confronted by one of those curious texts sometimes published as fiction but having the appearance of diary entries…I have no answer for the discerning reader, but I can state for his or her benefit that I decline to read any piece of fiction if I suspect the author of believing that fiction is mere artifice and that the reader of fiction has no more urgent need than to be diverted or teased. (Even the discerning reader should have learned from the previous sentence that the narrator of this present work of fiction is to be trusted.)”
If Murnane’s narrator is to be believed, the fictional is more real, more meaningful and more true that our physical being. For any of us readers who have found truth in fiction, we recognize the truth of that paradox.

I seldom give 5 stars. The work has to be original, something new and unusual. It does not have to be easy to read, and there is nothing easy about One Million Windows. You have to give up your sense of what fiction should be and your need for the conventional elements of plot, dialogue and so on and just let Murnane hypnotize you with his prose which is wickedly satirical and let him whisk you away on this surreal acid trip of a book.

I received a copy of One Million Windows in a drawing from GoodReads giveaways.

To get a sense of Gerald Murnane, you could read his Wikipedia entry which shows definite signs of being edited by Gerald Murnane.

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/one-million-windows-by-ge... ( )