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A review by nick_jenkins
Last Letter to a Reader by Gerald Murnane
3.0
On reflection, it was not a good idea to read this book before I had read any of Murnane's fiction. I had thought that it would give me a sort of preview of his oeuvre; there are a few different books of his that I have meant to read, and I thought I might be able to both gain some insights into his characteristic concerns or themes as well as get a sense of which book of his I might enjoy most as an entry into the rest.
There is not really enough detail about any of the novels to make such a decision, and while he does mull over what he considers his major themes, the principal thing which I took away from this book is a distaste for Gerald Murnane the man, or, as he says, "the breathing author."
"The breathing author" is one of Murnane's private idioms, and there is nothing more that Murnane enjoys telling us than that he is pleased with the idiosyncratic phrases, the bespoke theoretical frameworks, the personal "mythology," the unique visual vocabulary that he has developed over his many decades of writing. Perhaps all writers feel this sort of self-satisfaction in their (alleged) creative independence, perhaps they all get a similar pleasure from feeling that—even though thousands and thousands of writers and critics have come before them—only a few have actually seen part of the true nature of fiction that they alone have discovered.*
Murnane has a bottomless capacity for knocking himself sideways in awe: "I freely admit to re-reading certain passages from my books simply in order to be impressed by them and to find in them more meaning than I had previously found and much more than I had been aware of while I first wrote the passages." "The eighth paragraph [of the last section of History of Books] seems to me one of the most impressive of many impressive endings that I’ve found for my many works of fiction." "Most of my favourite sentences from my own works are too long to be learned by heart." Occasionally, his pride is pricked by a small detail, as when he says rather petulantly that he regrets letting his editor choose the title for The Plains: "My best-known book is the only one of all my books with the definite article as the first word of its title." Murnane also notes frequently that bad reviews of his books or reviews he disagrees with have been lodged under his skin for decades—his independence of mind apparently does not mean that he is content to let his readers think what they like about his books.
Murnane is also curiously proud of the meagerness of his experiences and his knowledge: "Morality, social issues, psychological insight – such matters seem as fanciful and inconsequential to me as my talk of shapes and dissolving imagery might seem to my conjectured reader." "After the first few of my books had been published, I was emboldened to say sometimes that I wrote fiction for the very reason that I was ignorant: that I had seldom travelled, had observed little, and found human nature baffling." "I’ve never felt the least interest in the mythologies of my own or any other culture." Or this lengthier passage, which has the virtue of illustrating the mind of settler colonialism better than any explicit analysis I have found:
"I was annoyed recently to read, at the end of a mostly favourable review of one of my books recently published in the United Kingdom, the disapproving comment that I seemed unaware that a different sort of landscape had preceded the Australian landscape that I wrote about so often and that a different sort of people had occupied that landscape. These are matters that I’m well aware of, but I exercise the freedom enjoyed by all writers in this country: the freedom of choosing what they wish to write about, even if I seldom chose but was more often driven."
That pivot from insisting on the complete freedom to ignore a pre-settler past and the effects that settler colonialism had on erasing that past to denying any volition in making that choice—just a perfect distillation of the cognitive incoherence of the settler mentality.
There are, to be sure, some interesting ideas in this book, and I do think I will end up reading one or more of Murnane's books. Like other supremely arrogant writers (Naipaul comes to mind), Murnane seems worth reading; I just would not take him at his word about his own work or anything else.
* The few writers or critics whom Murnane admits had some insight before him: Proust, Wayne Booth, Virginia Woolf.
There is not really enough detail about any of the novels to make such a decision, and while he does mull over what he considers his major themes, the principal thing which I took away from this book is a distaste for Gerald Murnane the man, or, as he says, "the breathing author."
"The breathing author" is one of Murnane's private idioms, and there is nothing more that Murnane enjoys telling us than that he is pleased with the idiosyncratic phrases, the bespoke theoretical frameworks, the personal "mythology," the unique visual vocabulary that he has developed over his many decades of writing. Perhaps all writers feel this sort of self-satisfaction in their (alleged) creative independence, perhaps they all get a similar pleasure from feeling that—even though thousands and thousands of writers and critics have come before them—only a few have actually seen part of the true nature of fiction that they alone have discovered.*
Murnane has a bottomless capacity for knocking himself sideways in awe: "I freely admit to re-reading certain passages from my books simply in order to be impressed by them and to find in them more meaning than I had previously found and much more than I had been aware of while I first wrote the passages." "The eighth paragraph [of the last section of History of Books] seems to me one of the most impressive of many impressive endings that I’ve found for my many works of fiction." "Most of my favourite sentences from my own works are too long to be learned by heart." Occasionally, his pride is pricked by a small detail, as when he says rather petulantly that he regrets letting his editor choose the title for The Plains: "My best-known book is the only one of all my books with the definite article as the first word of its title." Murnane also notes frequently that bad reviews of his books or reviews he disagrees with have been lodged under his skin for decades—his independence of mind apparently does not mean that he is content to let his readers think what they like about his books.
Murnane is also curiously proud of the meagerness of his experiences and his knowledge: "Morality, social issues, psychological insight – such matters seem as fanciful and inconsequential to me as my talk of shapes and dissolving imagery might seem to my conjectured reader." "After the first few of my books had been published, I was emboldened to say sometimes that I wrote fiction for the very reason that I was ignorant: that I had seldom travelled, had observed little, and found human nature baffling." "I’ve never felt the least interest in the mythologies of my own or any other culture." Or this lengthier passage, which has the virtue of illustrating the mind of settler colonialism better than any explicit analysis I have found:
"I was annoyed recently to read, at the end of a mostly favourable review of one of my books recently published in the United Kingdom, the disapproving comment that I seemed unaware that a different sort of landscape had preceded the Australian landscape that I wrote about so often and that a different sort of people had occupied that landscape. These are matters that I’m well aware of, but I exercise the freedom enjoyed by all writers in this country: the freedom of choosing what they wish to write about, even if I seldom chose but was more often driven."
That pivot from insisting on the complete freedom to ignore a pre-settler past and the effects that settler colonialism had on erasing that past to denying any volition in making that choice—just a perfect distillation of the cognitive incoherence of the settler mentality.
There are, to be sure, some interesting ideas in this book, and I do think I will end up reading one or more of Murnane's books. Like other supremely arrogant writers (Naipaul comes to mind), Murnane seems worth reading; I just would not take him at his word about his own work or anything else.
* The few writers or critics whom Murnane admits had some insight before him: Proust, Wayne Booth, Virginia Woolf.