The Quest for the Girl fromBendigo Street

December 20, 2012. J. M. Coetzee. The NewYork Review of Books [html]

Between 1840 and 1914 Ireland emptieditself of half its population. Famine claimedas many as a million people, but most lefttheir native land in hope of a better lifeabroad. Though North America was thefavored destination, over 300,000 Irish tookpassage to Australia. By 1914 Australia wasthe most ethnically Irish country in theworld outside Ireland itself. In Australia,Irish community life centered on theCatholic Church, which retained itspredominantly Irish complexion until, afterWorld War II, waves of immigrants began toarrive from southern Europe, inflecting itsforms of worship with their own rituals andfolkways.

Strong on obedience to doctrine and onforms of observance but intellectuallytorpid, the Church in Australiaconcentrated its energies on ensuring thatevery Catholic child received a Catholicschooling. Gerald Murnane, born in 1939,was one of the beneficiaries of this policy,and from Tamarisk Row (1974) onward, infiction and nonfiction, he records theconsequences of an Irish-AustralianCatholic education for a boy child with ahistory much like his own (in a Murnanianspirit of scrupulousness I hesitate to callthe child “himself”). Among theseconsequences have been, on the one hand,an abiding belief in another world, and, onthe other, ingrained feelings of personalsinfulness.

Murnane’s belief in another world needs tobe qualified at once. Although, after highschool, he took steps toward entering thepriesthood, he soon dropped the idea andindeed gave up religious observance forgood. His belief is therefore philosophicalrather than religious in nature, though noless strong for that. Access to the otherworld—a world distinct from and in manyways better than our own—is gainedneither by good works nor by grace but bygiving the self up to fiction.

As for sinfulness, the young Murnane wemeet has all the frustrated curiosity aboutsex that one might expect in a child broughtup in a community where impure acts areinveighed against from the pulpit, yet insuch clouded terms that what they mayactually consist in remains a puzzle. In atelling episode related in Barley Patch, theboy waits up until the household is asleep,

then steals out of bed to explore a dolls’house belonging to his girl cousins that hehas been forbidden to touch, and that islinked in his subconscious mind (I use theterm “subconscious mind”provisionally—see Murnane’s stricturesbelow) not only with the girls’ bodies butwith the tabernacle where the ceremonialvessels of the Mass are kept. By moonlighthe peers through the tiny window, longingto reach in a finger and touch the mysteriesinside, but fearful of leaving some guiltytrace behind.

How the male gets into the female is onlyone of the many mysteries faced by the boychild. In his naive cosmology, God theFather is at best a remote presence.Presiding over his destiny instead is afigure he calls the Patroness, a composite ofthe Virgin Mary and his own mother in heryouth. “The very purpose of her existencewas to remain aloof from me and so toprovide me with a task worthy of a lifetimeof effort: the simple but baffling task ofgaining admission to her presence.” A needto offer up to the female principle somestrenuous act of penance becomes one ofthe deeper motives in Murnane’s writing,animating his novel Inland in particular.

As a writer, Murnane is anything but anaive, straightforward realist. Putting downon paper what an Irish Catholic upbringingwas like in Australia circa 1950 is not thelimit of his ambition. As he makesabundantly clear, his boy hero, whovenerates his Patroness yet also tries to gethis cousins to take off their knickers in thetoolshed, has his existence less in oureveryday world than in another world thatis nonetheless in an obscure way part of ourown.

In this connection Murnane likes to quote agnomic observation of Paul Éluard’s: “Thereis another world but it is in this one.” (Thesame words were used by Patrick White asan epigraph to The Solid Mandala, his novelabout a suburban visionary.) Grasping justhow the other world relates to this one isthe main obstacle to understanding whatMurnane is doing, or believes himself to bedoing, in his fiction.

Thus: Is the boy about whom Murnanewrites to be understood as a figure in hisimagination? Is there a site, loosely to becalled an imaginary world, where all thepersonages in Murnane’s fictions have theirexistence; and when Murnane (or“Murnane”) writes of another world that isin this one is he referring to nothing more

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unusual than the imagination of hisauthorial self?

Of himself, his mind, and the power of thatmind to conjure up beings who do not“really” exist, Murnane has the following tosay:

He had never been able to believein something called hisunconscious mind. The termunconscious mind seemed to himself-contradictory. Words such asimagination and memory andperson and self and even real andunreal he found vague andmisleading, and all the theories ofpsychology that he had readabout as a young man begged thequestion of where the mind was.For him, the first of all premiseswas that his mind was a place or,rather, a vast arrangement ofplaces.

He fills out his scheme of the mind—or,rather, of his own mind, since he is notinterested in generalities—as follows:

In his fifties, he…had come tobelieve that he was made upmostly of images. He was awareonly of images and feelings. Thefeelings connected him to theimages and connected the imagesto one another. The connectedimages made up a vast network.He was never able to imagine thisnetwork as having a boundary inany direction. He called thenetwork, for convenience, hismind.

The activity of writing, then, is not to bedistinguished from the activity of self-exploration. It consists in contemplating thesea of internal images, discerningconnections, and setting these out ingrammatical sentences (“I could neverconceive of a network of meaning toocomplex to be expressed in a series ofgrammatical sentences,” says Murnane,whose views on grammar are firm, evenpedantic). Whether the connectionsbetween images lie implicit in the imagesthemselves or are created by an active,shaping intelligence; where the energy(“feelings”) comes from that discerns suchconnections; whether that energy is alwaysto be trusted—these are questions that donot interest him, or at least are notaddressed in a body of writing that is rarelyaverse to reflecting on itself.

In other words, while there is a Murnaniantopography of the mind, there is noMurnanian theory of the mind worthspeaking of. If there is some central,originary, shaping force behind the fictionsof the mind, it can barely be called a force:its essence seems to be a watchful passivity.

As a writer, Murnane is thus a radicalidealist. His fictional personages or “image-persons” (characters is a term he does notuse) have their existence in a world muchlike the world of myth, purer, simpler, andmore real than the world from which theytake their origin.

For readers who, despite Murnane’s bestefforts, cannot tell the difference betweenimage-persons and figments of the humanimagination, it may be best to treatMurnane’s theorizing—which extends intothe very texture of his fiction—as no morethan an elaborate way of warning us not toidentify the storytelling I with the manGerald Murnane, and therefore not to readhis books as autobiographical records,accountable to the same standard of truthas history is. The I who tells the story willbe no less a constructed figure than theactors in it.

With David Malouf and Thomas Keneally,Gerald Murnane belongs to the lastgeneration of writers to come to maturity inan Australia that was still a cultural colonyof England, repressed, puritanical, andsuspicious of foreigners. Of that generation,Murnane has been the least obedient toreceived norms of realism, the most open tooutside influence, whether from Europe orfrom the Americas.

Between 1974 and 1990 Murnane publishedsix books. Among these, The Plains (1982)and Inland (1988) are usually read asnovels, though they lack many of thestandard features of the novel: they have noplot worth speaking of, and only the mostdesultory narrative line; their personageshave no names and few individuatingcharacteristics. Landscape with Landscape(1985) and Velvet Waters (1990) are, morerecognizably, collections of short fictions,some showing the imprint of Jorge LuisBorges. Murnane is conspicuously absentfrom the list of Australian writers who haveanswered the call to celebrate orinterrogate Australianness: one of thepieces in Landscape with Landscape is asatirical commentary, not entirelysuccessful, on this call.

After 1990, according to his own account,Murnane gave up writing fiction. In a

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preliminary note to Invisible Yet EnduringLilacs, published in 2005, he writes: “Ishould never have tried to write fiction ornon-fiction or even anything in-between. Ishould have left it to discerning editors topublish all my pieces of writing as essays.”Both Lilacs and the book that followed it,Barley Patch (2009), are, loosely speaking,collections of essays. Now republished inthe US, Barley Patch comprisesrecollections of Murnane’s family,childhood, and early manhood; reflectionson his career as a writer, including hisdecision to give up fiction; explorations ofhis own practice as a writer; an outline ofhis philosophy of fiction; and synopses ofabandoned projects—synopses so detailedand well developed that they threaten tobecome works of fiction themselves.

As a child, Murnane recalls, he loved toread because reading allowed him towander freely among fictional personagesand stare openly at the women. In real lifehe dared not stare for fear of awakingfeelings of guilt; spying became his secretsin. He longed to meet a girl who would becurious enough about him to spy on him. Tospark the curiosity of girls he wouldostentatiously occupy himself in writing.Less amusing, more poignant, are hismemories of yearning for “some layer of theworld far beyond my own drab layer[where] it might have been possiblesometimes to follow one’s own desireswithout incurring punishment.”

He entered his twenties (he continues instraightfaced autobiographical vein)“lack[ing] the skills that enabled most otheryoung men of my age to acquire steadygirlfriends or even fiancées and wives.” Onweekends he met with other lonely, sex-starved young men to drink beer and talkabout girls. For the rest he holed up in hisroom, writing.

His decision to devote himself to writinginstead of furthering his education wasgreeted with disapproval from his family;after his first book came out he wasdisowned by a favorite uncle. To fortify hisresolve he recited like a mantra MatthewArnold’s poem “The Scholar Gypsy,” whichcelebrates a life of solitary intellectualendeavor. For his daily bread, he toldhimself, he would bet on the horses.

Looking back, he wonders how he couldhave spent three decades of his life makingup fictions. He entertains severalhypotheses, none entirely serious. One isthat, fearful of travel, he needed to invent a

world beyond his small corner of the stateof Victoria.

When he gave up fiction-writing, Murnaneinforms us, he also gave up reading newbooks and returned to the writers who hadmeant the most to him, chiefly MarcelProust, Emily Brontë, and Thomas Hardy.During the years left to him, he resolves, hewill occupy himself with the “mentalentities” who have visited him in the courseof a lifetime; he will “contemplate thoseimages and yield to those feelings that[comprise] the lasting essence of all myreading and my writing.” These images willbe tirelessly rearranged and remapped, sothat his works of fiction can eventually beviewed as a set of variations, chapters in asingle lifelong task.

Fascination with the image clusters in hismind leads Murnane to explore howmemory works. He reads books onmnemonics, including Frances Yates’s TheArt of Memory; he even invents a system ofhis own based on horse- racing and jockeys’racing colors. What interests him most arewhat (if he did not abhor the notion of theunconscious) he might call unconsciousassociations: the way the word “hiatus,” forexample, brings to his mind “a grey-blackbird struggling against winds high in thesky.”

Memory images will continue to trouble himuntil he can find a place for them in animage network. The qualities ofimages—their associations and theiremotional coloration—engage him moredeeply than their overt content. His fictionsare, fundamentally, explorations of thequalities of images. He has little interest inwhere in his life experience these imagescome from, that is to say, no wish tosubordinate them to the seeming real.

The most difficult pages of Barley Patchconcern the status of the “other” worldwhere fictional beings live. Although theymay depend on some author or another towrite them into existence, these beingsultimately escape or exceed authorialcontrol: they lead interior lives all theirown; in some cases their author fails tograsp who they truly are.

An important stage in the life of writing isattained, Murnane continues, when thewriting self moves from merely observingand reporting on inner images to living animage life among image persons in theother world. Readers of the right kind maybe brought along too, into a realm where

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they or their image selves rub shoulderswith fictional beings.

Too sketchy and eccentric to constitute aproper metaphysics of fiction, these pagesare better read as the poetic credo of awriter who at one point goes so far as toposit that the “real” (mundane) world andthe real (ideal) world are suspended inreciprocal tension, each holding the otherin existence:

Being no more than theconjectured author of this work offiction, I can have come intoexistence only at the momentwhen a certain female personagewho was reading these pagesformed in her mind an image ofthe male personage who hadwritten the pages with her inmind.

There will be readers who will dismissMurnane’s dual-world system as idletheory-spinning, and perhaps go on to saythat it shows he is all intellect and no heart.Murnane indirectly reflects on this criticismwhen, in Barley Patch, he tells the story ofhis last visit to a beloved uncle dying ofcancer—the same uncle who had cut tieswith him when he decided to become awriter. The two spend their last hourtogether in a typically male Australian way:avoiding sentiment, discussing horses. Afterthat Murnane leaves the hospital room,finds a private place, and weeps.

His uncle was right, Murnane reflectsafterward: there was no need for him towaste his life writing. Why then did he doit? The answer: without writing he “wouldnever be able to suggest to another personwhat I truly felt towards him or her.” That isto say, only by telling a story of a man whoappears to have no feelings but privatelyweeps, addressing the story, elegiacally, toone who can no longer hear it, is he able toreveal his love.

Murnane’s writing, from Inland onward,reflects continually on this difficult personalfate. On the one hand, being a writer hasset him apart from human society; on theother hand, it is only through writing thathe can hope to become human. The elegiactone that surfaces in his later work comesfrom the realization that he is what he is,that in his life there will be no secondchance, that only in the “other” world canhe make up for what he has lost.

Barley Patch concludes with a summary ofone of the fiction projects Murnaneabandoned in the 1970s. Its hero is a young

man who is awkward with girls, thinks ofentering the priesthood, and so forth—ayoung man much like his historical self.Then abruptly he abandons the summary,realizing he has resumed writing, albeit inprécis form, the work he had resolved togive up.

In Inland, republished in the United Statesa quarter of a century after its firstappearance, we return to the schooldays ofthe young Murnane (the young Murnaneself). At the age of twelve he is joined in hisclass by a girl whom he names simply “thegirl from Bendigo Street.” The two becomeclose companions, even soul mates, untilthey are sundered by a family move andnever meet again.

No word of love passes between the two.However, through an intermediary the boyinquires whether the girl likes him, and istold that she likes him “very much.” Thisunrealized love from thirty years ago isrevisited by the older Murnane (the olderMurnane self). Inland is a letter to the girlfrom Bendigo Street: a declaration of love;a lament over a lost opportunity; butalso—and here we touch on an underlyingmotive force that is harder to pin down—anact of atonement.

The transgression for which Inland is meantto atone is not visible in the story of theyouthful pair, but seems part of theconstitution of Murnane himself, or theMurnane self who figures as writer of thebook. Inland tries to give substance to thisobscure originary sin by situating it in anovert work of fiction, and thus—inMurnane’s metaphysical system—making itreal.

This invented fiction is a complicated pieceof work, so complicated that following itsins and outs will defeat many first-timereaders. One of the seminal books forMurnane has been People of the Puszta, anexploration of rural life in Hungarypublished in 1936 by the novelist GyulaIllyés (1902–1983). Illyés records anepisode from his childhood on a countryestate: the young daughter of a neighbor,raped by one of the stewards, had drownedherself, and he had seen the corpse. Thedead girl became an inspiration to him, an“angel of defiance and revolt” in his laterstruggles to put an end to the abuse ofpowerless serfs by the rural gentry.

This tragic story, alluded to repeatedly inMurnane’s oeuvre, comes most strongly tothe fore in Inland, where responsibility forthe girl’s death is taken on by an unnamed

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Hungarian landowner. This person narratesthe early episodes of the book and is one ofthe avatars of Murnane-the-writer. Hisconfession, expressed in the most veiled ofterms, takes the form of an essaycontributed to a journal called Mainlandpublished by the Institute of Prairie Studiesin Ideal, South Dakota, and edited by AnneKristaly, one-time beloved of the landowner.Anne Kristaly, Hungarian by birth, is nowmarried to a jealous Scandinavian who doeshis best to block communications betweenthe two.

The story of this trio—landowner, AnneKristaly, husband—complicated bymetafictional byplay and parodies ofHungarian authors like Sándor Márai(Murnane reads Hungarian and is familiarwith Hungarian literature), takes up thefirst fifty pages of the book and is its leastsuccessful part. After fifty pages, theHungarian plains and the Institute ofPrairie Studies are abandoned. Murnane, asit were, takes a deep breath and plungesinto the long contrapuntal composition thatconstitutes the rest of the book, the mostambitious, sustained, and powerful piece ofwriting he has to date brought off.

The underlying narrative is of the twelve-year-old boy and the girl from BendigoStreet, their friendship and their parting,and of the man’s later attempts, Orpheus-like, to summon her back, or if not her, thenher shade, from the realm of the dead andthe forgotten. Woven into this narrative area number of motifs whose common elementis resurrection: the violated serf girl whoreturns as an angel of defiance; the loversin Wuthering Heights united beyond thegrave (Inland concludes with the famouslast paragraph of Emily Brontë’s novel); thegreat recuperative vision experienced byMarcel in Time Regained; and verses fromthe Gospel of Matthew that foretell thesecond coming of Christ.

The physical world beyond Victoria barelyfigures in Murnane’s oeuvre. Yet in onerespect the Old World haunts the boy inInland. Jesus prophesies the end of theworld, but comforts his followers by tellingthem to watch the fig tree: when the graybranches show shoots of green, he willreturn. Following the Roman calendar, thepriest in Murnane’s church preaches thistext six months out of phase with theseasons of the southern hemisphere. Thuswhen the faithful are exhorted to watch, asif from the depths of winter, for the firstshoots of the fig tree, the heat of summer isalready upon them.

The obvious lesson to draw is that theChurch is out of touch with the realities ofAustralia, that Australians should get usedto reading Holy Writ as a document of aNorthern Hemisphere religion. What theyoung Murnane concludes, however, is thatthere are two calendars, two world-times,and that unless he can find a way of livingaccording to both, superimposing the oneupon the other, he will not be saved.

Once again we see reality being bent to fit adual-world system. We take to heart theplight of a boy caught in a self-fashionedtrap only because of the power of thewriting in which his story is told. Theemotional conviction behind the later partsof Inland is so intense, the somber lyricismso moving, the intelligence behind thechiseled sentences so undeniable, that wesuspend all disbelief, forgive the boy hisimagined sins, and allow the peasant girlfrom Hungary and the girl from BendigoStreet to shine their benign radiance on usfrom a world beyond that is somehow alsothis world:

On every day while I was writingon [these] pages, I thought of thepeople referred to or named inthe book with the word forgrassland [i.e., puszta] on itscover.

At first while I was writing Ithought of those people as thoughthey were all dead and I myselfwas alive. At some time while Iwas writing, however, I began tosuspect what I am now sure of. Ibegan to suspect that all personsnamed or referred to in the pagesof books are alive, whereas allother persons are dead.

When I wrote the letter which wasthe first of all my pages, I wasthinking of a young woman whowas, I thought, dead while I wasstill alive. I thought the youngwoman was dead while Iremained alive in order to go onwriting what she could neverread.

Today while I write on this lastpage, I am still thinking of theyoung woman. Today, however, Iam sure the young woman is stillalive. I am sure the young womanis still alive while I am dead.Today I am dead but the youngwoman remains alive in order to

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go on reading what I could neverwrite.

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