Gerald Murnane’s The Plains is perhaps nothing more than a collection of possibilities. A filmmaker goes to the central plains of Australia to make a film for the inhabitants on the country’s populated coastal edges. He is hired by one of the great families of the plains and he stays in the man’s house for twenty years. As for the film, it is never produced. This is all the plot there is to it. But we read through the novel as we walk through a field in the summer, stopping constantly to wonder at everything that eludes our gaze from afar. We learn of the religions of the plainsmen, of their obsessions with emblems and symbols, of their love affairs, and their wars.
The plains have little in common with the real plains of Australia. Instead, this is a highly philosophical book. But not in the sense that it puts forward arguments about the nature of things intending to convince us of some view or other. Instead, it offers us suggestions for interpreting the world that together form not a worldview but rather reflect the fruits of a certain vision of things. The novel shows us not how to live but what a certain life can look like. It is a life of the imagination, of the infinite possibilities of meaning-making latent within us. And reading the novel, we find that this emphasis on the imagination and its limitless potential has a far more practical, human value than we might otherwise guess.
What Does a Plain Mean?
“Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.”
What is a plain? What does the thought of it do to us? A patch of flatland, with the occasional tree or stream. It is not a complex image. On a piece of paper, we could represent a plain with a single horizontal line. And yet the more we consider a plain, the more Murnane’s novel makes us consider it, we realise just what possibilities are contained within that line, behind it, above it, beyond it. The central event of the novel’s first part is a meeting with the great landowners of the plains at the saloon of the town where the filmmaker is staying. A great many people have gathered at the place to offer their services to those rich men who with a single gesture could offer them work for the rest of their lives.
One man offers a way of representing the great families’ histories on graphs, and for hours they sit with coloured pencils drawing. Others come to offer religions, or emblems, to the landowners. They are constantly reinventing themselves, and always in need of the new visions that such outsiders can provide. Another man talks of a musical concert where the instruments are so far away from each other that we can only hear one or two at the same time, forcing us to imagine the harmonies that would be possible to hear if we were located in some invisible other point.
Many of the ideas and thoughts of The Plains suggest a space that must be filled by the imagination, like the concert/ stage. The philosophies that the plainsmen prefer never answer everything, always leaving space for interpretation. The plainsmen prefer to keep to their own understanding of the plains, rather than suggest that they are limited by common ground. We learn of relationships where after a single meeting two lovers promise never to meet again because the strength of the promise of that meeting is so great that no future reality could ever compare to it- better to fantasise than to live in disappointment. These are people whose imagination can replace a life of experiences but not in a way that seems sad to us. The sheer richness of the thoughts that Murnane describes makes it seem that we are the ones who are missing out on a full life.
Plains of the Soul
Reflection, the journey into another plain – the plain of the self – is the natural mode of these plainsmen. “The plainsman’s heroes, in life and in art, were such as the man who went home every afternoon for thirty years to an unexceptional house with neat lawns and listless shrubs and sat late into the night deciding on the route of a journey that he might have followed for thirty years only to arrive at the place where he sat”. There is a poem of the plains whose thousands of lines only describe the space around a woman seen from afar, but in so doing plant such seeds for the imagination that no description of her could ever compare.
We learn of the infinite plains of the soul. That “each man in his heart is a traveller in a boundless landscape. But even the plainsmen (who should have learned not to fear hugeness of horizons) looked for landmarks and signposts in the disquieting terrain of the spirit” – this is the view of one philosopher of the plains. The mansion where the narrator spends his years is filled with notes and diaries of the place’s previous occupants, and we soon realise that it takes far more than a lifetime to cross the plains of another’s world. The man barely talks to his patron’s wife or daughter, but he creates a plain for them in his mind.
We learn of a war between two factions. The Horizonites and the Haremen grew out of squabbling groups of artists. The former saw the infinite distances bespoken by the far distance as the greatest source of inspiration, while the latter saw the infinite variety of what lies before us as something still richer. Their disagreement bubbled for many years before suddenly disappearing without the armed conflict that seemed inevitable. As with the rest of the action of The Plains, it seemed that the imagination was the best space for carrying out the war.
Meaning-Making
“The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Milton wrote in Paradise Lost. Murnane’s novel shows the imagination making a heaven out of a space that we might imagine leading only to boredom. The Plains is not a novel that aims to answer our questions. Murnane’s narrator even notes that plains are “simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings”. Yet if we are to create our own meanings, we must know how to. We must train ourselves to look upon the world in a way that sees the potential for meaning-making lying in everyday things.
I love The Plains because I find this thought dizzyingly exciting. We know of those poets like Rilke who can entertain themselves with contemplating a single object, but Murnane seems to go further – he does not find beauty alone in single-minded contemplation, but a realm of infinite meanings and possibilities.
The Hidden Humanism of The Plains
Our capacity to imagine is perhaps the most extraordinary of human faculties. To see its sharpened form and feel our own be sharpened, as we do in Murnane’s novel, ultimately has a decidedly humanistic effect that seems surprising when we consider that The Plains has very little to do with those aspects of novels that normally make them seem human to us – plots and people. The American philosopher, Thomas Nagel, whom I’ve also been reading recently, notes in his essay “Death” that what makes death bad are “hopes which may or may not be fulfilled or possibilities which may or may not be realized”. In dying we lose possibilities, and the earlier and more unexpectedly we die the greater that loss is.
Death has little to do with Murnane’s novel, but it too is a plain that all of us must cross. More importantly, though, Murnane’s novel provides another way of looking at what Nagel talks about when he refersto lost possibilities. Now, this may seem silly. After all, we know what possibilities a young man at war may lose when a bomb explodes nearby – a sweetheart left unmarried, an unfounded family, an empty seat at the table where his friends sit and break bread. What good is a novel about imagination next to these realities, we might ask?
Only this – that Murnane’s novel reveals a layer of possibilities and riches lying even beyond that which comes to mind most obviously as having the potential to be lost. The novel is like the explorer it at one point describes whose task “is to postulate the existence of a land beyond the known land.” This land is the land of the imagination, and we come to feel by the end of The Plains just how infinite it is. If we die, we do not only lose the infinite world without us, but also the infinite world within us. Newly aware of the depth, death becomes more terrible, and life becomes still more wondrous, vital, and worth holding on to with all the strength we have.
Anyway, it is the kind of book that opens up a world. Just for that reason, it is well worth reading.
I previously looked at Murnane’s Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, which I was less impressed by, here. The Plains, which I have now read twice, is a much better book.