I read the Australian author Gerald Murnane’s novel The Plains last year, after coming across him in a long feature from the New York Times. The article paints him as an eccentric connoisseur of the imagination; a man who, though he has never left his small home region in Australia, nevertheless creates vast worlds within us, stretching our imagination in ways we hadn’t thought possible. I loved The Plains, though I wasn’t quite sure how to write about it. Although on a basic level it is the story of a man, come to the central plains of Australia to make a film about the place, the novel was really about the way that the simple idea of “the plains”, a central, apparently empty space, can actually contain a complex network of hidden meanings. How it’s much more than meets the eye.
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs is a collection of essays by Murnane, but even to call them that has its problems. Murnane’s fiction and non-fiction form a continuum, much as do the works of Borges, who Murnane cites as one of his inspirations. But where Borges makes his fictions essay-like and academic, Murnane makes his non-fiction oddly fictional. There is little concrete information here, and what we do read that might be factual never feels very reliable. Instead, what we get out of each of the essays collected in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs is an invitation into a kind of fugue state in which images melt into other images and our imagination is made child-like and free again.
Murnane has a poet’s sense for the magical potential of everyday objects to open up a world of associations, and the highest praise I can give the collection is to say that having finished it you go out into the world with fresh eyes, with the world itself equally fresh and made newly beautiful. But Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs isn’t without its problems, and a recommendation comes with certain caveats. For the book’s strengths, and its weaknesses, read on.
Spaces and Imagination
The essays in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs are chronologically ordered, and certain themes and ideas repeat throughout, although in each instance with a slightly different shade. One of the first major themes of the book is that of space, of empty space, and its potential. Murnane recounts in “On the Road to Bendigo: Kerouac’s Australian Life” how, as a child, he used to watch American films. He didn’t get much out of them – the action went too fast for him. Instead, he focused on the things which seemed unchangeable, stable. “The places where nothing seemed to happen.” The great brown vistas that lie behind the horse rider in a Western, for example. And over time Murnane began to fill the scenery, if not with action, then at least with his own ideas. He realised that “the way to understand a place” is “to turn your back on it”. To imagine.
And so Murnane reads Kerouac, and he reads Kerouac’s biographies, but he never boards a plane. Instead, in his head, he creates his own America, pieced together from Kerouac’s writings and those who write about him. If there is something that ties together the various essays of Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, it is this idea of the way that everything can be a tool for the creation of an inner, imaginary world within us. This has its dangers. Murnane’s infatuation with the imagination comes across almost solipsistic at times. He himself, in “The Breathing Author”, says that he acknowledges other people’s inner existences, but that he can only see other minds and their contents within the space of his own imagination, as a “landscape” his own mind’s “landscape”. While this may be true to how we understand each other, the way he emphasises it rather devalues individual human dignity…
“Stream System” and Associations of Images
Murnane is a mathematical writer. He likes his fictions to conform to shapes, like circles or triangles or whatever. Perhaps his most famous short story, which is also included among the essays here (another example of genre bending), is called “Stream System”. The narrator of the essay/story goes to a place which is marked on the map as “stream system”. This then sets off a chain of memories, thoughts, and associations, which eventually leads him to face repressed memories about his failure to be kind to his own brother, who died young and unloved. It is well done. We circle around the idea of this location on the map, but with each loop (as it were) the meaning of the water system changes, and new images are heaped on top of the old.
And meaning, the metonymic shifting of meaning, is key to Murnane’s whole project. As he writes, “my writing was not an attempt to produce something called “literature” but an attempt to discover meaning”. “Meaning” he later defines as what exists when he can see in his mind a thing “being connected to some other thing or things.” His whole fictional world concerns the creation of connections and meanings. In this, he stands awkwardly alongside postmodern writers like Don Delillo and Thomas Pynchon. Where they see conspiratorial connections in everything, Murnane seeks to connect apparently unrelated things together, finding in this act of connecting the very purpose of his work. It is, perhaps, an altogether more positive idea. Even though it is one that is very much divorced from the world itself.
Writing and its purpose
Murnane wanted to be a poet when he was young. And his writing, even in these essays, has a poetical quality to it. Not in the sense of a rhyme that creeps into the text. Rather, there is a hypnotic quality to Murnane’s rhythm and repetitions that borders the same world of free and childlike imagination that the best poetry does. It is, in a way, incantatory at times. And in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs there are a lot of details for one who wants to understand how he works. Not only is there the business of the stream system that I’ve mentioned above, but Murnane also quotes approvingly, on the subject of rhythm, the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson – “Each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself”.
For Murnane, writing is a way of creating meaning between images. But it also has the exorcism-like purpose that it does for other writers – he writes to remove things from himself. “My sentences arise out of images and feelings that haunt me – not always painfully; sometimes quite pleasantly. These images and feelings haunt me until I find the sentences to bring them into this world”. In the same way as Murnane turns other people into imaginations contained within his own imagination, his view of the purpose of literature is similarly unambitious. For him, it never explains anything, rather it simply serves to show “how stupendously complicated everything is”. He isn’t interested in creating living, breathing characters, so much as reflecting a real mind. What that means in practice is that his stories simply aim to make us believe that only his narrators are real. Believing the rest is unimportant.
Hungary, Horse Riding, Idiosyncrasies
Murnane is weird. He loves horse races, imagining decades of races and writing down their details over the course of his life. For him the best literature aspires to the condition of horse racing, and when he reads a good book he imagines it as a rider, approaching the finish on the field. He has never worn sunglasses, has never learned to swim. He has never gone voluntarily into an art gallery. He comes across, on multiple occasions in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, as a kind of aesthetic hermit. His influences – Borges, Calvino, Proust, and others – are all idiosyncratic, but with them I have never felt such a conscious retreat from the real world into the imagined one. Murnane often doesn’t seem interested in… well… anything.
Even books seem not to interest him in a serious way – he reads the same old ones over and over. And ultimately, the impression I had at times while I read Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs was not a positive one. We are taken from the world so brutally, so completely, that it’s hard not to miss it. His style itself becomes grating.
One of the biggest disappoints of the book for me was the final essay, “The Angel’s Son: Why I learned Hungarian Late in Life”. It is an exciting premise, but instead of answering it Murnane goes on another walk among past images, reaching the actual subject – Hungarian – very late in the essay. Of course, there are some beautiful turns of phrase – “if an English word or phrase is a pane of clear glass with something called a meaning on its far side, a Hungarian word is a pane of coloured glass. The meaning on the other side of that glass is apparent to me, but I can never be unaware of the rich tints of the glass.” – but that’s what Murnane’s good at. It’s not a surprise.
Even though the essay is in keeping with Murnane’s general style within Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed at the end. When I actually wanted to know something, the whole essay revealed itself to be akin to a construct of smoke and mirrors, and wholly unsatisfactory.
Conclusion
If you want to read Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs my recommendation comes with these warnings. There is almost nothing here, even though the nothingness is beautiful. Murnane’s style is unique, and the experience of being led into a world of the imagination is not without its charms. It’s also certainly true that his appreciation – ironically enough – of the objects of our world as sources of images is capable of leading us into the world, rather than away from it. But Murnane, it is fair to say, is one of those writers who is best sampled a few pages at a time. Reading Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs through within the space of a week, I felt especially keenly the problems of the work. Perhaps it has made me be unfair. Murnane is a unique writer, and certainly worth one’s time, but The Plains is a much more exciting book, and that’s the one I’d start with. If you’ve come across Murnane yourself and have a different view, why not leave a comment? He’s not the most accessible writer, and it may be that I just don’t know how to approach him.