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Triptychal Fiction: re-interpreting Murnane's workfrom The Plains to Emerald BluePaolo Bartolini.Southerly59.1 (Autumn 1999):p40(1). (4965 words)

Abstract:Fiction writer Gerald Murnanechallenges traditional notions offiction in such books as "Inland,""Emerald Blue," and "The Plains." Hewrites under the influence of theFrench surrealist Paul Eluard, whobelieved in simultaneous worlds.Murnane creates a separate world infiction, and uses the fiction to explorethe metaphysical dynamics of thevisible and invisible. The writing of

fiction, for Murnane, creates a theoryof fiction.

In this article I provide a newinterpretation of Murnane's fictionbased on the assumption that it isnot intended, as most of the criticalwork on Murnane seems to believe,to articulate a relationship betweenfiction and reality so much as toelaborate on an interpretation of theact of writing as that process in-

between reality and a furtherdimension. In the course of mydiscussion, I will call this dimensionthe "ur-text" or more generally the"centre" or, in Murnane's words, the"other world".

"There is another world but it is inthis one"

Murnane's writing is concerned withand revolves around another worldwhich, in the words of theprotagonist of Inland,(1) "is in this

one" (p.100). The anonymousnarrator in Inland borrows thisformula from the French surrealistpoet Paul Eluard. The Eluardianaphorism There is another world butit is in this one is not drawn from abook by Eluard but from anothervolume written by Patrick White. It is,as Murnane's character puts it, adrifted away sentence whose originalcontext is irretrievable to him. Whathe is left with is only speculations onthe meanings and implications of"this" and the "other".

In an article reviewing Murnane'slater collection of short stories,Emerald Blue, David Tacey hasremarked that Murnane's charactersare driven by "the desire for orderand system ... and one always senses

an element of urgency in theirpersonal quest."(2) The protagonistof Inland takes his quest further byquestioning the meaning of theadjective "this", for he senses thatthe "other world" can start to beunravelled only on the grounds of asound knowledge of "this" world. Heconjectures that "this" can only referto the realm of fiction (in thisparticular case Eluard's poetry) and,by a process of induction, that the"other world" is to be found within

fiction itself. The protagonist ofInland concludes his lucubration bysaying that:

The other world, in other words, isa place that can only be seen ofdreamed of by those people knownto us as narrators of books orcharacters within books. If you or I,reader, happen to glimpse part ofthat world drifting past, as it were, itis because we have seen or dreamedof ourselves seeing for a moment as

a narrator or a character in a booksees or dreams of seeing. (p.101)

The metafictional nature of thisreasoning is apparent; even more soif one follows closely the transitionalprocess from one text to the other:from Eluard to White, from White toMurnane and from Eluard, White andMurnane to the infinite otherpossibilities inscribed in otherimaginary of real texts.

Yet Murnane is not only implicitlyarticulating a theory of fiction bymaking fiction, he is also, consciouslyor not, drawing attention to theinherent nature of narrative, to whatBarthes in S/Z calls the deja-lu ("thealready read" [1974: 20]);(3) to thatwhich, as Peter Brooks has aptlyremarked, provides the reader withall the necessary tools to make senseof what s/he reads. "Structures,functions, sequences, plot, thepossibility of following a narrativeand making sense of it", claimsBrooks, "belong to the reader's
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literary competence, his training as areader of narrative. The reader is inthis view himself virtually a text, acomposite of all he has read, orheard read, or imagined aswritten."(4) This perspective offers a

valid introduction to Murnane's ideaof writing in that it serves to callattention to the rich and deepcultural and literary palimpsest whichinforms all of Murnane's books.

The metafictional and theoreticalundercurrent which characterisesmany of Murnane's books, especiallyfrom The Plains onward, not onlysheds light on the general discussionpertaining to narrative and fictionand their relationship with "reality", it

also offers a valuable insight intoMurnane's philosophical beliefs andhis idea of fiction. For Murnane,writing has the capacity to give atangible form to the magmatic realmof thoughts. Its purpose, in otherwords, is to solidify on paper theswirling, swaying and shiftingcompetence a person accumulatesover the years with the view ofreaching some kind ofunderstanding. Yet writing, howeverfunctional it may be, will never be

able to dislodge the sense ofinadequacy and confusion with whichour lives are imbued. In an interviewwith Ludmilla Forsyth, Murnanedescribes writing by proposing ametaphor:

Somewhere under the Red Sea, Ibelieve, are places where the magmafrom inside the earth rises upthrough cracks and turns into beadsof metal when it meets the water ofthe ocean. This tremendously hot

stuff pours into the water andsuddenly it's beads or pellets of goldand zinc and whatever. I think of mythoughts as bursting out from someunfathomable place and then turninginto all these funny, lumpy littlethings called words. And the wordsare valuable, which is nice to know;but the hot stuff, that's something ofa mystery.(5)

It seems almost natural to reconnectEluard's sentence to Murnane's ownunderstanding of fiction. Writing,"this world", speaks for "another

world"; but this speaking is atranslation whose transformingprocess fails to tender faithfully theoriginal. The translation can onlyaspire to allude to the original whichlies somewhere between the lines,

behind the words, invisible andinaccessible. In order to see it, oneshould remove the words whichcover it, scrape off the glossy surfacemade of sentences. Yet the viewerwell knows that on the other side ofthe page stands a language and aworld s/he cannot decode or enter.John Tittensor has remarked that"Inland speaks of the pages of booksas clouds endlessly crossing andintermingling to form new clouds,new pages from which we draw new

meanings even as, in a sense, ourview is obscured by them. Partialnessis all."(6)

The only option left to our viewer isto imagine the "other world" byrelying on his inadequate idiom.Murnane's fiction is an enormous,interminable quest of the imaginationwhose ultimate purpose is to gainaccess (mental access) to that otherworld from which he is shut out.

I've been looking all my life for avantage point--it's almost impossibleto explain. It's like the feeling you getin dreams that there is somethingyou're being prevented from seeing,or some pleasure or liberty you'reprevented from enjoying in yourdream. And if only you could get to acertain place, or be a certain person,then you would understandeverything.(7)

A Triptychal Fiction

Is Murnane thinking of fiction as hisvantage point, or is the vantage pointstill further removed from fiction?

The protagonist of Inland appears tobe engaged in distinguishingbetween two imaginary entitieswhich ate separated more or less bya degree of visibility. On one side ofthe ledger there is "this world"(fiction) and on the other "anotherworld" which Murnane's fiction setsout to explore and map. Fictionretains its referentiality but insteadof pointing to phenomenal reality, as


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in more conventional narratives, itrefers back to an ur-text. And yet weare not in the presence of a self-referential narrative insofar as weconfront two rather separate anddistinct shades of it: the written and

unwritten narrative. Murnane'scharacters imagine they see as anarrator or a character in a book offiction imagines he/she sees.

There is also a third dimension,phenomenal reality, but this remainsblurred, elusive, somehow invisible.Like the "other world", reality may beimagined. Some of its traits maysuddenly appear between the lines of"this world", yet the quickness oftheir appearance is matched by the

swiftness of their retreat, leavinglittle time to lay any sort of claims onthem.

In Murnane's fiction the only visible,graspable, dimension is fiction itself."This world" is made up of language.Sentence after sentence and pageafter page, fiction begins to unfoldand with it a world which soonpresents us with time, space, objects,beings, colours; in a word with itsown visibility. Fiction makes itselfpresentable, and thus visible, but notso much to parade its appearance asto evoke something else which iswithin it, indeed hidden by it. Itfollows that this other world, thoughcontained within narrative, isconstituted of things which cannotspeak for themselves. This otherworld, in order to emerge, needs toborrow the language of fiction, but indoing so it is forced to go through aprocess of transformation whichobliterates its essence.

One of the first questions to tacklewhen studying Murnane's fiction is toask oneself whether his narrativediscourse is arranged around abinary or triple equation. Thetemptation, which to be sure isencouraged by Murnane's couplet"this" and "another" world, would beto focus only on two terms. Indeedthis appears to be the general stancetaken by the majority of scholars whohave embarked on the study ofMurnane's fiction. Yet a purely binaryanalysis reintroduces theconventional counterposition

between imagination and realitywhich in Murnane is far fromsatisfying. Phenomenal reality doesnot occupy a central position inMurnane's writings. The firm andsecure features of everydayness

(proper names, localities,chronology) are systematicallysubverted by Murnane's fiction. Ifone has to operate in a two-dimensional framework, it would thenbe more appropriate to interrogatethe interaction at work betweenfiction and the ur-text bespoken by"pure thought". And yet this courseof action would fail to recognise, asJohn Tittensor has suggested,(8) theintrinsic "interstitial" function thatfiction plays in Murnane's work.

By definition, an interstice is in-between two dimensions. It positsitself as a connecting point, as a kindof aperture through which to peer.Fiction, the interstice, opens up on toanother world inside the text and onto another world still, that which liesoutside the text. The latter is thephenomenal of factual world. Thishas often been confused or taken tobe the same as "this world" which is,as the protagonist of Inland

unquestionably states, the worldinside the text, qua fiction. It isnecessary to be clear on this point ifone wants to do away with thesimplifying binary interpretation ofMurnane's work. It is all very well tosay that Murnane and hisinnumerable characters are exiledfrom the "other world" and it issimilarly important to focus on thereasons why they are so eager tobegin their imaginative journey intothis other world; but this certainly

ought not to obscure or blur the pointfrom which they depart. The questionremains the location fromwhichMurnane and his protagonistsspeak. The answer to this questionmight also shed some light on therelationship between the place inwhich Murnane and his protagonistsreside and the remaining two places(reality and the ur-text) which, as acombined triptych, form the treblegeographical map characteristicofMurnane's fiction.


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Murnane's characters definitely abidein fiction and it is from fiction thatthey attempt to understand the otherworld, the ur-text. It is worthremembering here that all ofMurnane's characters from The Plains

onward are artists (cinema directors,writers). Their intention is topenetrate the mystery and the secretof the other world by shooting a filmabout it or by writing on it. The factthat they fail to complete theirmovies or pieces of fiction goes along way towards exposing theinadequacy of art in the face of themystery of what Murnane terms the"hot stuff". And yet we are readingabout their futile, pathetic efforts,even laughing at their clumsy

attempts to come to terms with whatlies behind their "view". Whereastheir fictive narratives are notfinished, the "real" narrative abouttheir narratives is indeed finished.Here the question arises again: whatis the relationship between these twonarratives, the real and the fictive,and between these two and the thirdnarrative, the other world?

On the one hand we have tangiblebooks, The Plains, Landscape with

Landscape, Inland, Velvet Waters,Emerald Blue, with their front andback covers, their space on thebookshelves of bookshops, reviews inpapers and magazines; on the otherhand, imaginary books and filmsresiding within their tangiblecounterparts. Which legitimateswhich? Is it the fiction The Plainswhich legitimates the film TheInterior, or is it perhaps the manyfictive stories in Landscape withLandscape which grant the stamp of

reality to their homonymous realcounterpart? And furthermore, whathappened to the other world to whichboth the fictive and the real seem toallude? These are some of thequestions I would like to explore inthis article.

Fiction and the Ur-Text

Murnane attempts to grant hischaracters entrance to the realm offiction by writing fiction. From thisvantage point, they then proceed toimagine, by fictively writing/seeing,what lies behind fiction, in the ur-text

bespoken by "pure thought". It is asif Murnane has decided to subvertthe traditional order by which "purethought" necessarily precedes fiction.In Murnane the reverse applies:fiction precedes and leads to the

narrative of "pure thought", to the ur-text. That is possibly why Murnane'sbooks appear so rarefied, conceptual,theoretical, unreal. In fact they arenot interested in linking the ur-text toreality via fiction but, on thecontrary, in reaching the ur-textthrough fiction (the input of reality inthis apparent game of two will bediscussed later). Yet, andparadoxically, some of Murnane'scritics have stressed the realistictraits of Murnane's writing.(9) And

rightly so, especially if onereconnects Murnane's realism withhis notion of "true fiction". But beforeI attempt to do just that, let mespend a little more time on thedistinction between fiction and theur-text.

In Murnane the narrative process hasbeen turned upside-down or inside-out. We are not looking at fiction as aproduct of the ur-text, but rather atfiction as a hermeneutic instrument,

an interpretative tool for viewing andtranslating the ur-text. The ur-text isnot the key to fiction but the objectupon which fiction gazes.Murnane,metaphorically speaking, is inside thepage and from there he looks out,imagining himself seeing himselfthinking in front of the page. Thisprocess of reversal automaticallyerases all the accessories with whichtraditional narrative embellishes theur-text of "pure thought". Dialoguesare left out, proper names are

deliberately excluded, lengthydescriptions rich in adjectives andadverbs are ignored. What is left onthe page is the uncontaminated,undiluted, discontinuous, haphazard,digressive skeleton of thoughts. In anarticle explaining his role as narrativeconsultant for the literary journalMeanjin, Murnane, amongst otherthings, stated that:

An interesting story convinces mefrom the first few sentences that the

author has written the story in orderto discover the meaning of some part


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of his or her experience. (If anyperson concludes from this that Iprefer to read stories written in thefirst person or stories that areobviously autobiographical, then thatperson has not begun to understand

what I am saying here.) A boringstory usually puts me in mind of anauthor who is confused or vain oranxious to impress or who thinks thatMeanjin stories have to be about thethings that some journalists callissues or have to have characterswho talk about ideas.(10)

If on the one side Murnane'suncompromising poetic stance hasgained him the respect of many

critics, on the other it has alienatedmany readers. It is true that, asDavid Tacey remarks in his article onEmerald Blue, Murnane's books aredifficult "for new readers, or foranyone not familiar with hisparticular post-modern enterprise",(11) and this is so precisely becausethe way we have been taught toappreciate a book of fiction, even inpostmodern times, is totallyantagonistic toMurnane'sunderstanding of fiction.

The difference between fiction andthe ur-text ("this world" and the"other world") could be alsounderstood by considering ourexperience of time andspace.Murnane's writing iscontinuously interspersed with theimage of the horizon and what liesbehind it, with hedges and ridges anddivides, with hardly distinguishableedges and corners, and driven by acompelling curiosity to know what

the people on the other side of thosevisual barriers actually see. Thisrecurrent preoccupation with thenotion of the "behindness" is ignitednot only by spatial barriers, but alsoby time rifts which invariably engagethe protagonists ofMurnane's fictionin a frantic journey to and frobetween the present and the past.

Memory provides Murnane withanother powerful instrument forprobing the "behindness". Whereasfiction investigates spatial blankness,memory interrogates time, especiallywhere the present and the past

overlap. For Murnane the past is likea map which is only partially marked.This vast mental territory which liesbehind the actual in a region in-between, half reality and halfimagination, is, to use a sentence

from The Plains, the locus for the"remembrances of themisremembered."(12) But not only isit a realm paved with false anddeceiving signposts which need to becorrected, it is also a huge continentin which vast expanses remainunexplored. It is a map dotted withlarge blank patches which bewitchthe viewer, inviting him or her togaze insistently upon theiropaqueness as if the eyes had thepower to scrape off the white opaque

film and reveal the landscape behindit. This is the essence of Murnane'sexplorative journey through spaceand time, a journey that does notneed to be performed in actual timeand space but which, on thecontrary, takes place in mental timeand space.Murnane, like hisprotagonists, has replacedmovement, the physical treading onthe land, with seeing, the mentalexploration of the land. Hisprotagonists are motionless, static,and yet they travel for miles andmiles in a journey whose trajectory isat one and the same time horizontal,vertical, diagonal, circular,zigzagging. Unlike the traditionalexplorers who fill up maps bytravelling on the surface of the land,Murnane's protagonists attend totheir cartography by travellingbeneath the crust of the land. Theirassumption is that a map does notneed to be completed by going

somewhere else simply because italready contains the land withinitself: "there is another world, but itis in this one". Murnane's spatial andtime maps are made up of infinitepages whose images appear only byturning them over. It is not byaccident that Murnane's writing is sostrongly informed and structuredaround the process of reading:

Readers of good will understandme when I write that my better self isthe pan of me that writes fiction inorder to learn the meaning of theimages in my mind. The same


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readers will understand me when Iwrite that my better self is the part ofme that reads fiction in order to learnthe meaning of the images in otherminds.(13)

True Fiction

Murnane's fiction is an intricatemental landscape whose constitutiveelement is found in the notion of the"behindness": what lies behind thesurface, behind the horizon, behind aridge? And supposing that a person isalready over the horizon, the ridge ofthe surface, what does s/he see?Phenomenal reality, the actualasMurnane calls it, does not seem toharbour any particular interest for

Murnane and his protagonists as theyprepare for the journey toward the"behindness". In fact the empiricalreality appears to be treated with afair degree of suspicion, if notdespised altogether. And yet thisreality, far from being irrelevant,occupies a rather functional place inMurnane's writing. In his review ofEmerald Blue David Tacey remarks,amongst other things, that "GeraldMurnane is committed to mappinginterior space. He withdrawsinstinctively from the world, finding ituseful only insofar as it providesobjects that stimulate internalreflection and states of reverie."(14)If considered properly, the usefulnessthat Tacey speaks of with relation tothe world is far from being marginalin Murnane's fiction. It would beimpossible for Murnane to evencontemplate his journey into hismental landscape without the aid ofthe actual. I agree that the actual is

only the site ofMurnane's departurebut, as we know, the place fromwhich we depart tends to inform andto a certain extent influence ourtravels in that the experiences weaccrue during the trip are scanned,compared, sifted through ourexperience of beings in reality.Against this, one could argue thatmore often than notMurnane'smental exploration beginsnot so much in reality but in fiction.Indeed I have already pointed to the

imaginative process of Murnane'swriting, its metafictional nature, and

to his literary inheritance, whichembraces Proust, Joyce, Borges,Calvino, Hemingway, Bronte, Austen,to name only a few of the writerswhose influence on Murnane's workis, by his own admission, apparent.

But it is also true that this complexnetwork of texts continuouslyinteracts with Murnane's own reality,enacting a dialogue whose resultcannot be brought back either tofiction of to reality but perhaps towhat Murnane calls true fiction:

What I call true fiction is fictionwritten by men and women not to tellthe stories of their lives but todescribe the images in their minds(some of which may happen to be

images of men and women who wantto tell the truth about their lives).(15)

Here again is the triple nature ofMurnane's writings which, as we see,is a very particular combination offiction, reality and "pure thought",the outcome of which is "truefiction". True fiction is the site atwhich imagined men and women "tellthe truth about their lives". At thisstage, the temptation would be toequate "true fiction" to the "otherworld" which, in Eluard's words,resides within fiction, "this world". Itcould be said that Murnane's realitycombines with his characters' fictionin order to reach true fiction wherethe words spoken by a character arenecessarily and unquestionablytruthful:

When I prepare to read a piece of[true] fiction I look forward to readingsomething that is true in a way thatno piece of scientific writing or

philosophical writing or biographicalwriting or even autobiographicalwriting can be true. The narrator of"Landscape with Freckled Women" inmy book of fiction Landscape withLandscape speaks for me when heclaims that he can never be sure ofthe truth of any words except thewords spoken by a character in awork of fiction whose narrator hasdeclared that the character inquestion is speaking truthfully.(16)


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And yet true fiction, in anotherdefinition that Murnane borrows fromHerbert Read, "reproduces thecontour of our thoughts."(17) It isthen still an instrument, though moretruthful than "ordinary" writings, for

the translation of images andfeelings into language. "Mysentences", says Murnane, "arise outof images and feelings that hauntme--not always painfully; sometimesquite pleasantly. These images andfeelings haunt me until I find thesentences to bring them into thisworld."(18) The other world isdefinitely the realm of images andfeelings, the ur-text, which ateblocked of obscured by time andspatial barriers which language

attempts to remove in order to bringthem into this world. The latter istrue fiction through which the readercan attain a perception of "howstupendously complicated everythingis."(19) The knowledge carried byand via the process of writing is thusstill explanatory, but instead ofdiffusing the chaotic nature of life itsimply makes its heterogeneity,fragmentation and mystery standout.

Is the ur-text, the "other world", the"behindness", synonymous with theunconscious? David Tacey appears tosuggest this when he says that"Murnane is continually launchedupon the sea of the unconscious,which, for him, is a seething world ofimages and teemingpossibilities."(20) However, Murnaneseems to resist this interpretationwhen, rather scathingly, he statesthat:

My experience has been that awriter begins to write a piece of truefiction not knowing what he or she istrying to explain. In the beginning,the writer knows only that a certainimage or cluster of images seems tomean something of importance. Atsome time after the writing hasbegun, the writer begins to learnwhat that meaning is. The writergoes on learning while he or shewrites. Sometimes the writer is stilllearning after the writing has been

finished or even after it has beenpublished. My experience has been

that a writer has to trust his or herbetter self in order to write truefiction.

Readers of ill will may suppose thatI use the term better self for

something that they call theunconscious. Readers of ill willseldom understand any statementnot in accordance with fashionabletheories of psychology or politics oreconomics.(21)

Now, granting that true fiction via thebetter self speaks for the host ofimages and feelings contained in the"other world", and also granting thattrue fiction is not a product of the

unconscious, where can this otherworld be found?

Salusinszky's discussion of the notionof "exile" in the fiction of Murnanecomes in handy. Salusinszky remarksthat the sense of exile has somemetaphysical and religiousconnotations in that "behind allaccounts of exile there lies thearchetype of a Paradise Lost, aglimpse of a primeval garden or idealrealm from which mankind has beenexiled for its sins."(22) The "otherworld" is precisely the "primevalgarden"; a site which fits well withthe recurrent Murnanian theme ofbeing "shut out",(23) forced toendlessly circumnavigate an elusive"home". This world is obviously notthe everyday reality which surroundsus for the "present world [does not]allow for the satisfaction of humanneeds and desire."(24) It is not theworld of fiction either, although thiscan serve to alert the reader both to

the artificiality of "actuality" and theexistence "of a deeper truth ... animaginative truth, that is notaccessible through scientific orrational vision, but that the writer isallowed glimpses of when he or sheundertakes an internal quest-romance and looks honestly intodreams, memories, reveries andreflections."(25) It is rather the ur-text.

Its search turns Murnane'sprotagonists from disgruntledinhabitants of reality into wanderingtravellers whose errancy is


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determined by the consciousabandonment of their former home(reality) and by the elusiveness andinvisibility of their destination (thetrue home or ur-text). This process oftransformation is initiated in The

Plains, where the act of leaving home(the coast) is explicitly enacted andnarrativised, and pursued in thesubsequent fiction in which thecharacters are adrift, erring within alandscape that does not offertangible anchors and points ofarrival. If then The Plains is the pointof departure of Murnane'sexplorativejourney, Landscape with Landscape,Inland, Velvet Waters and EmeraldBlue are travel diaries testifying tothe lack of a visible destination, a

centre and ah origin in which to takeshelter.

One could thus say that exile andwandering in Murnane are the resultof an insoluble lack, of anunbridgeable gap. This, of course, isnot so much a spatial gap as amental and metaphysical conditionwhich in turn engenders a mentaland metaphysical wandering. InMurnane this journey also acquiresthe traits of a metafictional errancy

whose outcome is the investigationand exploration of the only given,graspable, physical place, namelyfiction. In leaving reality in search ofthe truthful and indivisible ur-text,Murnane's protagonists are "lost" inand left to deal with their new statusas gypsies, as beings inhabiting the"middest", the "in-betweenness", theliminal zone par excellence, writing.

In resisting and challenging notionssuch as closure, linearity and

chronology, and in constructing, bothspatially and temporally, an openand boundless landscape, GeraldMurnane has succeeded in re-defining the realm of fiction and itsrelationship with our hesitant andwandering condition as beingsdivided between the artificiality andthe "impurity" of "this world", asopposed to the truthful unity and theoriginal bliss permeating the mythical"paradise lost".

(1.) Gerald Murnane, Inland ([1988],London, 1989). All page referencesare given in the text of the article.

(2.) David Tacey, "Ambient ProseContains Repetitive Rhythms of Life",Age (Saturday Extra), 8 July 1995,p.8.

(3.) Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans.Richard Miller (New York, 1974),p.20.

(4.) Peter Brooks, Reading for thePlot: Design and Intention inNarrative (Oxford, 1984), p.18.

(5.) Ludmilla Forsyth, "An Interviewwith Gerald Murnane", GeraldMurnane, John Hanrahan (ed.)(Melbourne, 1987), p.45.

(6.) John Tittensor, "On the InterstitialPlain", Meanjin, 47, 1988, p.753.

(7.) Candida Baker, "GeraldMurnane", Yacker 2 (Sydney andLondon, 1987), p.212.

(8.) See John Tittensor's "On theInterstitial Plain", pp.751-754, and"Gerald Murnane's The Plains",Meanjin, 41, 1982, pp.523-525.

(9.) See Tittensor, "On the InterstitialPlain", p.753.

(10.) Gerald Murnane, "Thetypescript Stops Here", Meanjin, 48,

1989, pp.193-194.(11.) David Tacey, "Ambient ProseContains Repetitive Rhythms of Life",p.8.

(12.) Gerald Murnane, The Plains([1982], Ringwood, 1984), p.71.

(13.) Gerald Murnane, "Thetypescript Stops Here", p.192.

(14.) David Tacey, "Ambient ProseContains Repetitive Rhythms of Life",p.8.


(16.) Ibid, pp.191-192.

(17.) Gerald Murnane, "Why I WriteWhat I Write", Meanjin, 45, 1986,p.516.

(18.) Ibid, p.517.

(19.) Ibid.

(20.) David Tacey, "Ambient ProseContains Repetitive Rhythms of Life",

p.8.


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(22.) Imre Salusinszky, GeraldMurnane (Melbourne, 1993), p.3.

(23.) See Gerald Murnane, Landscape

with Landscape ([1985], Ringwood,1987), p.171.

(24.) Imre Salusinszky, GeraldMurnane, p.1.

(25.) Ibid.

PAOLO BARTOLINI lectures in theInstitute for International Studies,UTS.

Source Citation:Bartolini, Paolo."Triptychal Fiction: re-interpretingMurnane's work from The Plains toEmerald Blue." Southerly 59.1(Autumn 1999): 40(1). ExpandedAcademic ASAP. Gale. University ofMelbourne Library. 27 Jan. 2009