The mostly level grassy countryside around Gerald Murnane’s house is easy to visit and most of those who visit it will assume that this is the same mostly level grassy countryside that appears in many of his later novels. However, the MLGC of Murnane is not that which exists around his house, but that which exists within his mind, i.e. the imagined place.
It’s easy to assume Mr Murnane is an unimaginative person because of this, a misconception which can be dispelled by reading these later works. Rather than a lack of imagination, Murnane’s MLGC betrays a disinterest in the baser elements of conventional novels, or as I have taken to calling them, long-form perspective works. The characters and situations in his novels are borrowed heavily from his immediate reality because his goal is not to invent ephemera but to engage in a long-form perspective study – that being the final goal of the novel, that being the reason for a novel’s existence.
The true aim of a novel is to run a variety of phenomena through a perspective to reveal the universal elements present in a particular life. The culture of literature seems to me at present to be divided between those who understand this aim and those who do not. Guess which camp is heavily outnumbered.
As regards both writing and reading, many hours are wasted “world building”, discovering the precise number of fingers on warlocks’ hands, rather than engaging in long form perspective investigation. The resulting novels are not novels, but cheap entertainment, and not even good entertainment. Books aren’t fast-paced, they don’t have music or colour, they aren’t stimulating to my id, relative to other media. If I want empty entertainment I’ll watch videos online, which will accomplish the same thing more efficiently. They will be equally empty, but they have lights and sound, and entail passivity on my part, which allows me more freedom to daydream, eat, leave the entertainment playing in the background, etc. It’s more exciting and less focus is needed.
Therefore, empty novels of wizards and warriors etc are entirely useless to me. A novel, to be worth my time, must engage in a long-form perspective study. This is not to say it should be long, or should focus especially deeply on a single character’s perspective – it may be a series of short vignettes of life in a certain place or time, etc. There are no boundaries in writing if you can justify what you’re doing. But a piece of prose, to be worth the time spent on it, cannot be about empty action.
My first novel was not a complete novel. It contained a number of theatrical elements more suited for visual representation than literate representation. However, there were amateurish attempts at evoking a ‘novel exclusivity’, or a ‘reason for it to be a novel as opposed to a film’ by engagement with qualia, attempts which even then I understood were necessary to justify the text’s existence as text. Even if I had integrated different modes of thought into the work perfectly, representing them through the techniques of long-form perspective study (including prose styles) rather than through the evocation of images, the book would still have had a Dostoyevskian conception, being at heart an intellectual or a political debate couched in a drama. Therefore I call it an ‘impure novel’ though I don’t believe that alone necessarily impinges on a work’s quality (what really drives the nail in the coffin, at least in my case, is my amateurishness on all the necessary technical (prosaic), dramatic, and perspective fronts).
“Show don’t tell” is another symptom of this basic misunderstanding of the point of novels. Many people understand a novel to be a written story depicting a series of observable fictional events. They have some understanding that there must be a principal person who must react to his environment in a manner commensurate with his character. They also have the American creative writing class attitude toward the inclusion of any element – that being Chekhov’s, to mention nothing in your work unless it is relevant to a thematic point.
These attitudes are combined, and rather than being able to provide a basic description of a scene, or to simply leave things out, every unremarkable object must become a vehicle for the protagonist’s emotions to spill out in a thinly-veiled expository torrent. Telling, the simple method of conveyance which a student is warned to avoid at all costs, is in fact still accomplished, via this roundabout and rather obnoxious interpretation of every possible object. Even neutral feelings must become the focus of a great outpour, for the objects must be mentioned to achieve maximal realism, and the protagonist must have an opinion about them which informs his character to “make him a realistic figure” and justify the inclusion of ephemera for the sake of that same realism.
In other words, realism is equated with maximalism. And the world of a possible literature is equated with what we collectively understand to be reality.
In a 2014 interview Gerald Murnane asked where fictional events occurred, what lay beyond the described landscape of an artwork. I think this space can be described as neither individual nor collective. It’s not an individual space because it’s a transmitted vision, and it’s not a collective space because it is individually imagined, and no-one can imagine it the same way. Murnane’s question regarding this space is ‘Where is it?’ and mine, for the time being, is ‘How can it be reached and explored, and what are its boundaries?’ which is at heart the same question.
- Where is it? – presumably somewhere in the mind.
- How can it be reached? – by writing.
- How can it be explored? – by reading the resulting piece and imagining the landscapes both physical and mental beyond it. Much to Murnane’s chagrin, because he doesn’t use this word, such an exercise does require what us mere mortals call imagination.
- When you love a work and want it to last forever, when you hear the universe in ten seconds of music or see a limitless world in a few paragraphs, when you want to enter a painting to explore the background, when you imagine yourself as part of a drama as a relatively unimportant but still present character, this is exploration of the world beyond what’s made.
- (And perhaps God imagines himself as us, creating our works of fiction, and escaping into them.)
- What are its boundaries? – presumably limitless, given the range of possible responses.
I find I have a further question. If Murnane’s mental landscape is neither an individual nor a collective space, what kind of space is it?
When a Pokemon is traded, it doesn’t “move from one Pokemon game to the other.” A new Pokemon is made on the receiver’s system, with attributes exactly matching the sender’s Pokemon, and the old system’s copy of the Pokemon is deleted.
When I read a passage of text, I visualise a set of images, either abstract or realistic, it doesn’t matter. These visualisations are prompts by the text, not direct transmissions. There is no mystical addition, no magic mist pours from the text into my brain. The text is simply a catalyst for my visualisations.
When a young or inexperienced person reads a text containing concepts they don’t understand, they aren’t educated about the meaning of those concepts by their being mentioned alone.
To clarify, say I am a barbarian with a long beard who has never shaved and does not know what shaving is or what razors are for. I read the words “Ivan Ivanovich shaved” with no further detail or explanation included as regards that particular action (assuming the rest of the paragraph is irrelevant, say, it details Ivan Ivanovich readying himself in other ways for his day). In that case, I would substitute my own imagining of the concept of shaving for the period of time described in the text. While Ivan was engaged in this mysterious action I didn’t understand, I might visualise a blurry white field around him, and he would emerge from this field into proper clarity in closer alignment with the text when he was described as doing, or being, something else I understood better.
By this example I mean to say that the words “Ivan Ivanovich shaved” alone, without further context, do not so much communicate their “intended” meaning as they do prompt a reader to imagine a set of images or ideas. That readers will be able to envisage what the author intended is a separate issue. Cultural likenesses are needed. Consider the oldest joke in the world, a Sumerian joke: “A dog walks into a bar, and says, ‘I can’t see a thing. I’ll open this one.’” To the modern ear this is total nonsense. We have no way of understanding it merely by words alone.
My point may be considered an extrapolation of Miyamoto Musashi’s dictum – ‘seek nothing outside of yourself.’ This is an example of Musashi the Stoic – if someone does something to effect your mind, only you have the ability to act in such a way as to prevent that effect.
It follows that if one contains multitudes, if all that one can perceive or be is already within oneself, and that ‘new’ art merely shines a torch into the dark cave that lies within each of us, then no work communicates anything new whatsoever. Even hard data of which we were previously unaware is merely adopted into an experiential framework composed of a set of predetermined phenomena that make up ‘the sum total of possibility.’
Everything “new” is merely combinations of what already was. This is a truism. The argument being made here–one argument I could make–is that this applies to personal perception as well.
Let us divide perception into the subjective, opsis, and the objective, theoria. The first is Aristotle’s term re elements of tragedy, being the sight, the spectacle. The latter is an Orthodox theological term referring to contemplation of God. Both terms have histories and meanings beyond the scope of my current question which I will ignore for our purposes.
The framework I have assumed posits that when one learns ‘facts’ via e.g. an engineering textbook, this is an example of opsis. There is an observed phenomenon taken into oneself subjectively, not reflected on. Raw data added to the store of experience. Theoria is, perhaps, an end goal. An experienced engineer can simply understand what needs to be done at a relevant site from the available data, combined with prior cases.
After all, Musashi’s ‘everything necessary in oneself’ and the related idea that nothing external is necessary to live life assumes that such things will come by accident. But to develop a proper theory of how to exist, one untainted by the nihilism of Buddhist theology, there must be a period of education. In order to have everything inside oneself, one must learn what things are (take them into one’s mind). Therefore, there is opsis, the observed spectacle of the world, and theoria, the reflection of the world within the mind, the addition of competing ideas, the reaching of truth through contemplation. There is a practice and a goal under this framework.
So where is the MLGC located?
All fictional locations are made of a combination of real locations combined with subjective observations and ideas. Assuming an author has seen, heard of, or seen pictures of multiple types of place, arboreal glades and deserts and arctic wastes, these will be (perhaps unconsciously) reflected in their imagination of a location. Imaginary locations are a subclass of all real locations observed by an author. As such, shared experience is needed to understand MLGC, just as shared experience is needed to understand the world’s oldest joke.
(Note here that MLGC can stand for any imaginary location, including Castle Gormenghast or Mordor.)
Let us take Mervyn Peake, author of Gormenghast, as the next example. Peake, being a painter, would have had a perfect internal image of Gormenghast which was, though occasionally illustrated, never fully communicated except through text. As such we have only hints and descriptions of its full appearance. Readers extrapolate the real appearance of the true Gormenghast from the available data.
There is an opsis—reading the text—and a theoria – imagining or contemplating the text’s intended meaning. Gormenghast, or MLGC, can only be reached through theoria as the medium of text does not allow for instant transmission, there must be a learning, an opsis, first of language (what the words mean) and of reality, then of the meaning of the words as they correspond to physical reality.
Given that our minds are able to ‘traverse’ mental landscapes it seems fair to claim all landscapes exist metaphysically and metaphorically (since to say ‘we can traverse a landscape’ is a metaphor), as well as physically.
Perhaps the true location of a seemingly shared mental landscape is what we conventionally call Heaven, in the sense that we all reach it the same way, not by choice (in a way unaffected by the circumstances of life) and we will therefore understand it in the same way at the end of time. It is the only thing that will ever be understood by two different people in exactly the same way, and this is why it’s called Heaven.
Theoria takes us to a different place. Opsis is sight, and theoria is imagination, or extrapolation, or in-sight. Something being ‘insightful’ automatically means to us ‘something perceived with skill’, something subtle perceived well.
I hypothesise that insight over time became a stand-in for ‘having more and better sight’ because there is a truth to reflective sight that doesn’t exist in physical reality, or rather that there are truths to be gained by insight that can’t be physically found, truths that can only be arrived at through reflection rather than observation.
I posit that theoria takes one to a truer place, and that MLGC’s internality, resulting malleability, and ability to reveal more than the ‘real’ space can reveal, make it a more complete place than reality.
verso folio 