Stream System by Gerald Murnane

The map grew out of one simple proposition. I speak of it tactfully as a proposition, but it has always seemed self-evident to me. In all the world there has never been, there is not, and there will never be any such thing as time. There is only place. What people call time is only place after place. Eternity is here already, and it has no mystery about it; eternity is just another name for this endless scenery where we wander from one place to another.

Here is a sentence that is characteristic of the style of the stories of Gerald Murnane, a sentence which appears in the second paragraph of a story titled "Velvet Waters" and which is collected in a book called Stream System: "During the last two hours of the Saturday and the first two hours of the Sunday other persons walked on the footpath of the Lower Esplanade, but the other persons walked away and out of sight while the man who was walking up and down went on walking up and down until he was the only person walking on the footpath of the Lower Esplanade." It's all there: the resistance to giving the character a name, referring to him instead as "the man who was walking up and down," the long sentence nested with subordinate clauses, the curious flatness of the repetition, the language borrowed from, it seems, a newspaper story or a police report. If the sentence makes your eyes glaze over, you probably would not enjoy the 500+ pages of Murnane's short fiction, collected in a book the title of which is Stream System.

But I am reminded of a literary quotation I saw once that I won't be able to find again, the effect of which was, you can tell someone is a major new writer when their prose seems very ugly to us at first blush. The stiff, strange qualities of Murnane's prose are themselves like a puzzle: what's this guy up to? Similarly, the stories themselves--plotless, guileless--present a kind of inertness that seems less like a flaw and more like a challenge.

Take, for instance, the title story, "Stream System." The narrator of the story--who goes unnamed, but whose biographical details as presented in the story seem much like the writer himself--begins by standing in front of a pair of marshy lakes indicated on his map of the greater Melbourne area as "Stream System." The shape of these lakes--both in real life and on the page of the map--bring to his mind a squished human heart, a golden pendant as seen in a catalogue as a child, and the mustache of his grandfather. These similarities are something more than coincidence and something less than epiphany; the web of connections they present is the subject, rather than merely the method of the story. Murnane describes this imagistic method this way: 

He had come to believe that he was made up mostly of images. He was aware only of images and feelings. The feelings connected him to the images and connected the images to one another. The connected images made up a vast network. He was never able to imagine this network as having a boundary in any direction. He called the network, for convenience, his mind.

In that passage, Murnane attributes this notion to a fictional character, who is no doubt a version of himself, a notion that provides the key to understanding the "implied author," another term which he uses frequently. The stories talk often about themselves; they describe their own construction, and yet you wouldn't say that the lines between fiction and reality are blurred here, as you might with some of the modernists who are clearly Murnane's biggest influences. These stories announce themselves as fiction, but in doing so reject the notion that they are somehow less real than the "real world." "I have always been interested in what is usually called the world," Murnane writes, "but only insofar as it provides me with evidence for the existence of another world." This "other world" is the network of images, which is called by Murnane's stand-in, "for convenience, his mind."

The exploration of these image-networks, which one might call a mind, often takes the form of a map. In the excerpt that begins this review, Murnane rejects time as a way of understanding. His stories seem to lack plot because plot is too time-dependent, but the unfolding of these images is geographical. They appear as maps of fictional places, as in the excellent "The Interior of Gaaldine," about a man--again, who seems to resemble Murnane--who is asked to read a 2,000 page masterpiece which scrupulously records thousands of fictional horse races on a fictional island that resembles Tasmania. Similarly, the young protagonist of "As It Were a Letter," living on the grounds of an experimental commune, spends his time making a crude model of a fictional commune in the forest.

What's funny about these stories is that Murnane is quite clear, perhaps obsessively so, about his methods. One story describes a creative writing professor who extemporizes to his students about an image that appears in his mind, and then the image that image provokes, and so on, and then places his recorded versions of each of these in one of many colored folders. This might be a fictionalized version of Murnane's methods, but maybe not exaggeratedly so. In the charming "Stone Quarry," he describes an almost certainly fictional writers' retreat whose attendants are not allowed to speak to each other, but who must encode their messages to each other in the pieces of fiction they write. I don't suppose that Murnane is the first person to wonder how the process of writing a piece of fiction might be inscribed into the writing itself, but there's an earnestness or openness to the way he does it that is remarkable.

For me, Murnane's strange methods are most successful in the very first story, "When the Mice Failed to Arrive":

In earlier years I had always understood my son's signs as telling me that he was a mouse at heart. He was telling me that he was smaller than other children and made weak by his asthma. When I made my own signs in return in those years, I was telling my son that I recognised his mouseness and that I would never forget to put into his saucer each day a little heap of rolled oats and a cube of bread spread with vegemite and a scrap of lettuce, or to put a heap of torn paper into a corner of his cage when nights turned chilly.

There are comparatively few metafictional tricks in this story, no obvious analogue for the author and no attempt to write into the story the process of writing the story. But the network of images, the unfolding of a mind, is striking: the narrator connects his son's self-conscious "mouseness" with a memory of raising, then drowning, a crop of experimental mice in his closet as a child. These images stand next to each other and do not need explaining or analyzing; the story seems to discourage us from coming to a conclusion like The narrator is worried that his son is as vulnerable as the drowned mice or The narrator worries that he will not be able to care for his son. Those readings may be fair and true, but it is the leap from one image to the next that enriches the story, and not any secretive meaning they might produce. 

On the Beach by Nevil Shute

He stood up and poured himself a drink.  "You know," he said, "now that I've got used to the idea, I think I'd rather have it this way.  We've all got to die one day, some sooner and some later.  The trouble always has been that you're never ready, because you don't know when it's coming.  Well, now we do know, and there's nothing to be done about it.  I kind of like that.  I kind of like the thought that I'll be fit and well up till the end of August and then--home.  I'd rather have it that way than go on as a sick man from when I'm seventy to when I'm ninety."

Dwight Towers is an American naval officer in command of a nuclear submarine, the U.S.S. Scorpion, on an extended mission with the Australian navy.  The Scorpion has to work closely with the Australians because it's the only U.S. submarine left, and the Australians are the only navy: nuclear war has ravaged almost all of the northern hemisphere, as far as anyone can tell, and poisonous radioactive wind is creeping farther and farther down into the Southern hemisphere where it kills everyone it reaches.  For Towers and others in the area around Melbourne, the southernmost major city in the world, the world's end comes as a slow ebbing away of communication: they lose communication with Montevideo, then Cape Town, then northern Australian cities like Darwin and Cairns.  Towers' wife and children in Connecticut are almost certainly dead, just as he'll be in about six months.

On the Beach tackles similar existential fears as Dr. Bloodmoney and Station Eleven: what will the world be like after widespread disaster?  Dick and St. John Mandel both imagine that mass death will create a kind of sea change in human culture, including a return to pre-technological practices and structures.  But what's scary about On the Beach is that it believes that, in the face of human extinction, almost nothing will change at all.  People in Melbourne still go to work; they go to church.  People shop and plant gardens and have dinner parties.  Of course, it's more like Children of Men than it is those novels, because what is facing these characters is not new birth but certain destruction, but the contrast there is instructive, too.  Here, extinction brings not violence, not new religion, but repression and denial.

On the Beach seems like such a product of its time.  It's an artifact not just of the nuclear paranoia of the 50's (it was written in 1957), but the bourgeois variety of repression that's so recognizable from mid-century fiction.  Release does come in strange and subtle--but sometimes explosive--ways: Towers' romantic interest, a young Melburnian named Moira Davidson, drinks and drinks and drinks, but even she ends up enrolling in a typing-and-shorthand course.  Submarine science officer John Osborne chases his dream of being a grand prix auto driver, and the races he enters are wild bloodbaths that kill driver after driver, an expression of a sublimated death wish.  But release never overcomes the will to keep things going as normal: Towers not only refuses to sleep with Moira out of loyalty to his certainly dead wife, he persists in imagining that when the radiation sickness takes him, he'll be going "home" to Connecticut, even going so far as to buy gifts for his children.  His Australian hosts, the Holmeses, are busy planting next year's tulip bulbs; the Mrs. Holmes reacts with violent denial when her husband tries to show her exactly what they'll need to do to euthanize their infant daughter when the time comes.

Other apocalyptic novels are scary and showy, but I'm not sure I've read one as bleak as this one.  Little by little, optimism and denial turn out to be misplaced: the Scorpion sails all the way to Seattle to check out a mysterious radio signal that turns out to be a busted window frame rocking on a panel of buttons.  A scientist's insistence that the radioactive wind will dissipate before reaching the southern latitudes proves, as expected to be wishful thinking, and it's hard not to think about the many deniers of climate disaster who are with us today.  We're just not wired for apocalyptic thinking, Shute says, not really, and few human qualities are as strong as inertia.  Not that it matters; there's nothing to do.  But unlike Dick and St. John Mandel, both of whom seem to believe that disaster might at least free us from our bourgeois attachments, Shute thinks we're likely to whimper into the grave.  That's what makes it maybe the scariest post-apocalyptic novel of all.