The Plains - Gerald Murnane

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The Plains

by
Gerald Murnane

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The Plains
Author:	Gerald Murnane
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1982
Length:	111 pages
Availability:	The Plains - US
	The Plains - UK
	The Plains - Canada
	Les plaines - France
	Die Ebenen - Deutschland
	Le pianure - Italia
	Las llanuras - España

The Western Michigan University Press edition has an Introduction by Andrew Zawacki
The Text edition has an Introduction by Wayne Macauley

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Our Assessment:

A- : very neatly done

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Antipodes	.	(18:2) 12/2004	J.-F. Vernay
Australian Book Review	.	2-3/1983	Gerard Windsor
The LA Times	.	9/3/1986	Judith Freeman
Neue Zürcher Zeitung	.	18/7/2017	Angela Schader
Rev. of Contemp. Fiction	.	Summer/2004	Nicholas Birns
Süddeutsche Zeitung	.	3/9/2017	Lothar Müller

From the Reviews:

"(T)the storyline expressed in a Carver-like, terse style is actually quite straightforward (.....) A cursory reading of The Plains will render the flavor of Thomas More's Utopia. (...) Possibly, The Plains could be read as a parable of the persistence of desire. (...) Throughout the novel, the persistence of desire for the truth is maintained with the sense that it cannot be within the bounds of the visible, of the accessible, or of the possible." - Jean-François Vernay, Antipodes

"Not since Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy has a book appeared so impenetrable. (...) The landscape is too paradoxical to be captured. All the theories about the plains add up to a feeling that all things are mutable, and therefore, illusive. Things unfold in this novel like they do in dreams, where unlikely couplings between humans and landscape occasion curiosity, but little really happens and meanings are obscured." - Judith Freeman, The Los Angeles Times

"Der Roman des 1939 geborenen Autors ist eine faszinierende Meditation über die Rast- und Ziellosigkeit des menschlichen Geistes. (...) Murnane lässt die leise Komik in den Obsessionen seiner Charaktere atmen, ohne den Leser auch nur eine Sekunde aus dem poetisch-philosophischen Reflexionsraum zu entlassen, den das Buch öffnet. (...) Auf knapp 150 Seiten faltet Gerald Murnane diese Vision aus und nimmt sie -- durch das Scheitern seines Protagonisten -- im Gleichen zurück. Das ist kein literarischer Taschenspielertrick. Das ist echte Magie." - Angela Schader, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"That is the presiding trope of the plains--the search for a meaning beyond the visible, the projection of the given onto an indiscernible horizon. (...) As much as this search beyond visibility is mocked, Murnane's incantatory tones simultaneously privilege it. (...) Part science fiction, part gnomic parable, and part travel guide to regions that will be perpetually unvisited, The Plains heralds a vision of imaginative impalpability that postmodern literature cannot do without." - Nicholas Birns, Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Murnanes Prosa lebt sowohl vom Blick in die dünne Dunstzone der Ferne als auch vom Detail. Wenn sein Buch einen Plot hat, dann handelt er von der Unerreichbarkeit des Horizonts. (...) Bis zum letzten Satz hält der Erzähler sich an seiner Kamera fest, aber längst hat die Prosa die Regie übernommen, die als asymptotische Sprachbewegung auf ein immer ferner rückendes Ziel zuführt. Darin entspricht das Zugleich von syntaktischer Klarheit und vollkommener Rätselhaftigkeit, das von ferne an Kafka oder Borges erinnert, dem Zugleich von Sichtbarkeit und Unerreichbarkeit des Horizonts. Die deutsche Fassung ist den Kaskaden des Aufschubs, den fantastischen Theorien und Eskapaden des Konjunktivs nicht immer gewachsen. Aber sie lässt erkennen, was hier gelungen ist" - Lothar Müller, Süddeutsche Zeitung

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

The Plains is narrated by a nameless would-be film-maker. He travels to 'the plains' with grand ambitions and a vague plan, to make a film to be called -- and to fully grasp and reveal -- The Interior.
The plains he ventures to are part of Australia, presumably/arguably the heartland and yet (very) distinct and separate: already in the opening paragraphs, when the narrator talks of arriving there, some twenty years earlier, he: "cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia" but, clearly, for all intents and purposes at some point he had. Some style the plains as 'Inner Australia', differentiating themselves from the "coast-dwellers"; the narrator cites the example of just how far some Inner Australians would go:

He denied the existence of any nation with the name Australia. There was, he admitted, a certain legal fiction which plainsmen were sometimes required to observe. But the boundaries of true nations were fixed in the souls of men. And according to the projections of real, that is spiritual, geography, the plains clearly did not coincide with any pretended land of Australia.

The novel is presented in three parts, with the first taking up over half the novel and the last only taking up fifteen pages.
The opening paragraph already gives a sense of where things are going:

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.

       The reader will then not be surprised to find that the narrator still finds himself in the plains two decades on -- and the question what elaborate meaning there is (or just: might be) behind appearances is still one he hasn't been able to truly answer.
       Most simply put, The Plains is a novel about (not) making a film -- yes, the narrator doesn't get very far with his project. The first part mainly focuses on his arriving in the plains and gaining a foothold there, in order to facilitate working on his project. An outsider, he doesn't immediately force himself on the plainsmen but rather observes their words and ways. Eventually, he comes to make his case, as one of many petitioners who look for favor from the local landowners -- lords of large properties, heads of the great families of the plains, resembling old-style European nobility, Gilded Age American families, or plantation owners from the American South.
       These landowners employ -- or rather: subsidize -- in-house artists, called and considered 'salaried clients', as for example: "No great house could have done without its resident advisers on emblematic art" -- expected to capture the essence of the family, its history, and its vision. So also:

Even when an outsider was appointed, he was expected to have spent some years acquiring at his own expense a detailed knowledge of genealogy, family history and legends, and those preferences and inclinations that were only revealed in close conversations late at night, hasty entries in diaries on bedside tables, sketches of paintings pinned behind doors, manuscript poems torn to pieces in the last hours before dawn.

The narrator gets his chance to make his case to the landowners as to why one of them should underwrite and support his project -- "called into the inner room at the very hour when the authority and prodigality of the great landowners seemed most awesome". It is not a typical kind of job-interview; the seven landowners continue their discussion (and drinking), and the narrator waits and listens, before finally being asked his opinion. He explains his ambition:

I told them simply that I was preparing the script of a film whose last scenes would be set on the plains. Those same scenes were still not written, and any man present might offer his own property as a location.

He makes the: "claim that film was the one art form that could satisfy the contradictory impulses of the plainsman", and suggests: "My own film would be in one sense the record of a journey of exploration". And:

The film was the story of this man's search for the one land that might have lain beyond or within all that he had ever seen. I might call it -- without pretentiousness, I hoped -- the Eternal Plain.

He's taken on by one of the landowners, and moves to a grand estate, where he spends his times preparing for and researching his film:

During my first months in the great house I suited my methods of work to the leisurely rhythms of the plains. Each morning I strolled a mile or so from the house and lay on my back and felt the wind or stared at the clouds creeping past me. Then the time I had spent on the plains seemed unmarked by hours or days. It was a trance-like period or a long succession of almost identical frames that could have comprised some minute or so in a film.

He has everything he needs -- materially -- for his grand project, and yet it does not come together. He -- and his patron -- do not seem particularly impatient or frustrated; it is understood that the quest is for something elusive.
In the second part of the novel, many years into his work, he reflects also on how much 'Outer Australia' may (still) be having an influence on him -- and what a different world it is, not least in the fact that:

Even this distance from the Other Australia, I sometimes recall what was described as philosophy there. And almost daily, as I pace some unfamiliar path from my table here, I am pleasantly surprised to see, in the rooms and bays reserved philosophy, works that would have been given any name but that in my native district.

And he notes of a woman:

The books she read most often would perhaps be called novels in another Australia, although I cannot believe they would find publishers or readers in such a place. But on the plains they make up a well-respected branch of moral philosophy.

Murnane's novel is, of course, (also) such an in-between work -- novelistic, but with other aims as well. So also, the narrators finds: "the philosophy of the plains includes so much of what I once thought the subject-matter of fiction" .....
In the final section, the narrator also describes the ritual of: "the annual revelations, as they were called, when I was expected to describe the best of my recent projects". He dutifully offers his revelations -- though never the film that is the ultimate ambition. Despite being provided with all the necessary cinematic materials he could wish for, he reports:

It was my own decision to stand before the spectators at my earliest revelations with only a blank screen behind me and an empty projector pointing at me from a corner of the partly darkened room and to talk for sixteen hours of landscapes that only I could interpret.

Revelation, unsurprisingly, does not come in these 'revelation'-sessions -- not for the audience he makes his presentation to, not for the narrator, and not for the reader.
One of the ironies of the narrator's account is that it is a written account; though a film-maker, his notes and this record are the only tangible documentation of his 'work'. At one point, he imagines taking the time to write a short work -- "probably a collection of essays" --, with the ambition of 'settling things' between his patron's wife and himself (the women of the plains, and their place in the plains, are among the local preöccupations and distractions he obsesses over). The work is, in a sense, to be 'for' the woman -- but:

she should not read a word of mine, although she should know that I had written something she might have read.

He wants a record of the book's existence to exist -- but the work itself to remain inaccessible:

I thought of issuing only one copy -- to the librarians here -- and of then removing and destroying it as soon as the catalogue entry was completed. But someone in the future could still surmise that a copy existed (or had once existed) and that the woman it was meant for had at least glanced at it.

Even that is too much for him, and he finally comes to the decision that he would: "write no book and to put abroad no suggestion that I had ever written a book or intended to write a book". (Of course, this record, The Plains, is a written testament -- a book.)
In Last Letter to a Reader, Murnane describes some of the backstory of the publication of The Plains, the novel in fact only part of a "book-length work of fiction titled The Only Adam", as:

What is now known as the text of The Plains, together with a few hundred words as yet unpublished, comprised four separate sections interleaved with the four sections of The Only Adam. The offer was to publish as a book in its own right the first three of the four interleaved sections, the setting of which was a landscape of plains.

This is what readers now have -- a (large) fragment of the original work. (Murnane also reveals that: "I wanted the book to be called Landscape with Darkness and Mirage", but the original publishers pushed for The Plains, so that's what it is (still) called.) The book, in its currently available form, does not feel incomplete -- beyond the sense of incompleteness that it is meant to evoke: after all, the narrator's project is one that is destined and doomed to remain unfinished. He had anticipated that his project would be: "the record of a journey of exploration" and so it then is -- if in book-, rather than film-form. The explorations could certainly be expanded upon, but there is more than enough here; the compact format suits Murnane's ambitions well.
An exploration of place -- abstract as well as concrete 'Australia', as well as the concept of 'the plains' (and landscape) more generally, among other things (well, places) -- and time and the passing of time, as well as the role and place (and the possibility) of the artistic endeavor, The Plains is both opaque and absorbing. Readers willing to go along with its oddness should find it rewarding, but those looking for more of a plot (and resolution) might easily find it frustrating. It's well worth giving a try -- and, if you don't take to it the first time around, try again at some later time: it is deservingly considered a classic (though yes, also a 'difficult' one).

- M.A.Orthofer, 9 March 2025

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Links:

The Plains:

Text publicity page
Western Michigan University Press publicity page
P.O.L publicity page
Suhrkamp publicity page
Safarà Editore publicity page
Minúscula publicity page

Reviews:

Gerald Murnane:

Reading Gerald Murnane by Nicholas Birns in Context

Other books by Gerald Murnane under review:

Barley Patch
Border Districts
Inland
A Lifetime on Clouds -- see: A Season on Earth
A Season on Earth

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Australian literature

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About the Author:

Australian author Gerald Murnane was born in 1939.

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