What is the Real World in Murnane? The Case of the Antipodean Archive of Horse Racing James Elkins A draft of this is posted on Goodreads All comments are welcome there (August, 2022) This is my fifth or sixth time trying to understand what Gerald Murnane means by "fiction" and "real," as in "real world." Here I'll just talk about one of the stories in this collection, "The Interior of Gaaldine," and mainly just about the story's second half, which introduces the Antipodean Archive Thanks to Ben Winch for steering me to this "fiction" in particular, and for several corrections to a draft of this essay "The Interior of Gaaldine" can be usefully divided into three parts: a conventional narrative in which an author sets out to a literary conference in Tasmania; a scene in which a woman visits him and gives him a manuscript by an unpublished author, whose story she tells; and a detailed inventory of the contents of that manuscript Because "The Interior of Gaaldine" was in a collection that didn't sell well, and because it begins with the line "A true account of certain events recalled on the evening when I decided to write no more fiction" (in Italics, set off from the body text by a double space), it's reasonable to see it as a hinge between his eearlier fiction (the first third of the story) and the project he apparently devoted himself to (the Antipodean Archive, described in the last third of the story) An initial problem has to with the word "fiction" in Murnane's first line Nominally it refers to the fiction he had written up to that moment, pointedly including the near-travesty of his earlier writing in the conventional opening narrative But in order to make sense of the word in relation to his later work, I would also like to read "fiction" as applying to work from "Barley Patch" onward, and also to the Antipodean Archive On that last point, Murnane thought of himself as giving up fiction for the Antipodean Archive—and other texts, such as his logs of encounters with women—but he also called the Archive "fiction." It's been widely known for several decades now that Murnane's files contain a particularly extensive set of notes for imaginary horse races, which he calls the Antipodean Archive Mark Binelli's piece in "The New York Times" Sunday magazine for March 27, 2018 has an excellent description of the files and how they were arranged in Murnane's house (Or rather, his shed.) It seems likely there will be a printed edition of the Antipodean Archive at some point I can imagine it done expensively in color facsimile, the way it's been done for Emily Dickinson's envelopes, Robert Walser's microscripts, Nabokov's notecards for "The Original of Laura," and miscellaneous diagrams and lists left behind by Walter Benjamin "The Interior of Gaaldine" contains a supposedly fictionalized account of the method and content of the horse racing files In the story they are a manuscript given to "Murnane" by an unpublished writer (I'm calling the narrator "Murnane" to distinguish him from Gerald Murnane.) The woman who delivers the manuscript first tells "Murnane" about how the man has led an isolated life, not doing more for his job than he needs to, and moving often to avoid having friends (pp 454-60) Supposedly Murnane doesn't remember her telling him any of this, but that's probably so Gerald Murnane did not have to write dialogue (p 454) The man's life is very similar, in its benign misanthropy or autistic pleasure in isolation, to Gerald Murnane's and to what we know of "Murnane." After the woman leaves, "Murnane" peruses the manuscript It's 2,000 pages written between "the late 1950s" and the present, which would be sometime shortly after 1987, when "The Interior of Gaaldine" may have been written (It was published in 1995, in the collection "Emerald Blue.") Binelli reports Murnane began his horse racing file "in secret beginning in 1985." If Binelli is right, "The Interior of Gaaldine" is a report on the early days of the Antipodean Archive, long before it swelled to however many thousand pages it is now The place, Gaaldine, is mentioned by Emily Brontë as an imaginary place beyond Gondal, the imaginary setting of the stories she and her sisters wrote as children There's a hint of that in "The Interior of Gaaldine." In an interview in "Music & Literature" in 2012, Murnane says this relates to "my seeming discovery, in the 1980s and 1990s, that beyond the fictional landscape that I saw there was a further landscape of imaginary horse racing" (M&L vol 3, p 19) He then goes on to explain that apparently entire unaccountable, private, and irratonal "explanation" with an even weirder one The woman in the story, he says, wakes the narrator in the middle of the night (and so she's like a dream, and by implication part of his own imagination) Actually he doesn't say the visit happened in the middle of the night, but he makes it dreamlike, saying her knocking was like a sound in a dream Then, in "Music & Literature," Murnane goes on to explain that an "astute reader" would realize her name isn't Alice but Ellis (a confusion perhaps made easier in Australian English), Emily Brontë's first pen name "So," Murnane concludes, "if this woman is Emily Brontë, or pretending to be Emily Brontë, she is using Emily Brontë's fictional name to say who she is, and it's all very complicated and twisting and turning, but that is my answer to your question." It's one of the most openly irrational accounts of literature I have ever seen In what world, using what logic, is this anything even distantly approaching an explanation for the relation between the Antipodean Archive and fiction? In what world does Murnane imagine that even this simple, truncated version of his full "twisting and turning" explanation could possibly make sense to to any reader or listener? Murnane is absolutely serious: he just cannot find ways to explain his sense of fiction to anyone I think the best approach here is to leave aside the literary feints (Brontë, the manuscript by an unpublished author, "Murnane") and note that the Antipodean Archive documents a world in the "interior" of fiction, a world more real in crucial senses than fiction, and a world that depends, as I'll describe in a moment, on mechanically ingesting and processing fiction At the end of the story, we're given several different reasons why "Murnane" thinks the woman might have wanted him to see the unnamed author's text One is that "the author of the pages wanted to meet me in order to persuade me to write a different sort of fiction in the future." So on a first reading, "The Interior of Gaaldine" is a fictionalized account of a new kind of writing Murnane had invented, which made him change his mind about how to write In this way of understanding the story, he kept writing fiction, but understood it differently Three things complicate this The first is a description we get just before "Murnane" starts explaining the details of how horse races are invented and recorded in the file "If the pages comprised a work of literature," he writes, "I might report that the first thousand or so comprise an introduction to the work while the other pages are samples chosen at intervals from the narrative proper." And then, immediately, an odd repetititon: "If the pages comprised a work of literature, I might describe that work as a novel with many thousands of characters and a plot of infinite complications." (p 460) From what is known about the Antipodean Archive, it has nothing in common with the novel form Even for Georges Perec it would be a stretch to say the jockeys and horses are "thousands of characters" and the racing seasons comprise "a plot of infinite complications." Identifying the horse racing file as a novel is exactly as incomprehensible as Sartre's comment that "The Family Fool," his 2,600 page nonfiction study of the young Flaubert, is really a novel If this is what Murnane means by not writing fiction—while still writing novels—it's not something he has done A second complication is the role traditional literature plays in the Antipodean Archive, as it is described in this story "Murnane" says the author buys novels, finds passages that are especially striking, and writes them out, letter by letter, vertically down the columns of his imagined racing forms, so that it's possible to read a series of letters across each row starting from each horse's name Numerical values attached to the letters of the alphabet yield numbers, which indicate the horse's rank at different moments in the race This wouldn't matter, except that the author uses Victorian novels because "the profusion of realistic details in Victorian novels gives to the images of horse-racing that they cause to arise in his mind an unsurpassed richness and vividness." He calls this "decoding" Victorian novels He then uses the direct dialogue in Victorian novels in the same way in order to find out the winner of each race, and he calls that method the "gutting" of the novel (pp 464-65) The best writers for this numerological exercise, the unnamed author says, are those that "suppose that the best fiction is the most life-like." So the Antipodean Archive is an engine for converting a certain kind of fiction, valued for its realism, into a more realistic world of horse racing It takes realism to create realism, but the original realism must be destroyed to make the new one This could be a model for not writing fiction, except that it isn't, because it produces stronger fiction And third, there's a passage just after these descriptions in which "Murnane" addresses the reader, who he thinks must be wondering why the author went to such trouble to invent imaginary horses, race courses, jockeys, and even uniforms, when he could have written about ones that already exist "Murnane" answers, weirdly, in the first person, as if he's the author (which of course he is!) He wasn't surprised by this, he says, because: "I have always been interested in what is usually called the real world but only because it provides me with evidence for the existence of another world I have never written any piece of fiction with the simple purpose of understanding what I might call the real world I have always written fiction in order to suggest to myself that another world exists." (p 466) This is an idea that's pushed much farther in the novel "Barley Patch," the book that followed "the Interior of Gaaldine" by a decade and re-started Murnane's career There we're told that what's most interesting in fiction is the fictional lives of the characters, but mainly as they lead them when no one is watching—when they're doing things that aren't described in the novels In "Barlety Patch" he says he had always "wanted to learn what places appeared in the mind of one or another fictional character whenever he or she stared past the furthest place mentioned in the text that had seemed to give rise to him or her Now, I was free to suppose what I had often suspected: many a so-called fictional character was not a native of some or another fictional text but of a further region never yet written about." This is a conventional world-building model for fiction, compatible with work by Frank Herbert, J.R Tolkein, or George R.R Martin: it's the sense that the fictional world continues on when the book is closed, when the characters are asleep, or after the last page Murnane's idea is not quite the same as wondering what a Hobbit does when he walks offstage, because the "further region" isn't a direct extension of the fictional world But in my experience nothing of this sort, or of the Herbert and Tolkein sort, happens in Murnane's fiction (I don't doubt it happens for Murnane, but I'm concerned with readers' pausible responses.) The artifice is so intense, and in the case of the Antipodean Archive, so dependent on just one person's hermetic self-imposed rules and ideas, that absolutely nothing continues when the book is closed What counts as the "real world" in Murnane's fiction? It's something artificially constructed, using rules that the author himself can barely understand, that are often confused or unexplained, but that he perceives as inevitable, or simply given, or necessary to create realism out of the "decoded" and "gutted" remains of ordinary fiction They are nothing like Oulipeans' intellectual constraints: they're rules that have to be obeyed in order to make at least provisional, hedged and qualified sense out of the otherwise meaningless world ... kind of fiction, valued for its realism, into a more realistic world of horse racing It takes realism to create realism, but the original realism must be destroyed to make the new one This could... as an imaginary place beyond Gondal, the imaginary setting of the stories she and her sisters wrote as children There's a hint of that in "The Interior of Gaaldine." In an interview in "Music... when "The Interior of Gaaldine" may have been written (It was published in 1995, in the collection "Emerald Blue.") Binelli reports Murnane began his horse racing file "in secret beginning in 1985."