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Barley Patch

di Gerald Murnane

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Often mentioned as an author in contention for the Nobel Prize, Gerald Murnane is regarded by many as Australia's most innovative and important writer of fiction. Barley Patch, Murnane's first new work of fiction in fourteen years, written after a period in which he had thought he would never write fiction again. Appropriately, the book begins with the question, Must I write? What follows is a remarkable account of the images that have appeared in the author's mind during a career of over thirty years as a reader and writer.… (altro)
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This was Murnane's first work labelled as "fiction" after a long break, and it seems to be largely an attempt to investigate what the idea of "fiction" means to him, and why he stopped writing it, something he comes back to in later books like A million windows and A history of books. Naturally, he doesn't come up with a one-line answer, but spends time refining the question and blocking up some blind alleys, with — of course — copious reference to mutually contradictory versions of his own background and early life, books that have influenced him in good or bad ways, horse-racing, the Roman Catholic Church, girlfriends, and houses of more than one storey standing in level grassland.

As you would expect, it's the journey rather than the conclusion that is interesting (if there is a conclusion), and this has to be read as one of many facets of Murnane's exploration of what writing is supposed to be and do. But it's always a pleasure to immerse yourself in the twists and turns of his determinedly underdetermined language. ( )
  thorold | Sep 22, 2022 |
We're accustomed to literary masterpieces that can be read on their own. You don't need to read Dante's early poetry to read his Commedia, you don't need to read Milton's early poetry to read Paradise Lost, you don't have to read Dubliners to read Ulysses, and thanks all that is holy for that, because those earlier works are really bad.

Well, Barley Patch presents a bit of a problem, because if you haven't read, say, eighty percent of Murnane's earlier works, this will look, as one trustworthy goodreads friend puts it, "metafictional, and metaboring." Any given work of Murnane's will seem to be a postmodern book about books, or book about nothing, or book that just kind of meanders around and "trusts" the reader to find a way of connecting a bunch of more or less unconnected images. And that goes double for Barley Patch, which opens, unpromisingly enough, with the question "Must I write?" and by the second page is asking "Why had I written?" Large chunks of this book are about Murnane's previous works. Perhaps it's an essay. Who knows.

But read after Murnane's other books, this is an astonishing work. He stopped writing fiction for many years in between his collection of stories, Emerald Blue, and the present work (though Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, ostensibly a book of essays, is indistinguishable from his fiction). This was not a case of writer's block, of his being unable to write. He just didn't need to do it any more. Barley Patch is an attempt to explain why, and to explain how he came to write once again.

Still sounds metaboring, I know, but we're getting to the good stuff.

Murnane's work has always been about his own imagination, and his narrators have always been obsessed with imagination, but in Barley Patch he describes himself as lacking an imagination at all. What could that mean? As far as I can tell, Murnane decided that the word "imagination" was not the right word to describe what he was doing in his books, largely because what the world means by imagining is "being good at making stuff up." Murnane feels that he doesn't make stuff up in his fiction, that he is simply reporting the facts of his own thought. It can't be a coincidence that in describing his abandonment of writing, he also describes himself as lacking imagination. He came to see imagination as the key component of what the world calls literature, and decided that he did not have what the world calls imagination. By contrast, he could do what he had been doing in literature--i.e., report on his own thoughts--to himself, without writing them down. He no longer felt the "need" (a key word here) to write. He had solved, in some sense, the problem that he had set himself when he started to write fiction.

And then he started writing again, he again felt the need. To know why, you really have to read the book, but to simplify greatly I might say that it turns out there are reasons to write fiction other than to discover one's own thoughts to oneself. One might want, for instance, to discover them to other people.

This project (which Barley Patch succeeds very well in carrying out) is importantly different from both the anglo-modernist project of hiding meaning and demanding that a reader somehow divine what a text is meant to be about, and the anglo-post-modern project of writing about nothing in particular because it's all just a game.

Murnane's work, especially this one, is very demanding. But the demand being made here is not on one's ability to decipher fragments and clues and to reconstruct some kind of system or structure behind the text (whether you attribute that structure to the author or to language or whatever). There is no interpretation to be done here, no need to dig down beneath the words to the unspoken. Everything is there for you to work with. Murnane's demand is simply that you will think with him. He is not hard to read. He is hard to think with.

Although Murnane's thoughts seem limited (why write, why not write, etc...), they turn out to have no simple solutions. This does not mean, as it would in a postmodern text, "no solutions." The solution is the end of the book.

The thoughts also turn out to have a bearing on broader questions, but that will only be obvious to readers who have read Murnane's previous fictions. There, the imagination is not understood as the ability to make up stuff, but as an extraordinary longing for something that can barely even be named. Murnane has long interspersed his difficult, essayistic passages with fairly straightforward, realistic passages describing either the narrator's, or other people's attempts to name what they long for. This can be as "high" as God, or as low as sex with a busty blonde wench. Murnane's decision not to write, and then his decision to start writing again, are tied up with this: can imaginings and longings take place without communication? Or, perhaps, could it be that such imaginings and longings must be communal?

Barley Patch suggests that Gerald Murnane, at least, must try to communicate his own idiosyncratic imaginings--that communication of them is an important part of the imaginings themselves. Lucky for us, because he's writing again. Anyone interested in what a writer can do should read this book. After reading Murnane's first few books.
( )
1 vota stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 |
http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/56737790987/barley-patch-by-gerald-murnane

I have read enough bad reviews of Barley Patch to realize a good book when I see it. The negatives relate mostly to readers who did not finish the book or give enough effort to discover the goodness in it. I would guess that many of them were being introduced to the writing of Murnane for the very first time. If an earlier Murnane title such as The Plains had already been read there is no possible way the reader would have quit on him just because he admitted to quitting the writing of fiction fifteen years prior to the writing of this book. There are amazing parts throughout but one must actually read the book in order to get to them. Murnane is a very serious writer who is interested in real people even in light of his writing fiction. His characters are not "made-up" in the sense of unrealistic, but instead have flaws that make them susceptible to appearing in his fiction regularly. The unblemished woman is far less interesting to Murnane than one sporting freckles or even liver spots if truth be told.

I understand that I am reading the Murnane oeuvre incorrectly as I began my personal introduction with The Plains and then continued on into this title. It has been strongly suggested that I read Murnane's work in the order in which it was written, but I kind of like breaking the rules just as much as Murnane apparently does as well. He repeats himself, and revisits characters often enough that some readers consider him a bore. I do not. I like his style and the words he chooses are exquisite in his story telling. He writes of things most readers might find dull, but I enjoy the art of discovery and this is what keeps occurring throughout his lively and engaging fiction.

There are numerous reviews of Gerald Murnane available that talk about the gist of his topics and style that there is little need for me to impress my grasp on his writing and what it means to be one of the few who find his work a loftier exercise than most readers can handle, even though it is a badge of honor for a person like me. It is the same reason I love to read a writer such as Thomas Bernhard as much as I do, and the same reason I believe I relate to a writer like Gilles Deleuze or even Samuel Beckett. Perhaps I read for all the wrong reasons, but I do think not. Gerald Murnane is certainly an elite member in the personal canon of my literary greats, though he is unconventional in today's version of plot, character, and dialogue as it pertains to great and lasting fiction. Murnane makes you work hard for your pleasure and that is rewarding in itself. You have to pay attention or get lost in a labyrinth of people, places, and things.

This is the type of book I love to read, and my willingness to now collect the entire Murnane oeuvre must trump the normal and customary reading habits of most people I might know or have been acquainted with. The only instance where I may have doubted my new religious obsession with Murnane was during "the man on the horse" segment. I felt Murnane then was grasping at straws in his fiction. A bit disjointed and out of sorts. I hoped that maybe the introduction of the "nun" into the text would provide a new understanding, and she did, of course, in due time. And that is another thing I notice when I read Murnane, it is mostly about time. And, of course, landscape. The "man on the horse" proved to be an instrumental part of the book as well as in his life as he was trying to reconstruct through fiction his own conception, though he admittedly failed in his endeavor but not without a courageous first try.

I mentioned in one of my reading progress updates that, "If David Shields had been the writer of this book, the author of this fiction, I would have thrown the book in the trash many pages ago, perhaps from the very beginning. But Gerald Murnane is somebody I want to know, to be intimate with. I trust him and I am willing to go wherever he wishes to take me. And that is good because he is going places I do not remember being, but certainly I must have been there." And I meant what I said. For example, as a frame of reference, I cannot stand a writer with the personality of a David Shields and I find writers like him quite revolting. They seem "made-up" and full of themselves. I do not find them at all interesting, at least nowhere near as interesting as David Shields would want me to believe he is. But Murnane is different. He can speak of the very same issues of love, lust, courting, and masturbation that Shields does and still he has me engaged in my reading and not at all cringing with the disgust that Shields erupts in me. Frankly, I find that Shields is a creep and Murnane is not. And Murnane is so much more than a retarded lover unversed in matters of women and sex, but he does talk about it enough that there is an underlying impact to his writing.

This book has been unfairly criticized by some. It is definitely worth the trouble to read it. It is actually a very enjoyable experience. Kind of like being a dues-paying member of my coffee club. ( )
1 vota MSarki | Aug 3, 2013 |
An extremely inventive experimental novel, with a distinctive authorial voice. The back cover copy compares it to Calvino and Perec: the first is wrong, and the second is misleading. It's a book about the author's decision -- which is rescinded and contradicted many times in the book -- to stop writing fiction. Its salient feature is Murnane's strangely disaffected voice, and in that, I think, he is closest to Stein, not Perec.

The book takes the form of narratives interrupted by italicized questions, asked by an imaginary reader, but in first person. Here is an example; in this passage, the author is explaining why he thinks he does not have the kind of imagination necessary to write fiction (which he clearly has), and why that capacity would not, in any case, interest him:

"[In italics] Surely I have paused at least once during a lifetime of reading and have admired the passage in front of me as a product of the writer's excellent imagination.

"[In rom] I can recall clearly my having paused often during my first reading of the book of fiction 'Wuthering Heights,' which reading took place in the autumn of 1956. I can recall equally clearly my having paused often during my reading of the book of fiction 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles,' which reading took place in the winter of 1959. I doubt that I paused in order to feel gratitude or admiration towards any authorial personage." (p. 95)

"Barley Patch" is at is best when Murnane is moving patiently among the badly remembered episodes of his childhood, which was mainly spent reading, and trying to re-allocate them as supposedly fictional elaborations that would, supposedly, have been parts of the fiction project that he decided not to write, but which is, manifestly, the book 'Barley Patch.' The book slows in its entire middle section, in which he just goes ahead and tell the only story he thinks would have been worth making into a fiction, the story of how his parents met. First that story is told in a carefully distanced third person, but then it becomes first person, and toward the end there are rote mentions of the fictional frame:

"I would have reported in my abandoned work of fiction that the chief character, while he watched the rain..." (p. 221)

The book's strength is in its strangeness, and its strangeness is dependent on how carefully Murnane restricts the fiction of not writing fiction, and not writing autobiography, by confining fiction, writing, memory, and autobiography in elaborate stockades of conditionals and the past subjunctive mood. Later in the book, those devices become simpler. (For example, pp. 162-3)

At the beginning of the book, Murnane reports how, as a child, he experienced books by inserting himself into their fictions worlds, not as one of the represented characters, but as someone the author hadn't invented. That curious idea returns in a very strange, almost mystical fashion at the end, when he speculates that characters in fictions might have even more complex lives beyond the fictions that they're part of:

"During all the years while I had been a writer of fiction and while I had sometimes struggled to write fiction -- during all those years, I had 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." (pp. 246-7)

For me that is the interest and the drawback of Murnane in one passage: interesting because it echoes Stein's compulsive grammars; disappointing because the theme (fictional lives of fictional characters) is not the theme he'd started with (fictional lives of invented characters supposedly living among fictional characters). The first theme is more interesting than the second, and the fact that the book starts with one and ends with the other is a sign that Murnane hasn't purified his project. It's really about obsessive, compulsive distancing, categorizing, re-naming, and re-imagining -- and about how that project requires a writer to write in a way that weirdly starts to approximate Gertrude Stein. ( )
3 vota JimElkins | Jul 30, 2012 |
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One can only hope that this book is assigned in every creative writing class out there: here is a near-perfect example of what fiction can do, and what can be done with fiction.
 
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Often mentioned as an author in contention for the Nobel Prize, Gerald Murnane is regarded by many as Australia's most innovative and important writer of fiction. Barley Patch, Murnane's first new work of fiction in fourteen years, written after a period in which he had thought he would never write fiction again. Appropriately, the book begins with the question, Must I write? What follows is a remarkable account of the images that have appeared in the author's mind during a career of over thirty years as a reader and writer.

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