Postmodernism

• Already by then a rather outdated term, “postmodernism” never quite gelled with Murnane’s writing.
• Review: Murnane – Emmett Stinson (Miegunyah Press) It is with this exact observation that Emmett Stinson begins his new critical study of Murnane.
• Written for Miegunyah Press’s “Contemporary Australian Writers” series, Stinson’s Murnane is compact and accessible, designed to interest potential and beginning readers of Murnane.

The breathing author

• After a brief stint as a seminarian, Murnane trained as a teacher, then taught in primary schools from 1960 to 1968.
• From 1980, he lectured in creative writing at Prahran College of Advanced Education (now Deakin University), retiring from that position in 1995.
• He has since produced a further seven books, along with a fully restored version of an earlier book.
• Murnane’s many self-imposed rules, such as never wearing sunglasses, never using a computer, and never travelling in a plane (see his 2002 essay “The Breathing Author” for a full list), seem to mirror the contents of his fiction.
• His performance teasingly invites readers to connect the real-life (“breathing”) author with the narrators (or “implied authors”) of his fiction.

Inventive and playful

• All manifest his distinctive rigour, exemplified by his famously “chiseled sentences”, as J.M.
• His work is technically and conceptually inventive, even playful, and it has attracted admiring readers at home and abroad.
• In recent decades, his readership has grown significantly, enhanced by the internet and social media, which have allowed niche readers to connect with each other.
• Noting all this, as well as the vagaries of Murnane’s publishing history, Stinson ponders his subject’s somewhat divided Australian reception.
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Post-break

• Their purpose is to revisit, reorder, ramify and complete Murnane’s body of work as a whole.
• Stinson wants us to recognise “Murnane’s desire to frame and shape his own literary legacy”.
• I came away from them with a sharpened sense of each book, even as I could see continuities across the whole.
• The chapter on Barley Patch highlights (among other things) modes of reading and writing that are evident in Murnane’s work.

Late style, late recognition

• In his substantial conclusion, subtitled “Gerald Murnane’s Late Style”, Stinson brings these elements together, succinctly and effectively explaining his larger argument.
• It is marked by the artist’s decision to withdraw from the world, follow his or her own desires, and opt “for complexity over resolution”.
• Admitting that this may be true of all Murnane’s writing, Stinson nonetheless argues for its special applicability to the four post-break fictions.
• Beyond this conclusion, we encounter one more component: the transcript of Stinson’s recent interview with Murnane himself.

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