Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  With the second sheet of paper still in front of me, I would prepare to write a report of another of the details of the second of the images that belonged in my piece of fiction. But then I would tell my student that I had already seen in my mind a third image that seemed to be connected by feelings to the second image or to the first image or to each image by a separate route. In fact, I might not yet have seen such an image, but I would tell my student that I had seen the image so that she would understand that the images belonging in a piece of fiction sometimes appeared so fast and so profusely that the writer of the fiction might despair of being able to report the details of the images before they disappeared again into his or her mind. I would then tell my student that I had sometimes as a younger writer despaired in this way but that I had learned in time that the images and the feelings in my mind were always in their rightful places in my mind and that I would always find my way among them. Sometimes, having told my student this, I would feel for a moment urged to tell her something further. I would feel urged to tell her that the patterns of images and feelings in my mind had become in time more extensive and more intricate whereas the thing that I called my body (or that I should have called, perhaps, the image of my body) had been decaying, causing me to suppose that my mind might go on existing when my body no longer existed. (As to the question whether or not I myself may go on existing after my body no longer exists, the person writing these words cannot answer until he has learned whether or not the entity denoted by the word I earlier in this paragraph is in the place denoted by the words my mind earlier in this paragraph. As to the question that might have occurred just now to someone reading this piece of fiction: who is the writer of these words if not the entity denoted by the word I in the previous sentence?—only a reader of this piece of fiction may answer that question and only after having looked into his or her own mind, which is the only place where the personage exists who is most aptly denoted by the words the implied author of this piece of fiction. I learned the term implied author from the book The Rhetoric of Fiction, by Wayne C. Booth, which was first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1961. Certain parts of that book helped me during the years when I worked as a teacher of fiction. Whenever during those years I used such a term as implied author or implied reader, I seemed to be explaining to my students what took place in my mind while I wrote or read a piece of fiction. But these matters cannot be explained in so few words, and any reader of these pages who has read certain parts of the book mentioned above will not accept my answer to the question above and will assume that the flesh-and-blood author of this piece must be well aware of at least one implied author who has not been mentioned previously in this text.)

  I would never tell my student about the matter mentioned in the previous paragraph, my reason being that I did not know whether or not my student was a person of good will. I cannot decide whether or not a person is of good will by any other means than by reading a piece of fiction written by the person. As to the question: why have I written about the matter mentioned in the previous paragraph when I do not know whether or not the readers of these paragraphs are persons of good will?—these paragraphs are part of a piece of fiction, and the writer of these words is safe forever from readers of ill will. As to the question: what had I to fear from a person of ill will who had learned from me the matter previously mentioned?—I had to fear that my supposing that my mind might go on existing when my body no longer existed would cause my student to suppose that my mind contained an image of a person named God or of a place named heaven or of something called eternity or something called infinity whereas each of these words, whenever I hear it or read it, causes me only to see in my mind the image of grassy countryside that I see whenever I look at the farthest visible parts of my mind.

  All the images in my mind were in their rightful places, so I would tell my student, and knowing this, I did not feel panic or despair whenever the details of separate images occurred to me in such a way that I had to write in succession on two or three or more sheets of paper before I had reported more than one or two of the many details that I would have to report of the image that I had begun to write about on the first of my sheets of paper. The images were in their rightful places, and I would find my way in time from image to image, but I did not believe that the order in which the images first occurred to me must be the order in which they were fixed in my mind. I would then remind my student that a diagram of the images in my mind would resemble a cluster of small towns as marked on a map. I would then take from a drawer in my desk six manila folders that I kept there for this sort of occasion. Each folder was of a different colour. I would pick up the nearest at hand of the folders and would place inside it the first of the sheets of paper on which I had begun to report the first of the details of the images mentioned previously. I would then place each of my other sheets of paper into one or another of the other folders. (The reader should suppose that I had by then on my desk six sheets of paper, each with at least a phrase written on it.) The colours of the folders were important, I would tell my student. Like many people, I would tell her, I connected each colour in the world with a different feeling, but unlike many people, perhaps, I saw all the images in my mind as coloured. I was therefore able to decide which of the folders now on my desk was of the most appropriate colour for each of the sheets of paper that I wanted to store in them. I might then change one or more of the sheets from one folder to another, and while doing this, I might write on the front of each coloured folder a word, a phrase, or a sentence.

  While I wrote on the front of each folder, I might explain to my student that some of the words that I was then writing might become the title of the whole piece of fiction. I would certainly explain to my student at some time during my instruction that I could hardly begin to write any piece of fiction before I had found its title; that the title of a piece of fiction ought to come from deep inside the piece; that the title of a piece of fiction should have several meanings, and that the reader should not learn these meanings until almost the whole of the piece had been read; that none of the titles of any piece of fiction written by me contained a noun denoting an abstract entity; and that I had not for as long as I had been a teacher of fiction-writing read any published piece of fiction with a title containing a noun denoting an abstract entity.

  The piece of fiction of which this paragraph is the twelfth was not written in the presence of any of my students, but if it had been so written, each of the following six passages might have been written on one each of six manila folders before even the first draft of this paragraph had been written. The far fields of the Times Literary Supplement; Books are a load of crap; The man with his chin in his hands; Welcome to Florida; The Homer of the Insects; The man with the coloured folders. The colours of the six manila folders might have been respectively green, red, blue, orange, yellow, and buff or plain. If I had written in the presence of a student the words mentioned above on the folders mentioned above, I would then have picked up all six folders, holding each so as not to let fall any sheet of paper from inside it, and would have walked about the open space on the carpet at the centre of my office while I placed one after another of the folders at one or another point on the carpet but with no thought as to where I was placing each folder. If I had placed the folders as mentioned, I would then have told my student that the cluster of small towns in the expanse of grassy countryside suggested by the folders as they lay on the carpet might be approached from any of a number of directions, and that a person who had approached the cluster by way of one or another small town might then travel throughout the cluster from one small town to another by any of a number of different routes before he or she reached what had once been for him or her the far side of the cluster and looked towards further grassy countryside. If I had told my student this, I would then have walked away from the folders and would have sat down again at my desk as though I was about to begin writing while the folders and their contents were still
lying on the floor behind me. If I had done this, I would have expected my student to understand that I might sometimes write about certain images as though I only remembered having seen them or as though I had only imagined having seen them. Or, instead of leaving all the folders on the floor after I had told my student what is mentioned above, I would have picked up one or another of the folders and would have placed it on my desk. I would then have picked up the remaining folders and would have thrust them into the drawer of my desk where I keep used envelopes and folders. I would then have sat down at my desk as though I was about to begin writing with only the one folder at hand. While I sat there, I would have hoped that my student saw in her mind a small town surrounded by grassy countryside with no end in sight or some other place surrounded by other places with no end in sight and that she saw herself as keeping to that small town or to that other place during the remainder of her life and as reporting detail after detail of image after image that seemed to surround her with no end in sight.

  At some time while I wrote or prepared to write in my office, I would remind my student that what I was writing or preparing to write consisted or would consist only of sentences. At some time after I had written a number of sentences, I would point out to my student that the subject of nearly every sentence I had written was a noun or a pronoun or a noun phrase denoting a person. If I had been writing this piece of fiction in the presence of a student, I might have pointed out that this is the eleventh consecutive sentence that has such a subject. If any student had asked me to explain what I had told her about sentences, I would have told her, whether or not I believed her to be a person of good will, that I wrote fiction in order to learn the meaning of certain images in my mind; that I considered a thing to have meaning if the thing seemed to be connected with another thing; that even a simple sentence established a connection between the thing called its subject and the thing called its predicate; that I believed a writer of fiction with a better vantage point than mine could have composed a single far-reaching sentence with clauses to the number of the total of simple sentences and of clauses of all kinds in my published pieces of fiction plus one further clause to establish a connection such as I would never be able to establish, but that I would try to read such a sentence only if the subject of its main clause was a noun or a pronoun or a noun phrase denoting a person.

  After my student had watched me writing and had heard me talking for some time, she would assure me that she had watched and heard enough. Before she left my office, I would tell her, as a last piece of advice, that she need not have learned the meaning of every image reported in a piece of fiction before she had finished writing the final draft. Nearly every piece of my fiction, I would tell her, included a report of an image whose connections I did not discover until long after the piece had been finished. Sometimes these connections had not appeared until I was writing a later piece of fiction, and then I would understand that the image in the earlier piece of fiction was connected with an image in the later piece. If I had ever had in front of me while I talked to a student in my office the first draft of the first five hundred words and more of the piece of fiction of which this paragraph is the fourteenth, I might have told her that the image whose details were reported in the second, third, and fourth paragraphs of that draft, which paragraphs have the same numbering in the final draft, seemed not truly connected with the other images reported in any of the six folders that would have been lying on my desk while I spoke. I might then have told my student that the true meaning of the image just mentioned might still not have appeared to me even while I was writing the final draft of the final paragraph of the report of the images reported in the folder in which that image was first reported, and that if the true meaning had not so appeared, I would report this as the last detail to be reported in the last sentence of that draft.

  The far fields of the Times Literary Supplement

  On a certain morning in my twenty-third year, when I was writing the first draft of what I hoped would be my first published piece of fiction—a novel of more than 200,000 words—I approached a young man who was only a year or two older than myself, to judge from his looks, but who had seemed to me whenever I had visited Cheshire’s Bookshop in Little Collins Street during the previous three years the most knowledgeable of all the sales assistants in the shop. I spoke to the young man the words that I had been rehearsing for a week. I told him that I was a regular buyer of books, mostly of fiction and poetry, and that I learned about the latest published works by reading every Saturday the Literary Supplement in the Age, but that I felt isolated from the world of English and European literature. I then asked the young man if he could recommend a publication that would keep me well informed about contemporary fiction and poetry overseas and if he could arrange through the subscriptions department of his bookshop a subscription for me to the publication.

  The young man did not turn me away, and I felt grateful to him at once. He answered my inquiry, but he spoke as though he was wearied by having to explain to me something that was common knowledge among the people he mixed with. At the time, I was far from supposing that he might have learned his way of speaking from persons who seemed to him as superior as he seemed to me. Three years later, I enrolled for the first time at the University of Melbourne as an evening student of first-year English and heard the same way of speaking among most of the tutors and some of the lecturers. (Three years later again, when I was enrolled in third-year English, I saw the man from Cheshire’s Bookshop coming out of an evening tutorial in second-year English.) The young man looked past me from where he stood behind the counter in the bookshop while he told me that the premier literary periodical in the world was generally acknowledged to be the London Magazine. I was disappointed to learn that this was only a quarterly periodical, but I paid for a subscription and looked forward to receiving my first copy by surface mail some weeks or months later.

  When my first copy arrived, I saw at once that the London Magazine was not what I needed, but I sat down to read it through. The first piece was called “The Golden Bowl” and was by a Tony Tanner. I believed that I was about to read a piece of fiction. I hardly knew at that time what literary criticism was, and I had never heard of Henry James or of any of his books. For as long as I have read, I have been attracted by the promise of certain titles of works and especially by any title containing an adjective denoting a colour. As I began to read, I was imagining the details of an object shaped like a chalice or like the Melbourne Cup and appearing against a background of green fields such as I had seen in illustrations of Glastonbury. I was baffled by the first few paragraphs that I read, and I gave up as soon as I understood that I was reading someone’s comments on someone else’s book.

  I would not have dared to go back to the young man in the bookshop to complain about his choice of a literary periodical, but I set about finding a better. Two years later, I saw in the literary supplement of the Age an advertisement for the Times Literary Supplement, and I took out a subscription.

  For nearly twenty years, I read every page of every issue of the TLS. I even read the advertisements for bookshops (“Russica and Slavica bought and sold”) and for professorships in West Africa and librarianships in Malta or Singapore. I read the letters to the editor, although I sometimes heard from the prose the same tone of voice that I had first heard from the young man in the bookshop and although I was often unable to understand what was at issue in the many disputes between letter-writers. I admired the intricate addresses of many of the authors who wrote in defence of their books (“The Old Mill Cottage, St John’s Lane, Oakover, Shotcombe, near Dudbury, Suffolk”) and imagined those persons as living from the royalties of their books in remote green landscapes. For fifteen of the twenty years mentioned above, I cut out book reviews and essays and poems and a few letters, all of which I intended to read again in the future. One day in the late 1970s, when the pieces I had cut out had filled a drawer of one of my filing cabinets and when the residents of
the city where I live had not yet been forbidden to burn waste matter in their backyards, I burned all the cuttings that I had kept from the TLS, having read none of them since I had filed them, and having decided that I was unlikely to read any of them during the next fifteen years.

  During the twenty years or so mentioned above, I bought many thousands of dollars’ worth of books, mostly books of fiction, as a result of my having read reviews of the books in the TLS. Whenever a parcel of books arrived from my bookseller, I felt that I was a person of exceptional discernment as I opened the parcel and put the books on my shelves. I bought books other than those reviewed in the TLS, and each year the number of books that I bought was far greater than the number of books that I read, even though I read part of a book every day, but for most of the twenty years mentioned above I intended to read at least once every book that I owned. During most of those years, I would have said that I remembered some of the books that I had read far more clearly than I remembered others. During most of those years, I would have said that some of the books I had read were inferior or much inferior to others, but I had always read to the last page of any book that I had begun to read. One day in the early 1980s, I decided not to go on reading the book that I was then reading. On the same day, I decided that I would not in future read to the end of any book that I did not wish to go on reading. On the same day, I decided further that I had read in the past to the end of many a book when I ought not to have done so.