Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  The author runs a race by consulting a passage of prose chosen at random from one or another of the same library books that he scans for the names of New Arcadian horses. After many months of experiment, he decided as a young man in the 1950s that each letter of the alphabet would have a certain numerical value. Before the running of a race, the names of the starters are listed vertically at the left-hand side of a page. The words of the chosen passage of prose are then written in vertical columns adjoining the list of names in such a way that each name soon has beside it a horizontal array of letters. When this array is of a certain number, the numerical value of the array is calculated and the total is written beside the last of the letters. A comparison of the totals determines the progress of each horse up to a certain point of the race; roughly speaking, the horse with the highest total is the leader at that point.

  The description in the previous paragraph grossly simplifies the author’s method of running a race. A race run by the method described above would scarcely resemble any race in the world where I sit reporting on the author’s pages. In a race run by the method as described above, the lead would change constantly, as would most other positions. In a series of races run thus, rank outsiders and short-priced favourites would win with equal frequency. In the short time remaining to me, I can only report that the author foresaw from the beginning the need for corrective devices that would be combined with the evaluation of scrambled texts. The chief of these is a banking system that allows him to hold in reserve for any horse a sudden addition to its total. Thus, a horse running fifth halfway through a race and suddenly earning a large score from the letters allotted to it—such a horse may hold its position for some distance further until it needs to draw on its bank. The author also provides each starter before the race with a bank in proportion to its odds in the betting ring, with favourites receiving much more than outsiders. This is done, of course, so that favourites and outsiders will win about the same percentage of races that they win in the world where I am writing this sentence.

  The author has a name for his method of deciding races by consulting books borrowed from libraries. Whenever he runs a race by the detailed method reported in the previous paragraphs, he thinks of himself as decoding a certain text. In the years when he was running the first few thousand races in New Arcadia, he would sometimes become interested in one or another book whose pages he was opening at random and decoding and would sometimes begin to read passages from the book. He found in time that he could get little meaning from reading such a book. Instead of reading in the accepted sense of the word, he was decoding the book in his mind: seeing the letters of word after word listed vertically and imagining the forward rush of a field of horses. I believe that the author has not read any book for nearly thirty years. He still scans certain books or consults the indexes of certain books in search of names for the latest crop of two-year-olds in New Arcadia, but when he walks out of a library nowadays holding in his hand a book that he intends to decode, the pleasure he feels as he closes his fingers around the bulk of the book comes from his thinking of it as the source of the stringing out of the field on the far side of the course in a steeplechase of two and a half miles at Leamington (population 40,000; chief city of the north-west of New Arcadia) or of the bunching of the field on the turn into the straight in a mile weight-for-age race at Killeaton Park in Bassett (population 300,000; capital city of New Arcadia).

  The author has always lived close to a library, but when he has retired and has gone to live in N—, he will no longer be able to stroll home with an armful of books each week. He has already begun to prepare for his retirement by buying books. New books would be too expensive, even if he wanted to buy them, and so he looks through the shelves of second-hand booksellers. The books that I would call novels of the Victorian period are what he most prizes. He loves these books, as I can readily understand, for the sheer mass of their texts. A few chapters from a novel by George Meredith or Anthony Trollope can bring to his mind a whole race meeting somewhere in New Arcadia, together with such consequences as that a certain horse will show signs of injury on the following day or that a certain owner will have been enabled by his success to buy a costly yearling for racing in the future.

  But the author loves more than the mere wordiness of these books some quality that he claims to find in the prose itself. In a note that I cannot claim to have understood, he seems to state (I have, as it were, translated his note; he uses no grammatical or literary terms, decodable books being for him mere agglomerations of words) that the profusion of realistic detail in Victorian novels gives to the images of horse-racing that they cause to arise in his mind an unsurpassed richness and vividness. If my interpretation of his note is correct, then his method of decoding a text must surely be more complicated than I have so far described it. If he merely converts letters of the alphabet into numbers in accordance with a fixed scale, how could the details of his races be in any way affected by what most readers would call the subject matter of the texts he decodes?

  Nor is this the only mystery about the author’s methods. In another note, he seems to state something similar to Gustave Flaubert’s claim that he could hear the rhythms of his unwritten sentences for pages ahead. The author seems in this note to state that he can hear the multiple thudding of horses’ hoofs in any text he looks at, and that of all the various kinds of prose (I translate him again), the Victorian novel is best able to generate the slow rising towards the frantic climax appropriate to a horse-race. Again, I suspect that his decoding, as he calls it, is more complex than I have so far understood it to be.

  When the author has retired, he will be able to run in detail every race in New Arcadia and to keep the calendar of that place aligned with the calendar of the world that contains the township of N—, but until then, he will have to go on running certain races in detail and merely determining the results of all other races. He determines the result only of a race by a method that he calls gutting a text. The method of gutting a text is much more straightforward than decoding. He begins to gut a text by looking only at what most people would call the passages of quoted speech. His term for these passages is junk-mail. As with decoding, the words to be gutted are written vertically beside the names of the horses in the race. The scale of numerical equivalents consulted when gutting is different from the scale consulted when decoding. I have not yet understood the difference between the two scales, but I suspect that the scale for the method of gutting might be called crude and unsubtle. Its only purpose is to determine the finishing order at the end of a race. It is not required to suggest any of the gradual unfoldings or the multiple possibilities suggested by the method of decoding. In this matter, as in many others, I suspect the author of hiding behind a show of bluff simple-mindedness. His using quoted speech in this way seems to mock the purpose of the authors who use it in their fiction. Such writers, he seems to be saying, suppose that the best fiction is the most lifelike; that the best prose is speech. (The Victorians used quoted speech as much as any later writers, but he seems more tolerant of them for some reason—perhaps because the speech in Victorian novels seems to readers nowadays too formal or too elaborate to be lifelike.)

  A different sort of writer from myself might have wondered why the author of the pages in the briefcase had gone to such trouble to invent a duplication of what was already available to him: why he should have invented the racecourses of New Arcadia when he could have bought a racehorse for himself and watched it of a Saturday at Mowbray or Elwick. I have always been interested in what is usually called the world but only insofar as 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. And whenever I have read a piece of fiction that seemed to me worthy to be read, whether the author of that fiction was myself or another person, I have always read with th
e purpose of suggesting to myself that a world might exist beyond the world suggested by the fiction, even if that further world was suggested only by such passages in the fiction as a report of the narrator’s reading a text that he could not understand or of a character’s dreaming a dream that was not reported in the text.

  The author of the pages in the briefcase might have been making a declaration similar to my declaration in the previous paragraph when he made such notes in the margins of his pages as he made after his detailed report of the running, in a certain year, of the Rosalind Park Stakes (1 mile, 7 furlongs; weight for age; run in the autumn at Killeaton Park). In that race, Psalmus Hungaricus (owner/trainer S. T. Juhasz; rider M. L. Quayle) beat Lavengro after having been beaten by that horse by a margin of three lengths at their previous meeting under somewhat similar conditions. The author in his note asked, and was, of course, unable to answer, the question whether the trainer and the rider of Psalmus Hungaricus had agreed not to let the horse run on its merits in the race in which it was beaten.

  While I was writing certain passages in the earlier pages of this piece of writing, I fell into one of my ways of writing fiction, which is to write as though I am looking at one or another detail in my mind and reflecting on that detail at my leisure. Certain passages in the earlier parts of this narrative may have suggested that I have been and will continue to be at leisure to imagine what ought next to be reported of the imagined narrator. I beg the reader to be under no misapprehension. While I have been writing this and the previous paragraph, I have felt less and less able to pretend that I am writing one more piece of fiction of the kinds that I have written in the past. My time is short. In a few hours, the woman representing the writers’ organisation will call at the reception desk of this hotel, and my tour of Tasmania will begin. (If any reader of these words should wonder about my health, let that person be assured that I have largely recovered. In order to have finished this narrative before I leave the hotel, I have omitted many a paragraph that I might have written to report my having slept for a few hours or eaten a bowl of oatmeal and other things or drunk a few stubbies of beer.) What I intend to do in the time remaining is to pack my suitcase and to be ready for the writers’ tour and then to write a last few paragraphs in an effort to answer certain questions in my mind. (The briefcase is already packed, with its contents in the same order that they occupied when I first looked at them. If the woman who left the briefcase has not returned before I leave this room, I intend to put the briefcase inside my suitcase and to lug it around Tasmania until I am confronted by either the woman or the author, as will surely happen if no one calls on me during the next few hours.)

  Why did the woman bring me the briefcase? Who is the woman and what is her connection with the author of the contents of the briefcase?

  I list my answers to these questions in the order in which they occur to me and not in the order of their likely accuracy.

  The author of the pages sent them to me out of gratitude. One or another of my books of fiction, when decoded, had caused the three-year-old colt World Light to come from last on the turn and to win the renowned Stanley Plate, run over nine furlongs at set weights on the Merlynston Racecourse at Inverbervie (second city of New Arcadia; population 200,000).

  The author of the pages sent them to me because he wanted to meet me. He had come to believe that I was ready to be converted to his own way of life. Something that I had written or something that I had said in one or another interview had persuaded him that I would be happier decoding and gutting texts than writing them.

  The author of the pages wanted to meet me in order to persuade me to write a different sort of fiction in the future. He would never dare to think of interfering in the multitude of possibilities that might affect the running of any race in New Arcadia in the future, but he had observed certain things in all the years while he had been decoding and gutting texts. He would like to suggest to me that a few changes to my way of writing the texts that would later be published as books might one day result in a few more races in New Arcadia ending with what are called by race commentators blanket finishes.

  The author of the pages in the briefcase is not a man of my own age, a bachelor who had worked all his life as a teacher in primary schools. The author of the pages is the woman who brought the briefcase to my room for some purpose that I cannot as yet divine.

  I have read many texts during my lifetime: many more texts than I have written. Whenever I have read any text, I have had in my mind an image of the personage who caused the text to come into existence: the implied author, as I call him or her. The ghostly outline of this personage has arisen in my mind as a result of my having read certain details in the text. While reading many a text, I have begun to mistrust and to dislike the implied author. As soon as I have begun to do this, I have stopped reading the text. While reading other texts, I have begun to like and to trust the implied author. When I have begun to do this, I have gone on reading and have sometimes felt so close to the implied author that I seem to have understood why he or she wrote the text that I was reading. While I was reading the pages in the briefcase, I seemed to understand that the implied author of the pages—the person in my mind who had written the pages—had written the pages in order to cause to arise in the mind of one or another reader of the pages one or another image of a personage who would seem to the reader more likeable and more trustworthy than any person in the place where the reader was reading.

  I have trusted for many years that I will remember from every text that I read the few words or phrases that I need to remember. I remember now the names of the owners and the trainer of the winner of a maiden race in a certain year at Cleveland (population 60,000; chief city of the midlands district of New Arcadia). The colours carried by the horse were an unusual combination: grey and white. The owners were J. Brenzaida and F. de Samara. The trainer was Ms A. G. Almeida.

  The text ends at this point.

  Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

  I first read part of the novel À la recherche du temps perdu, translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, in January 1961, when I was aged a few weeks less than twenty-two years. What I read at that time was a single paperback volume with the title Swann’s Way. I suspect today that I did not know in 1961 that the volume I was reading was part of a much larger book.

  As I write these words in June 1989, I cannot cite the publication details of the paperback volume of Swann’s Way. I have not seen the volume for at least six years, although it lies only a few metres above my head, in the space between the ceiling and the tiled roof of my house, where I store in black plastic bags the unwanted books of the household.

  I first read the whole of À la recherche du temps perdu, in the Scott Moncrieff translation, during the months from February to May in 1973, when I was thirty-four years old. What I read at that time was the twelve-volume hardcover edition published by Chatto and Windus in 1969. As I write these words, the twelve volumes of that edition rest on one of the bookshelves of my house.

  I read a second time the same twelve-volume edition during the months from October to December 1982, when I was forty-three years old. Since December 1982, I have not read any volume by Marcel Proust.

  Although I cannot remember the publication details of the volume of Swann’s Way that I read in 1961, I seem to remember from the colours of the cover a peculiar brown with a hint of underlying gold.

  Somewhere in the novel, the narrator writes that a book is a jar of precious essences recalling the hour when we first handled its cover. I had better explain that a jar of essences, precious or otherwise, would be of small interest to me. I happen to have been born without a sense of smell. That sense which is said by many persons to be the most strongly linked to memory is a sense that I have never been able to use. However, I do have a rudimentary sense of taste, and when I see in my mind today the cover of the paperback of Swann’s Way that I read in 1961, I taste in my mind tinned sardines, the product of Portug
al.

  In January 1961, I lived alone in a rented room in Wheatland Road, Malvern. The room had a gas ring and a sink but no refrigerator. Whenever I shopped, I looked for foods that were sold in tins, needed no preparation, and could be stored at room temperature. When I began to read the first pages of Proust’s fiction, I had just opened the first tin of sardines that I had bought—a product of Portugal—and had emptied the contents over two slices of dry bread. Being hungry and anxious not to waste anything that had cost me money, I ate all of this meal while I read from the book propped open in front of me.

  For an hour after I had eaten my meal, I felt a growing but still bearable discomfort. But as I read on, my stomach became more and more offended by what I had forced into it. At about the time when I was reading of how the narrator had tasted a mouthful of cake mixed with tea and had been overcome by an exquisite sensation, the taste of the dry bread mixed with the sardine oil was so strong in my mouth that I was overcome by nausea.

  During the twenty or so years from 1961 until my paperback Swann’s Way was enclosed in black plastic and stored above my ceiling, I would feel in my mind at least a mild flatulence whenever I handled the book, and I would see again in my mind, whenever I noticed the hint of gold in the brown, the light from the electric globe above me glinting in the film of oil left behind after I had rubbed my crusts around my dinner plate in my rented room in Malvern on a summer evening in 1961.

  While I was writing the previous sentence, I saw in my mind an image of a bed of tall flowers near a stone wall which is the wall of a house on its shaded side.