Border Districts

by Gerald Murnane

  Students of English at the university were required to study only a certain number of the list of set texts for each year of the course. The man mentioned previously chose not to study Paradise Lost when he found it on such a list. This was not from any reason connected to the anecdote mentioned but because the man was unwilling to read at length about the same mythical beings and events that had occupied his mind during much of his childhood and youth. He had decided as a young man, some years before, that he no longer believed in the reality of those beings and events. If pressed to explain more exactly his loss of belief, the young man might have said that he no longer accepted that certain images in his mind were images of actual beings able to punish or reward him. As a student of English, the man was made weary by the mere thought of his having to read a long work of fiction believed by its author to be a report of actual events, not to mention his afterwards having to find a way of praising the work in words acceptable to his tutor and examiner. The same man also preferred not to call to mind again the images mentioned because they seemed connected with many of the fears and anxieties that had troubled him as a child and a youth. If the man had recalled just then the image of the young woman with the doves at her breasts, he might have felt less reluctant to read Paradise Lost, although he would still have dreaded, and rightly so, the task of pretending to respond to the text as his teachers expected him to respond. If the man had recalled the image of the young woman, he might have begun to understand that an image in the mind is itself real, whether or not it may be said to denote some other class of entity; that the dark-haired image-woman standing in the shaft of image-light from the image-window was by then as much a part of him as was any of his bodily organs. He might have begun to understand that even the images that he claimed no longer to believe in – even these were necessary for his salvation, even if they were no more than evidence of his need for saving imagery.

  During many weeks of his childhood, his parents borrowed and read two or three books from some or another so-called circulating library in their nearest shopping centre. In the years before television was available in the capital city, a circulating library flourished in every suburban shopping centre. Subscribers to a library borrowed for a modest fee one after another book of a kind sometimes called by publishers library fiction. The books had been originally published with hard covers and dust-jackets, but before they were made available for borrowing the dust-jacket of each had been removed by the librarian. She (the proprietor of a circulating library was invariably female) would then have cut from the dust-jacket first the front panel and then the inside panel on which was printed the so-called blurb. These panels she glued to the front and rear cover respectively. She finally brushed over both covers a clear varnish or lacquer. The boy’s parents went to bed on most evenings long before he had finished his homework. If he passed their bedroom door, he would see them side by side, propped up on pillows, and each reading by the light of the bedlamp fixed to the bedhead between them one or another of the books with the glazed covers. Sometimes, when both of his parents were out, the boy read as much as a chapter from one or another of the glazed books that lay always in his parents’ bedroom or in the loungeroom. Sometimes, when his mother was busy but not far away, he had time for reading only a page or two at the place where her or his father’s bookmark rested. What he read thus furtively would surely have reported the thoughts and deeds of a variety of fictional characters in a variety of fictional settings, but he who had been the boy seemed, as from only a few years afterwards, to remember what he had read from the borrowed books as passage after passage or chapter after chapter in one never-ending book. Likewise, the many fictional characters that he had read about he seemed to remember as two only: a young male character and a young female character.

  Nearly sixty years after he had first conceived of the never-ending book, the man who had been the boy mentioned above remembered the setting of the book as a far-reaching landscape of pale-green meadows interspersed with patches of dark-green woodland. Each meadow was bordered with flowering hedgerows. In each woodland were paths leading past banks overgrown by wildflowers with appealing names. Here and there in the landscape were large houses of two and more storeys and with numerous chimneys. Each house was surrounded by a spacious formal garden at the far end of which was a park with an ornamental lake. Each large house was occupied for the time being not only by several of the latest generations of the family that had owned the house for several centuries but also by a sort of floating population of youngish men and women who were distant relatives of the owners of the house or who had been recommended to the owners by some or another friend or distant relative in a city that might have been named London and was no more than a conjectured smokey blur far away past the furthest of the pale-green meadows. Each member of this numerous population had been thus recommended because he or she had recently suffered from some or another bereavement or personal crisis. The persons thus recommended were at leisure during the whole of their lengthy stay at the large house. None seemed concerned with earning income and each was in possession of an extensive wardrobe together with tennis racquets, golf clubs, and perhaps even a motor-car.

  The remembering man remembered also that the chief concern of the young persons who lived or who were staying as guests in the large houses mentioned was to fall in love with one another. The boy who was long afterwards the remembering man was not at all surprised when he first learned this. Falling in love would have been his own chief concern if ever he had found himself in one of the large houses mentioned in the landscape mentioned. The glimpses of far woodlands, the exquisite greenness of the meadows, the lines of trees concealing shallow streams in the lowest parts of the valleys – this satisfying scenery alone could not have fully satisfied him. He would have had to search among the young female persons of his acquaintance for someone whose image in his mind seemed not averse to his explaining to her how he felt towards such scenery for as long as he was preparing to approach her.

  The remembering man could never remember any detail of the appearance in his mind long before of any of the young male or female personages who had fallen in love with one another in what had seemed an endless book. All such details were lost to view in far parts of his mind as from the time during his tenth year when he began to read furtively the first episode of a long work of fiction that was published in serial form in one after another monthly issue of a magazine passed on to his mother by a woman-neighbour who could afford to buy the magazine, which was published in England, so the remembering man remembered, although he had forgotten its title and the appearance of its front cover. The man could never recall himself studying the details of any of the duotone illustrations that appeared each month on the first of the pages where the fictional text appeared. He could not even recall any detail of any face in the illustrations. Yet the man had clearly in mind while I was composing this sentence a certain image of a young woman with dark hair and a wistful expression and of a young man with a troubled expression. Whenever afterwards he tried to recall any of the image-fallers-in-love who had appeared to him while he was reading the many pages of fiction that he had read as a boy, these were the only two that he recalled.

  A young Englishwoman is travelling by ocean liner from London to Ceylon in one of the first years after the Second World War. She is going to Ceylon in order to be married to a tea planter, the owner of a large estate. Soon after leaving London, the young woman meets up with a young man who is also travelling to Ceylon. The man is a journalist on his way to take up an appointment with a leading newspaper there. Or, perhaps he is a writer of fiction on his way to research the background of his next book. The two young persons dance together and later talk together on deck. On subsequent days they meet and talk often. Even the nine-years-old boy-reader of the text in which these matters are reported – even he soon understands that the young woman finds the young man more lively and more interesting than her fiancé, who has begun to seem stoli
d in comparison. Once having understood this, the boy-reader changes his allegiance. Previously, he had felt in sympathy with the man on the liner who had met up with a desirable young woman who was already bespoken. Previously, the boy-reader could foresee nothing better for the man on the liner than that he should return soon to England, there to mingle with the other young persons of his kind in the fictional green landscape described earlier, where he would be more likely than in a sweltering country with dark-skinned inhabitants to meet up with a young woman of pale complexion who was still unattached. Now, however, when the events of the narrative were falling in favour of the man on the liner, the boy-reader began to transfer his sympathy to the tea-planter, the man sitting alone on the veranda of his bungalow among the mountains and not suspecting that his long-awaited wife-to-be was preparing to break their engagement. The boy-reader prepared to share the man’s heavy-heartedness after he had learned his fate and to hope that he would soon sell off his plantation and return to England, there to mingle with the other young persons of his kind as his rival in love might previously have been expected to do.

  Anyone reading this report would be surely able to anticipate the outcome of the fictional events summarised above: the shipboard romance, so to call it, going forward; the young woman’s seeming more and more to accept that she had fallen in love with her new suitor and ought to break her engagement; then the narrative’s taking an unexpected turn, after which the young woman comes to decide that the charm and the glamour of the man on the liner are in some way deceptive and not to be compared with the sincerity and trustworthiness of the man waiting for her on his plantation. In fact, the remembering man remembered nothing whatever of the ending, although he never doubted that the young woman remained true to her tea-planter – even in his tenth year, he had learned many of the conventions of so-called romance fiction. I am not concerned here to report the passing thoughts of the boy while he read in haste from some or another women’s magazine that his mother had left lying about. What interests me is a man’s having kept in mind for more than sixty years an image of a female face and even of a certain expression on that face, which images first occurred to him while he was reading a work of fiction every detail of which was surely forgotten long ago by every other reader of the work. (An image of a male face also stayed in mind, but mostly as a means used sometimes by the rememberer when he supposed that he might feel more keenly as a fictional tea-planter or a fictional male passenger on an ocean-liner than as a rememberer of an image-face.) What interests me also is the man’s seeming to have assumed during most of his life that the image-female whose face he kept in mind was above reproach or blame; that any seeming fault in her character was no more than an endearing imperfection. If, for the fictional time being, she was a young woman on an ocean liner seeming to encourage a certain suitor while she was betrothed to another man, she was neither capricious nor indecisive, much less disloyal, and male characters and male readers alike were obliged to accept her changes of feeling and to abide by her choices. What interests me finally is that neither the boy nor the man ever looked forward to treating in the so-called real world with some or another likeness or counterpart of any of the image-heroines who appeared to them while they read certain works of fiction. Both the boy and the man were attracted often to some or another female face resembling that of his fictional girlfriend or wife, but what followed more resembled the rapid reading to its end of a work of fiction than a courtship or an attempted seduction.

  More than thirty years ago, I copied in longhand from the major work of fiction by Marcel Proust a passage purporting to explain why the bond between reader and fictional character is closer than any bond between flesh-and-blood persons. I put the statement among my files, but I failed to find it just now after having searched for it for nearly an hour. I first copied the statement because I could not understand it. I understood the matter that Proust was trying to explain but I could not understand his explanation. I filed the statement in the hope that I could later study it until I was able to understand it. Today, while I was writing the previous paragraphs, I seemed to arrive at my own explanation for the intimacy between a reading boy and a remembering man on the one hand and on the other hand a female personage brought into being by passages of fiction. (I do not consider the boy and the man fictional characters. I am not writing a work of fiction but a report of seemingly fictional matters.) I then felt urged to look again at the statement by Marcel Proust so that I could first try again to understand it and could then compare Marcel Proust’s explanation with my own. I will look again in future for the statement, but in the meanwhile I am not at all put out. Marcel Proust may have had his explanation, but I now have my own explanation.

  I seem to remember Marcel Proust’s having written that the author of fiction was able so to report the feelings of a fictional character that the reader was able to feel closer to that character than to any living person. Did I read the word feelings in the English translation that I read long ago? And, if I did so read, was that word the nearest English equivalent of the French word used by Marcel Proust for the precious item that the writer of fiction reported to the reader? In earlier years, I would have striven to answer these questions. Today, I content myself with my own formulation of the matter: sometimes, while reading a work of fiction, I seem to have knowledge of what it would be to have knowledge of the essence of some or another personality. If asked to explain the meaning of the word essence in the previous sentence, I would do so by referring to the part of myself (the seeming part of my seeming self?) that apprehends (seems to apprehend?) the knowledge (seeming knowledge?) mentioned in the previous sentence.

  After I had written the previous paragraph, I succeeded in finding among my files a statement that I copied more than thirty years ago from a biography of George Gissing. ‘What a farce is Biography,’ George Gissing once wrote in a letter. ‘The only true biographies are to be found in novels.’

  The whole of the rear page of the dust-jacket of my copy of a certain biography of George Gissing is given over to a reproduction of a black and white photograph of the young female author of the book. She was photographed in profile. She chose, or she was directed, to stand side-on to the camera. It is not possible to tell from the vagueness surrounding her whether she posed indoors or outdoors; behind her is a wall of bricks or stones; in the background is another wall forming a right angle with the first; in the second wall is what seems at first glance a doorway leading to a brightly lit further room or out into bright daylight but may be no more than a rectangular patch of light reflected from some or another window or mirror beyond the range of the camera. Whenever I pick up the book and look anew at the rear of the dust-jacket, my eye is led at first to the seeming doorway but an instant later to an equally noticeable lighted area in the upper foreground. The author stares intently while a bright source from somewhere ahead of her forms zones of light on a part of her forehead, on her nearer cheekbone, on her chin, on the ridge of her nose, and on the cornea of her nearer eye. (Her further eye is hidden from view.) The author’s face might not have taken my attention if I had first seen it lit evenly by daylight or electric light, but the image of her face in the reproduction of the photograph on the dust-jacket of her biography of George Gissing – that image has remained with me during the thirty or more years since I first bought the book and stored it on my shelves. I read the book itself in the year after I had bought it, but often in the following years I took the book down from its shelf and stared at the rear page of the dust-jacket. I stared sometimes at the background, and especially at the rectangular patch of light, trying to learn what sort of place the young woman had been posed in or had insisted on posing in. Mostly, however, I stared at the image of the young woman.

  I stared because I felt as though something of value might appear to me as a result of my staring. I tried to stare at the image of the face of the young woman with the same intense stare that the original young woman had once directed at
something visible, or perhaps invisible, on the far side of the light that picked out the prominences of her face. I tried to stare as though something of meaning might appear to me if only I could turn aside from, or see beyond, all extraneous objects of sight; if only I could see truly and without distraction. After I had failed to see what I had hoped to see, I allowed my eyes to pass again from lighted patch to lighted patch and to rest at last on the most arresting detail of all: the filament of darkness or shade enclosed within two semi-circles of light, all of which together represented the cornea and iris of the right eye of the young woman as it appeared at the instant when she was photographed with the bright light directed at her. Sometimes, the bright semi-circles at the front of her eye brought to my mind a theory of vision that was given credence in some or another earlier age. (If no such theory was ever given credence, then I dreamed of having read about it, but the theory, whether actual or dreamed, remains relevant to this passage of writing.) According to the theory, a person perceives an object of sight by means of a ray of light emitted through the eye of a person. The ray travels outwards from the eye and then renders visible the object of sight. If I subscribed to this theory, I would probably suppose that the young biographer had been photographed just at the moment when her eye lighted on an object of much interest to her: perhaps an object visible only to her.

  Hardly any details of the young woman’s life are reported on the dust jacket of her biography of George Gissing. I am therefore unable to think of her as recalling so-called scenes from the past or daydreaming about some or another future. I know her only as the biographer of George Gissing and, according to the dust-jacket of the first edition of her biography of him, the author of five books of fiction. And so, whenever she seems to me to be looking blankly ahead I think of her mental imagery as deriving from one or another of the five works of fiction that she wrote while her eyes were similarly averted from what is commonly called the world or as deriving from one or another of the many works of fiction written by a man who died about forty years before she was born; I think of her as contemplating essences of personages.