A Million Windows

by Gerald Murnane

  A well-known writer of fiction in this country, once, as part of a discussion about one of his books, which could fairly be called a work of historical fiction, said or, perhaps, wrote words to the effect that he insisted on his right to imagine the past. I have often wondered at his statement. If I assume that he was not making the preposterous claim that he was somehow better qualified than other living persons to suppose what one or another person thought or felt, say, a hundred years ago, then what was he claiming? Perhaps his emphasis was on the word imagining, as though he had other means at his disposal for discovering what this or that person felt a hundred years ago but chose to use his imagination. And yet, what other means could he or anyone possibly call on for such a task?

  Reader, we are all of us, whether writers or readers, surely obliged to imagine the past, although I, who dislike the word imagine, would prefer to use such an expression as speculate about. And surely each of us in this wing of this building, given the nature of our subject-matter, so to call it, might be called a writer of historical fiction, if not an interpreter of history. A certain one of us might learn, if he so wished, when was built the house of stone where his father’s father lived throughout his life and, after him, throughout their lives four of his children, all of them unmarried. Another of us might learn, if he so wished, where stood formerly a certain cottage of timber in a clearing in a forest long since destroyed – the cottage whence his mother’s mother once set out to visit her own mother in a township surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside. But in order to learn what we most desire to learn about the persons in that house or that cottage, we would have to be enabled to be readers of works of fiction with those persons for their implied authors and with narrators wholly to be trusted: works of fiction which drew, perhaps, on the experience of their authors.

  The narrator of this present work of fiction is unable to end the work other than by reporting of the chief character of the work of fiction mentioned often in the final pages of this work that he seems only to see and to feel when he might have been expected to speculate and to imagine. He seems to see the flashing of sunlight on the blue and silver-grey plumage of a bird and he seems to feel a prickling in his hands from certain foliage and a pain in his fingers after certain sharp-sided leaves had drawn blood.

  The single holland blind in his room is still drawn down, even though the time is early evening and a traveller looking hither from far away in the mostly level grassy countryside surrounding this building might see the window as a drop of golden oil among sumless such drops. I walked in the grounds a short while ago and looked up at his room. (We know better than to knock at his door.) I looked up and saw a dull pane of glass rather than a drop of golden oil. I saw a window and behind it a drawn blind. In short, I learned nothing. But what could I have been hoping to learn about the flesh-and-blood author, the breathing author of these and who knows how many other pages of true fiction?

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.