A filmmaker ventures into the interior of Australia, seeking the patronage of the plainsmen who live there, so he can make a movie about the plains. His movie - like every artwork or product or pastime that tries to establish with any certainty what the plains are - is destined to fail and become another object for the plainsmen to obsessively discuss, catalogue, study, and compare.
The plainsmen are a strange lot. They live in rundown towns and fashion themselves like colonial aristocrats. They don’t make eye-contact while drinking in their dusty pubs. They talk in oblique ways about uncertain things. Their way of life is shared through horseracing, dressmaking, writing, painting, cobbling, building, carpenting, and numerous other activities. Film is just one more of these. The plainsmen are sceptical about its possibilities. They argue that film only accentuates the visual qualities of the plains, which are their most superficial and obvious qualities.
The filmmaker tries anyway. He fails. Like every other attempt to understand it, there is a gap between what is felt, understood, privately internalised, and what may be shared with others. What is in the mind can never be communicated with perfect fidelity. The true creative act lies in the assimilation of histories, locations, stories, and memories into some coherent sense of the way things are.
The Plains is an evasive book. It’s like a recluse who structures his life so he doesn’t have to meet anyone; you never even get a glimpse at him. What is the filmmaker’s film actually about? The impossibility of putting things into words, and the subsequent happiness that comes with accepting this. This seems to mirror Gerald Murnane’s own reclusive, eccentric life, shaped as it has been by his obsessions, revelations, apophenia, and disappointment. We are all shaped by these forces acting upon us. Each of us hammers them into our own understanding of life:
How might a man reorder his conduct if he could be assured that the worth of a perception, memory, a supposition, was enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others? And what could a man not accomplice, freed from any obligation to search for so-called truths apart from those demonstrated by his search for a truth peculiar to him?
The words in this book are simple and ordinary, but Murnane is masterful at raising the tempo when he needs to. He will lull you into a calm, which only heightens the power of every word when he draws them out and finally reveals them for what they really are. Words are often twisted around and used in different ways, like the various objects the plainsmen obsessively analyse and discuss:
Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes — one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily.
When Murnane gets going, he can really set a fire underneath his writing, which is not overly flashy, but works because he has patience and earns your trust before dipping into your mind. He really is a smooth and fluid writer. I’ve never felt the stakes were so high in such mundane descriptions of looking at a girl across a library, or reading a book:
None of the scholars I mention can even guess how many successive encroachments of afternoon slough on the shadowy corners of libraries will have bleached the glossy inks on the books that they open at last. These men talk instead of the peculiar pleasure of knowing, when they finally chance on some unforeseen correspondence between metaphors in the confessions of a forgotten writer, that their prized discovery is of no value to others.”
If there’s a disappointment in the book, it’s that it’s almost too gentle and smooth and lacking sharp edges. It lulls you into a pleasant languor that doesn’t always require you to reach out and actually touch the edges of reality. Sometimes you just drift away.
Murnane is the real-deal though. If I had to compare The Plains to anything else, it’s like a postmodern Moby Dick for bogans who don’t like going outside. I mean that in the best way possible.
