The Plains by Gerald Murnane

Original Language: English

Original Title: The plains

Publication Year: 1982

Valuation: Essential

Hannibal crossing the Alpsby Turner, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 or Mrs. Barbara by Rómulo Gallegos are artistic creations where the following is proven: nature has been one of the main driving forces of art. How many mountains and volcanoes, stormy seas or starry nights have not fueled poems, paintings or films?

Australia, the land of writer Gerald Murnane, is not exempt from seductive landscapes: humid and untamed jungles, dream beaches and mystical monoliths, but The plainsour novel in question, takes place in the central plains. Why does this novelist choose the monotony of this place and not the wild world of other regions?

The imposing mountains come to an end before the eye of the beholder, the sea is endless but volatile: only the plains remain in their vastness. And it is this quality that has fascinated its inhabitants, who have developed myths, arts and traditions around it, to such a degree that the immensity of the plains and the unexplored nature of its lands perfectly symbolize the greatness of its people, which even he delights in being another independent Australia: not that of kangaroos and koalas, but that of partridges and bustards. They are the ones who affirm that there is only something greater: eternity as a plain.

In The plains, Murnane presents us with a filmmaker who comes to this region with the aim of portraying its immutability. As much an explorer as he is an ascetic, he will spend many years trying to fulfill his mission: because Murnane is more than adventures, more than indescribable sunsets and ineffable relationships: it is a growing tangle of possibilities and details. The text becomes a fight against the limitations of thought and consciousness. Murnane will make us reflect through the filmmaker and the inhabitants of the plains that what I see is not the same as what you see, and this same thing is transferred to the individual, because what I see and think today is not the same as what what I saw and thought yesterday.

This heterogeneous range of perceptions will make the filmmaker observe each element of the landscape and notice the subtlety with which everything changes in what seems immutable. It is enough for a grass to move for those plains to be something else. Nothing remains no matter how vast it is. Perplexed by this discovery, he indefinitely postpones the shooting of his film.

But the fruits of this disappointment also change. The filmmaker goes from paralysis to fascination with a meditation on this labyrinthine and elusive world. He “nothing exists, if something exists we cannot communicate it” of Gorgias is poetically rewritten and launched as a direct kick to the heart, as if defending himself from the angel of Jacob, recognizing his defeat, but leaving a text as epic as that biblical fight against the angel of God, with a language so delicate and profound that it recalls to Proust and that bifurcates endlessly like a map drawn by Borges.

Thus, Murnane exchanges knowledge for contemplation: the protagonist weaves an elegy of limits and sings an ode to the unspeakable. It ruins any itinerary because it is useless in a changing world where to travel you just have to lift your head and sigh.

In the absence of the definitive, the filmmaker may abandon his film: Murnane will never abandon art. From the vertigo of change to the tranquility of introspection, the text will flow as the filmmaker will: stopping questioning and beginning to experience nature firsthand. Only then will you be able to enjoy your life and start a new project in the face of other difficulties (all this with a very particular sense of humor). Murnane achieves a poetics of the contingent and in The plains We drink it ecstatically without the risk of a hangover. We are ready to travel any world.

Signed: Arturo Jimenez Viveros