Gerald Murnane’s interview in The Paris Review is fascinating.
He lives in a stone blockhouse behind his son’s house in a community of about 200 in Australia. The place is filled with filing cabinets, holding his archives. He sleeps on a folding cot. There’s no room among the filing cabinets for a bed.
You’d expect a writer to keep archives of personal business and writing. But Murnane also has an “Antipodean Archive,” which describes horse-racing in two imaginary countries. The countries have names — New Eden and New Arcady, collectively known as the Antipodes — and maps. The horses have owners and trainers. Stables have racing colors. Murnane plays a complicated game — it reminded me of the kind of game that kids invented with dice to play baseball games using the statistics on the backs of baseball cards — in creating the races.
Murnane said that he crossed the territory of fiction and found the horse-racing archive on the other side.
The ordinary, well-meaning person would look at it and say, That’s an imaginary world. But that imaginary world occupies me.
He began the archive in 1985. He’s now 85.
It’ll cease to expand when I’m dead. I created all this mental space that no one else will ever occupy.
Louis Klee, who did the interview, said in his introduction that Murnane dodged questions about his writing routine and methods, and my heart sank. But Murnane wanted to talk about creating space in one’s imagination. I
• Sources: Louis Klee, “The Art of Fiction No. 266: Gerald Murnane”; The Paris Review, Winter 2024 (250).
Mark Binelli, “Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?”; The New York Times, March 27, 2018. It’s here:
Dustin Illingworth, “After a Five-Decade Run, a Master Hangs Up His Reins”; The New York Times, May 3, 2022. It’s here:
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