Behind the Appearances: Spaces and Places in Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982)
Mateusz Naporowski
University of Silesia, PolandMateusz Naporowski is a graduate student at the University of Silesia in Sosnowiec, Poland. He is currently finishing his Master’s thesis on landscape in the works of Gerald Murnane and Cormac McCarthy. His academic interests include literary theory, experimental and postmodernist literature, and metamodernism as a broader cultural paradigm. Recently, he published an article titled "Soliloquy as Love and Change: Molly Bloom and Ducks, Newburyport."
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9675-7507
Abstract
Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982) depicts a world in which the landscape governs both the characters’ and the readers’ perceptions. Analyzing the novel’s duplicities and peculiarities, as well as the author’s individual approach to fiction writing, the article identifies sources for the plains’ uniqueness. Murnane’s language, along with the writing process, is a bearer of the quality termed uncanniness which shapes the (un)reality of The Plains by employing contrasts and evoking the feeling of un/familiarity in the reader. Following the trope of in-betweenness, the article views the novel through the prism of liminality, treating its various components as sites of transformation. As the further analysis of both the spaces/places of the novel and the protagonist-narrator’s personal experience illustrates, the plains subvert this seemingly linear process of transformation and, opposing their occupants’ attempts to gain control, prove their own existence as the influential, yet elusive, force on the novel’s reality. In essence, the article aims to explore Murnane’s portrayal of this idiosyncratic landscape, probing the applicability of capturing or defining the plains, be it by the protagonist’s camera and senses or our theoretical tools.
Keywords:
The Plains, Gerald Murnane, liminality, the uncanny, spaces and placesReferences
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University of Silesia, Poland
Mateusz Naporowski is a graduate student at the University of Silesia in Sosnowiec, Poland. He is currently finishing his Master’s thesis on landscape in the works of Gerald Murnane and Cormac McCarthy. His academic interests include literary theory, experimental and postmodernist literature, and metamodernism as a broader cultural paradigm. Recently, he published an article titled "Soliloquy as Love and Change: Molly Bloom and Ducks, Newburyport."
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9675-7507
