When a prolific artist dies, it takes time to sort through his output and decide what—if anything—is likely to last ... Novelist, Gerald Murnane, presenting a seminar, with Dr Imre Salusinszky (standing centre) looking on - 1990
Shortly after his move to the small town of Goroke in the summer of 2009, Gerald Murnane ( https://mobile.twitter.com/GeraldMurnane ) began writing what he has declared will be his final work of fiction. If Border Districts is indeed his last, it is a remarkable conclusion to a body of writing many are only now recognising for its true originality and importance. Border Districts is a strange and demanding experience, but to give over to its demands, to its way of making the familiar strange, is to open oneself to the delicate power of its rhythms, the haunting depth of its images, and the irrefutable craftsmanship in every sentence Border Districts review: Gerald Murnane crafts his final work of fiction - The Sydney Morning Herald
Is The Next Nobel Prize Winner For Literature Tending Bar Deep In The Australian Outback?
"A strong case could be made for [Gerald] Murnane, who recently turned 79, as the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of. ... Yet his work has been praised by J.M. Coetzee and Shirley Hazzard, as well as young American writers like Ben Lerner and Joshua Cohen. Teju Cole has described Murnane as 'a genius' and a 'worthy heir to Beckett.' Last year, Ladbrokes placed his odds at winning the Nobel Prize for Literature at 50 to 1 - better than Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie and Elena Ferrante." Mark Binelli goes to visit the author in his tiny village five hours from Melbourne, where Murnane promised him "an interview unlike any you've done before." (He was as good as his word.) … Read More
The Grammar of Gerald Murnane
John Stephenson
Spring 2017
In his rich and heartfelt Meanjin essay ‘In Praise of the Long Sentence’ (no. 1, 2016, pages 56–65), the novelist Gerald Murnane disclaims having received any thorough grounding in English grammar during his ‘patchy’ education across a number of schools. Nonetheless much of his essay is strong on, even you might say soaked in, grammatical analysis, particularly with regard to the structure of paragraph-long sentences. Unfortunately, despite Murnane’s confident presentation and his rightly esteemed fine literary record, his own sentence analysis occasionally invites challenge.
The essential concept here is the distinction between main and subordinate clauses, a main or principal clause being one that can stand by itself as a sentence while the subordinates, like branches from a tree, enrich the main with further information but are unable to stand independently. The two quotations here from his essay include his own quotations of another’s and of his own work. The racial issue and literary taste involved in the first inner quotation are weighty and even eye-goggling but not to the present point.
A distinction is sometimes made between right-branching and left-branching sentences. This is a right-branching sentence from a short story by Flannery O’Connor:
She was a long-faced blonde schoolteacher who boarded with them and Mr Cheatham was her admirer, a rich old farmer who arrived every Saturday afternoon in a baby-blue Pontiac powdered with red-clay dust and black inside with negroes that he charged ten cents a piece to bring into town. The main clause is at the left, and the subordinate clauses all follow. It is not hard to compose a very long right-branching sentence—not much harder than thread-ing beads … You absorb the main item to start with and you don’t have to strain to swallow all the extras afterwards. (p. 64)
(A left-branching sentence is one where the subordinate clauses precede the main clause.)
Murnane’s analysis of the sentence is not correct. The principal clause that begins O’Connor’s sentence is: ‘She was a long-faced blonde schoolteacher’. It has a subject, verb and predicate and can stand by itself. To it is then attached a subordinate clause: ‘who boarded with them’. Then comes, attached to the preceding by the conjunction ‘and’, a second principal clause: ‘Mr Cheatham was her admirer’. It has a subject, verb and predicate and can stand by itself. To this second principal clause all the rest of the sentence from ‘who arrived every Saturday’ applies, qualifying and enriching it with detail. This can be made very clear—allowing for a small stylistic change—by inserting a full stop and a capital letter:
Grammar: Gerald Murnane
