Barley Patch starts with a question posed by Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, a question Rilke says all writers should ask themselves, namely: “Must I write?” (9) This question leads to other questions, so the book is structured as the narrator interviewing himself or explaining himself, except that the questions are sometimes so widely spaced, with so much text between them, that it’s sometimes a bit of a surprise to come across the next one. The narrator, who repeatedly reminds us we’re reading a work of fiction, is nevertheless Murnane-ish: the right age, Australian, and himself a writer of fiction, or, at least, a former writer of fiction who’d given up fiction-writing until the present work. The narrator insists on his lack of imagination:
When I stopped writing at last, I had not for many years used the terms novel or short story in connection with my writing. Several other words I likewise avoided: create, creative, imagine, imaginary, and, above all, imagination. Long before I stopped writing, I had come to understand that I had never created any character or imagined any plot. My preferred way of summing up my deficiencies was to say simply that I had no imagination. (11)
As Peter Mares points out in a 2009 interview with Murnane (available here), this is something of a paradox, given how concerned the narrator is with images. Barley Patch is in large part an examination of, as the narrator puts it, “patterns of images in a place that I call for convenience my mind, wherever it may lie or whatever else it may be a part of” (165). The book is also an examination of the reading and writing life. The early part of the book is a history of the narrator’s reading life: the serialized novels he read in the magazines his parents subscribed to, the stories his mother told him, the poems he read in school. There are bits of comic books and mysteries, and a focus on how the narrator read and what he remembers about it. I loved this whole early part of the book for how concerned it is with the text and the experience of the text and how the reader can interact with the text; I loved it for passages like this:
A person who claims to remember having read one or another book is seldom able to quote from memory even one sentence from the text. What the person probably remembers is part of the experience of having read the book: part of what happened in his or her mind during the hours while the book was being read. I can still remember, nearly sixty years later, some of what I read as a child, which is to say that I can still call to mind some of the images that occurred to me while I read as a child. As well, I claim that I can still feel something of what I felt while those images were in the foreground of my mind. (13)
Or this:
I can recall my having discovered as early as in 1952, while I was reading Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott, that the female characters-in-my-mind, so to call them, were wholly different in appearance from the characters-in-the-text, so to call them. I was too young at the time to know that this was not the result of my being an unskilled reader. Many years passed before I began to understand that looking at line after line of text is only a small part of reading; that I might need to write about a text before I could say that I had fully read it; that even while I write this present piece of fiction I am trying to read a certain text. (31-32)
The narrator is concerned with the processes of reading and writing and thought and memory, and one of the ways this concern becomes apparent is in how self-referential the text is. The narrator keeps interrupting himself with things like: “Before I began to write the first of the three preceding paragraphs” (14). I liked this, the back-and-forth or stuttering rhythm it creates, though it also makes for slow reading: sometimes the paragraph being referenced is pages and pages earlier, and of course I wanted to go back and look at it.
Another concern of the narrator, which is first raised fairly early in the book and then re-emphasized later, is the idea “that the truth about a fictional personage need not be available to the very personage who was supposed to convey that truth to the reader,” the idea “that a work of fiction is not necessarily enclosed within the mind of its author but extends on its farther sides into little-known territory” (71). The idea of there being “a place on some or another far side of fiction” (72) becomes key, and relates to the way the narrator speaks of “personages” in fiction rather than “characters,” “personages” being fictional entities that nevertheless have some independent existence in a world we just can’t reach. (The narrator’s conception of personages includes not just people in works of fiction but also, say, the way the narrator (who was raised Catholic) perceived Jesus and Mary in his mind when he was a child.)
The language of Barley Patch is fairly repetitive, and once I passed the section of the book that was most strongly concerned with the narrator’s reading life, the repetition sometimes made things slow going. The outer landscape, or an inner representation of or vision of the narrator’s ideal outer landscape, comes up a whole lot: there’s a recurring image of “mostly level grassy paddocks with lines of trees in the distance” or similar-looking land (166). (If the count on Google Book Search is correct, the phrase “mostly level” appears 25 times in a book just over 250 pages, I think always in phrases like the one just quoted.) And there’s lots about racehorses and model racetracks and the colors of racing silks, all of which felt quite odd and distant. Still, I’m glad I read this.
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