The Departure of the Author : A Post-Structuralist Reading of Gerald Murnane's Landscape with Landscape

• Gerald Murnane’s Landscape With Landscape is an intriguing book, full of contradictions and inconsistencies, teasing in the way it seems to be deliberately constructed to escape interpretation. Its anonymous, subversive and conceited first-person narrator cum protagonist, recognizable from other books by Murnane, is also the alleged writer of the six stories in the volume. In this capacity he gradually distances himself from his readers and finally, as will be further discussed, divests himself of all credibility. Thematically, truth and reality are key concepts but the narrative slides precariously between events that are ‘really’ taking place and a set of events that exist only in the deceptive narrator’s imagination. All the stories start with a definition of place, a vantage point or a scene of departure. Significantly, as the title indicates, place and spatial perspectives are far more important than time. Seemingly matter-of-fact introductory descriptions like “I am in the backyard of my three-bedroom house in the City of Heidelberg…” or “I stood on a hill northeast of Melbourne and looked across the folds of suburbs…” turn out to be just as unreliable as the person who defines them. What the narrator claims to be a Paraguayan setting turns out to be decidedly Australian, for example. Beneath and beyond what is usually defined as reality, depths and vistas of unreality are exposed. This indeterminacy related to landscapes and perspectives affects the reading experience making the interpretation of the text fraught with intriguing uncertainty.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Australian literature

criticism

Post-Structuralism

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

rap (ämneskategori)