Murnane Gerald - A Million Windows

The reader of these pages will hardly need to be told that a third unattributed monologue or, rather, a third written report of an unattributed monologue followed the second. I cannot recall how many such reports I read before I gave up reading the highly praised book, but I recall that I looked ahead in order to satisfy myself that the hundreds of pages yet to be read comprised nothing else but report after report of monologue after monologue from some or another nameless thinker, or mutterer, or rememberer or daydreamer.

At some time when I was trying to read the highly praised book, I learned from the publisher’s advertisement on the dust-jacket that the novel, so to call it, was written in a spiral of time . Perhaps, being gullible and ignorant, I decided that a great deal had now been explained; that I was at fault for not having recognised the invisible whorled structure that gave coherence and meaning to what I had found incoherent and meaningless. Perhaps I even searched for evidence of time’s being arranged spiral-wise in the jumble of text. (I surely understood at the time that a close study of events and places and persons referred to in each monologue could have told me who was the presumed speaker of each and when, in the time-sequence of the whole work, each speaker could have been presumed to have delivered his or her outpouring. But I was just as surely hindered from doing so by the fact that each of the monologues, as I call them, was made up of the same unrelenting prose. Authors of fiction purporting to come from a medley of voices are seldom skilful enough to compose a distinctive prose for each supposed speaker.) If I did thus search, I could hardly have found anything to justify the publisher’s absurd claim. I recall only that I put the book away unread and have never since looked into it or felt any desire to read any other work by the celebrated author.

In an earlier paragraph of this section, I tried to compare my situation among the circular paths in the grounds of this building with the situation of a reader content to know in detail about only the chief character of a work of fiction. Elsewhere in this section, I tried to describe a sort of narration that I could wish to achieve and a sort of narrator that I could wish to become. Am I being too fanciful if I end this section by describing myself as standing again among the paths and the box-hedges but this time being reminded of a bewildering diagram in a book of several hundred pages on the subject of narratology — a diagram of concentric circles and diametrical axes — and regretting that I, a fictional personage myself, have never yet seemed a part of such complexity? Or, should I simply report my pleasant confusion when I look away from the hedges and paths and upwards towards the nearest wing of this building and the window of the room in which these words are being written at this very time?

I am writing again about a supposed author, as I might call him: someone at a desk in some or another room at no great distance from here. He is struggling, if I know anything about him, to compose a few pages of fiction based on, or relating to, or derived from, or inspired by a few weeks that he has never been able to recall. Those were the weeks during his seventeenth year when he sat beside a certain young woman, hardly more than a girl, in a suburban railway train and when they talked together for perhaps ten minutes on every weekday afternoon. If the supposed author, so to call him, believes that a writer of fiction is obliged to explain why his characters, so to call them, behave as they are reported as behaving in his fiction, then he has much to explain about his chief character, a young man, hardly more than a boy, who talked for a few weeks with the young woman mentioned in the previous sentence. He, the supposed author, has to explain, for example, why his chief character had previously travelled regularly for two years in the same railway compartment with the young woman and had glanced often in her direction but had made no attempt to speak to her. Alternatively, if the supposed author feels no obligation to explain what might be called the motives of those who might be called his characters, then his readers, whoever they might be, are free to devise their own explanations. One such reader, for example, might suppose that the chief character, although he would never have used such terms, had always preferred fictional personages to actual personages. That same reader might suppose further that the chief character, soon after he had first exchanged glances with a certain young female person in a railway compartment, had met up with a certain fictional female personage, so to call her. The reader might further suppose that this personage, on a certain afternoon during her fictional life and when she was still a young woman, hardly more than a girl, had met up with a certain fictional male personage, a young man and hardly more than a boy. The lives of the two fictional personages had then seemed to go forward not as the lives of actual persons go forward but as the lives of characters in works of fiction are enabled to go forward, which is to say that the deeds and words and thoughts of the personages seemed not to occur in what is commonly called time but in what was called earlier in this work the narrative dimension . In that dimension, events, so to call them, that might have occupied a year of actual time, so to call it, are reported in a single paragraph whereas the contents of a few moments might need for their full appraisal a chapter that might detain the reader for an hour and might have occupied the writer for a week. In short, while scant details might be said to have been noted from the years when the two young fictional personages chatted in railway compartments or on outings together, details abounded from their later years. Their intimate conversations were transcribed, as it were. Sentences and whole paragraphs were quoted, as it were, from the letters that they wrote during their brief times apart. And, given that these two personages were far from being characters in an actual text, their behaviour was explained in minute detail. And the subject-matter, so to call it, of this fiction-in-the-mind, as it might be called, included the courtship of the two personages, their engagement, their marriage, their honeymoon, and year after year of their life together as husband and wife and parents.

During a certain few moments of a certain afternoon, the chief character of a conjectured piece of fiction spoke for the first time, or so it would have been reported in the piece of fiction, with another character, a young female character whose name he had once misread as Dathar . He, the chief character, could never afterwards recall what he had said to the young female character while they were walking down the ramp from the railway station after having travelled together in silence in the same railway compartment during the previous fifteen minutes. Nor could he afterwards recall what, if anything, she had said to him in reply, but after she had smiled at him when he entered her railway compartment on the following afternoon he had sat beside her as soon as a seat had become available and had talked with her.

He and she, the characters or personages or whatever else the reader may consider them, had talked thus together during the next few weeks. Their conversations had lasted for a total time of about three hours. Given that a great deal of what he heard from her would have answered questions that had occurred to him during the previous two years — what siblings had she? where had she spent her early childhood? where did she go for her holidays? what were her favourite books? what were her hobbies? — he found it strange in later years that he failed to recall not only her answers to such questions but even his posing the questions. In later years he would sometimes feel such unease when alone with some or another female person that he could afterwards recall nothing of the experience, but he was never able to believe that he had been stricken in the presence of Darlene, as he would have learned to call her, with the sort of apprehension that overcame him in the presence of those others. The fact that he willingly met up with her on day after day for several weeks argues against his having been wary or uneasy with her as he was sometimes wary or uneasy in later years with certain female persons, dark-haired or otherwise. The preceding is the sort of sentence that might appear often among the notes made by an author committed to explaining the behaviour of his or her characters, so to call them. If I were reporting the strange forgetfulness of the chief characters of these paragraphs, I would report no more than what is reported in such as the following paragraph.