Murnane Gerald - A Million Windows

During all the time while I was writing the previous six paragraphs, some or another image has appeared to me from among the sequences of images that would first have appeared to me twenty-five years ago, while I was reading for the first time a piece of short fiction sent as an unsolicited contribution to a periodical that employed me for several years to help select fiction for publication. Before I had finished even my first reading of the piece, I had decided to recommend it for publication, and it was later published. Of all the other pieces that I would have thus recommended I recall only a few titles, a few authors’ names, and a few imprecise images that would have occurred to me while I read the pieces, which I usually read only once. In connection with the piece of fiction mentioned just now, I cannot claim to recall what happened during my first reading for the reason that I have been drawn to read the piece a number of times during the twenty-five years since, so that the images brought to my mind and the feelings linked to the images have been often augmented or renewed and I am often able to recall whole sentences from the text itself. The title of the piece is ‘The Characters of Nineteenth-Century Fiction’, and the author is Louise Davenport. The text, which comprises fewer than a thousand words, begins with the sentence ‘She wanted to squash the characters she read about in nineteenth-century fiction.’ The remainder of the text reports that the chief character kept many of the characters of nineteenth-century fiction in matchboxes; that on a certain day she killed the characters one after another in her parents’ bedroom — not by squashing them but by breaking their tiny bodies with a toy axe; that she then took the matchboxes full of the dead, broken bodies of the fictional persons out into the sunshine and carried them to a shallow irrigation channel on the boundary of her parents’ property in the north-central district of the state where I sit writing these words; that she waded into the channel and emptied the matchboxes into the muddy water among clumps of bulrushes; and that she afterwards returned home and began to rake the grass-cuttings left by her brother, who was mowing their parents’ lawn.

Her name is Torfrida, and he has never during the past fifty years thought of her as any sort of character from any sort of fiction, he being the occupant of some or another room not far from this room. (If the doors after doors along the dim corridors hereabouts had nameplates or even numerals on them, I could be more precise, but when once I tried to suggest such a system I was told, somewhat pompously, it seemed to me, that bright lighting and unambiguous labelling would be not at all in keeping with the tasks undertaken in this part of the building, which tasks have always been agreed to possess a certain mysteriousness, or so I was told.) He claims that no word in the language denotes the class of being that she belongs to. Sometimes, for the sake of convenience, he calls her a ghost, but he ought rather, he tells us, to use the odd-sounding term haunter , given that the verb to haunt comes close to defining her dealings with him. While he admits that certain passages in a certain work of fiction were in some way connected with his becoming aware of her, if he were to set about making notes — here, in this very corridor and on this very afternoon — for a fictional account of her connection with him, he would surely begin by mentioning not only a certain book but certain places, a certain piece of music, and even a certain weather, as though to allow for the possibility that she might have appeared to him, so to speak, at a certain time and in a certain place no matter what fictional text happened to be in his hands.

He was mostly deprived of books during his schooldays. The few books in his parents’ house were of little interest to him. No school that he attended was equipped with a library. Even his secondary school, in a suburb that would have been called middle-class, had not even a shelf of books in any classroom. In his fifteenth year, he learned that a circulating library for young persons had been recently established in an upstairs room in the shopping centre near his school. When he registered himself as a borrower, he was made uneasy by several prominent signboards announcing that the library was a project of the ladies’ committee of the local branch of the Liberal Party. He understood that his parents voted for the Labor Party, as had their parents, and regarded the Liberals as the party of the oppressors, and so he felt obliged to tell his father who it was who had made available the books that he, the borrower, had begun to bring home. His father was at once suspicious and for some weeks inspected every book but decided in time that they were harmless. Even he, the borrower, was at first wary of the mostly white-haired women who registered his borrowings and returnings and was relieved that they did not preach to him on political topics.

The library was quite unlike any of the places that go by that name nowadays. It occupied a large room above a shop in a street of shops. The only items of furniture were the table where the white-haired women sat and the shelves around the walls where books were stored. There was nowhere any sort of poster or what might be called nowadays a promotional display. He, the chief character of these paragraphs, could not recall in later years having seen any picture books or non-fiction books in the library, although this may be due to his having been interested only in the collection of fiction. This comprised many hundreds of titles, all with cloth covers and all second-hand. Despite his feeling in great need of books, he mostly struggled to find a volume of interest to him. He believes nowadays that he visited the library for only a few months before deciding that he had read every book with a claim on him. He recalls having read every volume he could find with Robert Louis Stevenson as its author and still recalls a few of his experiences as a reader of them. He recalls likewise several books by Charles Dickens. He recalls the fact of his having read Lorna Doone , by an author whose name he long ago forgot, but of his experience as a reader of the book he recalls nothing, although he seems to recall, from the few hours after he had borrowed the book but before he had begun to read it, his looking forward to reading about the setting, so to call it, of the narrative, which setting, or so he believed, was remote moorland. Finally, he recalls his having read a number of books by an author whose name appeared on the books as D.K. Broster and who may have been a woman, or so he was told by someone many years afterwards. From the many hours that he must have spent in reading those books, all of which he believes to have been of the kind often called historical fiction, he recalls only a few moments that he has sometimes recalled during the sixty years since those moments passed. He seems to recall that he was reading at the time a book with the title The Flight of the Heron . He certainly recalls that the historical setting, so to call it, of the book in question was the Vendean War, so to call it, which took place in the south-west of France during the first years after the Revolution. He recalls that the chief character of the book was a young man, probably an aristocrat and certainly a devout Roman Catholic, as were most of the rebels taking part in the so-called war. He, the man recalling, felt little sympathy that he can recall for the chief character, who seemed to him too virtuous and proper. And yet, after sixty years during which he forgot all else that he may have experienced while reading several books by D.K. Broster, he still recalls his reading, towards the end of the book, a report of the chief character’s learning from a letter, and at a time when the Vendean forces were hard pressed, that the young woman with whom he had been for long in love and with whom he had had, or so he supposed, an understanding — the young woman had married or had betrothed herself to another man. From one or another of the pages of text towards the end of the book, he, the man recalling, is able to recall an actual phrase. The third-person narrator, claiming to have access to the thoughts and feelings of the chief character, and using almost the very technique that I called earlier double voicing , reports that the young woman mentioned had for long been to the young man his guiding star , or it may have been his shining star .