SOURCE: “Spatialised Time and Circular Time: A Note on Time in the Work of Gerald Murnane and Jorge-Luis Borges,” in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, October, 1997, pp. 185-90.

The image of the journey in time characterises much of twentieth-century fiction—Joyce, Mann, Proust, Svevo and Woolf bear witness—and finds in Australian writing a fertile ground. In fact, the interplay between past and present appears to be one of the recurrent motifs among Australian poets and writers either by virtue of a preoccupation with the inner and outer landscape (White, Jolly, Wallace-Crabbe, Dessaix to name only a few) or with cultural biography and ethnicity (Castro, Mudrooroo, Lazaroo, Cappiello, for instance). The representation of time is not only the object of the story proper, but it also finds expression in the stylistic structuring of a few contemporary texts whose narrativisation of events invites a re-evaluation of temporality, especially in relation to the linearity of ‘clock time’.¹ To this end one might consider the juxtaposition of different levels of narrative in Mark Henshaw's Out of the Line of Fire and in the recent novel Before I Wake by John Scott, to confine myself to two obvious examples.

The journey in time is also one of the most powerful metaphors connecting the work of another Australian author, Gerald Murnane, to the fiction of Jorge-Luis Borges inasmuch as both Borges and Murnane are engaged in questioning the ordinary notion of time and the way in which we perceive and live it. This association is hardly casual. In an interview with Ludmilla Forsyth, Murnane stated that: ‘I read and admired Borges as long ago as 1962’ (42). Considering that Borges' fiction was translated and disseminated outside Argentina only at the end of the fifties, Murnane might well have been one of the first Australian readers and followers of the Argentinian author. Yet behind this shared suspicion of calendrical time, and although appearing to tread on similar poetic paths, Borges and Murnane construct a rather different representation of time. It is the purpose of this note to discuss time in Borges' and Murnane's fiction not only in order to shed some light on attributes of poetic allegiance,² but also, if not primarily, to highlight one aspect of Murnane's prose which, to my view, contributes to its claim to be situated among the most original and innovative writing of recent times.

Borges' ambivalent dealing with the topic at hand is exhibited in his essay ‘New Refutation of Time’ in which he attempts first to deny the existence of time by drawing on Berkeley and Hume's negation of matter and space (‘having denied matter and spirit,’ says Borges, ‘which are continuities, and having denied space also, I do not know with what right we shall retain the continuity that is time’ [183]), and then he refutes his refutation by re-admitting time altogether under the shape of a tiger, a fire and a river which devour, burn and disperse him: ‘Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Borges' (187). ‘New Refutation of Time’ contains, and not only in the explicit contradiction inscribed in the title, a scarcely subterranean hesitation which marks and characterises most of Borges' fiction. My comparative discussion of Borges' and Murnane's understanding of time finds in this hesitation its first paradigmatic and theoretical stepping stone.

At the beginning of ‘New Refutation of Time’ Borges justifies his quixotic confrontation with time by emphasising that this battle is carried out by the nocturnal side of himself: ‘In the course of a life dedicated to literature and, occasionally, to metaphysical perplexity, I have perceived or sensed a refutation of time, which I myself disbelieve, but which comes to visit me at night and in the weary dawns with the illusory force of an axiom’ (172). It appears that Borges is interested here in differentiating between his day-self and his night-self, the former qualified by rationality and the latter by idealistic, if not altogether romantic, traits. The fracture of the self witnessed in ‘New Refutation of Time’ reappears years later in the short narrative ‘Borges and I’, where the writer Borges is explicitly opposed to the actual Borges, and in many of Borges' short stories whose protagonists often experience a duplication. In ‘The South’, for instance, Dahlmann is at one and the same time the person who dies in a hospital bed and the person who travels south just to die in a knife fight; in “The Secret Miracle’ Hladik, the writer, is given a taste of eternity while Hladik the man is gnawed by the ticking of calendrical time separating him from his execution; in ‘The Death and the Compass’ Lonnrot is both the killer and the victim; in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, Yu Tsun is alternatively the killer of the Sinologist named Albert and the murderer of his ancestor Ts'ui Pen. This duplication, a kind of mirroring game is not only the result of Borges' predilection for riddles but also, and most importantly, the necessary outcome of an unresolvable hesitation which stems from the deeply rooted contradiction engendered in his experience as a person as opposed to his experience as a writer. Whereas Borges the writer, the nocturnal thinker of ‘New Refutation of Time’, can imagine eternity and the annihilation of linear time, the actual Borges is immersed in chronology and mortality. The difference is also that separating a quotidian, prosaic Borges and a metaphysical and ultimately fictive Borges. This hesitation is apparent in the duplication of the self but also in the narrative discourse characterising Borges' fiction in relation to time.

In order to elucidate this point, and also to introduce the discussion of Murnane's writing, I need to make use of my second key analytical passe-partout (the first being ‘hesitation’), notably the ‘journey’. Many of Borges' protagonists, like those of Murnane, travel. Dahlmann boards a train southward, Lonnrot takes the train to Triste-le-Roy, Yu Tsun travels, and again by train, to the town of Ashgrove, the director in The Plains leaves the coast with the plains as his destination. These travels are moreover distinguished by a further analogy, that of being metaphors. Although Lonnrot's and Yu Tsun's journeys, like that of the director in The Plains, present many of the features typical of physical journeys in space, their destinations betray traits more akin to mental and metaphysical places than real ones. This is not to mention the journey in ‘The South’ which is endowed so much with dream-like and mental allusions that it is virtually impossible to mistake it for a ‘real’ journey in space. Although the function of these journeys is not so much to move the traveller within a physical space as a mental space, they still retain some of the characteristics of a conventional journey, especially in relation to time. It is precisely by studying some of these characteristics that I will be able to illustrate the qualities differentiating Borges' journeys from those of Murnane together with their respective understandings of time.

The ordinary understanding of ‘journey’ implies the movement necessary to cover a distance from a given place to a prearranged destination. This conventional interpretation is legitimated and fixed by the definitions of journey found in dictionaries: ‘Any travel: tour: excursion: movement from end to end of a fixed course’ (Chambers 772); ‘1. A course of travel from one place to another, esp. by land. 2. A distance travelled or suitable for travelling in a specified time’ (Macquarie 943). What is striking about these definitions, which, like any definitions to be found in dictionaries, echo the voice and the linguistic values of a whole culture and tradition, is the clear premeditation and purposefulness inherent in the notion of ‘journey’. According to the western cultural tradition, a traveller ought to be aware of his or her destination and the time necessary to reach it before embarking on a trip. This also means that by being so focused on the place of arrival, our traveller will not (should not) be distracted or diverted by other routes encountered during the course of the journey. Indeed, western tradition is suspicious of digressions and dispenses all sorts of warnings one of the most powerful of which, emotionally and psychologically speaking, is administered at an early stage with the iconic tale of ‘Red-Riding Hood’. The same notion is found in the Odyssey and in the perilous and anguished journey of Ulysses who, regardless of the many alluring wonders met along the way, never forgets that Ithaca is his only destination.

Diagonal, zig-zagging, forking and branching paths acquire an eerie, uncanny feeling compared to the bright, familiar, direct linear course. Wandering is thus discouraged not only because it might take the traveller into unwelcoming and threatening territories, but also because it is a waste of time and an indication of indolence. In the western tradition, the wanderer, the gipsy, has often been looked down on as a strange and peculiar type, an outcast who lacks the more basic social skills and ambitions, notably a home, a place and a structured context to which to return.³ ‘Free from every secure dwelling, the unsettled, undomesticated wanderer is always unsettling and uncanny. Having forsaken the straight and narrow and given up all thought of return, the wanderer appears to be a vagrant, a renegade, a pervert—an outcast who is an irredeemable outlaw’ (Taylor 150).

Time is of course as much an issue as space. They are in fact linked inextricably inasmuch as notions such as linearity, circularity and wandering are not only inscribed in space but also in time. Wandering aimlessly, for instance, shows an open disregard for the sacred symbol of home as well as a demystification of chronological and linear time with its attendant tenets of deadlines and irreversible ends. To wander means to subvert the notion of an indivisible and ultimate point of arrival both at the level of time and space.

The deeply rooted notion of linearity has not only informed the western understanding of physical journeys but has also affected other areas, including fiction. If western fiction has been intent on organising and constructing symbolic and metaphorical narratives which warn against the dangers of straying from the path, it has also attempted to imitate and represent the ideal journey through the clear and unmistakable juxtaposition of a beginning, a middle and an end.

In Borges' fiction, the journey is away from reality toward an unknown destination. It is a journey which does not contemplate a return to the point of departure, to home, in that by entering the journey the traveller experiences an irredeemable split which separates him/her into two halves. One of these halves will remain at home, grounded in reality, the other will be set free to travel in fiction, in this medium or vehicle headed for an unmapped place lacking spatial and temporal referents. As a result Borges' fiction generates a host of doubles.

The many journeys in Borges' fiction (Dahlmann's journey to the south, Yu Tsun's journey to Ashgrove, Lonnrot's journey to Triste-le-Roy) could be thus interpreted as metaphor for a more metaphysical and hermeneutic journey whose function is to connect the traveller with a truer reality. As journeys toward another realm, they also enact a ritual of initiation, a passage from one life into another which in Borges' fiction is usually announced by an eerie and unfamiliar atmosphere marking the transition and transformation affecting the characters. Let us remember, for instance, the fantastic, dream-like, hallucinatory landscape encapsulating Yu Tsun's or Dahlmann's or Lonnrot's approach to their destination. The same eerie and uncanny feeling is experienced in the pages of The Plains where, as in Borges, we are presented with a metaphorical, mental journey delivering the protagonist from the artificially constructed society of the coast to a purely intellectual construct in which philosophical debates and lucubrations seem to rule unchallenged.

At a first reading the destinations of Borges' characters appear to be straightforward. Dahlmann leaves the city heading south, Yu Tsun travels from his hotel to the town of Ashgrove and so does Lonnrot, who travels from the centre of the city to its periphery. Their journeys are linear and chronologically plausible. They are all travellers possessed by a sense of purpose, all desperately and anxiously committed to an end which, in their case, coincides with death, the ultimate and non-negotiable, timeless end. Indeed they seem to symbolise the passage of chronological time and the decay which is, almost inevitably, attached to it. By contrast, in Murnane, apart from the metaphorical and Barthesian death of the author by the hand of the reader (see especially Inland), it is rare to find death.

Yet, death also decrees the end of time, its disappearance into the void of individual annihilation. The equation of time with humans (‘The real presence of Time in the World is called Man [sic]. Time is Man, and Man is Time’ [Derrida 85]), the poignant correspondence and apparent interdependence which seem to link the two, as if time were only possible because of life and vice-versa, is one of the most salient characteristics of Borges' fiction and reconnects strongly with his introspection into eternity. It is not by accident that the presence of death with its many symbols and omnipresent shadows occurs in Borges' writings much more frequently than in Murnane's.

This is another reason which explains why the protagonists of Borges' stories appear to have a clearer idea of their destinations, and be endowed with a tension pushing them resolutely toward a point of arrival. If their purposefulness is unquestionable, since it is their aspiration toward a concrete end, it is the nature and identity of this end which remains problematic for it keeps multiplying and accruing a plurality of features and meanings. As a result, the orderly linearity characterised by the beginning and the middle of Borges' protagonists' journeys in the end explodes into a myriad of alternative courses which, departing from their matrix, radiate, engendering parallel and forking times. It is on these grounds that Dahlmann's and Lonnrot's deaths can acquire double and treble meanings, that Yu Tsun's crime can exponentially multiply itself. In Borges the linear movement detonates, pulverising its original linearity and homogeneity.

In Murnane the linearity of the conventional journey is altogether dissolved and replaced with a different set of geometric patterns. This is most evident from Inland onward, but even in The Plains, where a semblance of linearity is still recognisable on the surface of the page, the orderly movement toward a prearranged destination comes abruptly to a halt. Like Borges' protagonists, the director in The Plains leaves the coast in order to reach the plains. In line with the traditional understanding of travelling, he has rationally prepared himself and made careful plans which, in theory, will not fail to take him where he wants to go in the time that he has reasonably set aside for the purpose. This happens of course before he leaves, within a narrative the reader of The Plains can only imagine by interpreting the many clues and allusions scattered throughout the actual text which, by all accounts, is not about a journey. In fact, The Plains is only partially a book about the memories of a journey and mainly about the unsolvable impasse of a journey. And yet, although the preparation for the journey to the plains is not part of the text, it is obvious that the director has a mental image of his destination before he leaves. In his mind the plains exist as a tangible, concrete place, a dot on a map, which, thus, is susceptible of being known and possessed via the journey. As a matter of fact, and The Plains is the chronicle of this realisation, the director finds out that the plains are not a site, a location which can be encompassed by the eye and represented accordingly, but rather a landscape which is simultaneously here and everywhere, both in time and space.

The rotating image I have used in relation to The Plains becomes the main feature of Murnane's subsequent fictions. But contrary to The Plains, Murnane's following journeys are not characterised by a line but by a set of different patterns (circles, diagonal lines etc.) which keep generating other patterns. This is the wandering process of Murnane's fiction in which the sense of a clear destination, end or centre is irreparably lost. Murnane's travellers continue travelling aimlessly in search of something which resists and defies their search, moving away from a home where they do not belong. This idiosyncratic and haphazard journey is exemplified by the interlocking, digressive, self-referring, wrapping and ultimately unending narratives making up Landscape with Landscape, Inland, Velvet Waters and Emerald Blue.

Time is essential in shaping Borges' journey into knowledge. Time becomes an example, bearing witness to the actual development of the explorative search. It is on these grounds that parallel, forking, circular times and eternity are introduced to illustrate what may be experienced once the threshold of ultimate reality is trespassed. But as a mere representation and imitation of a set of times to which language cannot entirely do justice they remain endowed with and immersed in their opposite, namely linear time. I am touching here on one of the most relevant differences between Borges' and Murnane's writing in relation to time. Whereas in Borges writing is still arranged around a linear chronology whereby the beginning is replaced by a middle and the middle by an end, in Murnane writing is divested of its linear structure. This is to say that if in Borges, parallel, forking, circular times and eternity are described and offered to the reader along the axis of linear time, in Murnane they act on the page not so much as representation but rather as concrete events. This argument is not only based on the content of the actual stories but also on their narrative structure, on the language in which they are spoken to us. In Borges we have complete stories whose endings, although opening a plurality of interpretations, are satisfactory and gratifying. As readers we close Borges' books with a feeling of puzzlement but also with a sense of completion which is engendered by the assurance that we have read something to its end. It does not matter so much whether this end is only one among many others, what really matters is that this end is plausible. And this is indeed because it takes the narration to a climax and finally to a close, wrapping it all up nicely. Moreover, the end is reached by following, as we have seen above, a linear path which agrees with our experience as readers engaging with a story. In fact, as readers of a generation used to reading books as if their internal life were ticking at the same pace as our life, we expect the story to proceed forward in a kind of cause and effect fashion whereby one event must ignite another event which in turn nudges the story ahead and so on until we get to a plausible end. The end, as I stressed before, does not necessarily need to be the only possible end, but it must be one of them; it must have the structural capacity and the narrative weight to impede and discourage the chain-reaction effect which started the story in the first place. Borges' fiction makes use of such endings as well as the cause-effect mechanism to propel a story. By contrast, Murnane's fiction does not.

In Murnane the cause and effect process is still present, but instead of propelling the story ahead along a linear time it generates a sprawling narrative which disperses itself in all directions. This fragmentation subverts the stable notion of ‘centre’, be it a narrative's ending, the final destination of a journey or the paradigmatic order inscribed in the linearity of time, and in so doing it redescribes the reader's perception of and relation with the text. What we confront is a set of texts deprived of a central and guiding narrative whose place is occupied instead by a myriad of narratives which constantly keep interlocking and referring to each other:

I have written by now on many pages. Each day I cover a page with writing and then I push the page gently away from me towards the edge of my table. By now the table is strewn with so many pages that each page I push away from me causes other pages to drift ahead of it. Sometimes one of those drifting pages drifts over the edge of the table in the way that a cloud drifts over the edge of a district of level land. Sometimes on my way from this table to the window I pass some of the pages that have drifted over the table-horizon. Sometimes my walking past causes the air to move and a page to drift a little across the floor.

(Inland 84-85)

It is as if the pages of Murnane's books are free to float and mingle with other pages of the same text or with pages of other texts. ‘In contrast to the closure of the book, the text is radically open … The intertextuality of scripts displays the codependent origination of texts. Every text arises and passes away through its interplay with other texts. Consequently, no single text can be regarded as either the absolute origin of another text or as the initial source of the entire metonymic chain of texts. Texts and the network within which they are inscribed stand in a tangled relationship of coimplication’ (Taylor 178-179). This ‘intertextuality’ gives rise to a superimposing effect whose result often evokes a feeling of deja vu in the reader of Murnane's fiction. The implications for time are obviously enormous. A narrative structured on the multiplication of narratives, superimpositions, and borrowings obviously defies the experience of linearity and not only in relation to the story narrated but also with regard to the actual, physical act of reading, to the extent that the reader of Murnane's fiction is often explicitly invited to go backwards rather than forwards.

Yet, the superimposition of different narratives not only invites a re-appraisal of our experience as readers, who are invited to wander in a vast landscape of narratives rather than follow a prearranged and clearly defined path but, on the theoretical level of poetics, it also describes an alternative apperception of time. By writing memories and images and by combining them on a large and flat surface, Murnane circumvents the chronological experience inherent in the perspectivisation to which human events have been subjected in western society. By taking away the depth of field imbued in our understanding of time, with which western narratives have been engulfed since Aristotle, Murnane creates a new temporal dimension in which the counterposition between past, present and future is no longer functional simply because it is invisible.

It may be said that Murnane adopts a totally different way of looking at things. Thus time, the life of a person, is not seen by applying a perspectivising, historicised reading whereby some events are closer than others, and hence placed and ordered on a chronological scale, but rather by displaying it on a surface where events are disposed as countries are arranged on a map. The levelling of time thus achieved makes it possible to see the past, the present and the future coexisting and interlocuting among themselves; they belong to the same map, to the same landscape. To distinguish between them does not mean to understand them as closer or more remote but instead to focus on one rather than the other. Let us think, for instance, of the episode in The Plains where the director superimposes a patch of ‘present’ landscape here and a patch of imagined landscape there onto a picture painted many years before. At the end of this intervention the picture he sees is a combination, a composite of past and present:

Towards the end of the summer my notes were so extensive that I sometimes put them aside and looked for simpler means of devising the opening scenes of my film. I would stand at the window, holding up against the glass a painting done by the young woman in the last years of her childhood, and trying to see some detail of the land outside as though it was suspended in the translucent swathes of faded paint. Sometimes I cut a piece from the paper so that a distant view of actual plains appeared at a significant point of a painting. Once, I pasted a detail from a painting onto the glass at the centre of a large rectangular blank in a different painting. When this arrangement was fixed to the window I walked slowly towards it, murmuring music appropriate to the first frames of a film concerned with memories and visions and dreams.

(The Plains 62)

This compression, this levelling of time means that Murnane, although still travelling in time, is in fact experiencing a journey in space. Yet this space cannot be travelled in depth because it is not a three-dimensional space which allows a vertical exploration but rather a two-dimensional space where one can only wander horizontally on the surface.

Murnane's books challenge our interpretation of space and time by reviewing from scratch notions such as perspective, depth of field, three-dimensionality, gravity, in other words, the scientific basis on which our experience of reality rests. No wonder then that travelling with Murnane can cause a sense of dizziness and defamiliarisation, of bewilderment and shock. If Borges questioned the conventional notion of being in the world while maintaining his feet firmly grounded in this world, Murnane takes the challenge further by looking at this world as if he were in another world.

Notes

1. The term ‘clock time’ was used by Heidegger to describe temporal linearity; see Being and Time (465ff).

2. The contiguity of Borges' and Murnane's fiction has been discussed by, among others, Stephen Kolsky (97), Helen Daniel (310), Don Anderson (63) and Barry Oakley (46).

3. On this point see also Paul Carter (328).

Works Cited

Anderson, Don. Hot Copy. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1986.

Borges, Jorge-Luis. Other Inquisitions Trans. Ruth L. C. Simms, Austin: U of Texas P, 1964.

Chambers English Dictionary. Cambridge: Chambers and Cambridge UP, 1988.

Carter, Paul. The Lie of the Land. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

Daniel, Helen. Liars: Australian New Novelists. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1988.

Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Trans. D. B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.

Forsyth, Ludmilla. ‘An Interview with Gerald Murnane.’ Gerald Murnane. Ed. John Hanrahan. Melbourne: Footscray Foundation for Australian Studies, 1987. 42-68.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Trine. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

Kolsky, Stephen. ‘Exploring Inland.’ Outrider (1991): 97-109.

The Macquarie Dictionary. 2nd. rev. ed. Chatswood, NSW: Macquarie Library, 1987.

Murnane, Gerald. Inland. London: Faber and Faber, 1989.

———. The Plains. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1984.

Oakley, Barry. ‘Negotiating Strange Terrain.’ Sydney Morning Herald, 8 June (1985): 46.

Taylor, Mark. Erring. A Postmodern A/Theology. Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1984.