Cirrus@Austlit

'Let us take the bull by the horns:

[Gerald Murnane] is without question both the most original and most significant Australian author of the last fifty years, and the best writer Australia has produced since Christina Stead. (Stinson 104)

'One cannot help but ask what Murnane himself might make of this claim. On the one hand, he would surely find it flattering: who would not? To have one’s work hailed as even more significant than that of – to take but a few of the usual suspects – Alexis Wright, Patrick White, Helen Garner and David Malouf is no mean feat. And this is to exclude the poets from consideration, though Stinson’s terms (‘author’ and ‘writer’, in lieu of the narrower ‘novelist’) notably do not. What about another Wright – Judith? Or Oodgeroo Noonuccal? Les Murray? Lionel Fogarty? John Kinsella? To declare it is so with nary an instance of comparison makes this seem less a self-evidently defensible claim than a provocation intended to provoke spirited debate, especially given that little indication is offered as to what constitutes significance for Stinson. His approach in the preceding hundred pages is by turns introductory, contextual, and explicatory, offering a series of useful inroads that both academic and non-academic readers might follow to arrive at a better grasp of Murnane’s four post-break fictions, rather than evaluative, as this claim might otherwise lead readers to believe. The chief virtues of Murnane (2023) as a contribution to scholarship are its careful tracking of references across and beyond the titular author’s corpus, and its account of this obsessive grammarian’s oeuvre-spanning practice of literary revisionism, both of which build steadily upon the foundation laid by Imre Salusinszky’s Gerald Murnane (1993) and Anthony Uhlmann’s edited essay collection Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One (2020). This comparatively modest scholarly endeavour makes Stinson’s big bad bold claim all the more striking. Such an unusually explicit judgment of Murnane’s place in Australian literary history arrives at the eleventh hour, just a page or two before the critic’s voice cedes the soapbox entirely (well, almost) to that of this most auto-exegetical of writers, via the interview that permits Stinson’s subject the last word on his work. Footnotes, of course, excluded. Which takes us rather neatly back to the question with which we began.' (Introduction)