A Million Windows

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Gerald Murnane. A Million Windows

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OTHER BOOKS BY GERALD MURNANE

TAMARISK ROW

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One of the terms often appearing in books meant to instruct intending writers of fiction is point-of-view. Being an unscholarly person, I can only speculate as to when some or another writer of fiction or commentator on fiction first devised the term, which he or she surely did in an effort to describe and, partly, to explain a process that countless readers of fiction and nearly as many writers of it had engaged in for centuries past and engage in to this day without troubling themselves to examine it. The result of the process is that the reader (myself and, surely, not a few others excluded) is persuaded that he or she stands in relation to one or more fictional personages as no one in the world where I sit writing these words could ever stand in relation to another: the reader (excluding those noted earlier in this sentence) is persuaded that he or she knows what the fictional personage thinks, feels, remembers, hopes for, fears, and much else. I am not concerned here with the manifest folly of the reader thus persuaded: the reader who wants from fiction an experience hardly more subtle than the viewer gets from a film. I prefer to suppose that the discerning reader of this work of fiction needs no further reminder from me in the matter. Perhaps even the discerning reader, however, is unaware of the many variations of the process that goes nowadays by the name point-of-view. At one extreme is the boldness and directness of the nineteenth-century writer of fiction who informs the reader, as though possessing an unchallenged right to do so, that this or that character is contented or disconnected or weighed down with remorse or uplifted by hope. Many a writer of this sort ranges freely from character to character, even within the same few pages, with the result that the reader might be enabled to know the intentions of each of two characters in a dispute between antagonists, for example, or a proposal of marriage. One such passage that occurs to me reports the scene, so to call it, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, in which Tess Durbeyfield and Alec d’Urberville meet for the first time. The narrator reports in the same few pages not only Tess’s thoughts and feelings but some of what occurs to Alex when he first meets her and even the motives of Alec’s dead father, he who had built the mansion in front of which Tess and Alec meet and had appropriated the ancient surname that seemingly linked the two characters. I quote here a short paragraph from the chapter titled ‘The Maiden’.

Tess’s sense of a certain ludicrousness in her errand was now so strong that, notwithstanding her awe of him, and her general discomfort at being here, her rosy lips curved towards a smile, much to the attraction of the swarthy Alexander.

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