Gerald Murnane is my favorite writer and I reread his work often. He has been called a grounded visionary who writes mystic fictions. His prose is virtuosic, with grammatically precise, beautifully constructed, yet oftentimes complex sentences that may require rereading. Merve Emre has praised the “technicity” of his writing. In discussing his work, Murnane has said, “behind a simple seeming image can lie a dense network of meaning.” He talks about a “country on the far side of fiction”, whose “setting is place after place in the invisible world”. This “invisible world”, which can be equated with our mind, contains a “richly detailed map of an immense landscape.” There are many dichotomies at play in his work: visible vs invisible; actual vs. possible; communication vs silence; presence vs absence.
These all come into play in ‘Stone Quarry’ and any attempt at unearthing the import of this story will be but a feeble effort. I can but only offer some brief glints of light as I have discerned them. It is about a most unusual writing workshop, the amusingly named Waldo school, whose avowed purpose is to communicate the seriousness of writing fiction. Participants are not allowed to talk to each other; communication is done by exchanging fiction they have written during the day. Writing is destroyed at the end of the workshop, suggesting that when we write it is primarily for ourselves. An amusing scene which should resonate with every writer is of a participant still revising his work as he is preparing to throw it in the bonfire. As in many of Murnane’s stories there is also an unapproachable, inaccessible woman.
For me, the essence of the story is about the solitary nature of reading and writing. My favorite quote about writing comes from this story. “A writer’s precious resource is the belief that he or she is the solitary witness to an inexhaustible profusion of images from which one might read all the wisdom of the world.” The narrator senses that he must approach the actual obliquely, looking inward into the solitude of the self to become a “starer into the fog” and a “mutterer of the names of islands on the wrong side of the country”. It might then be the case that words might be found where “the invisible was on the point of becoming visible”.
First published in Meanjin, 1986, and available to read here. Collected in Stream System: Collected Stories of Gerald Murnane, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018
A Personal Anthology 