Jim Elkins's Reviews > Barley Patch

A Collision Between Metafiction and Empathy

An extremely inventive experimental novel, with a distinctive authorial voice. The back cover copy compares "Barley Patch" to Calvino and Perec: the first is wrong, the second misleading. It's a book about the author's decision -- which is rescinded and contradicted many times in the book -- to stop writing fiction. Its salient features are Murnane's strangely disaffected and self-aware voice, and his insistently overly accurate forms of description; in that last trait, I think, he is closer to Stein than Perec.

The book takes the form of narratives interrupted by italicized questions, asked by an imaginary reader, but in first person. In the following passage, the author is explaining why he thinks he does not have the kind of imagination necessary to write fiction (which he clearly has), and why that capacity would not, in any case, interest him:

"[In italics, asked by a reader:] Surely I have paused at least once during a lifetime of reading and have admired the passage in front of me as a product of the writer's excellent imagination.
"[In roman:] I can recall clearly my having paused often during my first reading of the book of fiction 'Wuthering Heights,' which reading took place in the autumn of 1956. I can recall equally clearly my having paused often during my reading of the book of fiction 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles,' which reading took place in the winter of 1959. I doubt that I paused in order to feel gratitude or admiration towards any authorial personage." (p. 95)

"Barley Patch" is at is best when Murnane is moving patiently among the apparently badly remembered episodes of his childhood ("apparently" because in fact he has manuscripts tens of thousands of pages long on his memories), which was mainly spent reading, and trying to re-allocate them as putatively fictional elaborations that would, supposedly, have been parts of the fiction project that he decided not to write, but which is, manifestly, the book "Barley Patch." The narrative slows in the middle section, in which he just goes ahead and tells the only story he thinks would have been worth making into a fiction, the story of how his parents met. First that story is told in a carefully distanced third person, but then it becomes first person, and toward the end there are rote mentions of the fictional frame:

"I would have reported in my abandoned work of fiction that the chief character, while he watched the rain..." (p. 221)

The book's strength is in its strangeness, and its strangeness is dependent on how carefully Murnane restricts the fiction of not writing fiction, and not writing autobiography, by confining fiction, writing, memory, and autobiography in elaborate stockades of conditionals and the past subjunctive mood. Later in the book, those devices become simpler. (For example, pp. 162-3.) (This slipping back from hypotheticals about unwritten fictions, to examples of those unwritten fictions, to the writing of the fictions themselves, also happens in "A Million Windows.")

At the beginning Murnane reports how, as a child, he experienced books by inserting himself into their fictional worlds, not as one of the represented characters, but as someone the author hadn't invented. That curious idea returns in a strange, almost mystical fashion at the end, when he speculates that characters in fictions might have even more complex lives beyond the fictions of which they are a part:

"During all the years while I had been a writer of fiction and while I had sometimes struggled to write fiction -- during all those years, I had wanted to learn what places appeared in the mind of one or another fictional character whenever he or she stared past the furthest place mentioned in the text that had seemed to give rise to him or her... Now, I was free to suppose what I had often suspected: many a so-called fictional character was not a native of some or another fictional text but of a further region never yet written about." (pp. 246-7)

For me the interest and the drawback of Murnane is condensed in this passage: it's interesting because it echoes Stein's compulsive grammars, but disappointing because the theme (imagined lives of fictional characters) is not the theme he'd started with (imagined lives of invented characters supposedly living among fictional characters). The former is more interesting than the latter, and the fact that the book starts with one and ends with the other is a sign that Murnane hasn't purified his project. "Barley Patch" is really about obsessive, compulsive distancing, categorizing, re-naming, and re-imagining.

To be exact, there are three founding fantasies: that fictional characters in fictions may lead lives beyond the fictions of which they are a part; that imaginary characters may also be objects of attention in the context of fictions that don't include them; and that it might be possible to wander in the spaces implied by a novel, even if they are not described. (This last comes from a meditation on a reproduction of Claude Lorrain's "Landscape with Samuel Anointing David," which has an enticing uninhabited distant landscape.) These fantasies congeal, I think, into a single desire to disappear multiply, repeatedly, beyond rescue: not only out of "the place that I called the world," as he says, and not only into fiction, but through or beyond fiction to places only partly represented, or not represented at all.

The desire is inseparable from Murnane's sense of writing: he repeats and elaborates it in "A Million Windows," 2016. (The book got a very unsympathetic review in the New York Times, June 19, 2016, which misses much of Murnane's point.) As the desire works itself into books, it produces an idiosyncratic theory of metafiction in which the usual acknowledgment of the artificiality of writing is mingled with a stubborn insistence that immersion happens best, or only, in imaginary figures within imagined fictions. I think Murnane isn't in control of this fantasy, which is a desire for full empathetic imagination and real immersive picturing, undercut by a disillusion about desire and a need to exhibit its failure. Just as deeply as he seeks immersion, he believes that it has to be constrained--in this book, immersion is located only certain rare species of invented creatures, and yet he cannot decide which sorts of creatures, because that would mean giving up the multiplying metafictional frames that protect him from those very creatures.

"Barley Patch" is not the book it appears to be. For a reviewer like David Winters, it calls attention "to the way the content of a work exceeds whatever words are read or written." ("The Far Side of Fiction," in the book "Infinite Fictions: Essays on Literature and Theory," 2015, p. 113.) It's true that "Barley Patch" is a disquisition on the openness of fiction: but that is its argument, not its expressive value. What matters here is how all that goes wrong, repeatedly, because Murnane is not, even as he writes, in control of his desire, which is at once to disappear into the work and to turn the sad impossibility of that disappearance into art.