Border Districts
Gerald Murnane
And Other Stories
Purported to be his farewell to fiction writing, Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts is a report of an elderly man’s ‘image-world’ as he contemplates the memories that have shaped his mind. Bearing a semblance to autobiography, this modern stream of consciousness is contemplative at its best, and dull at its worst. With digression upon digression, the narrator explores the impact of mental representations.
The self-described remembering man argues that our ‘image memories’ construct our distinct personal reality – we imbue stimuli with qualities not inherent in them. He ponders why certain images resound with us, shaping and contextualising our experiences, while others blur into the background. Structured such that snippets of reality feed into an abundant spring of memories and musings, the narrator makes no effort to filter the trivial meaning and, at times, these ramblings appear to be of interest to none but the remembering man himself.
Nevertheless, the novel details the mind’s seemingly insignificant sources of inspiration. As today’s youth are bombarded by an overwhelming influx of imagery from television and the Internet, our consumption far exceeds that of the narrator. In this way, Murnane highlights how reduced consumption of information may facilitate the development of a more meaningful relationship with the available stimuli.
Highly conceptual in nature, Border Districts is an introspective, thought-provoking novel, exploring the grainy depths of our consciousness.
Words: Courtney Byrne
