A Season on Earth with animals: Gerald Murnane’s mundane afterlife

Abstract

“By the age of eight I had been thoroughly taught in the eschatology of the Catholic Church. Yet nothing I had been taught could help me decide what would happen to the red cow if she died … I knew without asking that animals lacked souls. For an animal there was no heaven or hell, only the earth. But I could not bear to think of the red cow as living on the earth and then dying forever.”

Gerald Murnane, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs¹

Having learnt the eschatology of the Catholic Church at a Catholic college and seminary, Murnane is aware of the dogma that excludes nonhuman animals from the afterlife.² According to Eschatology or the Catholic Doctrine of Last Things: A Dogmatic Treatise: animals are excluded from the afterlife in heaven or paradise because they lack souls.³ Nevertheless, Murnane denies this dogma in his fiction by including animals in paradise landscapes grounded on earth, where they are saved from their mortal suffering.⁴ In the epigraph quoted above, Murnane recalls the end of Frank Dalby Davison’s novel Man-Shy, where a red cow and her calf are dying from thirst because they are cut off from their water supply. In the final scene, we are left with the image of the calf lying on the ground beside his mother who waits to “join the shadowy … herd that had passed from the ranges forever.”⁵ In his version, Murnane saves the cattle from their dire fate by depicting them as living forever in an earthly paradise where they freely “[drink] … from a pool at his feet.” Rather than consigning the cattle to death, Murnane depicts their afterlife journey as a pilgrimage through valleys and meadows in the company of a “shadowy herd” (IYEL, 37–44).

According to the Catholic tradition, all “purely material beings such as animals” will perish because only humans have immortal souls that survive death in a post-mortem existence.⁶ Contrasting this tradition is the Animal Universalist view that maintains all animals have immortal souls that “shall be ushered into [paradise] and remain there for [all] eternity.”⁷ Murnane adopts this theological view by portraying a paradise in which nonhuman animals thrive and flourish, “in God’s company forever,” alongside their human companions.⁸ He depicts this paradise as a peaceful place, free from suffering, where animals explore the landscape with their senses: “The red cow smells the water. She goes … towards the pool that keeps her alive” (IYEL, 44). Thus, Murnane envisions paradise as an earthly, embodied sanctuary that invites humans and animals to explore what I call eschatological landscapes. These landscapes correlate to real places. They are drawn from “places [that Murnane] knew so well” during his formative years,⁹ such as his hometown of Bendigo, Victoria, and are infused with eschatological imagery from his Catholic upbringing. As Murnane says in an audiotape conversation with Alexandra Rombouts, “I see Bendigo as a sort of paradise.”¹⁰ Despite abandoning his Catholic beliefs, Murnane maintains an “unshakeable belief” in an animal afterlife, claiming that “in the life to come … There’ll be [horses and] racecourses.”¹¹ He drives this point home in his essay “The Breathing Author,” writing, “I feel confident that a part of me will survive the death of my body and will find itself … [in] a vast and possibly infinite landscape.”¹² Thus, Murnane asserts a kind of theological monism in which eschatology is inseparable from ontology and the afterlife collapses back into this life. Or as the narrator of his 1988 novel Inland puts it, “There is another world but it is in this one.”¹³

There is a consensus amongst critics that Murnane orients his human protagonists on eschatological journeys toward an “eternal paradise” or a “true home” in his fiction.¹⁴ However, these critics overlook the eschatological journeys of animals that bear upon the human protagonists’ character development and salvation in grassland landscapes.¹⁵ As Murnane’s narrators convey in the short stories As It Were a Letter (2001) and Birds of the Puszta (1988), “[I’m] much more interested in the place where God lived than in the Deity Himself” and “[I] think of myself as being saved by my grasslands … [and] the animal world.”¹⁶ Taking this as my starting point, I claim that Murnane spiritualizes the landscape in his fiction by grounding God or divinity within grasslands and the animals inhabiting them. That is, Murnane opposes what he calls the “narrow-mindedness” of the Catholic Church¹⁷ through his monistic view in which “God is everywhere” and all creatures are divine.¹⁸ Murnane, the self-acclaimed “pantheist,” humorously conveys this idea in his novel Barley Patch when the narrator states, “God [is] … a beetle with orange-yellow markings.”¹⁹ Developing the scholarship of Betsy Clark George and others on nonhuman animal immortality,²⁰ I want to use this article to investigate the idea of creaturely immortality in Murnane’s paradise landscapes. I examine how Murnane configures a spiritually grounded eschatology in his novel A Season on Earth and some of his other fiction by tracing the trajectory of humans and nonhuman animals toward eternal salvation in grassland landscapes.

Several critics have noted the importance of landscapes and animals to Murnane’s fiction. Dustin Illingworth argues that Murnane’s late modernist writing invokes “another world … in this one” by drawing from imagery such as endless grasslands, paddocks, and animals.²¹ Although Murnane’s use of grasslands and animals amounts to a “spiritual topography,” Illingworth says it does not make him a religious writer, as Murnane only spent three months at a Catholic seminary.²² I think Illingworth underestimates the importance of the Catholic religious framework to Murnane’s fiction. In an interview with Antoni Jach, Murnane notes, “I can’t think without that [religious] framework” and the “things that [religious] people … believe in has never left me.”²³ In his essay “The Still-Breathing Author,” Murnane clarifies, “I am utterly confident that the invisible part of me will survive [my] death … ‘in [a] sort of eternity.’”²⁴ In the interview and essay, Murnane says that he follows the beliefs of Richard Jefferies who writes in his autobiography The Story of My Heart, “It is eternity now … now is the immortal life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now: I exist in it.”²⁵ Like Jefferies, Nicholas Birns notes, “Murnane’s Catholic background … has [been] jettisoned”²⁶ but stays with him conceptually when depicting the eternal afterlife as an immanent reality. Rather than expressing an “otherworldly eschatology” where eternity is elsewhere, Murnane’s late modernist writing fuses eschatological time with the material present.²⁷ That is, Murnane makes paradise immanent and continuous with earthly life by allowing his grounded creatures to experience it through their embodied existence and imagination. Moreover, in Murnane’s fiction, the imagination not only pictures unseen heavenly realities, but manifests these realities into real-life flesh and blood experiences. Following the monistic view that the mind manifests matter through a “divine power,”²⁸ Murnane defines “the imagination” as “the power of the human mind to create other universes.”²⁹ To conceptualize how Murnane contextualizes paradise within grassland landscapes, I now turn to critics who have connected God and landscape in his writing.

According to Daniel Ross, while Murnane “ceased … to be a believing Catholic” he still believes in a “Place of Places, which … is denoted for some other persons by the word God.”³⁰ As Ross notes, in Murnane’s short story “In Far Fields” in the collection Emerald Blue, Murnane “states that the word ‘God’ [evokes] … ‘the image of [a] grassy countryside.’”³¹ However, it is important to note that this image of a grassy countryside is the character’s afterlife where his mind goes on existing in “heaven or … something called eternity.”³² Furthermore, in Murnane’s fiction, this afterlife or place of “Eternity [with God] is here already” within embodied existence where humans and animals roam “grassy paddocks.”³³ From the heavenly grasslands in his debut novel Tamarisk Row (1974) to the paradisical paddocks in his latest novel Border Districts (2017),³⁴ Murnane’s work affords a place for animals in a spiritual plenum. Rather than interpreting Murnane’s human protagonists as failures who never realize their ideal,³⁵ I see them being saved in a “spiritual homeland [of] … mostly level grassy countryside” (BP, 236–37) alongside their animal neighbors. Building on the scholarship of Ross and others, I develop the idea of an eternal, embodied afterlife in Murnane’s fiction where humans and animals are saved from their suffering.³⁶ To draw from Robert Falconer’s 2023 book Embodied Afterlife: The Hope of an Immediate Resurrection, Murnane’s embodied afterlife envisions all creatures as “wholly physical, enjoying their new glorious bodies in the state of perfection.”³⁷ He captures this ideal in the form of “heavenly [grassland] vistas,” writing, “The landscapes of heaven were lit by a light that emanated from God … [and] shone serenely … [on] a few cattle or horses” (AIWL, 57).

Critics such as Mark Byron and Lawrence Buell agree that Murnane’s grasslands have a supportive function for native flora and fauna that infinitely extends into a promised zone.³⁸ These critics draw the connection between grasslands, animals, and infinity, but do not sufficiently emphasize this promised zone as crucial to Murnane’s eschatological thought.³⁹ As John Tittensor writes, Murnane’s grasslands constitute a “physical and spiritual reality … beyond appearance” where the human body orients toward its “final destination.”⁴⁰ According to Tittensor, this final destination is Murnane’s “most personal, most real landscape” where a fallen humanity enters into the endless acceptance of God and infinity.⁴¹ However, in Murnane’s enchanted universe where God is immanent in the landscape itself, both humans and nonhuman animals are redeemed from their fallen, embodied nature.⁴² Whereas in the Christian tradition where only fallen humans are redeemed in paradise, Murnane’s version of paradise has all animals being saved in a kind of universal salvation.⁴³ In a similar vein to Jürgen Moltmann’s “grounded … eschatology,”⁴⁴ Murnane envisions resurrection “not merely for human beings, but for animals, plants, [and] stones.”⁴⁵ What is important here is the human protagonist’s development in relation to animals, to be spiritually transformed by what Murnane calls “the glory of God,” at the ends of time.⁴⁶

This article contributes to scholarship on the intersection of the afterlife, landscapes, and animals in Murnane’s fiction by developing the concept of an eschatological landscape.⁴⁷ Murnane creates these eschatological landscapes from places he has seen in Australia and transforms them into a paradise landscape for all creatures, human and nonhuman animal. Furthermore, I contribute to research into the afterlife as a place of sensory exploration⁴⁸ by examining how Murnane’s humans and animals relate to each other through their senses. Throughout my analysis, I will focus on A Season on Earth, which is the original and unabridged version of Murnane’s 1976 novel A Lifetime on Clouds, comprising its first half.⁴⁹ That is, I am utilizing the four-part novel that Murnane himself favours over the two-part version, which truncates the character development of its protagonist Adrian Sherd. In Murnane’s words, “A Lifetime on Clouds is … only half a book and Adrian Sherd is only half a character.”⁵⁰ In my original reading of Murnane’s A Season on Earth, I interpret Sherd’s heavenly journey toward eternal landscapes as a “fall, eschatological recovery … and redemption”⁵¹ alongside his fellow animal neighbors. To draw from Jurij Lotman, Sherd’s life consists of “eschatological moment[s]” in which his decision to set a “good” example elevates the rest of creation.⁵² As Murnane writes, “His main task was to win souls for God [and] judge his success by the number of immortal souls he had saved” (AS, 271). Overall, Sherd’s narrative progression follows the “eschatological … schema” outlined by Lotman where he falls into a state of sin, replaces sin with righteousness, and achieves an apotheosis.⁵³

Whereas Sherd’s homecoming journey ends prematurely in the abridged A Lifetime on Clouds,⁵⁴ it is fulfilled in A Season on Earth when he enters “the ideal realm of [Paradise].”⁵⁵ Taking one’s true home to mean “in Christian terms … finally not of this world,”⁵⁶ Sherd embarks on a Dantean journey through hell, purgatory, and salvation in paradise. This “heavenly” state is not “ever-receding” as Imre Salusinszky suggests,⁵⁷ but is embodied through Sherd’s care toward the unique lives of animals, like when he “[keeps] a diary describing the ants’ habits and [draws] maps to show how far they travelled from their nest” (AS, 15). Moreover, animals are crucial to Sherd’s “spiritual development” (AS, 303) because during his time at the seminary, “he [sees] all nature as a visible manifestation of God” (AS, 290). We can say that Sherd’s “spiritual pilgrimage” (AS, 387) resembles a Christ-like katabasis in which he descends into hell before returning to his “new life” in paradise (AS, 478).⁵⁸ His descent begins in a “Sodom and Gomorrah” where he wards off Satan’s temptations, defeats his lustful thoughts, and faces humiliation on “Judgement Day” (AS, 52, 113, and 298).⁵⁹ Following “the model [of] Christ,” Sherd paradoxically ascends through a descending path of “suffering … [and] humility” (AS, 349–50)⁶⁰ where he aims to follow “God’s will at every moment” to achieve “nothing less than mystical union with God” (AS, 303). He ascends by realizing that “God’s Will [or] … the Will of His Father” (AS, 349), to quote Neville Goddard, is his own “wonderful human imagination” that “creates reality.”⁶¹ During his “progress towards perfection … following … the long upward path to its end” (AS, 303), Sherd receives guidance from creaturely psychopomps,⁶² whose purity leads him home.

According to Don Anderson, Murnane’s fiction aspires to a “reunion with Paradise” or a “better … world” that aligns with a Christian framework and “the Justice of God.”⁶³ As Anderson argues, “One of the ways to paradise, as any Christian saint and martyr will bear witness, is through an asceticism of the spirit” and an “unfallen [and] immaculate” purity.⁶⁴ This applies to Sherd’s journey as he “live[s] each day of his life as though it was his last day on earth, and leave[s] it to God to work out His plans for bringing the world to an end” (AS, 206). By having this eschatological orientation, Sherd comes to see the afterlife as a metamorphosis or transformation where his soul persists in a pure paradise with animals.⁶⁵ That is, “After the end of the world and the Resurrection of the Dead and the General Judgement” (AS, 182)—which are physically, embodied states⁶⁶—Sherd lives his life in complete remembrance of his past “lives” and the love he gave to his animal neighbors (AS, 183). According to animal studies scholar Dustin Crummett, it is “possible for [animals] to survive death” once we accept the notion that a benevolent “God … save[s] animals from death.”⁶⁷ Crummett argues that God extends an “eternal, infinitely good” afterlife in paradise to all creeping things—(Sherd’s ants included)—and endows them with a memory of their past life.⁶⁸ That is, in this persistence of life—assuming resurrection in paradise is both material and metaphysical⁶⁹—humans and animals will remember and love each other for eternity. Murnane illustrates this when Sherd envisions his embodied afterlife in paradise as living “Eternity … [on the] Earth itself, transformed into an abode of perfect natural happiness” (AS, 479–84).

According to Lars Andersson, Murnane engages with Catholic dogma in a playful way by bringing “the sense of … God observing [Sherd] from above” down to his embodied life.⁷⁰ Although Andersson is right that Murnane plays with the Catholic notion of God’s judgement,⁷¹ he does not explicate how animals are involved in Sherd’s eschatological plot. Building on Andersson’s argument, Murnane depicts animals as Sherd’s theological neighbors who accompany him on his “spiritual journeys” to an earthly paradise (AS, 388). In the Catholic view of paradise, the saved are meant to see God’s face or the “Beatific Vision,”⁷² but in Murnane’s view, God’s face is replaced by a grassland landscape with animals. Therefore, Murnane challenges the Catholic view of paradise by shifting the focus away from a timeless contemplation of God to being in a “spiritual” environment with animals.⁷³ Instead of presenting “vague images of harps and choirs” in heaven above,⁷⁴ Murnane inverts the eschatological schema by diverting our gaze down to earth.⁷⁵ Aligning with Bruno Latour’s argument in his book If we lose the Earth, we lose our souls (2024), Murnane configures an “earthly paradise” in which God is “here [down] Below” in a world replete with fragility, vulnerability, and impermanence—this life immortalized as it were.⁷⁶ Knowing that his actions influence “the fate of his soul for all eternity” (AS, 112), Sherd chooses to be loving to his animal neighbors, who will be “resurrected after the General Judgement” (AS, 187). We see this shown through his deeds when he “[feeds] the fowls and [collects] the eggs,” and observes the possums instead of scaring them away (AS, 15). Therefore, Murnane’s vision of paradise transcends both traditional Catholic beliefs and philosophical views on the afterlife that deny nonhuman animals the right to immortality.⁷⁷

Before I analyze a scene from A Season on Earth, I conceptualize how Murnane compresses the afterlife into this life by focusing on the embodied relation between humans and animals. As Paul Giles argues, “Murnane draws extensively upon Catholic [eschatology] … but he typically reconstitutes [its eschatological] doctrines … in the name of material embodiment.”⁷⁸ In this sense, to draw from Giles, Murnane’s depiction of the “afterlife” performs a “metaphysical reversal … in which human time [conflates] with eternity” in his landscapes.⁷⁹ To elaborate on Giles’s argument, Murnane depicts his human protagonists and their animal neighbors within eternal, embodied landscapes that are spiritual and free from suffering.⁸⁰ Before entering this paradise, Sherd is stooped in suffering like Christ (AS, 350) and is compared to the protagonist of Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger by Murnane himself.⁸¹ According to Brendan McNamee, Sherd “ape[s] the sufferings of saints” through ascetic practices such as ridiculously walking with a stone in his shoe at the seminary (AS, 351).⁸² These humiliating rituals are not aimed at relieving Sherd’s suffering as they are in Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy, such as when Molloy sucks on a “stone” to relieve his hunger.⁸³ Rather, they are aimed at merging with “the Divine Essence” (AS, 303) located “in Heaven” (AS, 183). Like his literary precursor Molloy, Sherd is a suffering character who imagines himself into what McNamee calls “paradises … where he and the world are [eternally] connected.”⁸⁴ These paradises, like “the Christian … Kingdom of Heaven,” are “not [too] different from this present world right here,” except they are free from suffering and death.⁸⁵ Similarly, as Beckett “brings the prospect of eternity within the envelope of mortality,” Murnane imagines an eternal afterlife in paradise where the former things of grief and misery have passed away.⁸⁶ That is, Murnane draws from his “Catholic faith [offering] the possibility of [a] life beyond,” and envisions paradise as a “spiritual world” that is hospitable to both humans and animals.⁸⁷ Instead of viewing “Death [as] the definitive end of our state of pilgrimage” or journey, Murnane sees it as a natural, “eternally abiding” process of spiritual transformation on earth.⁸⁸

Another key aspect of Murnane’s earthly, embodied eschatology in A Season on Earth and something that likens him to Beckett and Coetzee is “working more within a spiritual dimension.”⁸⁹ In an interview with Drew Pavlou, Murnane contemplates the “spiritual dimension” of his work, stating, “The invisible parts of you and me, I’m sure will survive [death].”⁹⁰ Shannon Burns corroborates that Murnane’s archives testify to his belief in an “invisible world” or “afterlife.”⁹¹ As Murnane says, “death isn’t the end … and we might even discover after death that this … reality [is] just a visible trace of a much larger, ongoing development.”⁹² This ongoing afterlife, according to Burns, “is purer … than the material world” and is shown through Murnane’s “mystical [connection] with larger realities.”⁹³ Although Murnane considers his work to be worldly, he endows it with a “spiritual dimension”⁹⁴ where God and the afterlife are eclipsed within the ambit of earthly existence. Therefore, Sherd’s spiritual life not only resembles Murnane’s in terms of going to a seminary,⁹⁵ but he also shares with his author the idea of a terrestrial afterlife here on earth. We see this idea comically shown through Sherd’s sketch of the afterlife when he uses a “spiritual colour scheme” to illustrate “souls” radiating happiness in a transfigured, earthly paradise (AS, 6–8). In her article “Estrangement in paradise,” Delia Falconer argues that Murnane’s fiction denatures the “mundane aspects of life,”⁹⁶ and I believe he does this by depicting a mystically mundane afterlife. In the following, I examine how Murnane’s view of the afterlife as a spiritual transformation informs Sherd’s eschatological journey with animals.

Karin Hansson argues that Murnane orients his human protagonists on “esc[h]atological … journeys” toward grasslands that constitute a “true home” for them.⁹⁷ In these journeys, according to Hansson, the human protagonist seeks their true home by embarking on an solitary quest of suffering with no hope of transformation or salvation.⁹⁸ While the human protagonist in the traditional journey becomes “apotheosised,” Hansson suggests Murnane’s protagonists remain unchanged as their landscapes are dreamscapes.⁹⁹ Developing Hansson’s work, I argue that Murnane’s human protagonist Sherd is delivered from his suffering and redeemed from his fallenness through the intervention of animals. Furthermore, Sherd reaches an apotheosized state after death through his kenotic characterization that imitates Christ’s self-emptying kenosis on the cross (Phil. 2:5–8). Similarly, as Christ “emptied himself” by taking the form of a servant in the “creaturely sphere,”¹⁰⁰ Sherd empties himself through his “act[s] of self-denial” and “humility” (AS, 334 and 303). To achieve the “glory of God” (AS, 303) and reach his apotheosis, Sherd must renounce his “degraded, selfish lifestyle … [and embrace] compassion” toward animals.¹⁰¹ According to Ihab Hassan, Murnane’s protagonists develop a sense of “Boundless Compassion” toward creation through their “spiritual act[s] of self-emptying [kenosis].”¹⁰² Sherd expresses this spiritual kenosis through acts of prayer and care,¹⁰³ such as when he “rest[s] his head against … [a] Jersey cow” to milk her while pondering his life (AS, 198). Throughout his spiritual quest, Sherd cultivates the kenotic characteristics of suffering, humility, and chastity as a novitiate in the Charleroi order, and experiences his apotheosis or union with God¹⁰⁴ by emptying himself into “serene landscapes of the imagination” (AS, 388).

In the following scene, I examine how Murnane portrays Sherd and animals within an eschatological landscape that is a “spiritual home” and “paradise on earth” (AS, 367–68). Utilizing a spiritually embodied framework, I analyze Sherd’s physical and emotional responses to what David Tacey calls the “spiritual dimension … [of] the earth.”¹⁰⁵ To contextualise this analysis, we must see how “the Sky God has expired … and the divine effulgence has fallen to earth, lighting up the world of nature with an otherworldly glow.”¹⁰⁶ In this way, the earth comes alive with God’s divinity, where everything is “eternally connected” through the senses,¹⁰⁷ as if Sherd’s mundane existence merges with heaven. In the scene, Sherd composes a poem called Pilgrimage to Yarra Glen on a train on the way to Goulbourn inspired by “the broad vistas of the Riverina … landscapes” in Victoria (AS, 367–68). As Sherd peers outside the window, he “jot[s] down his emotional response to a long bare hillside with a dam below it and a file of cattle coming down the golden-brown water.” The beautiful landscape containing the cattle going down toward the water, “work on his deepest emotions and prompt him to praise … the true perfection of God” (AS, 367–68). Sherd’s poem conveys this by reading the landscape as a “heavenly earth”¹⁰⁸ in which everything is “charged with the glory of God” and “every soul [is] perfectly obedient to the Will of God.” Murnane focalizes through Sherd’s schema, a profoundly “spiritual” appreciation of nature in which every soul, human and animal, is at one with “an awareness of … God” (AS, 367–68). This spiritual appreciation for nature borders on a “comic eschatology” when Sherd offers up his devotion to the landscape by “pour[ing] out his seed” (AS, 371).¹⁰⁹ Here, Sherd comically mimics Christ’s “poured out” kenosis¹¹⁰ when he looks at “stirring landscapes … and pour[s] out his seed” to empty himself, of his self (AS, 371). Murnane’s comical climax subverts the idea that the soul is confined to humans by depicting Sherd’s “essence” (AS, 368) merging with the earth’s soul and spiritual ground of being. Following Jefferies’s rejection of a “God … exist[ing] outside the universe,” Murnane’s monistic model brings “‘heavens’ upon the earth,”¹¹¹ where God resides within the landscape.

According to K. Thomas Kahn, Murnane’s fiction exemplifies a “Proustian project of self-discovery” by privileging the journey toward the landscape over the “final discovery or enlightenment.”¹¹² This is an eschatological journey that “we all undertake … in our lives”¹¹³ but the meaning of this journey is up to the human to discover along the way with animals. Returning to the scene, Sherd discovers a whole new vista when he kneels down and sees outside the bathroom window “no more than a splinter of landscape … baffling fragments [that] might have been part of a whole new land far more complex and variegated than Australia” (AS, 370). This landscape, reminiscent of an “Earthly Paradise” in a “Golden Age,”¹¹⁴ convinces him “that Australia could be rearranged into landscapes after his own heart” (AS, 371). What Sherd realizes is that “the Hand of God” or “Divine Providence” (AS, 352) communes with the earth, allowing each “soul” to share in “the beauty and majesty of God” (AS, 367–68). Sherd expresses this idea when he sees himself immersed in the landscape, sharing “in its creation” as “It was he who … composed [everything] into a pleasing whole” (AS, 371). Since “kenosis is the opening necessary for new life to begin … rooted in the earth,”¹¹⁵ Sherd’s choice to empty himself, both physically and imaginatively in this scene, opens him to a new life living “in the service of God … [in] his ideal landscape” (AS, 376). Ultimately, Murnane’s scene illustrates an earthly paradise in a grassland landscape, where Sherd and his fellow animals thrive in God’s presence, like the red cow and her calf (IYEL, 44).

“Every journey moves toward the ideal” in Murnane’s fiction, Scott Esposito writes, and it is through the eyes of the human protagonist who sees the “divine and earthly” realms.¹¹⁶ As Esposito notes, these protagonists resemble “a nomad forever voyaging through a landscape … forever staring out upon Australia’s vast interior, finding … some equivalence.”¹¹⁷ Though he is not someone who “travels from place to place to find fresh pasture for its animals,”¹¹⁸ Sherd is a metaphysical nomad searching for his ideal landscape with animals. This ideal is not “irretrievable” as Esposito suggests,¹¹⁹ but is made real through Sherd’s kenotic action of letting go of his depraved “outward life” (AS, 397) and creating a new one. That is, Sherd travels to an ideal place with animals by dying to his old “corruptible and depraved nature” until he is “washed clean … in the [new] life” to use Coetzee’s phrase.¹²⁰ Since eschatology interprets a person’s identity or soul as a continuum that reaches its apotheosis after death,¹²¹ we can see Sherd’s ongoing development as a process of growth. Thus, Murnane’s inclusion of nonhuman animals in an ideal place or paradise not only challenges traditional eschatological dogma, but it encourages a rethink of human ontology. This implies that humans can ascend to newer heights of “heavenly persons”¹²² once they accept the loss of their old fallen selves and approach animal others with humility in mind.

According to Brian C. Moore, “we are not individuals, but creatures called to be persons” participating in the “[kenotic] action of Jesus Christ” that conceals his divine glory.¹²³ As Moore argues, Murnane sees the human as a sort of heavenly creature who undergoes an immanent “transformation” by orienting toward “the future that is God … and eternity.”¹²⁴ Sherd reflects his desire to become a heavenly creature when he swears off his “American adventures” or “[sexual] games” with women and commits a “[kenotic] act of renunciation” (AS, 23 and 472). To draw from Zena Hitz’s book A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, “the practice of total renunciation is an action … [that] holds one’s whole life in view.”¹²⁵ Sherd’s act of total renunciation holds his whole life in view as he “turn[s] away” from his fallen life and commits to living “an ideal” life of purpose where he cares for creation (AS, 472–74). Instead of being caught up in the “problems of the modern world,” Sherd’s eschatological story is about “looking into his soul and making sure he [is] on the right path” (AS, 187). Since animals are markers of “change in a story, such as [significant character] growth,”¹²⁶ Sherd’s animal neighbors usher him on this path by making him “more humble and less self-satisfied” (AS, 198). We see this evinced when he imagines himself as a Franciscan monk “saying mass alone with … only the birds and animals to watch him” (AS, 286). Rather than ascending to a lifetime on clouds, Sherd’s “transformation [or] metamorphosis” is immanent and happens in this world when he opens himself up to a new life in which he is “existentially enlisted by God in the form of a [humble] creature.”¹²⁷ According to his sketch of the afterlife, Sherd makes “safe conduct to [paradise]” by conquering “the sin that enslaved [him]” (AS, 9) with the help of his loving, theological animal friends.¹²⁸ While Sherd must overcome a moral transgression to enter paradise, animals automatically gain entry as innocent beings who have never sinned.¹²⁹ In Sherd’s eyes, the animals he encounters are already “innocent” (AS, 57) as they embody the perfect state with God in the Garden of “Eden” (AS, 167) and therefore have a place beside him in his physical paradise.

In an interview with Bruce Gillespie “Gerald Murnane: Other Eyes, Other Universes,” Murnane expresses his belief in “the power of human mind to create other universes.”¹³⁰ By other universes, Murnane refers to Proust when he writes, “The only real journey, the only [eternal] Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another … like an angel fallen from … Paradise.”¹³¹ According to Coetzee, in Murnane’s fiction, “access to the other world—a [Paradise] distinct from and … better than our own—is gained … by giving the self up to … the imagination.”¹³² What we see in Murnane’s A Season then is this kenotic process where Sherd trains his “imagination thoroughly” to empty himself into “a land after his own heart” (AS, 478 and 484). That is, keeping with Goddard’s idea that the imagination crystallizes into tangible reality,¹³³ Sherd’s imagined life becomes his real life in a paradise “rearranged” (AS, 371), or in Murnane’s words, “more … providentially arranged than [he] could have arranged [himself].”¹³⁴ Through his spiritual homecoming, Sherd realizes that his apotheosis or “union … with God” happens by using his imagination “to never be confined by the … world” (AS, 478–79). Moreover, he realizes that the remedy to his “homesickness” is to “perfect himself … in heaven” by following God’s will, which aligns with his own will (AS, 291 and 377). This is echoed in Murnane’s novel Border Districts when the narrator contemplates “heaven or [the] after-life” and realizes “It was not God who arranged this … but I, a man” (BD, 94 and 103). This culminates in the ending when Sherd imagines his heavenly afterlife in “a region that lay on the far side of literature” by amending the title of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (AS, 484). At first, Sherd wonders if this final destination “resembled the place the theologians had speculated about—the earth itself, transformed into an abode of perfect natural happiness.” After crossing out “HELL” and writing “LIMBO,” Sherd feels a sense of dissonance and so continues to imagine “with eyes open … the place that he was hoping to reach” on his journey. After some time, Sherd recognizes that “his longed-for destination had been called into being solely by his own wants and yearnings,” and alas, Sherd discovers he is in paradise all along. Finally, Sherd crosses out the word “LIMBO” and amends the last word to show the inscription: “A SEASON ON EARTH”: a time and space he wishes to spend “Eternity” (AS, 479–82). As he lies on the ground with his “skin [laid] bare,” Sherd realizes that heaven is found within himself and manifest in creaturely life on earth (AS, 485). Murnane’s A Season on Earth presents an earthly, embodied eschatology by portraying his protagonist Sherd on “a long journey” with nonhuman animals in which he falls into sin, redeems himself through kenosis, and ascends to the eternal bliss of “paradise” (AS, 471–82).¹³⁵

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of this work through an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship. Many thanks to Professor Chris Danta, School of Cybernetics, Australian National University, for his unwavering guidance and fascinating insights that significantly improved this manuscript.

Footnotes