Free Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane Page B

personage whose original narrator had declared her dead. Even during my wavering, however, I must sometimes have acted boldly. It would very much suit the pattern of meaning in this work of fiction if I could report here that I decided once at least, when I was a mere child-reader, that a certain narrator was mistaken: that the truth about a fictional personage need not be available to the very personage who was supposed to convey that truth to the reader. It would very much suit my purpose in writing this work of fiction if I could report that I learned in my childhood that a work of fiction is not necessarily enclosed within the mind of its author but extends on its farther sides into little-known territory.
    The story of Bridget, so to call it, is told in twelve lines of a poem made up of fifty-six lines. The last lines relating to Bridget are these:
    They have kept her ever since,
    Deep beneath the lake,
    On a bed of flag-leaves,
    Watching till she wake.
    The verbs in this passage are no longer in the past tense. Often, as a child, I strove to prolong a narrative: to keep it from ending in my mind. I had no need so to strive with the story of Bridget. Nor were the last words of the text of the sort that sometimes sounded cheerfully at the end of a so-called fairy-tale. (“And for all I know, she may be living there still . . .”) The last words relating to Bridget were calm and assured; the narrator spoke with authority. The story of Bridget had still not come to an end when the last word had been written about her. But what could remain of a story when the chief character already lay dead? Again, I could wish to report that I once, as a child-reader, found reason to doubt a narrator of fiction. I could wish to report that I decided that the personages within the text knew more than the personage hovering over the text, as it were; the abductors of Bridget, watching by her bed, knew more about her than the man who had written about her. Or, I could wish to report that I stared at the last four words of the story of Bridget until they seemed to change in meaning; until a hoped-for event became an unexpected event, and, finally, an actual event. If I could report such as this, I could hardly report that Bridget, the fictional personage, finally awoke. The eventual awakening would have taken place outside the boundaries of the text composed by William Allingham. Bridget, by now subtly other than a fictional personage, would have been restored to her new existence in a place where neither reader nor narrator could lay claim to her; in a place on some or another far side of fiction. What sort of life was hers in that place neither William Allingham nor I could know, even if we tried to go on writing or reading about her.
    As for Bridget’s being said to lie beneath a lake, I always resisted the notion that she was beneath the surface of the lake; that she was underwater. If she were underwater, so I reasoned, then those watching her would have had to be underwater also, and all of them would have long since drowned. (I was never able to learn the rudiments of swimming. Whenever I was told as a child to put my face into water, I closed my eyes and held my breath and supposed that I was drowning. I felt sympathy, years afterwards, for the men that I read about who put to sea off the west coast of Ireland in frail, handmade boats. Those men disdained to learn anything of swimming, believing that to do so would only prolong their death-agony if their boat were to capsize. From my point of view, anyone who ventured beneath the surface of an ocean or a river or a lake was doomed.) I was able to devise a safe place for Bridget because I had followed not long before certain episodes, so to call them, of the comic-strip “Mandrake the Magician.” In those episodes, Princess Narda had been captured by a man who seemed to live with his followers underwater. Whenever they retreated to their hide out, they seemed to disappear among