Inside the house of fiction: The creative-critical possibility of Gerald Murnane’s A Million Windows

To grapple with the meaning of creative-critical writing today, it is necessary to begin from within literature. Too often, literary critics take up a disinterested position outside the text, which foregoes the ways in which the critic is always entangled with the text’s meanings. Through a reading of Gerald Murnane’s A Million Windows (2014), I propose a model for how a critic might read from within a literary text. I demonstrate how Murnane’s fiction – through the use of estrangement – entangles the reader-critic into performing acts of extension, rather than explication. With Murnane’s fiction, a critic must embrace – extend themselves into – a fictional landscape where “it [is] impossible to accept that the last page of a book of fiction was any sort of boundary or limit” (Murnane, 2014, p. 20). Such extended reading opens new possibilities for criticism’s form.