SOURCE: “Spatialised Time and Circular Time: A Note on Time in the Work of Gerald Murnane and Jorge-Luis Borges,” in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, October, 1997, pp. 185-90.

In the following essay, Bartoloni compares the use of time and travel in the fictions of Borges and the Australian writer, Gerald Murane.

The image of the journey in time characterises much of twentieth-century fiction—Joyce, Mann, Proust, Svevo and Woolf bear witness—and finds in Australian writing a fertile ground. In fact, the interplay between past and present appears to be one of the recurrent motifs among Australian poets and writers either by virtue of a preoccupation with the inner and outer landscape (White, Jolly, Wallace-Crabbe, Dessaix to name only a few) or with cultural biography and ethnicity (Castro, Mudrooroo, Lazaroo, Cappiello, for instance). The representation of time is not only the object of the story proper, but it...