The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

into composition as an arduous, meticulous process that yielded at best two hundred words a day. The labour of countless drafts was immense, the stakes high. In opposition to engrained pragmatism and stolid realism, he focused on “situations, propositions, speculation” (Bail, “Questionnaire on Fiction” 188), setting supreme store by the richness and ambiguity of “language, discussion, imagination, all the dreaming that goes with it … [and distinguishes] the species” (Chisholm 42). Audacity, invention, and experiment became Bail’s watchwords, and his first book—a collection of short fiction that focused on concepts—was their vindication.

Contemporary Portraits and the Crisis of Representation

Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories (1975) marked a stark break with dun-coloured realism and much modernist fiction. An avid and conscientious reader, Bail is familiar with towering precursors such as Joyce, Musil, and Proust; nevertheless, hallmarks of their revolutionary work—stream of consciousness, exploration of time and memory—are largely absent from his work. Similarly, despite alleged interest in portraying states of mind, Bail is seldom concerned with individual consciousness as a means of bringing protagonists to life or with tracing their psychological development in the manner of Flaubert, the great Russian novelists, or White—authors whose examples he has praised. Instead, Bail is intent on how individuals perceive and react to the world during a revelatory incident, like a host who hides from his guests or a rabbit trapper who finds intolerable the fortnightly intrusion of a workmate on his silence. Many of his early stories are “propositional” in the sense of “proceeding to answer a certain problem or to explore one” (Davidson 265). Moreover, realists rarely foreground the authorial contrivances that foster an impression of verisimilitude and lend coherence to their accounts, whereas Bail repeatedly disrupts his audience’s willing suspension of disbelief by underscoring the status of his tales as artefacts. Although these insistent acts of alienation could be used, as in