The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

much the same way that it had moved from smooth, flawless paintings in which any trace of a brushstroke was effaced to avant-garde works that underscored their own materiality, whether through clotted, dripping paint or through a boldly slashed canvas.

Bail, having immersed himself in the major modernists and their doctrines, had comprehensive knowledge of these developments. In England he records going “backwards and forwards” mentally as well as physically before individual works, or “ogling art” to the point of making a spectacle of himself—but never naively: “the silence and serenity offered by Rothko and Nicholson … is not all that reassuring” (L 26). This familiarity extended to their private musings and correspondence—Cézanne and Van Gogh are quoted, for example, on the absence of absolute black in nature (L 31–32)—and to watershed moments: “The Red Interior of Matisse is jammed with confidence” (L 46). Not acknowledged (but presumably appreciated), the canvas marks a highpoint in the shift of modern art away from objectively rendered matter, for the putative interior is painted entirely in vibrant red and filled with Matisse’s earlier works. Artistic perception and its individual evolution provide a sufficient and all-important subject, which the painter boldly embraces (“jammed with confidence”), raising cognate issues for a would-be writer and arguably encouraging a shift from the allegedly objective to its subjective observation and formulation. Little wonder, then, that during each gallery stroll Bail was “assailed by literary ideas which beg to be resolved” (L 47).

Evidence of the kind of ideas that presumably assailed him is prominent in “Huebler.”² Though the two seem unrelated, both “Huebler” and “A B C”—the collection’s first and last stories, respectively—play on modern dilemmas of representation and draw attention to the presence of cognate material in the collection. Appropriately, “Huebler” focuses on photography, the form of reproduction that ignited the seminal aesthetic revolution. The story subtly underscores the new medium’s limitations by depicting characteristics that would escape a camera’s purview, as well as the hubris of its practitioners in Huebler’s stated intent to