The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

“photographically document … the existence of everyone alive” (3). The merits of a rival form of portraiture are implicitly presented through the ensuing accounts “of twenty-three people or ‘types,’” accompanied by the provocative comment: “I offer them to Huebler, helping him, one artist to another, whether he likes it or not” (4). Two centuries earlier Blake’s narrator in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell had promised readers his “Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no” (Erdman 43). The parallel is apposite, for both speakers are committed to a radical enterprise that involves subverting conventions and anticipated responses. Blake’s composition is profoundly antinomian, reading black where the majority see only white and embracing, through the voice of the devil, antithetical codes that privilege energy over constraint, imagination over reason, and infinite over finite potential—an evaluation dear to the Australian writer. Bail’s aims, though cast in a less tendentious and morally confronting key, are similar, inverting straightforward univocal meaning in favour of inventive, ludic readings—thereby setting in motion a project that culminates in the narrative challenges posed by “A B C.”

The keynotes of these twenty-three “portraits” are reversal of expectations and a privileging of diverse forms (rather than a single one) of presentation and narration. For instance, “1. At least one person who always has to have the last word” turns out to be a character who, to overcome fear of his own mortality, is determined to contribute the last entry to the Oxford English Dictionary. First he produces coinages like “zynopic”, “zythm”, and “zyvatiate” (“Huebler” 5). Then he contrives to have them appear in print, so that they may qualify for inclusion in this standard compendium of the English language. Even the empirical gathering of data is open to manipulation; subjectivity apparently will not be denied. The next portrait, “2. At least one person who would rather be almost anyone else,” depicts an architect doomed to minor commissions by the distrust he awakens in clients. And he cannot bear his own characteristics reflected in the face of his son. Reproduction and duplication, as this vignette shows, can assume many forms, while the fact that recognition of family similarities is emphatically subjective and that the boy’s face is