The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

said to function “like a camera” (70) constitutes an unsettling commentary on photography and the way viewers respond to its end products.

These varied portraits also blur the supposedly definite categories of fact and fiction. Bail’s Huebler is clearly based on the American Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler (1924–1997). Huebler’s excellent eye was first revealed through his spotting, from the air, camouflaged enemy positions in the Pacific theatre during World War II—camouflage is a Bail leitmotif—and postwar, Huebler made headlines by announcing his intention to “photographically document … the existence of everyone alive.” Bail’s story appropriates and tweaks historical fact in order to indicate the limitations and blindness of this encyclopedic undertaking. Still playing with facts, the next “portrait” is nothing more than a bald summary of personal details: “Age: 54/ Date of Birth: September 22, 1920/ Status: married” (“Huebler” 8). But is it any less a portrait and, if so, do reader-viewers expect something more than the merely factual? The data hardly rise above what might be included on an official questionnaire, and this portrait is adjudged “a bit woolly” either because of its dubious bearing on the type portrayed or because the bare facts fall short of constituting an adequate portrait (“Huebler” 8). Ensuing heterogeneous matter challenges conventional notions of what is permissible within fiction. The title of “15,” for instance, breaks off midsentence and is followed by two blank pages, whereas “13” is set apart by distinctive typeface and the claim that “I tore this out of the London Times on June 16, 1973. It can be reprinted here without changing a word” (23). Such strategies broaden the range of potential narrative modes much as the modern artist, no longer limited to oils or watercolours, might include collage, words, and found objects on his canvas.

Fittingly, critical awareness about fiction and its motives, one of Bail’s unambiguous objectives, is foregrounded in the last portrait: “23. At least one person for whom reality is richer than the artist’s fantasies.” Huebler is this person, and again paradoxes abound. In one sense the statement is true, in that the real-life Huebler is “richer” than Bail’s briefly sketched