| Chapter 1: | Enamoured with Art and Ideas |
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the work of Brecht, to create a socially responsible art, in Bail’s writing they are primarily the corollary of a distinctive aesthetic.
Exemplary of the uses and ends of alienation in Bail’s fiction is his often anthologised story “A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z.” Its very title draws attention not to a potential storyline but to the building blocks of fiction, to their essentially neutral nature, and to the fact that meaning depends on their arbitrary or, more usually, manipulated conjunction—points underscored from the outset:
I select from these letters, pressing my fingers down. The letter (or an image of it) appears on the sheet of paper. It signifies little or nothing, I have to add more. Other letters are placed alongside until a “word” is formed. And it is not always the word WORD.
The word matches either my memory of its appearance, or a picture of the object the word denotes. TREE: I see the shape of a tree at mid-distance, and green.
I am writing a story.
Here, the trouble begins. (“A B C” 173)
The opening offers a series of affronts to the realist tradition and its informing empirical assumptions. These presuppose an objectively knowable reality, language commensurate to its depiction, and usually a one-to-one relationship between signifier and the object or property signified. The “trouble” mentioned intriguingly here is identified first with William James’s proposition that “the word ‘dog’… does not bite” and then with the evocation of “philosophers other than myself [who] have dismissed the inadequacy of words”(“A B C” 174). For Bail’s speaker, words are inherently neutral, but readers’ understanding of them is highly personal. That understanding is likely to invoke a visual image that reflects the reader’s subjective conception and cumulative experiences rather than any unalterable universal, whether the signifier be “tree” or the starting point here, “a weeping woman”. Thus instead of a conventional short story dealing with an unhappy protagonist, Bail produces fiction that is multilayered,