The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

their unquantifiable reverberations. Certainly mere “marks on paper” have neither absolute nor transcendental meaning, but neither have the most conscientious records of “real life,” which depend ultimately on fallible memory or methods of recording that almost inevitably involve a subjective dimension. The story, in brief, affirms multiple ways of knowing and exerting influence on the world, and officialdom serves as a surrogate for those stable, common-sense traditions against which Bail has railed in interviews. Their shortcomings are shown to be a limited response to emotional needs and complexities, as well as a failure to encourage what is most spontaneous and inventive in existence, including art itself.

More generally, this radical narrative and the collection as a whole read like a belated response to the seminal aesthetic crisis of the twentieth century. The crisis’s primary arena was that of the visual arts, which in terms of innovation and diversification far outstripped writing during this period. Developments in photography throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century had both challenged artists’ time-honoured raison d’être of accurate representation and provided them an opportunity to seek new subjects, approaches, and media. Suprematism, Fauvism, futurism, and cubism, as well as a multitude of other movements and manifestos, signalled a liberation that was well underway by the outbreak of the First World War. As the century unfolded, this aesthetic revolution accelerated until, by the time Bail was composing his stories, it could be stated as “self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist” (Adorno 1). Art, as Adorno’s synopsis continues, had achieved autonomy, replacing a dominant approach with infinite possibilities, and severing itself from “the categorical determination stamped on it by the empirical world” (6). Nevertheless, the spell cast by empirical reality, Bail’s bête noire, remained strong; therefore artists needed to stress the “artificial element” of their work—“These marks on paper, and so on” (“A B C” 183)—their independence had to “be constantly renewed” (Adorno 7). Modern art, as its historians tirelessly stress, had become unapologetically intent on presenting the individual artist’s response to reality, in