The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

not walking)” (L 74). At last Bail was firmly set on the path to discovering and realising his true talents; now writing and Australia beckoned.

Towards a Daunting Credo

Long before Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories brought him sudden fame in 1975, Bail had envisaged his art in adversarial, iconoclastic terms. In his notebook he attributes the maxim “the practice of art is antichrist” to William Blake (L 107) without further comment. In an earlier entry, however, he quotes the artist Francis Bacon’s dictum that “the image must be twisted if it is to make a renewed assault on the nervous system” and notes that, after a visit to a Bacon retrospective in the Grand Palais in Paris, “the streets, traffic and trees of the bright-aired everyday world… seemed less ‘real’” (L 80). Here was proof of art’s radical potential, ample reason for heeding Flaubert’s admonition, at the time dubbed “premature advice”: “Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your books” (L 28). These mutually reinforcing adages reveal the notetaker’s preoccupation and intention. According to Bacon, the need to defamiliarise reality boldly and to launch a visceral assault on audience complacency constituted “the peculiar difficulty of art today” (L 80). The Australian, who maintained that “Bacon manages to say things … that are beyond most writers on art,” concurred (Bail, “Unpacking” 13).

Bail’s target was the “wall of ordinary realism” (Bail, Introduction xvii) that constrained antipodean writing; his inspiration was realism’s most vocal opponent, Patrick White (1912–1990). The points of intersection between the two authors were many (Thomas). Famously, in 1958 the recently returned expatriate White had denounced “the Great Australian Emptiness,” together with a society “in which the mind is the least of possessions” (White 558), and announced his determination “to prove that the Australian novel is not necessarily the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism” (559). Decades later this ringing declaration, entitled