The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail By Michael Ackland

White. These are all writers “concerned as much with invention and speculation as with tracing the usual psychological contours” of protagonists, concerned with securing for themselves creative elbow room (“Continental” 34). In brief, the fabulous worlds and mental travelling made available through translations were potent antidotes to a land and literature “so dry and dusty and flat, it was just like the Nullarbor Plain.” Their local shortage Bail adjudged an inadmissible denial of “normal knowledge of the world,” even a McCarthy-like constraint on intellectual freedom (Davidson 274–275).

In addition, Kafka and Proust have been singled out by Bail as providing crucial insights into the potential scope of fiction. Whereas White, in his drive “to discover the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the mystery and the poetry which alone could make bearable the lives of such people” (White 559), depicts the hidden depths of common, unprepossessing protagonists, Kafka reveals in The Metamorphosis a less exalted version of the extraordinary in the midst of daily routine: a young man awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous bug. Here terror and the irrational invade the domestic haven to create a situation that is grotesquely fantastic and deeply disturbing. To young Bail, surrounded by trite local fiction of a dun-coloured era, The Metamorphosis “was terribly impressive because [Kafka] showed what could be done, and the strange way he did it had a great naturalness about it and so much more power and clarity” (Davidson 274). An alternative to the spare prose of Kafka or Hemingway (both early influences) was afforded by Bail’s postponed encounter with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which offered not the dreaded “river of prose but a flood plain of sensations: alertness and beauty from all directions, and all depths. A marvellous curiosity transmitted. Ideas, laughter. Amazed at my complacency: to think I hadn’t begun reading this most complete novel [Proust], even a day earlier” (L 96). A second reading followed; a third was resolved on, and a fourth was a possibility “in my twilight years” (“Unpacking”). The lessons of Remembrance went home, and even Bail’s densely packed, cerebral novels admit bursts of sensation and beauty: