Abish, Walter - Alain Arias-Misson (essay date 1980)
Alain Arias-Misson (essay date 1980)
SOURCE: “The Puzzle of Walter Abish: In The Future Perfect,” in Sub-Stance, Vol. IX, No. 2, 1980, pp. 115–24.
[In the following essay, Arias-Misson argues that Abish deconstructs language by using devices like listing and counting the words used in his texts in order to show “the fictitious nature of our truths.”]
Combinations, copulations, permutations, deletions, transferences, transgressions, substitutions, cross-references, doublings: Walter Abish fabricates puzzles—puzzles of sex, puzzles of minds, puzzles of death—and words and images, letters and numbers are the matter of a puzzle. In his first novel, astonishingly amusing Alphabetical Africa, section A is assembled only with words beginning with a, section B only with a's and b's, C only with a's, b's, and c's and so on to Z, then into reverse, deleting first all z words, then z's and y's until in the last section,...
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