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, A, only a's are left again. A fabulous letter-land thus expands and shrinks, even describing a shrinking Africa progressively colored orange in the second part, in a linguistic slapstick where meaning jumps from word to event and character and back again to words and trapdoors fly open in the text with real persons falling through, all with the verse and speed of a Marx Brothers ad-lib. Under the extraordinary constraints exercised on the language, WA displays a virtuoso mastery of articulation; under the pressures of alphabet (the dual, structuring principle of language: phonetics/writing), his fictions constantly collapse into syntax and semantics and are as constantly resuscitated.

In the Future Perfect, WA's third work of fiction, a collection of stories, enriches the alphabetical instrumentarium with numbering-cogs and wheels and tightens the humour to a razor-cutting edge. The “puzzles of life” are brought to disquieting incandescence. If the labyrinth is the matrix symbol of a Borges, WA has put the puzzle at the obscure heart of his own fiction. The peculiar interest of an examination of his work is the ultra-violet light it sheds on the problems of contemporary fiction.

In the Future Perfect is not written in the future perfect. In the gap between the tense of the title and the tense of the book lies a puzzle. More exactly, the future perfect is the tense of the puzzle—the tense of the ready-made possible. Kierkegaard said, “Poetry commands the possible”; WA puts the stress on commands. The future perfect is determinative. In one of the stories WA writes, “The immediate future, the immediate, immaculate future lies mapped out in the brain cells.” Persons and events lock into place like pieces in a puzzle. Essential to the puzzle is that its artificial itineraries, slots, sums provide predetermined solutions. In his Self-Portrait¹ WA writes, “I read over and over again a story by Borges, called Death and the Compass which bears a resemblance to a mathematical equation a ÷ b ÷ c = x. On first reading the story one is unprepared, accepting at face value the contrivance that entices the detective in the story to move from a to b then to c, finally as surprised as the reader to die at x.” The arbitrariness of WA's constructions, their superdetermination, corresponds to the intrinsic indeterminacy or randomness of character and action.

In the Future Perfect is a book of ultra-chic furniture—gleaming surfaces, luxurious implements, push-button controls: a super-developed, American dream-world—a muffled nightmare. This perfection shines forth from the photos of thick, glossy fashion and interior decorating magazines, in the Fifth and Madison and Lexington Avenue plate-glass shop windows, inside the color television sets strewn throughout WA's fiction. Flatness and surface are the constant properties of his fictive world. The American perfection lies in the future, the “immediate” future: the images of opulence (things, sex, lives) which beckon just beyond the audience's reality-screen. Little wonder that the Muriels and Maudes and Janes (almost all the dominant characters are women—sexual images of the images of desire) and Hildas, who pick their way precisely, knowingly through this cosmetic rubble, have so keen a sense of smell of unreality. “Imprinted on her brain were a succession of faces, interiors and the sound of voices. All she had to do was switch channels.” The “heroine” from “In so many words” is not named, this story being the only such case in a fiction where proper names constitute the one barrier between their characters and the pervasive flatness. “In so many words” is about perfection, and “she” is absorbed quickly, remorselessly into the succession of images. Her apartment, her days, her sex-life are brightly, coldly outlined; bold flat coloring included. The story begins with her “standing at one of the elongated windows, munching a Sara Lee croissant (quite delicious), she is taking in the American perfection, the American splendour—absolutely no irony is intended. It is true. From a certain height and perspective, the eighth floor of her building, America is convulsed with perfection.” It ends with her taking her pleasure with three black-leather-jacketed small-town thugs, sitting in a row on her brand new leather couch, “not oblivious of the perfection of her furniture, her lighting fixtures, the paintings on the walls, the view of the horsemen in the park below.” At one point in the story she is disturbed by Whitehead's admonition, “Even perfection will not bear the tedium of indefinite repetition.” The fastidiously accumulated, sheer weight of this perfection delivers a nearly imperceptible but most murderous, ideological razor-stroke across the baby-smooth skin of America.

But the Future Perfect is a tense, a category of language, of grammar, before being a ratio of reality. The flawless furniture of the American mind is interiorized, is the interior decoration in WA's precise, minimal line of diction. None of that messiness of speech which is an esthetic category of a characteristic American literature, consecrated in a Henry Miller and enshrined in innumerable material-hungry literary reviews, an esthetic seeking salvation in the brute massiveness and numbers of its own prolixity, a looseness and “richness” which once seemed to reproduce the chaos and energy of American life but today only capitulates to journalistic myth and publicity-image. Prolixity of language in the best contemporary users does draw attention to itself as prolixity of language; but an internal contradiction debilitates the correlation between a superabundant language and the superfluities of American life, since the life of the fiction can only be left over as the residue of such a correlation—and how can this residue be communicated in a welter of language? (That the life or energy of fiction be communicated as a direct product, as “superlife,” of such a language is only conceivable in a Whitman, at the latest in the pre-war naïveté of a Miller, in the superalienation² of the 1960s and 1970s not at all). To find WA's roots one would have to go back, behind the self-conscious American literature (which sought as much its “literariness” as its “americanness”) to the paradoxically unself-conscious writing of a James. The marginal life allowed in WA's stories, the fictive energy which feeds, animates his characters, their landscapes, the events, is a precise function of the sparse economy of his phrasing. The muffled universe described above finds its muffled echo in sheer and toneless constructions of his grammar. A pathological sameness of tone carries from descriptive passages to the direct speech of characters—which is never enclosed in quotation marks—and these characters, their conversations, their acts, the polished interiors and exteriors, and the ex cathedra annotations of the narrator blend into the same textual tissue. Questions and exclamations usually end with a period; even when characters cry out or groan, the text does not rise above a measured, polite, conversational tone: “Oh, no, cried Gregory. Not again. It's going to be one of those long drawn-out melodramas. I can't take it. I simply can't take it. Not at four in the morning.” It is like watching television with the sound turned off. This soundless speech has a name: it is writing. Writing is language slowed to almost-zero, a near-immobility of language, frozen language. Derrida has taken an extreme, nihilistic position on this “second nature” of language as the full autonomy of text: consequently “logocentrism,” the basis of classic, western ontology, is split and collapses. That is, logos can no longer represent Being in its transparency. A doubling, a destructive ambiguity stretches down into the roots of the Beginning; language exhibits in its phonetic spacings the articulations of writing. This is the reflection, the double of language that WA calls attention to constantly. The minute, precision-work of WA's elegant phrasing is a shield against its terror—terror of the abyss beneath the words, of an ontological caving-in. The reflexivity of his writing tunnels into and undermines the molar figures on the surface. Subversion of the “fictive truths” of his own fiction is already achieved in the molecular stresses of grammar and diction.

“The English Garden,” the first story of this collection, perhaps exhibits the double and its terror with the starkest simplicity. “The English Garden” is quoted from Ashbery's Three Poems: “Remnants of the old atrocity subsist, but they are converted into ingenious shifts in scenery, a sort of “English Garden” effect, to give the required air of naturalness, pathos and hope.” I have requoted WA's quote of Ashbery because there is no literal “English Garden” in his story, only this literary one “lifted” from another text—the typical gap between language and referent, like a decalcomania, leaves a translucid tracing in the ensuing story where its content should have been. The story is the narrator's visit to a German city, Brumholdstein, ostensibly to interview the experimental writer, Wilhelm Aus. There is a puzzle under the surface however, as this WA plays an insignificant role in the story, much more attention being given to the local librarian, Ingeborg Platt, with whom the narrator has an affair, and to the city itself. The “ingenious shifts in scenery” become evident as we learn that the new, model German city was built on the site of a former concentration camp, Durst, demolished because “it would not attract a sufficient number of tourists to warrant the extensive repairs.” The vanished camp imperceptibly pervades the busy, pleasant garden-city. One thinks of Walter Benjamin's characterization of Baudelaire: “The construction of his verse is the map of a big city, in which one can move about discreetly, covered by blocks of buildings, gates and squares. On this map are words, like conspirators at the outbreak of a revolt, their positions exactly indicated. Baudelaire conspires with language itself. …” Benjamin's intuition has come full circle in the new fiction; here the city, Brumholdstein, is a text, a sinister double of the “real” city; instead of conspirators the former inmates and torturers hover in the background like shadows of the present, model citizens, the “cheerful faces, massive faces … faces colored various shades of satisfied red.” WA, the narrator, picks his way through the “German Garden”-city and the characters that people it with a lethal accuracy of tone, every word calculated and positioned precisely as if the Garden were a mine-field, barely hinting, by a shadow in the voice, at the horror and menace beneath. Like clues planted in a detective story, one by one pieces of the puzzle fall into place, although the “mystery” is never really elucidated, never “given” as in the detective story, its configuration only suggested. “Why did he refuse to take off his shirt? Because he is hiding something. What could he be hiding under his shirt,” we are told after his affair with Ingeborg Platt in pedantic, puzzle-book type questions-and-answers, with a switch from the narrator's first person account to the third person, abruptly dropping the drama to a text level. Shortly afterwards Ingeborg disappears, and we learn that she had revealed to the narrator that her father had been commander of the Durst concentration camp. In the next to last paragraph, a photograph is found in her apartment of a “group of skeleton-like men standing in a row, posing for a photograph” in front of a building of the former camp. “Under a magnifying glass I could clearly make out the numbers tatooed on their forearms.” What might be called the macro-puzzle emerges tenebrously, as we are obliged to fit the pieces together in a complicity with the narrator. So far, the obliqueness, the savagery beneath the delicate phrasing, mark what might be a typical if notable example of contemporary fiction. At the heart of this story however lurks a quintessential Abishian invention which separates his work out as a unique undertaking: a language-machine.

There is a language-machine in every one of WA's stories. Much has been made of WA as one of the foremost experimental writers today, a title which he disavows with some embarrassment—“I'm not really concerned with language. As a writer I'm principally concerned with meaning,” he declares, with some duplicity as well, in one of his stories. But to these language-machines the label “experimentation” must be affixed, because they are imposed from “outside” upon his subjects, his material, his data, like some device, an input-output model, a black box. In this story the black box is a child's coloring book—an innocuous-looking device to apply to this “literary” visit to a German town built on the ruins of a concentration camp. The coloring book is acquired by the narrator upon arriving at the German airport. It depicts a jolly, gemütlich Germany, “almost everything that could be said to exist in the mind of a child.” It is a machine because it generates language, or better a certain activity in the text. It might be more accurate to say that it degenerates the text. The presence of the coloring book is most obvious at the beginning of the story, the arrival in Germany; it serves as a sort of guide to Germany. “The question one keeps asking oneself is: How German is it? And, is this the true color of Germany?” Bright, chatty comparisons are made between coloring book and Germany until it is no longer clear when the narrator is speaking of the one or the other: those model Germans—“Many of the cars contain families on their way home from a Sunday outing … faces colored various shades of satisfied red. Cheerful faces, massive faces, glum faces.” Coloring book and “real” Germany are, again, a doublet. It is in the pages of the coloring book that we first meet Brumhold, the hopelessly profound philosopher-Professor after whom the city is named, a Wittgensteinian or is it Heideggerian archetype who ponderously, asininely echoes WA's own preoccupations with words and “Things” in pseudo-conceptual counterpoint to the “colors” of the story. Gradually explicit reference to the coloring book is phased out of the story, but it has been so solidly lodged at the reality-base of the story that its energy eats away subliminally at the macro-puzzle. Embedded in the phrase-work of the story, it is a micro- or subpuzzle which disintegrates the macro-figures emerging from the story-frame and reduces them to bits and pieces of a puzzle, merely, or here to a coloring book. Any reference to color in the story-fiction is charged with this energy and immediately deconstructs the molar figures in its proximity. After the affair with Ingeborg Platt, for example, the narrator finds her “bright-colored silk scarf made in India. It has been left behind to remind me of an event that had taken place in this third-floor apartment.” The neutral, “colorless” language of the “event” is colored only by the scarf; later when the narrator visits WA the avant-garde writer, “There are white tiles on the floor of their apartment. The metal railing on the staircase is black. The stairs like the exterior of the building are also made of red brick.” As WA's apartment is colored in, it collapses onto the page of the coloring book. When Ingeborg disappears at the end of the story, all that marks the disappearance is “an ivory-colored dress with gold buttons” she wore on her evening at a restaurant with the narrator, the night before. “The coloring book,” points out the narrator, “simply activates the desire of most people to color something that is devoid of color.” The language-machine (or micro-puzzle, or double) re-converts the figures and events of a staged, fake Germany to language. With the narrator's straight-faced evocations of Professor Brumhold's impenetrable inanities in the background, “He started his philosophical inquiry by simply asking: What is a thing,” one might think of another famous, and mad, professor—Nietzsche, who, considering the “cogito ergo sum,” found that the only certainty was that “I speak.” And Clavel,³ questioning this grammatical faith, suggests “why say ‘I’ speak, why not ‘it’ speaks in what I call ‘me’. …”

SEXUAL EQUATION

We have approached the dark heart of WA's puzzles; before descending more deeply into this tissue of words, the spongy labyrinth of language, surely sex in should provide some relief, an antidote to words? In his Self-Portrait, WA speaks of “allowing the I to resuscitate itself by immersing its I in the attractiveness of a story-line or a screen or a page … there is also always sex. … As it fucks the I is temporarily expunged, only to reassert itself afterwards, a bit feebly it is true, as it addresses the other, saying: I love you.” There appears to be an equation here. WA's fiction has been said to be erotically obsessive; it would be truer to speak of the absence of sex—or of its presence in the eye.

Ingeborg is attempting to give me pleasure. She is doing it in a completely selfless and unselfconscious manner. It is, admittedly, not an entirely new experience, but the familiarity of the experience is colored by the unfamiliar world around me, a world housing unfamiliar things, that the remoteness, the polite distance between Ingeborg and myself serves only to intensify, although what I interpret as distance may merely be due to the way we express or fail to express ourselves in both English and German.

(my italics)

Sex in WA's fiction is voyeuristic, divested of any sensual imagery, cold if mildly interested or amused, cerebral—it is a combinatoire. Composed of the observer and the object(s) (never subjects) observed, it interposes a membrane between them as impenetrable and transparent as writing between reader and event. The reflexiveness of the narrator—or whoever the observer may be—strips the communication of experience—except the experience of alienation of desire—precisely communicated because nothing of sexual experience is communicated. The experience of sex is diaphanously substituted for by language-about sex. “Knees are for supporting the body in a crouching position,” a female character reflects in the middle of “the act” in another story; the mechanics are observed in a language reminiscent of a manual or instructions-for-assembling. Sex is a machine similar to the language-machine: it deconstructs people, separating them into parts. “Alva and his loved one entangled in a familiar routine of love, combining heads and legs, but all a bit mechanical, a bit staged, a bit fake. …” An articulation of writing?

WA never touches, penetrates the phenomenal level in his stories, but slips, glides over a film. The normal seeing of the reader—unself-conscious, absorbed, merged with the eyes of the characters, immersed in the seen—is converted by WA into the detached if fascinated looking of the voyeur, a literary voyeurism which stands outside the fiction looking in, which invests the world with eroticism, horror, eccentricity. “Thanks to language, thanks to maps, thanks to a few signs on the road, the brain can digest the surface of the areas that lie just beyond the familiar. In that way the familiar is expanded. …” This de-familiarization occurs when language is no longer purely transparent, or rather when self-aware, self-reflexive, it becomes quasi-visible as writing. It mirrors its own grammar, its own semantic projections in the trembling double of its writing. If WA's sex is textual, his text is no less sexual: just as the neutrality, the disassociation, the depersonalization of voyeuristic sex produce a febrile excitement, so the meticulous mechanics and static grammar of WA's “observed” prose create an inexplicable tension. The eye transgresses an erotic barrier in sex analogous to writing in language. “Barriers appear in my writings more frequently than they deserve,” writes WA in a story. “Language is not a barrier,” he says in the same paragraph, tongue-in-cheek. Writing, as fictive act, is the radical transgression of the new novel.

There is an absolute barrier to language: the image. I do not mean the “literary” image which is a fulfillment of language. For just that reason much contemporary fiction, including WA, strips its language of imagery. Some new novelists and “visual” poets use “real” (reproduced) images, blocking out or paralyzing the imagination of language. Language is murdered by the image, displaced and made superfluous by the mechanical abstraction and mimicry of “life.” This image may be interiorized in fiction: as language-about photos, film, television. A subtle blur is produced in the fiction as a result. Fictive persons, events, landscapes are exchanged between the space of fictive language and an other, frozen and flat space: “At what stage does the Southern Californian convert the world around him into the flatness that resembles a movie screen.” WA makes the conversion constantly in his fiction by means of these machines of artifice: “Has she become a part of Maxwell's scenario for the afternoon,” a character asks. In this story, “Ardor/Awe/Atrocity,” a television series, Mannix (man X?), saturates the physical and “human” environment of the “real” characters. The images of visual media—flattened, hard, exact—become the language of WA's entire fiction. WA compares his writing to Rosenquist: “The realism of being screwed by three men in leather jackets. The overlapping was not disharmonious. If anything it resembled a painting by Rosenquist.” While recognizing the discontinuities which WA might share with Rosenquist, I prefer to compare the hyper- or photorealists—the pellucid quality, sheen, esthetic functionality of phrase line coincide with photorealism in the reproducing of “reproduction.” Precise detail and hard surface did not bring visual art back to the figure of course, but doubly removed it. Photorealism produced a picture of reproducibility—just as WA produces language-about language. Susan Sontag has said that the photographic image is language. More precisely, it is a writing. In WA's fiction, these “images” are an image of writing.

CROSS-WORD PUZZLE

The artifices of WA's language have become sufficiently apparent; these are doubled to a power X² by his languages of artifice. The paradox of his fiction is disclosed here. The model of the puzzle has been shown to articulate his entire fiction. The combining of characters and event sequences and identities throughout his stories, the mini-plots of sex, the micro-structural unravelings of image, find their analog in the effort to identify and unscramble letter and number games. There are two kinds of writing in WA's fiction: a warm and a cold current. “The English Garden” is an example of the former: the puzzle, the structuring-destructuring device, however pervasive, is married or blended more smoothly with the “fiction,” is more implicit and “literary” (in the nature of an extended image). In the cold current, the puzzle hardens, becomes entirely visible, visual, and clearly imposed upon the fiction from the “outside.” The mysterious heart of the puzzle is revealed in such stories: this most trivial of intellectual diversions, this distraction from the serious, meaningful concerns of life becomes a metaphysics of nihilism.

“In so many words,” the contents of which I outlined in the first part of this essay, has such a puzzle applied onto it. The text is divided into pairs of paragraphs: the first in italics consists of a list of words in alphabetical order; the second in ordinary print is the regular, on-going text of the story. Each paragraph is also headed by a number. One notes first that the words in the alphabetical series are all found in the regular paragraphs; next that the alphabetical paragraphs are always shorter than the regular paragraphs; finally that the numbers heading the paragraphs correspond to the number of words each respectively contains, and that these naturally differ since certain words given only once in the alphabetical series, particularly prepositions, articles and pronouns, are repeated in the other paragraph.

Even if we wish at first to skip over the disturbing, italicized paragraphs to find out what is happening in the story, our eye is tripped and slowed down by the opaque blocks of (meaningless) alphabetical paragraphs and foreign bodies of the numbers. Events, people, scenes and their words are inexorably split apart, subjects and acts are broken down. However even in the next-to-zero velocity of one- and two-word concrete poems, a flicker of life is preserved; like gravestones with their pithiest of biographies, name, date of birth and death, the shadow of a man is fleetingly recalled—especially when one reviews these fossilized stones serially, the cemetery comes faintly, remotely alive with the murmur of their momentarily concrete presences. It is provocative in this regard to reiterate the importance WA places on names (particularly of the women): the female automats that people his pages are defined sexually and as personalities solely (almost) by the phonetic symbols that compose their names: the peculiar resonances of Irma, Maude, Muriel. In any case, since word and meaning cannot be fully amputated, we never read WA's prose like the succession of words and letters he keeps impressing (by means of print) upon us, but the presence of disintegration is always there, and his characters and landscapes threaten at every instant to crumble into the flatness and bloodlessness of their lettered likenesses—and they know it.

On the face of it, this alphabetical and numbering clockwork appears to be purely mechanical and external. On closer examination the puzzle is seen to participate in the persons, their acts and love-making, in a cold and horrifying, pseudo-intrinsic way: the number at the top of the ordinary paragraphs in its ratio with the number of the alphabet series stands for the number of the words which brought them—persons, events, etc.—into being. The number thus contains them like their cipher. The alphabetical order of the words which represent these beings serializes them arbitrarily but in a coherent, other universe. The senselessness of their “own” world is purely mirrored in this arbitrary order. The rigidity of the alphabet reflects the determinism of their lives. The perfections of America so dazzlingly projected in this story are translated, encapsulated in the arithmetical series. The pure structure of alphabet and number reproduce, in their insidious relationship to character and event and landscape, the elegance of a perfect, meaningless world.

In another “cold” story, “Ardor/Awe/Atrocity,” the trip of “Jane” through Southern California and her adventures, mostly sexual, finally murderous, are described in the first half; in the second half, “Bob Down's” arrival in Southern California and elusive pursuit of “Jane.” The subject of the story is as much the psychic landscape of CA, intimately pervaded, colored by the detective series, Mannix. The story is divided into 26 paragraphs, each headed by three numbered words: the first is Ardor¹ Awe² Atrocity³, the second Byouan⁴ Bob⁵ Body⁶, the third California⁷ Color⁸ Cut⁹ and so on down the alphabet to Zoo⁷⁶ Zodiac⁷⁷ Zero⁷⁸ at the end. In the body of each paragraph several words are numbered, and the words and numbers which at first appear quite random are found to coincide with a corresponding word/number couple in one of the paragraph headings. The triplicate titles, at first seemingly arbitrary, are felt to cast a sheen, an aura which sets the atmosphere of the story.

The highly contrived and artificial look of the puzzle immediately makes its point, as a language of artifice. The letters and numbers scattered through the various paragraphs are like coordinates, ordering events, parts of events, particles of persons somewhere else. In our effort to solve and combine the puzzle, we become accomplices of WA in fixing or framing (the criminal connotation) characters in a situation they are ignorant of; we move above them. The author's—and our—self-exclusion in the coldness of the medium, is over-compensated for by this hovering, shadowy presence through the grid of alphabet and number.

So far we have looked at the negativity of the (written) word and the ruinous effects of the puzzle. Having penetrated into these interstices of language, an unexpected inversion takes place. By reducing “things” to words, to symbols, WA has gained power over them; by sacrificing the expressive, i.e., magic property of words, WA gains a magic, incantatory power over the intractable world. Deconstructing the continuum of language to an inebriate excess by lettering and numbering, WA produces an alchemistry of the anguishing “everyday” world; breaking it down into its molecules, it may now be chemically recombined—the new compounds hinted at by letter/number couples. Having recognized the non-translatability of “reality” into language, WA performs instead a magical or Kabbalistic letter-meditation on his fiction; a sort of Holhmath ha-tseruf or “science of the combination of letters” such as the Sephardic Abulafia elaborated in the 13th century. In his search for a method of meditation which would enable the soul to shut out and see beyond the sensible forms of this world, Abulafia found the mystical contemplation of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Among the conceptions he studied was gematria, the numerical value of words (surely a future perfect fiction of WA will number the letters of words!), and the extraordinary dillug, a jumping from one conception to another, a species of discontinuity thoroughly familiar to WA! Now of course the whole aim of this “mystical logic” for Abulafia was the movement to God in ecstasy. In WA however, the use of our degraded alphabet, and the schizophrenic condition (doubling) of our superalienation which his fiction so mordantly represents, point in the opposite direction. It is well known, in fact the popular misconception, that Kabbalism tended to slide from a translucent meditation into magic. Are WA's puzzles a magical rite, by means of which he exorcizes the mindless horrors of our future perfect world and substitutes an alternative reality: mysterious, poetic, opaque to the one described? A magical manipulation and domination of the everyday world?

SOLUTION

This essay has been an attempt to solve the puzzle. The letters of the words of events and personalities have been inserted into their numbered slots, and seen to lock together. The puzzle may have been solved but it has not been resolved.

What “real life” is left in “In the Future Perfect”? Well, there is WA himself, the narrator/author present throughout his fictions. I have labeled him with his initials, feeling authorized by WA himself in his Self-Portrait: “Kafka … took refuge behind one of the letters of our alphabet. It so happened that the letter he picked was the initial of his family name … a formal link to the exteriority of his self”—a link similar to the pseudo-intrinsic relationship of letters and numbers to the words of his world. In the unraveling of the puzzle we thus see WA play amidst the letters he assembled. WA is both actor in and author of the fiction. In “The English Garden” he colors in the picture book which generates the story. He appears at the end of “AWE/ARDOR/ATROCITY” as a “Mannix nut” and author of a book set in Southern California, in which this story takes place. In “In so many words,” one of his real-life books, Alphabetical Africa, inexplicably finds its way into the heroine's perfectly furnished apartment. And throughout, ex cathedra, WA lets us know about compositional problems and itineraries in the movement of the fiction. His entrances “on stage” are discreet, like a Hitchcock's. He is an innocent onlooker in a voyeuristic prose, mildly sympathetic to the ravenous and soulless characters peopling his pages. WA is a real person as we know from his extraordinary Self-Portrait: born in Vienna, raised in China where he lived through World War II, then eight years in Israel, where he served in the army, and where he also had a chance to become well acquainted with the Negev Desert. Incidents, friends' and acquaintances' names, objects shift back and forth between biography and fiction. A friend of WA's disappeared exactly like Ingeborg Platt in “The English Garden.” The photograph “of Irma on a west side pier” which generated the story, “Parting Shot,” is to be seen on the second shelf of WA's bookcase, as described at the end of the story, “sitting on the second shelf is a photograph I took. …” On the other hand, his apartment is far from the perfect, antiseptic interiors of his characters; I am glad to say it is quite messy and comfortable and gemütlich.

I am not sure whether WA's presence tends to soften or “gentle” this hard and glassy world, or to ensure simply that every exit is securely locked. In effect there is no way out of his world of surfaces, a world with no inside to start with and an outside which is nowhere. Sex itself has been experienced as impenetrable: seamless, perfectly jointed, it allows no crack, no surface rupture, no way to penetrate to the other. His characters do rarely, briefly, recognize imperfection: “… in bed something else besides perfection was wanted, needed, desired,” but that need is quickly overcome in the headlong rush into the future perfect. In only one story is there something like an opening, a rent in an otherwise seamless fabric: at the end of “The English Garden,” WA “tossed the coloring book and the crayons into a garbage can. The man who stamped my passport said: Come back soon. Auf Wiedersehen.” The gesture negates, contemptuously, the very stuff of this fictitious culture: the German farewell, ironic self-contradiction, betrays the passion WA has kept just below the surface of this particular story, and which does not surface elsewhere. But the rent allows no light to pierce through, and opens out onto nothing.

RESOLUTION?

What is missing in WA's fiction is any moment of ecstasis, a standing-out from the world. And this exactly defines its closure, its perfect circularity. The analysis of this essay is constructed on the concentric circles of WA's grand puzzle. The master-puzzler manufactures the fictive truths (identity, act, origin) and this verbal act constitutes the truth of his mastery. There is a metaphysics implicit in WA's fiction; it is the metaphysics of an active nihilism. Through the subtle relations, hierarchies, figures of his lettered and numbered geometry of the mind, WA deconstructs ordinary language and builds, projects a mathematical, artificial language in its place, one which exactly spells out the fictitious nature of our truths, dispels these truths, and numbering, recollects them in the mesh of its finely webbed construction. The mastery of the whole vibrates in a polarity with the will to master. A. Glucksmann has shown how this Nietzschean circle of domination is rooted in traditional western metaphysics⁴: “the double question: what is being? is formulated on the one hand: what is (in general) being? and on the other hand it is formulated: what (which) is (absolutely) being?” (Heidegger). Shades of Prof. Brumhold! WA, the Grand Puzzler, holds his puzzlebook up like a decoding grid to the light of everyday, an alphabet and an arithmetic to decipher the world—and encodes the world as a puzzle. To take the last image of the last story in In the Future Perfect, to cast a last—light?—on this puzzle: at the end of “Crossing the great void,” Zachary, the hero, “is bound for the center of the desert,” a place (topos) which has had mythic (?) importance in WA's “real” life, “and every step he has taken is bringing him closer to the center, and every step he has taken in the past has led to his being here. Even before he was aware of the center's existence, he was traveling towards it.” Two lines further, he declares that “the emptiness which he expects to encounter at the center will be no different from the emptiness he might experience in the interior of his room after it had been denuded of all his possessions, stripped of all the things he had clung to with such persistence, such tenacity, such great effort, as if all his entire life depended on it.” The eerie beauty of this final image points to some content of the puzzle, to something like a resolution. Or is the image voided by the “emptiness”? Or isn't “emptiness” an image of the voided imagery? In the bible, the desert is seen as the place of spirits, not of the Spirit. The desert lies beyond language, a white page. It has been seen how WA's writing oscillates with the tensions of an absent sexuality, or the sexuality of absence. This absence, that emptiness, has a name: cruel, half-hidden at the sharp corner of the last letter of the last phrase, the jocular grin of Death.

Notes

1. “Self-Portrait,” W. Abish, published in Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America (New York: Dutton, 1977).

2. Superalienation is a concept I developed in a recent essay, “The Ideology of Fiction,” as the ideological framework of the new fiction, in particular “superfiction.” Based on M. Clavel's thinking, and Foucault and Derrida, I described the “text” of our culture, which—having become autonomous and universal, the voided metaphysical assumptions about man embedded in the forms of culture, co-extensive with language itself—can no longer be “read” by man today; he can no longer recognize himself in this “text.”

3. Maurice Clavel, seminal thinker and first of the “nouveaux philosophes,” in Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1975), and Dieu est Dieu nom de Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1976).

4. André Glucksmann, Les Maîtres Penseurs (Paris: Grasset, 1977).