SOURCE: “The Self-Apparent Word,” in The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction as Language/Language as Fiction, Southern Illinois University Press, 1984, pp. 86–95.

[In the following excerpt, Klinkowitz examines the techniques Abish has employed to create an “awareness of the author's role in the composition” of his fictions.]

The novella “This Is Not a Film. This Is a Precise Act of Disbelief” forms the centerpiece to the author's first collection, Minds Meet.¹ How we live, what our needs may be, and the form our hopes will take are all determined by the available surface of things surrounding us, this piece of fiction argues. Strongly narrative in form, it uses the methods of city planning (the trade which brought Abish to America after living in Austria, China, Israel, and England) to show how the structures available to us actually create, rather than serve, our needs. The occasion is the planning of a new shopping mall, which a French film director very much like Jean-Luc Godard² has come to study as an example of decadent American capitalism. The mall developer is part of a group which runs the town; within its population can be found a network of relationships, financial and sexual, which determine how things will happen. “This is a familiar world,” the novella begins, announcing a strategy parallel to Abish's theory in “On Aspects of the Familiar World as Perceived in Everyday Life and Literature” and just as systematic as the alphabet in Alphabetical Africa. “It is a world crowded with familiar faces and events. Thanks to language the brain can digest, piece by piece, what has occurred and what may yet occur” (p. 31). The developers plan malls, and the builders construct them according to plan—a comfortable arrangement of surfaces. The lowest worker in the story takes delight in forklifting cases of soda pop from shelves in the warehouse to pallors in the parking lot. (He also enjoys table tennis, just as his bosses enjoy bouncing their designs along the town's surface.) Disruptions of routine are moved aside, whether it be a retarded child shunted off to an institution or a corpse hidden behind locked doors. Whatever might be hidden beneath this clean and shiny surface is as important to Abish's work as to Poe's, and is a recurrent device to suggest how the systems which regulate our surface lives screen the less workable complications within the depths.

Much of Minds Meet, however, is playfully comic, toying with the inadequacies of a bumbling narrator. In “The Istanbul Papers” he is an embassy official seduced into giving Hitler's daughter a visa to the United States. “The Second Leg” finds this same type of figure as the odd-man-out at his girlfriend's apartment, where he plots out the doings in syntactic fashion.

All evening I master forebearance. I decline to inquire into their true relationship, Why should it matter to me, a kind of stretched-out week-end guest, what she and Victor do in the bathroom. It is so simple to jump to an erroneous conclusion. First Victor excuses himself, and leaves the table. Then she goes to the kitchen to fetch the dessert and coffee. Don't run off and desert me, I say jokingly. The next thing I hear is their boisterous shouts, their unabashed shrill laughter. They do nothing to restrain their mirth … or the sound of running water. It is seeping through from under the bathroom door when I get up to investigate. I keep myself in check and do not bring it to their attention. All things considered … not to overlook the soaked bedroom slippers, as well as the inexplicable presence of the two damp pillows on the toilet seat. I am at an utter loss for an explanation. Is this all being done for my exclusive benefit? I am resolved not to take too dark a view of all this horseplay.

(P. 111)

Still other stories verge on abstraction, as in “With Bill in the Desert” and “Non-Site.” In the former piece a desert trek seems to be taking place in a small room lit by an unshaded bulb, Abish's fictive reaction to a work of conceptual art by Terry Fox where “the light formed a topography of the interior that was, at once, a familiar romantic configuration in which the tent became the emotive key to a kind of disturbance of things past, and another in which one's physical presence, one's emotions, were measured (and partly activated) by one's proximity to that light” (p. 103). It is in such conceptual artwork that Abish finds the true connection between surface and depth and indicates the direction his own work pursues.

In the Future Perfect,³ Abish's second collection, shows the wide range of the author's methods, from the sign-fixated topology of “The English Garden” (which anticipates How German Is It) to a series of shorter pieces which experiment with structural forms even more complexly determining than that of Alphabetical Africa. In “Ardor/Awe/Atrocity,” for example, block paragraphs are titled by a trinity of alphabetically ordered words, seventy-eight in all, which are in turn identified by superscript numbers (of their ordinal ranking according to the alphabet). The subtitles introduce us to the words before their narrative sense, and their superscription when they do appear reminds us that they are first of all lexical devices and only secondly signifiers of an other reality. The story line itself discusses the surface of the “perpetual present” along which Californians propel themselves, acquiring styles from hit TV shows and acting them out along the boulevards, freeways, and beaches of their streamlined land. Without such shows as guidance, the story insists, the land and its people would be bereft of distinction. Citing the private detective hero, Abish notes that “keeping an eye on Mannix is one way of watching the smoothly functioning process of a culture prepared for any eventuality” (p. 49), as if the entire world has been converted to a movie screen. Breaking down this technique even further in the story “In So Many Words,” Abish titles his paragraphs by the number of words they contain, and then mixes the contents up before repeating them in proper order. Hence the reader again encounters the words apart from any combinatory meaning; and even when the meaning emerges on the second reading through, there will still be a sense of each word's individuality remaining from the first self-apparent encounter. In similar manner the emerging story features a young woman around whom meaning slowly takes shape as the sense of her syntax forms itself: “They know nothing about her except what is on view. What is on view is splendidly displayed. It is, furthermore, on view in order to be appreciated” (p. 94), and that act of appreciation must be constructed according to rules of visual grammar, just as Abish unscrambles each paragraph's words to make sense.

Three of Abish's more recent stories are even more radical in their methods of self-apparency. Prefacing the first, Abish explains his intent.

In constructing “Inside Out” I pretended that all books published in English represented a vast dictionary that made sentences (instead of just words) available to a writer. More or less at random I selected one sentence, and sometimes part of a sentence, from eighty authors. The numbers on the page indicate the number of words taken (and I cannot think of a more appropriate word) from each writer. The selection of the sentence, the sequence I followed and the idea to undertake this exercise are mine, but the story … ?⁴

The piece which follows does have a sense of progression to it, as a narrator describes his position, activities, and reactions—all of which is amazing because we have been told first off that the author has not composed these sentences but chosen them at random. This method is less shocking when we are reminded that there are such things as dictionaries of symbols which writers may use to create stories and which critics may in turn refer to for interpretation. But Abish's achievement is considerable when we note that words lose their self-apparency (and had in fact in his earlier experiments) just at the point of their combination into sentences. In “Inside Out” and the author's other variations in this mode the sense of opaqueness is expanded to include the sentence and then the paragraph, all the while maintaining a humanly interesting story.

“Ninety-Nine: The New Meaning”⁵ and “What Else”⁶ show Abish perfecting his theory and also moving toward longer selections, so that a fully new meaning for each sentence may be assumed from its new context. The first consists of ninety-nine selections each from page ninety-nine of books available in Abish's library, including two of his own. “What Else” allows the freedom of scanning fifty other books for passages that seem to be of use, although the story does not assume final form until all the selections are placed in Abish's “order.” Such a technique—using others' sentences rather than his own—would seem to be the extreme of abstraction in composition. But Abish's device in fact produces the opposite effect, for so rich are words and their associations that even plucked so randomly they still allow the author to compose with great human significance. “What tense would you choose to live in?” this latter story concludes, and answers: “I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle—in the ‘what ought to be.’ I like to breathe that way. That's what I like. It suggests a kind of mounted, bandit-like equestrian honor” (p. 119), much like the sense of vitality Abish's work entails.

Notes

1. Walter Abish, Minds Meet (New York: New Directions: 1975.

2. In the original manuscript later changed for publication by Seems magazine, Abish named his character Jean-Luc Godard.

3. Walter Abish, In the Future Perfect (New York: New Directions, 1977).

4. Walter Abish, “Inside Out,” Personal Injury, No. 4 (1977), pp. 57–68.

5. Walter Abish, “Ninety-Nine: The New Meaning,” Renegade, No. 1 (1979), pp. 2–15.

6. Walter Abish, “What Else,” Conjunctions, No. 1 (Winter 1981–82), pp. 105–19.

Robert Siegle (excerpt date 1987)

SOURCE: “On the Subject of Walter Abish and Kathy Acker,” in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXXIII, Nos. 3 & 4, 1987, pp. 38–57.

[In the following excerpt, Siegle examines how Abish uses language to undermine subjectivity, which, Abish argues, encourages the projection of presumed meaning onto ready surfaces, and prevents the discovery of the actuality of things in themselves.]

Part of the attraction of Walter Abish's work is the extent to which it carries forward the rethinking of subjectivity, rescuing many immediate experiences we know to be part of the contemporary subjective reality instead of dispersing them along with the theory of selfhood that had supported their fictional manifestations. He tells Jerome Klinkowitz in an interview that “I avoid the intentional and sometimes unintentional hierarchy of values that seems to creep in whenever lifelike incidents are depicted,” and goes on to explain that

language ceases to be a “tool” that facilitates the realization of a lifelike atmosphere, and concomitant creation of “real” people … it also ceases to intensify the immediacy of action, thereby diminishing the somewhat misleading proximity between words and what they signify.

(Klinkowitz, Life of Fiction, 65)

But of course “realistic” places, situations, encounters, “people” are throughout a collection like In the Future Perfect, but partly, perhaps, because his foregrounding of various cultural languages reoccasions the vitality of those situations without their distance from language and belief systems diminishing.

In terms of subjectivity, then, Abish does indeed dispense with the illusion of the Self as a regal authority with power, and thus responsibility, to determine its thoughts, actions, the assumptions underlying them, and the means by which they are exercised. Behavior is a complex interaction of systems and structures which exist in no simple internal/external or cause/effect relation with the “subject,” but perhaps in one of mutual supplement. Fiction seems to have become an ideal site in which Abish arranges encounters between history, systems, and subjectivity. Always in those encounters the latter fails to function in ways predictable by its classic formulation. Relationships, for example, are mediated by systems of which consciousness (language) and history (state policy) are woven. “Self-awareness” is contingent upon the ability of given elements to resonate within accessible frame(s) of reference.

Subjectivity is dwarfed by larger structures like History, the State, popular culture, private and collective myths, all evolving from the cultural process—and all of which, of course, are not to be conceived, as they often have been, within the metaphysics of the Subject (intention, identity, etc.), but as themselves undercoded, asymmetrical, and self-differing codes-in-formation which are latent within the overdetermined and hence infinitely complex events of experience.¹ “In the Future Perfect” is an ideal title for Abish because it underscores the extent to which futures are perfected, completed, by the systems and structures by which they are determined. The danger of oversimplifying a cultural model is present, of course, and Abish works against that not with the “humanism” of traditional realism with its illusion of infinite depth, but rather with the facets and glints of surfaces, their emphasis being upon the two-dimensional semiotic planes of billboards, silver screen, House Beautiful, and television.

The result is a significant interplay of immediate elements and mediating cultural forms, of individual and collective scales of reference. In “The English Garden,” perhaps the most often mentioned of the stories, one of many interesting incarnations of that interplay is to be seen. In effect, the story is about the stakes, often ideological, in the naturalized relation between sign and referent. In that most accessible and ideological dimension, the story undoes the attempt to repress a concentration camp by building a model city upon it. The “English Garden” metaphor is at first glance inappropriate, since anything but a natural paradise is erected: what we really find is a prefab city, gleaming, urban, perfect. But since an English garden, on second thought, is also anything but natural, is in fact a Central Park built stone by shrub or a Yorkshire sculpted by a landscape designer, the metaphor points towards prefabricated and mechanized “perfection” as what a semiotically hyperactive culture takes as its Nature.

What happens, of course, is that the concentration camp stalks the collective memory, a constant source of anxiety to its politicians, writers, and survivors (from both sides of the line). The Mayor snubs the narrator, the Writer tears up an old photo of camp inmates in front of him and works instead in avant-garde surfaces and the predictable and half-domesticated mildly left politics of the intelligentsia, and the commandant's daughter becomes “desperate” (her word) in her effort to maintain the contemporary facade and drops out of sight. In the public world History, in the private world Memory, each work against the ideological closure which the preplanned city is designed to impose upon the fertile ground of the old camp's site. The new system overcoded onto the old system preserves, perhaps, too much of the latter's reduction of people to objects, its management of dissonance with the final solution of exterminating traces of any perceived threat to its hegemony. That is to say, the history of systems is sedimented into their current morphologies despite our best efforts.

But that buried past is not the only lever used to dislocate the perhaps hegemonic sway of the reigning codings. Abish makes much of the after-thought of naming the new town after a philosopher, Brumhold, an unmistakably Heideggerian philosopher in his queries about “the thing” and its “metaphysical” or “intrinsic” meanings. These two labels, of course, resist a reigning assignment of significance by opposing to it a Real or True meaning in the classic idealist tradition, a tradition whose traces in Heidegger's metaphysical nostalgia are equally unmistakable:

In the great tradition of Greek and German philosophy Brumhold has questioned the meaning, the intrinsic meaning of a thing as it manifests itself in the context of metaphysics. There is, moreover, if one stretches the mind a little bit, a certain correlation between a thing as we know and understand it to be so and 2,500 apartment units, not to mention the additional services, the fire department, post office, library, school …

(8)

The context of metaphysics is different from that of city planning, just as the thing-in-itself (the apartments, or the camp for that matter) is different from the thing “as we know and understand it to be so”—i.e., as it functions within a given semiotic coding or, if you prefer, discursive regime. Brumhold raises similar questions as a WWII draftee:

If we assume that this is merely a thing, he said pointing at his rifle, and this is a thing, pointing at his uniform, and each and all of us are doing our thing, then our actions, whatever they might be, and whatever they might be called if we were to use the prevailing military terminology, are formulated by our grasp of the things around us.

(8–9)

Abish has great fun, of course, with his narrator's parody of Brumhold (particularly when the incongruity surfaces between such speculation and the surrounding destruction), so that the apolitical quietism of idealist speculation is made unmistakable. But equally important is the revolutionary potential Brumhold's Idealist—that is, ahistorical and anti-ideological (itself, of course, an ideology) loosening of reigning codings from their naturalized authority. As “our grasp” changes, so change our actions and our understanding of everything around us. Brumhold's belief in “the profound need and urge to think” is a license to recode the present in terms of a metaphysical, “meditative,” idealist, ontological, or other order alternative to the dominant.

The effect of the parody of Brumholdian style, the juxtaposition of his questions with the historical reality of WWII death and destruction, and the inevitably already completed passage of the thing into a grasp or a thing “as we understand it,” is to see his thought not as the freeing of things from codings, but simply as another coding. The master metaphor of such coding is that of the coloring book the narrator buys, a metaphor no commentator on the story misses (see, for example, Klinkowitz 69, Arias—Misson 118). As he considers the stylized shapes and the implications of coloring them German, the narrator indexes in the course of the story a number of functions the book serves.

To begin with it is, of course, an instrument by which children are socialized with certain values and assumptions: “the coloring book accurately depicts almost everything that could be said to exist in the mind of a child” (1). Moreover, “nothing that is depicted in the coloring book will force them to think in either” the calculative or meditative modes, but instead everything simply asks to be colored as “details whose sum is perfection,” a nice image of the totalization of both these cognitive alternatives beyond which the story strives to push. And since its contents include only things “that will never arouse anyone's disapproval,” it “simply activates the desire of most people to color something that is devoid of color. In this particular instant it is the normal everyday activity of people in the process of going about their tasks” (5), an apt reference to the coding of Heidegger's Everydayness. Since “dislike has been permanently effaced from the world of this coloring book” (17), it serves the current social goals of homogenization and pacification, just as the 1940 coloring books, we're told, emphasized tanks and “strange salutes.” History has shifted from lebensraum to altäglichkeit, but the culture's means of filling the minds of its (childlike?) citizenry remain the codings in popular media.

That media operates by two crucial dimensions of meaning in its semiotic media. The first we might call, following Eco, the segmentation of the content continuum (Eco 50–58). Coloring books, as those of us with no artistic talent experienced early on, are often one of the earlier experiences of the Law, of boundary, of arbitrarily recognized or constituted entities naturalized by the force of cultural institutions. One has to take as authoritative its pictures of the world, and one has to confine one's play within the boundaries it authorizes. Until one becomes a Brumholdian philosopher or an avant-garde artist, the possibility does not occur to one to rethink those circumscriptions of the actual, to alter its selection, its decisions about margins and categories, its accentings of the stress in garments or experiences.

The faces and scenes, we're told, are “by no means … characteristically German faces. Nothing is intrinsically German, I suppose, until it receives its color” (1); it corresponds to western culture's general segmentation of reality, but not yet to the specific networks of historical coding we call characteristically “German.” Just as significant, then, are the emotional tonalities that govern their combination, their vitality, their emergence as a vibrant and living (realistic?) whole. The narrator decides of the pages that

all they need is a bit of color to come to life and embrace each other, and then, in the best of humor, stroll over to a nearby cafe and have a Bratwurst or some other kind of Wurst, and then, to top it off, see a good film, a satisfying film shot in bright color, the bright color of Germany around them, the color that still remains to be added to these pages, the color that in the film isolates details, the details whose sum is perfection …

(4–5)

The passage equates the colors by which the book is colored “German,” of the colorful life of “ethnic” German pastimes, of popular film (the adult world's coloring book?), and of the world outside as perceived. It also suggests that “color” represents the network of connotation by which film, art, landscape, and other cultural forms weave meanings by connecting their various meaning-clusters, their semiotic strands, their systems—the mechanics, in other words, of coding their values, hierarchies, and assumptions about what is “natural” in the “Germany around them.”

But this story is only one of those by which Abish draws a box around all the activities of a story's participants and includes them within the systematic quality of contemporary semiotic mores. In the New Germany of the collection's opening story, the product of such activity is a disquieting world in which repressed contradictions lead to constricted relations, whether social, artistic, or sexual. The narrator keeps his shirt on when making love to the commandant's daughter, Ingeborg Platt the librarian, no doubt “hiding” the metaphorical stenciled numbers he wears as an inmate of a global camp of ideological control that is the alarming counterpart to those literal numbers worn by the wraiths in the old photo. The rest of the stories open a fascinating range of perspectives upon this global “city planning” of the collective consciousness.

In “Ardor/Awe/Atrocity,” for example, Abish is up to tricks reminiscent of Alphabetical Africa with a story of twenty-six sections, alphabetically arranged, each of whose three keywords are superscripted. The story then superscripts each word when it appears, perhaps to signify, by means of the absent footnotes to which we expect superscripts to refer, the often unacknowledged diacritical nature of its meaning. The tactic thus denaturalizes the medium and prevents our minds from disappearing into plot. That is important, of course, if we are not to repeat the fate of the principal characters who disappear into the plots of popularized pathways. Jane, that is, goes to L.A. over the misgivings of her parents, makes it (literally) in pornographic movies, and dies (also literally) to her old acquaintances, murdered by her success. Aside from a commentary on the fundamentally voyeuristic appeal of popular film and its (ab)use of its starlets and upon the reduction of women to male sex objects—a theme pervasive in the volume—Jane's fate is also a reading of the surprise characters experience when they try to follow too literally the prescriptions of popular stereotypes.

Everyone in the story, for example, looks to Mannix (manics?) as “one way of watching the smoothly functioning process of a culture prepared for any eventuality, any disaster” (49). Such a culture is, of course, engaging in the basic project of semiosis, perceiving experience as signifying elements within a coherent system, though at the frenetic pace imaged in the story by the freeway network with its menace of death at high speed for those, like Jane, who fail to navigate by its signs with sufficiently well-trained apparently “spontaneous” responses. Hence Bob Down's parents, trying to understand another East Coast emigrant, “realize that they needed someone like Mannix to get to the heart of the problem, to determine what was the matter with their son”—they too watch Mannix for guidance. Indeed, just as Jane is reduced to the object of the voyeuristic lens, so is she reduced in the second half of the story to no more than the contents of a suitcase by which Bob Downs converts his outsider status, thanks to its $14K, to marriage with someone he met at the “house of two dear and close friends of his” he met that weekend—a not inconsequential conjunction of capital and the commodified Image as subject. Indeed, every (metaphorical) Californian is similarly reduced:

At what stage does the Southern Californian convert the world around him into the flatness that resembles a movie screen. Everything the mind focuses on may be something it might have, on a prior occasion, spotted on a screen. In time, the Southern Californian will no longer ask, can I also do it? Instead he or she will want to know where, at what movie house, can it be seen?

(50)

In the place of the depth of the intending subject we have the two-dimensionality of the self as public screen figment, its inner and outer actions both within the sphere of commodified simulations. It is a short distance indeed from the coloring book of “English Garden.”

In “Read Only Memory,” we encounter a series of characters—from the President's wife reading French novels in translation, to a stable boy dreaming of the last cavalry charge, to Harry who seeks the maid who fits the shoe he finds in the bowery—for whom internalized fantasy incapacitates any ability to relate directly to experience or even to share parts of so fragile an internal mythology. No doubt such fantasies compensate for what personal experience lacks—in private license for a public figure, in heroism for a laborer, in a Romance role for the wide-bottomed protagonist—and thus function in ways similar to the repression of historical contradictions masked by the conception of Brumholdstein. But they also stress the concomitant function of popularized forms in programming the desires of the culture's subjects. It's not for nothing that the President's wife names her dog Madame Bovary.

“Access” shifts the emphasis slightly to the logic of conventional coding. Its title stands in a significant contrast to its subtitles (all of which include the word “Barrier”) that undoes the logic of oppositions, that emphasizes the extent, that is, to which binary oppositions are in fact redundancies. Something of a shorthand, perhaps, for certain deconstructive themes, “Access” presupposes barriers which surround it and to which it is a perhaps temporary exception, just as “barrier” denotes a temporarily barred access. More generally, then, language, or any of the “larger” semiotic systems to which the stories in the collection allude, is an access that is simultaneously a barrier or, perhaps more profoundly, (and in keeping with the collection's repeated reference to language as the medium of “dread”), a barrier that marks a (desired) access blocked by the ellipses or aporia—it's difficult always to tell which—in the culture and the signifying systems through which it is manifested.

Each of the “barriers” denominated by the story's subtitles grows out of a transgression of a social law—the “emotional” violation of the (working class) garbageman who attends the (upper middle class) party, a clash of Class and Party mores; the “absolute” barrier of a husband who arrives home a day earlier than announced to find his wife absent and, as it turns out, swinging; the “physical” barrier of $50 that Hilda (the wife) interposes between her available body and two briefcase-carrying businessmen who had expected freer access; the “acquisition” barrier Hilda has faced in trying to cultivate a boutique owner (Marthe) with whom one kind of relationship (as customer) defers another (as lover); the “language” barrier that Mark, the husband Hilda leaves, encounters when she moves in with “Marthe” now called “Paul”; and the barrier of cataloging or categorizing we face by the ease with which virtually any of these labels could be applied to any of the cases summarized in the story.

Language, it seems, and the social codings which share their structure with it, permit a certain kind of access as long as rules are agreed upon and scrupulously observed. But experience, reading, writing, thinking, interpretation, history, all seem at times to surprise the barriers necessarily imposed in its structuring of the content continuum, with the result that the access those barriers may be intended to channel is blocked by the gap between Reality and Signifying System, and that cultural “inside” to which one is granted access turns out to lack what the entrant seeks. Perhaps nowhere is this radically semiotic understanding of our collective experience so memorably portrayed as in “Crossing the Great Void.” Zachary has always been told by his Mafiosi uncle and beautiful mother that his father was lost in the WWII desert as a Captain on a heroic secret mission. Dependent upon a hearing aid, Zachary still does not hear well—particularly the under-currents. The picture he is shown (and treasures) is of a hotel doorman in Rome, and he is unwittingly in the position of Hamlet, his mother his uncle's lover, his own position usurped, his father displaced. Forced to work in a garage, he bombs his uncle's car and heads for the desert oasis in which his father has, reportedly, been seen, though not before he has a not entirely satisfactory sexual relationship with a beautiful girl on whose back is tatooed a map of the desert with Blitlu, the oasis in question (and an anagram for bullit?), at its center.

The story, then, is not difficult to “interpret.” By the time he reaches the town nearest Blitlu, his hearing aid battery is dead, the only available batteries said to be at Blitlu. The hotel doorman, suspiciously like an older version of the photograph he has of his father, hails the cab in which he rides off toward Blitlu:

Now he is bound for the center of the desert, and every step he is taking 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. … After all, the emptiness 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 his entire life depended on it.

(113)

He has taken as his reality a myth, a reordering of facts fabricated by his uncle in order to obtain the object of his desire with the least disturbance. His room, its maps and photos a shrine to the absent Father, is like the desert, an experience of absence, but the informing myth on which his life depends. His whole upbringing is like that of any citizen of the culture—a steady training in the expectation of a certain mythic center from which the Father beckons (compare Alice Jardine's use of the story as her allegorical emblem in Gynesis).

But it is a center in the void, and it is a center which is a semiotic black hole sucking into itself the psychic power of every experience to which he is exposed: the mind-liberating drugs he hears are sold there, the Father who is said to be there, the past the stories of which are the means by which, whispering to him in the night, his mother soothes him into sleep, the erotic totem of the girl on whose back is the map and whose directions he follows to the Center. All are subsumed in the paradigmatically logocentric myth of a center that the story marks as both regressive and delusional. Perhaps one might well conclude that every Abish story is about the desire for such a Center and the discovery of a metaphysical or intrinsic Void at the heart of every semiotic linkage, a marker of the ideological interests of the sign-wielders and managers of discursive regimes, a pointer to the absence of the thing the Greek and German traditions have taught us to expect of language. Each story is a variation upon a tracing of the semiotic strands of which the stuff of subjects is woven and the tragic rending of those strands by those who take them literally enough to act fully upon them, rather than cataloging peacefully in the library, governing politely like the Mayor of Brumholdstein, operating along the spokes of the semiotic webbing like the Mayor's brother-in-law, WA the writer, or the photographer-narrator of “A Parting Shot” whose stylized photograph of a bathing beauty facilitates both the disappearance of a husband in whom it awakens unfilled desires and his own taking of that husband's place with a woman who, apparently, fills his.

Note

1. Such a statement illustrates my debts to theorists like Foucault, Eco, Jameson, and Althusser, debts whose theoretical implications are acknowledged at great length in The Politics of Reflexivity.

Works Cited

Abish, Walter. In the Future Perfect. New York: New Directions, 1977.

Arias-Misson, Alain. “The Puzzle of Walter Abish: In the Future Perfect.” SubStance 27 (1980), 115–124.

Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Life of Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.