Viennese Jews, Walter Abish and his family fled Hitler's Austria for China. Unbeknown to him, there lurked below Vienna's surface decorum, concealed by the refinement and prosperity of a former imperial center, a most virulent ethno-racial hate. And how did such a world appear to a boy of seven or eight? Life, Abish tells us, was very much an affair of surfaces for him, a mistaking of the apparent for the real. Reassured by the props of his childhood—favorite toys, a comfortable home, a supportive family—Abish viewed life as a harmonious arrangement of people and objects. Writing recently in a lengthy essay on his Viennese roots, Abish, referring to himself in the third person, retrospects:

… from the very beginning he sensed a smoothly functioning world in which his needs were taken care of with a scrupulous attention to detail, a world in which pleasure had to be negotiated, in which the gramophone, the radio, the telephone as much as the tiny bell on the underside of the dining table, the bell with which his mother summoned the maid, highlighted the perfection of a designed world. Everything was always planned, all contingencies appeared to be covered. Nothing was left to accident …

(“The Fall of Summer,” 121–22)

In its various allusions to perfection, familiarity, orderly surfaces, and naive confidence, this brief passage highlights key thematic interests of Abish's innovative short stories, collected in Minds Meet (1975) and In The Future Perfect (1977), and his novels, Alphabetical Africa (1974) and, most notably, How German Is It, winner of the Faulkner/Pen award for the best fictional work of 1980.¹

PLEASING SURFACES

Abish's fiction depicts the surfaces of things, of people, of events, compelling the reader to ponder the moral and psychological interests that shape life's visible contours and condition our response to them. He attributes his reluctance to intrude with “clarifying” narratorial commentary to his own perception of the world, while growing up, as “bewildering in its profusion of stylized drama … a drama that remained forever highly elusive” (Klinkowitz, “Walter Abish,” 97). In Abish's view, we, in the twentieth century, present images of order and perfection to ourselves in order to assuage the demands of psyche and conscience for emotional and moral solvency. The world of Abish's fiction is preeminently urban, a not surprising preoccupation given Abish's professional training as an urban planner. The characters that populate this world strive for urbanity, a presentation of self suggesting confident mastery of the codes of bourgeois taste and personal comportment. “Taste,” in this narrow context, involves the recuperation of familiar standards of social grace, the repetition of an unreflective “perfection.”

Abish's characters strive to achieve “familiarity” and “perfection.” They dexterously arrange objects in space, from domestic bric-a-brac and furniture to major institutional architecture, in an effort to present iconically the values and achievements most revered in the late twentieth century: self-confidence, material success, taste, stability, and power. Whether involving the markers of bourgeois affluence—designer clothes, a “good education” for our children, fashionable holidays—or the signs of sociopolitical prowess—sleek technologies, polished executive performances, well-publicized philanthropies—we live in an image-conscious era in which style, artfully and strategically, subverts substance, in which the ephemeral often supplants the ethically responsible. Whether considering our collective preoccupation with appearances in the context of personal crises, as he does in many of the short stories, or in light of a major historical issue such as contemporary attitudes toward the Nazi pogroms, as in How German Is It, Abish, a subtle social critic, always returns to a single question: “Is there any other way to live?” (Klinkowitz, “Walter Abish,” 96).

Abish's work, like the fictions of Pynchon, Handke, Vonnegut, and many Latin American writers, effectively rebuts the argument that contemporary, innovative writers neglect history in their preoccupation with formalistic vanguardism and (what Jameson cites as) postmodern stylization of “past-ness” (“Postmodernism,” 66–71). As in the best postmodern fiction, technique and content are interactive in Abish's work. The discernment of the “familiar” is a central imperative in Abish's fiction, for it is only through discernment that the “familiar” can be displaced by something more morally profound, more profoundly insightful. Abish would risk unintended, unfortunate self-parody were he to discuss the “familiar” in familiar literary-generic terms. The “familiar” can only be effectively depicted through a representational mode that denudes it of its familiarity, making of it something foreign, something unsettling, something perhaps even hateful to the reader.

Abish's most succinct statements on his narrative aesthetic come in interviews, one in 1974, the other in the early 1980s, each appearing after the publication of a novel. In the earlier interview, he analyzes the uninflected description that figures so prominently in Alphabetical Africa and Minds Meet (and that we also see in later work):

In my writing I try to strip language of its power to create verisimilitude that in turns shields the reader from the printed words on the page that are employed as markers. Writing as close as possible to a neutral content, everything, the terrain, the interiors, the furniture, the motions of the characters are aspects of a topography that defines the limits of the situation being explored.

(Klinkowitz, “Walter Abish,” 96)

Though indicating a concern for the empirical, this statement quite obviously defines no standard mimetic realism, nor indeed a neonaturalism. Abish's realism, really an “experimental realism” as Jerome Klinkowitz has observed, presents a highly nuanced vision of a world only superficially stable (The Self-Apparent Word, 128–31). Unlike conventional realists who supplement description with much straightforward narratorial analysis and commentary, Abish manipulates language and images in a more self-conscious, subtle manner in order to show the capacity of communicational codes to constrict thought and to preempt moral introspection.²

Structurally, both in the stories and the novels, we find an emphasis on spatiality. Not a great deal happens in Abish's fiction, typically. He juxtaposes a series of short, narrowly enframed scenes involving, for example, a character considering the contents of a shop window, or a sparse narratorial description of an interior, or a bland conversational exchange. His realism offers no expansive, slice-of-life tableaux. His is the art of the photographer, not the mural painter (and we find frequent references to photographs and photographers in his fictions). Abish's verbal vignettes flaunt the surfaces of life. Abish is not after a deep, hidden truth. For him, “everything is on the surface” (Lotringer, 165). Characters are presented to the reader very much as people present themselves to us in our daily interactions with them, replete with apparent goodwill and not always scrutable motivations and desires. Yet, though he offers neither conventional psychological analysis nor exemplary characters, Abish, in a resolutely Bakhtinian spirit, consistently manipulates an understated irony to deride the superficiality of our age. Unlike Robbe-Grillet, for example, Abish pursues “neutral content” in order to achieve a value-charged end. His fictions relate the epistemological to the moral.

As has been suggested above, in order to isolate phenomena, and therein render them less “familiar,” Abish uses a kind of scenic enframement in his fictions roughly analogous to the spatial limits placed upon a photographic image by the aperture of a camera lens. Abish, like many twentieth-century writers and philosophers, is acutely aware of another “enframing” device—language. As we find with other modern, native-born Austrian writers like Musil, Thomas Bernhard, and Handke (all of whom are mentioned by Abish from time to time), Abish interrogates the constrictive function of language. Through the isolation and repetition of clichés—the verbal bedrock of human interaction—Abish considers language's seductive capacity to domesticate objects and events in the world by reducing them to the rhetorically familiar. Abish's characters take refuge in language, allowing the reassuring rhythms of trite conversation to lull them into intellectual and moral apathy.³ In How German Is It, for example, the weather inspires an often repeated exchange that, incidentally, has embedded within it a reference to the war the characters are attempting to forget.

A glorious German summer.

Oh, absolutely.

A scent of flowers in the air.

Isn't it marvelous.

Easily the most glorious summer of the past thirty-four years [since 1944].

And how relaxing.

(54)

The unreflective use of language represents, of course, an affirmation of the status quo and this affirmation has obvious and profound moral implications. At the conclusion of “Access,” the narrator remarks both on the malaise of stereotyped speech patterns and the writer's capacity to effect partial remedy:

I'm not really concerned with language. As a writer I'm principally concerned with meaning. What, for instance, does being a writer mean in the context of this society … writers perform a vital task, they resuscitate words that are about to be obliterated by a kind of willful negligence and general boredom. Writers frequently are able to inject a fresh meaning into a word and thereby revitalize the brain cells of the reader by feeding the brain information it does not really require.

(Future Perfect, 72–73)

And, by helping overcome the intellectual entropy begot of formulaic language, the writer may also have a moral impact.

Though, as Wolfgang Holdheim has pointed out, “The boundary between ethical blindness and intellectual obtuseness has never been precisely defined,” we may nonetheless consider Abish's fictions as preliminary cartographic efforts to draw this line of demarcation (147).⁴ Before considering the novel How German Is It, his longest and most successful work, let us turn first to the short fiction and Abish's portrayal therein of contemporary urban society.

THE SHORT FICTION

A materialistic society is controlled by the manipulation of, and its own absorption in, the apparent. It practices a crude, impatient phenomenology that “understands” through reduction and typification. A priori notions of perfection render invisible the nuances of the moment. “This Is Not a Film This Is a Precise Act of Disbelief,” the lengthiest of Abish's collected stories, starts off with some apparently reassuring observations:

This is a familiar world. 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. It is never at a loss for the word that signifies what is happening this instant. In Mrs. Ite's brain the interior of her large house with a view of the garden and the lake are surfaces of the familiar. … To some degree the objects in the familiar interior of her house channel the needs.

(Minds Meet, 31)

The passage suggests, as Abish says of it, “the dubiousness of the familiar” (Klinkowitz, “Walter Abish,” 96). Its naively confident tone excites in the reader the suspicion that all is not as it appears to be, that the verbal surface of the story must be attended to closely. As the story illustrates, Mrs. Ite's “understanding” of the world around her is based on myopia. She understands very little about the circumstances in which her life is enmeshed. This opening section concludes with Mrs. Ite remarking to her son Bud that something is missing, something normally present “among the familiar setting of her furniture” (Minds Meet, 31). Her son responds wanly that it couldn't be anything “terribly familiar,” investing the scene with comic absurdity for, in fact, it is her husband who has disappeared.

Three years after his father's disappearance, son Bud discovers the keys to Mr. Ite's locked study. Upon casual investigation he and Mrs. Ite discover Mr. Ite's body, the seeming victim of foul play (though the cause of his fate is never identified). Mr. Ite, an architect by profession, was professionally engaged in the creation of new surfaces. At the time of his death he was involved in the design of the local mall, a fixture in the landscape of contemporary America. A mall, of course, bears testimony to our capacity (and desire) both to neutralize nature and to implant our own stylized vision on the world. (And, lest we doubt the compelling nature of this vision, there were, in 1985, more enclosed malls in the United States than cities, four-year colleges, or television stations, and almost as many as county courthouses [Kowinski, 20].)

In the story, a French Marxist film director who has come to “use” the mall as a set for a movie—actually to blow it up as a gesture of proletarian self-righteousness—refers to the new mall as a “Museum of Need,” noting generally the “surfaceness of all American things” (Minds Meet, 34). Abish's story shows us that the mall must be read as a sociological marker. Apparently a “museum” that bequeaths to its clientele usable cultural artifacts, it represents, at the same time, equally apparently (if we defamiliarize “mall-ness” for a moment, as Abish does), the most recent stage in the commercialization of modern life. The architects of such structures are also, in concert with developers, retailers, etc., the would-be architects of our desires. Barthes, in the essay on the Eiffel Tower—another architectural paean to “progress”—notes that architecture has always been “dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience” (239). It remains of crucial importance that we consider self-consciously the dream, the utopia, the mall's authors are, quite literally, selling and that, if we accept this dream, we do so volitionally.⁵

Like many postmodern writers, Abish rarely puts forward exemplary ethical postures in his fiction. As noted earlier, his characters exhibit bad faith and bad moral judgment, typically. In “This Is Not a Film” the various characters represent different classes, varying intellectual interests, and conflicting political positions; therein, they serve as foils for one another. Yet, in the end, the cast behaves in a frighteningly undifferentiated way. The working class—represented by Hank notably—and the controlling bourgeoisie have essentially the same values, a situation that denies the Marxist claim—at once romantic and hopeful—that the workers are closer to historical truth than any other class. Hank, a worker in a local bottle plant, accepts unquestioningly both his wife's lavish wardrobe and the ease with which he himself receives well-remunerated employment. Hank, like his bourgeois masters, affirms a statement made by Cas Ite shortly before his death: “We're all trapped by our needs” (60). Hank's needs, emotional ones that are serviced by material well-being, compel him to overlook the source of his prosperity—his wife's efforts to copulate her way up the social ladder, a circumstance happily exploited (and paid for) by the town's oligarchy of professionals and businessmen.

In addition to class difference, there are two other noteworthy oppositions in the story though neither admits significant moral differentiation. Merce Ite, the brother of architect Cas, appears to be markedly dissimilar to his brother and the latter's cronies. A man of culture, a cosmopolitan, Merce seems admirable in his sensitivity to books and theater and his general aloofness from the maneuverings of the provincial business world. However, these aesthetic interests—call them “needs”—merely indulge a hedonism indistinguishable from those of his peers, a hedonism that is underwritten in part by brother Cas, who provides Merce funds for fine suits and trysts in Boston with male prostitutes. Finally, the seemingly disparate priorities of culture and corporation are subsumed by a common foundational priority—the satisfying of personal need. After seeing his sister-in-law and his brother's business associate Frank Ol together in a Boston hotel, Merce opts for the preservation of surface harmonies and does not inform his brother of the infidelity. Cas's death, though never definitely explained—was it murder or was it suicide?—seems most likely attributable to the treachery of Ol and Mrs. Ite, a treachery inadvertently abetted by Merce's moral passivity.

Completing this pattern of immorality in “This Is Not a Film” is the character Michel Bontemps, a leftist filmmaker after the fashion of Godard, who serves as a foil to businessman Frank Ol and his associates. As with the oppositions discussed above, Abish plays with stereotypes in this juxtaposition of the “Marxist revolutionary” and the captains of commerce. Written in the early seventies, “This Is Not a Film” rejects the fatuous assumption (more current then perhaps than in the opportunistic eighties) that antiestablishment rhetoric serves as the only necessary surety for ethico-political idealism. Though purportedly intent on producing an agitprop film depicting the general corruptness of American values—values that are embodied by Ol and Cas Ite—Bontemps' cinematic project is more an act of self-promotion than of social critique. The narrator makes clear in introducing Bontemps that the latter has developed a personality cult around himself by carefully fashioning a public image. Dark sunglasses, a myriad of affairs, temper tantrums, fifteen “innovative films,” and the interior of his apartments are the markers that define “Michel Bontemps” (32). As his surname suggests, Bontemps is after a “good time”; he is a hedonistic media star, not a Marxist ideologue.

Bontemps and his aides—the unnamed narrator and his fiancée—have installed themselves in a local hotel:

The hotel room is our center, our HQ … our books, our papers, our black-and-white photographs of Che and Mao have diminished the bleak uniformity of the surfaces in our room. We have, for the duration of our presence, imposed on the neutral hotel surface the dynamics of our ideas and intentions.

(37)

The narrator suggests that their alteration of the hotel's surface establishes a moral difference between themselves and small town America. Their actual behavior, however, contradicts this implicit claim. In his development of a glamorous public persona, Bontemps does not indulge in the revolutionary's characteristic self-denial. Significantly, when Bontemps unexpectedly leaves the town, he takes along the narrator's Gillette razor, thirty-five of his Seconals, and the narrator's fiancée, Jill. In a farewell note, Bontemps admits having bedded Jill, while denying that she holds any physical appeal for him. The note's recurrent use of the pronoun “I” unambiguously denotes Bontemps' central concern in life. The narrator remains in America to work out filming details. Feeling that the film may improve mall business, Frank Ol agrees to certain “eccentricities”—to allow Bontemps to blow up a few houses, to burn a pile of consumer goods, and even to destroy a portion of the mall. Paradoxically, the film, which intends to destroy corporate America, may well accomplish the opposite end of financially buttressing it (a situation, incidentally, that often occurs when “antiestablishment” books, recordings, and films are successfully marketed through mainstream corporate entities).

Bontemps is a poseur, a conventional bourgeois artist for whom self-expression and personal accomplishment are primary goals. In his films the aesthetic overwhelms the ethical.⁶ The narrator points out this contradiction. Bontemps, he tells Frank Ol, “subverts the destruction of his enemies by his aesthetic concerns. In other words, the placement, the color, the objects, the motions, the juxtaposition of faces all combine to diminish the revolutionary content” (58). In Bontemps' films, aesthetic novelty produces a strong visceral reaction, produces an aesthetic frisson, and undermines his ostensible theme(s). This is a danger that every innovative artist courts. Unusual formal designs can dominate semiosis rather than aid it, can produce a formalistic reception. And we can legitimately ask how an innovative story such as “This Is Not a Film” succeeds notwithstanding the risks inherent in experimentation.

First of all, the “experimental realism” of the story obviously builds on the elements of conventional realism, the latter a mimetic form readily accessible to readers. Clearly defined characters occupy a clearly defined time and place. Characteral introspections are totally neglected. Settings such as domestic interiors and the mall serve as obvious symbols of a human desire for order at whatever moral price. The plot is progressive with few violations of natural chronology. Yet, notwithstanding these features, the fluidity of the conventional realist fiction is not apparent here. A number of elements block narrative flow and compel an active engagement on the part of the reader. “This Is Not a Film” has a complexity of plot unusual for a story or even a novella. There are a number of subplots that require contextualization within the main story. Relationships between people, for example, are only hinted at, requiring the reader to scrutinize the “surface” of the narrative carefully for clues indicating, variously, a love interest, corporate machinations, or a betrayal of trust. The three parts of the story are broken up into a total of thirty-one sections, a structure that further fragments the narrative, with the reader forced to relate each part and each section to the others, forced to fill in what Wolfgang Iser calls “blanks,” those points in a story where focus shifts—sometimes subtly, sometimes radically (166–70; 190–203). In the absence of guiding narratorial commentary, the preoccupation with surface description results in an allusivity one associates more with the mystery tale than with a realist milieu study. And of course, as noted already, there is no moral center in the story, no exemplary character, no foil to define virtuous conduct. In “This Is Not a Film,” as in other of his works, Abish skillfully marries fragmentation and allusivity to such conventions of realism as natural plot chronology, symbolism, and surface description. This marriage of the disparate yields a relatively original narrative that valorizes neither form nor content and thus avoids both aestheticism and an aesthetically barren tendentiousness. The story defamiliarizes both the reassuring surfaces of conventional realist fiction and the reassuring surfaces of the quotidian.

In “This Is Not a Film This Is a Precise Act of Disbelief,” characters take considerable emotional and moral solace in the aura of order that emanates from the surfaces of their surroundings and the surfaces of their lives. They remain scarcely aware of the sexual predation, the avarice, the manipulation, the general misanthropy that motivate their behavior. The mall, Bontemps' films, and Hank's apartment all serve as calming, familiar surfaces to be recognized; they conspire to perpetuate moral and epistemological obtuseness. Similarly, in other stories, Abish uses such highly structured phenomena as contrastive symbols to highlight a desire, often distinctly neurotic, on the part of his characters to protect themselves from the contingencies of their existence. These contrastive symbols—photographic portraits, maps, mosques, formal gardens, and chic living quarters are notable—all present to the viewer a superficially ordered world. They offer a world enframed, one reduced to essence. Each symbol in its own way lies and conceals: the portrait, for example, seeking in a single glance to characterize; the map offering its custodian an illusory sense of mastery over space, its two-dimensionality emphasizing surface; the mosque and the formal garden objectifying metaphysics; the chic apartment exhibiting a tenuous self-assurance. These symbols bear closer scrutiny.

For the narrator-protagonist of “The Second Leg,” mosques, actually photographs of them, provide endless fascination. Though he has never visited a Muslim country, mosques are part of his “turf” (Minds Meet, 105). On the other hand, the turf of Ludmilla, a former lover with whom he is staying while visiting New York, is “insidious sex.” As the story unfolds, the protagonist and Ludmilla act out a sadomasochistic melodrama in which mosques, his images of completeness, and Ludmilla's misshapen leg, a living allusion to imperfection and death, provide symbolic polarity. Having failed in marriage and having been spurned by Ludmilla, the protagonist turns to his mosques. “Love,” he observes, “does not have the resolute perfection of the courtyard of the Great Mosque of Kairouan” (117). The illustrations give him order, however vicarious and fragile. At the same time, they present a past that is neutral and hence not psychologically oppressive for him. He passes an ingenuous confidence: “Unlike most passionate involvements with the past, illustrations, it seems to me, are not necessarily regressive. I find this reassuring. I have no wish to be imprisoned in a Parthenon of rosy memories” (118). In fact, the protagonist's own past has enshrined in his mind oppressive memories of marital failure, of sexual confusion, of an enigmatic relationship with his mother.

The orderly volumes of the mosque, its pillars, its many naves, the striking chromatic contrast between the mosque's whiteness and the perfect blue of the Mediterranean sky, all these write a topography of his desires, a need for clear delineation and confident restraint and physical prowess:

I now can clearly see the egg-white ribbed dome, the cobalt blue frames of the crosshatched windows and the gleaming white walls. … The eye is so tremendously selective. The exterior of the mosque is covered with many layers of whitewash, and when viewed below, the walls stand out in sharp contrast to the Mediterranean sky above.

(118)

The protagonist's eye is indeed “selective,” his mosque “fantastic” (118). He takes in surface detail without considering the mosque as a time-conditioned artifact. Just as his own dispiriting circumstances are forgotten in his contemplation of the mosque, so too is the mosque's cultural specificity overlooked when it is translated into a mere objet d'art existing beyond the contingent within the covers of the coffee-table book. In “The Second Leg,” “culture,” as it does in much of Abish's work, becomes a refuge for the emotionally (and morally) weak. In serving up time-honored analogues of perfection, that is, predefined “masterworks” stripped of cultural context, culture risks becoming an opiate that dulls the sensibilities. “The Second Leg” concludes, uncharacteristically enough for Abish's fiction, with the protagonist achieving some degree of self-understanding. The protagonist and Ludmilla sit contemplating her legs, first the healthy one, then the misshapen one. “Poor Ludmilla, no amount of loving will replace your deformed leg,” he confides to himself, acknowledging, symbolically, the imperfections of his own life (124). The story ends with the protagonist and Ludmilla in emotional union, the former having accepted “the second leg,” an emblem of the contingency and death that his mosques had striven to negate.

A numbing concern for perfection also surfaces in stories of the second collection, In the Future Perfect. The same quote from Whitehead occurs in two of them, “Parting Shot” (25) and “In So Many Words” (79, 87): “Even perfection will not bear the tedium of infinite repetition.”⁷ Both stories are set in chic Manhattan. The characters in both have not come to terms with Whitehead's remark. In each instance they use money to achieve “perfection” repetitively, unconsciously calling into question of course, at the same time, the very notion of perfection. Television, shop displays, glossy magazines, the small private galleries, all these mold notions of value, identity, and world:

Did Whitehead know that wealth enables people to acquire the perfect apartment, the perfect country house, the perfect haircut, the perfect English suits, the perfect leather and chrome armchair, the perfect shower curtain, the perfect tiles for the kitchen floor, and a perfect quiche available only from a small French bakery near Madison Avenue, and the perfect Italian boots that look like English boots but are more elegant, and the perfect mate, and the perfect stereo, and the perfect books that have received or undoubtedly are just about to receive a glowing review in the Saturday Review. Wealth makes it easier to have the perfect encounter with a stranger, enjoy the perfect afternoon, make perfect love, a sexual encounter that is enhanced by the objects that are in the room, objects that may at one time have attracted a good deal of attention while on display in a Madison Avenue shopwindow.

(Future Perfect, 25)

The narrator's mock rebuttal of Whitehead's statement illustrates well Abish's technique of defamiliarization, in this case of a crassly materialistic view of perfection. In response to Whitehead's succinct, seemingly credible assertion, the narrator offers a droning anatomy of “perfection” as construed by an upper-middle-class urban milieu. The appending of “perfect” to a great number of mundane objects ultimately derides the values that define “perfection” in this context. The litany of “perfect” objects is interlarded with references to human relationships, indicating of course that some equate the two or, more accurately, emotional satisfaction is, for some, a mere derivative of bourgeois faddishness. Objects combine in their settings to serve as a panoply to protect their proprietors from the vagaries of open, forthright relationships. Perfection is accomplished only through reification of self and others. People wear brand names, rather than clothes. People become “generic,” mere mannequins posturing within “sets” appropriated from shop windows and department store displays.

In the tastefully appointed prison houses of the urban chic, stylish perfection is an end in itself. In “Parting Shot,” Maud acknowledges, from her midtown Manhattan apartment, that she and her husband have become “two collectors of the perfect experience, assessing the degree to which we have arrived at the state of perfection” (26). Maud herself is an object on display. At her parties she serves as another prop within the fashionable ensemble of her apartment. Certainly, the “perfection” of her surroundings in no way protects her from sexual frustration and a general sense of displacement any more than it does the heroine of “In So Many Words.” She too seeks, and fails to find, ecstasy in the perfection of surfaces:

Standing at one of the elongated windows, munching a Sara Lee croissant (quite delicious) she is taking in the American perfection, the American splendor—absolutely no irony intended. It is true. From a certain height and perspective, the eighth floor of her building, America is convulsed with perfection.

(Future Perfect, 75)

Again, name brand consumer goods are the primary patrons of this perfection, e.g., Abercrombie and Fitch binoculars, Gillette and Schick razors, Sara Lee pastries, and Draino. Yet, these fail to neutralize the existential malaise that envelops her. (Or do they enhance it?) At story's end, in a desperate attempt to escape the “familiar perfection” of her social set, she invites three leather-jacketed men from small town Arizona into her bed for “in bed something else besides perfection was wanted, needed, desired” (97). Finally, the familiar, perfected topography of her milieu yields to long repressed desire.

HOW GERMAN IS IT: PERFECTING NOTIONS OF GERMAN-NESS

The Nazi reign of terror remains, decades after its defeat, an enduring nightmare. It crops up regularly as a primary theme in various artistic media as well as in contemporary current events.⁸ There is, as Elie Wiesel tells us, a double moral imperative to remember—to honor the innocent victim (living and dead), and to ensure that history never again takes such a vile turn. And indeed, in the face of a fundamental human inclination to gloss over the savage, there can never be too many reminders. How German Is It is Walter Abish's reminder. Abish first considers the Holocaust in “The English Garden,” a story which provides the setting and general tone of the novel. The “garden” of the story's title has a symbolic rather than ontic presence in the story, appearing as it does only in an epigraph that Abish takes from John 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.

(Future Perfect, 1)

Both the short story and How German Is It explore how the “English Garden effect” strives today in contemporary West Germany to subdue an unseemly past.⁹ Since the novel's techniques and themes subsume, for the most part, those of the story, I will focus on it.¹⁰

“The presentation of the ‘familiar world’ is not,” notes Abish, “an innocent one.”

To me, the familiar details are also signs of a familiar world. In projecting these signs I am aware of my own preoccupation with the “familiar” and the presentation of it. Essentially, I am questioning how we see and write about something. … I feel that the text I write lies between me and the experience.

(Lotringer, 162)

How German Is It studies how the familiar signs of the world—linguistic, kinetic, iconic, etc.—are perceived and processed. For Abish's characters, just as for Abish himself and the reader, the variegated “textual” signs that the world offers us help configure our general attitudes. The world looms as a dynamic semiotic field, one that is open to manipulation, one that demands of us an interpretive gesture. Both the manipulation of the semiotic field and the interpretation of it have obvious ethical ramifications. How German Is It considers the production, maintenance, and reception of the field of signs in the context of a small West German town in the seventies, paying particular mind to the ideological bias that responses to signs betray.

Abish uses a number of techniques to defamiliarize the milieu of the novel: the detailed listing of “typical” features; unaccentuated references to the past and the past in the present; the posing of blunt, leading questions; and the double entendre. In part 1 of the novel, entitled “The edge of forgetfulness,” the protagonist, Ulrich Hargenau, Jr., a writer, returns home to Würtenburg after an extended French sojourn. “The edge of forgetfulness” offers a subtly ironic catalogue of what, for the native German or the returning expatriate or the tourist, constitutes “German-ness.” Like a tour book or a Chamber of Commerce pamphlet, the images presented strive earnestly for typicality. Great emphasis is placed on the visible splendors of Germany's past but, as the narrator observes in “This Is Not a Film This Is a Precise Act of Disbelief,” the brain is “highly selective” (Minds Meet, 36). The typical portrait of German typicality is indeed laudatory. Germany is culture: Gothic and Baroque architecture; Wagner and Beethoven festivals; Dürer and Cranach and Holbein and Grünewald; and Goethe, natürlich. Germany is punctiliousness: clean streets, obedient trains, civic order, well-stocked shops, and precision-engineered automobiles coursing along precision-engineered Autobahnen. Germany is economic progress (if not “economic miracle”): industrial plants, well-designed dams and bridges, modern farms, and new urban centers. These are the familiar signs of German typicality that greet one pondering “this smooth and agreeable surface” (3). These are the familiar signs that present German history as an unbroken series of achievements and civilized national gestures.

Yet, punctuating this familiar, univocal semiotic system, we find brief, hushed allusions to the “atypical,” to past events and current attitudes that lie beyond the conventionally familiar. In these passages, Abish strictly controls the flow of information, presenting only a superficial description and, consequently, leaving the reader to his or her own resources. Ulrich von Hargenau, Sr., Ulrich's apparent father, a Nazi officer executed in 1944 for treason—he is not “familiar,” remaining for many ever a traitor to national ambitions. Passing mention is made of a local Jewish furrier who converted to Catholicism earlier in the century (6). Why? Perhaps to escape the wrath of anti-Semitism, and perhaps not. Abish compels the reader to consider the bare facts of the anecdote, i.e., its “surface,” and to postulate their implications. The narrator does not guide the reader through commentary. Pointing out the many “tall blond men and women” wearing leather coats and jackets, the narrator asks, “But why this curious predilection for leather?” (3). The linking of fabled Aryan racial traits to leather overwear stirs images of Hitler Youth donning martial leather. Or does it? Again, Abish neither confirms nor denies such readerly associations. It is only through a slow accretion of such allusive references and images that the reader becomes suspicious that traditional notions of German typicality are compromised by a strategic blindness to certain “obvious”—at least in Abish's defamiliarized context—moral failings. Indeed, these unsettling references to an immoral recent history, and its residual influence, are largely beyond the ken of the protagonist who, until the novel's conclusion, disregards visible suggestions of a dark past—collective or private—preferring to write self-indulgent autobiographical novels about male-female relationships.

At the end of part 1, Ulrich plays the boulevardier, drinking beer, observing others, and taking in the sights. But Abish allows the reader no such anesthetized point of view. He heightens the reader's sensitivity to his thematic concerns through questions and the double entendre. The narrator probes: “The question remains, do the Germans still expect to be asked embarrassing questions about their past and about their present and what, if any, ideas they may have about their future?” (7). And, as Ulrich considers the reconstructed version of a bridge destroyed in the war, the narrator ironically acknowledges that “replicas of this kind testify to a German reverence for the past and for the truth, a reverence for the forms and structures upon which so many of their ideals have been emblazoned” (7). We will later learn that this interest in replicas is “highly selective” and that it does not extend to replicas of Durst, the local Nazi death camp that now lies in ruins (7). At the conclusion of “The edge of forgetfulness,” a series of questions focuses unequivocally on the novel's key interests. The last two questions are central: “What is seen? And what is said” (9). Most of the novel focuses on the major disjunction between, precisely, what the eye recognizes, and what the mouth reports.

In parts 2 (“The idea of Switzerland”) and 3 (“Sweet truth”), the setting shifts from the “Old World” splendor of Würtenburg to a new town, Brumholdstein, with Ulrich spending a brief interlude in Geneva. Brumholdstein is a civic embodiment of Ashbery's “English Garden” effect in very many ways. Constructed as it is on the site of Durst, it literally covers the “surface” of an unsavory remnant of Germany's Nazi past. Brumholdstein offers a clean, new topography. The town emblematizes the “New Germany,” presenting a revision of “typical” qualities, ones apparently at odds with those honored in the thirties and forties. The novel of course will demonstrate that now, as in the period of the most heinous persecution of innocent people, there exists a conspiracy of silence that, effectively, puts the best face on the past and the present. In the only concentrated description of Brumholdstein (77–82), the narrator shifts registers continually, modulating with these shifts the degree of irony within the respective sections. These registers range from a bald promotional tone to objective description to a subtle criticism of the townspeople's “forgetfulness.” The town has become a modest center of culture offering concerts and operas, international films, and lectures on such compelling topics as excavations in Outer Mongolia (79). Brumholdstein also happens to be home to author Bernard Feig, whose novels Burghermeister Kahnsitz-Lese praises for not being “immersed in the past,” and for offering characters “happily free of that all too familiar obsession with the 1940–45 period of our life” (82). Feig is, as his name indicates, “cowardly” and “fainthearted” in his forgetfulness of history. Ulrich's views on authorship suggest his own aversion to plumbing the unhappy depths of his nation's past. In comments given in an interview in Geneva, Ulrich denies for his own novels any political import, or at least any politically revisionist function. The novel is not, Ulrich tells us, “a process of rebellion,” but rather “it validates and makes acceptable forms of human conduct, it also validates and makes acceptable societal institutions” (53). In viewing writing as an apology for the status quo, Ulrich's views are obviously at odds with Abish's.¹¹ Like Feig and the good citizens of Brumholdstein, Ulrich neglects the archeological study both of local historical “treasures” and of the soul, preferring to concentrate on the surface of a temporally disembodied present.

Brumholdstein is named after “Germany's greatest contemporary thinker,” a world-renowned philosopher who happens to be a native of its environs (80). Over his long career, Brumhold has concentrated mostly on ontology except during the thirties when social ethics and political philosophy attracted his attention. Notwithstanding the tribute paid him by his fellow citizens, this august figure, now in venerable old age, refuses to mix with the good burghers of Brumholdstein, eschewing the highways and byways of urban society in order to pursue his contemplative life amid the fields and forest paths (Holzwege) of a rural setting, in order to advance his study of Dasein and “thinking.” “The forest continues to beckons us,” writes Brumhold.

For in the forest are located our innermost dreams and desires. In order to reestablish our roots and our purpose and return to a simplicity of life that can no longer be found in the German community, we turn to the forest. We wander off by ourselves, packs on our backs … confident that in what we are doing, we are coming closer to our past, to our history, to our German spirit.

(167)

And, like Martin Heidegger whose words these echo, and on whom the character Brumhold is based, the latter returns to university teaching after an enforced absence, “the result of too many reckless speeches in the '30s and '40s, speeches that dealt with the citizen's responsibility to the New Order” (19).¹²

Abish harbors ambivalent feelings toward Heidegger.¹³ Though admitting the astuteness of Heidegger's observations on the linguisticality of being—“Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (“Letter on Humanism,” 193)—Abish is openly scornful of Heidegger's philosophy of history:

His [Heidegger's] history, as I see it, was always a universal history that he somehow managed to locate in his own beloved forest. But was his history not shaped by specific historical events? When Heidegger, a most remarkable thinker, touches on German history he verges on the banal. That is perplexing.

(Lotringer, 169)

Though How German Is It offers no rigorous critique of Heidegger's rapprochement/cooperation with Nazism—Heidegger's famous 1933 rectorial address calls Hitler the “greatness and glory of this new [national] dawn”—it makes a number of suggestive observations through its characterization of Brumhold (quoted in “Only A God Can Save Us,” 269).¹⁴

Heidegger and Brumhold both appeal to German “rootedness,” what in his Discourse on Thinking Heidegger calls Bodenständigkeit, to support their views of German history and national destiny (48–49). Brumhold's withdrawal from society emulates Heidegger's; both retire to the Schwarzwald to seek philosophical clarity in its foggy reaches.¹⁵ Isolation in the German countryside allows each to recuperate that special relationship between spirituality and the land that makes Germans special. Of the German spirit Heidegger writes:

For “spirit” is neither empty cleverness, nor the noncommittal play of wit, nor the endless drift of rational distinctions, and especially not world reason; spirit is primordially attuned, knowing resoluteness toward the essence of Being. And the spiritual world of a people is not the superstructure of a culture … it is the power that most deeply preserves the people's strengths, which are tied to earth and blood, and as such it is the power that most deeply moves and most profoundly shakes its being (Dasein).

(“Self-Assertion,” 474–75)

Like much of the Rektoratsrede, this passage represents a strange amalgam. Here, to the philosopher's sincere affirmation of the importance of truth, Heidegger weds an appeal to an obscure romantic nationalism, one that is not much elevated above the tabloid editor's, the soapbox sage's, or indeed the populist politician's. National-racial pride is not far removed here, if it is at all, from a banal chauvinism.

In his characteristically deflated way, Abish satirizes the preoccupation with “rootedness” and what is for Brumhold an overweening concern for the etymological purity of the German language, the latter issue also important to Heidegger as both his Germanophilia and his often ingenious, often interminable “word studies” would seemingly suggest.¹⁶ Indeed, for Brumhold, the special relationship between “earth and blood,” between land and race, is enhanced by the unique character of the German language itself.

Their language, die deutsche Sprache, as once before is again absorbing words from other languages. Still, notwithstanding the doubtful foreign elements in the language today, the German language remains the means and the key to Brumhold's metaphysical quest; it is a language that has enabled him, the foremost German philosopher, to formulate the questions that have continued to elude the French- and English-speaking metaphysicians. How German is it? Brumhold might well ask of his metaphysical quest, which is rooted in the rich dark soil of der Schwarzwald, rooted in the somber, deliberately solitary existence that derives its passion, its energy, its striving for exactitude from the undulating hills, the pine forests, and the erect motionless figure of the gamekeeper in the green uniform. For that matter, Brumhold might well ask of the language, How German is it still? Has it not once again, by brushing against so many foreign substances, so many foreign languages and experiences, acquired foreign impurities, such as okay and jetlag and topless and supermarket and weekend and sexshop, and consequently absorbed the signifiers of an overwhelmingly decadent concern with materialism?

(5)¹⁷

In this seemingly neutral, innocent engagement with key ideas of Brumhold the narrator identifies a number of questionable elements in his world view: his intellectual chauvinism, his obscure religious attachment to German topography, his linguistic xenophobia, and an undergirding nostalgia for a simpler, premodern time. Interestingly, we find guarding over Brumhold's Baden idyll the gamekeeper, whose uniform is a subtle reminder of the Germanic need for order, and often order at any price, as history documents.¹⁸

The reception of Brumhold by his fellow Germans is marked by strategic oversight and self-congratulation. Brumhold's writings are read by few and understood by fewer yet. His major public political addresses, unable to take refuge in abstraction and terminology, are “platitudinous”: “We have completely broken with a landless and powerless thinking” (19).¹⁹ Yet, upon death, he becomes another national treasure. Helmuth Hargenau, Ulrich Jr.'s brother, a celebrated architect, delivers a memorial address at a service for Brumhold, who dies midway through the novel. His speech can be read on two levels—as a straightforward eulogy or as a clear instance of “indirect authorial word,” to borrow from Bakhtin. Viewed from the latter perspective, Brumhold's views exemplify neither virtue nor insight, particularly, but rather ethnic arrogance, irrationalism, and romantic obfuscation.

Helmuth links Brumhold's “metaphysical quest for Dasein” to a concern for “universal history” (170–71), tying Brumhold to a metaphysical-idealistic tradition that phenomenology, Heidegger's certainly, seeks to undermine, though not always with success as Adorno points out in The Jargon of Authenticity. Helmuth's speech contributes to Brumhold's canonization as an important cultural artifact, comparable to other German cultural “goods” such as Bach, Grünewald, and Hölderlin. For Helmuth, as for his auditors, Brumhold becomes another signifier within the semiotic field of “German-ness.” Adorno offers some trenchant comments on this sort of commodification of one's national cultural legacy (and obviously it is not an exclusively German tendency, by any means):

Those who most loudly proclaim Kant, Goethe or Beethoven as German property as a rule have the least concern for the content of these authors' works. They register them as possessions despite the fact that what these writers taught and produced precludes transformation into something that can be possessed. The German tradition is violated by those who neutralize it into a cultural property which is both venerated and yet has no consequence. Meanwhile those who know nothing about the implications of these ideas are quickly seized with indignation when even the slightest critical word is dropped about a famous name which they want to confiscate and exploit as a brandname product “made in Germany.”

(“On the Question,” 122)

“Brumhold,” rendered less than human at this point by idealization, contributes to the familiar and favorable stereotype of the intelligent, civilized Teuton and in so doing serves as yet another instrument of official culture. Yet, as Abish maintains throughout How German Is It, official culture is forgetful or, as Heidegger would have it, “lethetic.” Neglecting many of the colors of the historiographer's palette, Helmuth—an exponent of universal history—presents a portrait of Germany that is too reliant on pastels, that neglects the delicate chiaroscuro that best captures the variegated story of any nation.

In his address, Helmuth actually identifies, inadvertently, a typical German “dualism,” as Thomas Mann calls it—the coexistence, historically, of the “boldest [philosophical] speculation” and “political immaturity” (188–89). While the magnificence of German achievements in the arts and letters is undeniable, the German record in social and governmental reform is far from exemplary. Even the briefest survey documents the regressive, reactionary tenor of German political history, a tradition that long resisted substantive democratic reforms and general social reorganization. Certainly, the leader cult is not an isolated post-Versailles phenomenon that culminates in the Hitlerian Führerkultus, a point Heinrich Mann makes in his sardonic novel Der Untertan, which ridicules the Kaiser cult and therein the average German's blind commitment to “order and duty” (Ordnung und Pflicht). Helmuth's historiography fails to write these chapters in German history, ones that would compromise the superficial harmonies of his own definition of German-ness. Certainly, such a revisionist project would have to contend with four hundred years of political autocracy, a trend already highlighted, as Thomas Mann notes, by Martin Luther's betrayal of the peasants (186–89). Such a project would acknowledge the slow development of what Mann calls “social maturity”:

The Germans are always too late. They are late, like music which is always the last of the arts to express a world condition—when that world tradition is already in its final stages. They are abstract and mystical, too, like this, their dearest art—both to the point of criminality.

(193)

Though Helmuth does not acknowledge it, Brumhold's immersion in philosophy after his political phase in the thirties and forties is an escape from social responsibility and a flight to the security of the “ivory tower.” Brumhold effects a kind of Faustian pact wherein he acquires philosophical knowledge but fails to exercise the moral and social leadership one might expect of a great mind, the kind of leadership exercised, for example, by Sartre. Helmuth concludes his speech by praising Brumhold for enabling Germans to see themselves as they really are, indicating that the philosopher's meditations are both exemplary and illuminating (171). Yet, in the context of How German Is It, this is at best ambivalent praise. Read as double entendre, Helmuth's claim becomes an indictment of the German nation.

As noted, we can transvalue many of Brumhold's seemingly positive attributes, seeing his writings, and life-style generally, as reproachable—his spiritual unworldliness can be viewed as a flight from social problems, his preoccupation with German culture as simple chauvinism, his ontological meditations in the Black Forest as dreamy, self-indulgent romanticism. Similarly, though most of the key figures in the novel are cultivated, intelligent, and professionally accomplished, they remain nonetheless morally myopic, both in their relations with others and in their neglect of their national past. Quite simply, they separate intellection and ethics. The examples are many. Ironically, Anna Heller, a schoolteacher, attempts to sensitize her students to the world around them through a phenomenological study—she does an ontology of chalk—yet she opts to marry Jonke, bookstore owner and collector of Nazi memorabilia, not out of love but because she does not wish to become an old maid.

Intelligence and cultivation are alienated from moral vision in the cases of Egon and Gisela as well. Egon, a book publisher and therein a patron of the arts, is a paradigm of the “New Germany,” a prosperous, civilized democracy that has apparently conquered its past. Indeed, a popular magazine—suggestively entitled Treue, which can mean either “honesty” or “loyalty”—runs a photographic essay on Egon and Gisela that extends to its subscribers an “invitation … to reinterpret Germany”:

A new Germany. Certainly not the Germany that was once firmly ensconced (the saddle, after all, is an appropriate metaphor) in the Prussian tradition of honor and obedience, old money and authority, the saber, the crumbling castle overlooking the Rhine.

(129)

However, concealed beneath the topography of civility that the photos write lies an unmistakable recidivism. In comments given to a photo-journalist from the magazine, Egon, seemingly an exponent of a politically reformed Germany, offers a crypto-fascist political philosophy. For him, democracy has become depleted of “its meaning, its energy, its power” (131). “If anything can be said to represent the new Germany,” he explains, “it is the wish, the desire, no, the craving to attain a total harmony” (131; my emphasis). (And the very term “New Germany” carries with it an unfortunate but, in the context of the novel, symptomatic echo of another slogan, Hitler's “New Order.”) Curiously, neither phenomenologist Anna nor Egon nor their peers reach beyond the surface of the familiar to grapple with difficult moral issues; they use the artifacts of culture and material prosperity to fashion for themselves a “New Germany,” a topography that leaves them reassured and unthreatened.²⁰

Though offering an unflattering view of right-wing politics, How German Is It does not see in leftist extremism a tenable alternative. Throughout the novel, the Einzieh group, a leftist terrorist cell, conducts various violent acts, many of which involve, or appear to involve, Ulrich's former wife, Paula. Yet, the blowing up of public property has no clearly delineated purpose other than to disrupt public life. The Einzieh group issues no manifesto and seems to find its incendiarism an end in itself. Events at the end of the novel suggest that the group has little genuine sympathy for the working class, the constituency whose causes it apparently wishes to champion. With the aid of the very ambiguous Daphne (who is in turn Ulrich's lover and apparently Paula's, who may be a terrorist or a counterterrorist agent or even a double agent), Paula recruits a simple drawbridge attendant, Gottfried Mühler, to blow up the bridge where he works.

When Daphne and Paula visited his [Mühler's] control room on the tower, it was Paula who asked him: Is this what you will be doing for the rest of your life? Raising the bridge for yachts, the pleasure boats, and nothing to show for it except a small pension at the end of thirty-five years? He pointed out that most of the boats during the off season were fishing trawlers, not yachts.

(222–23)

Clearly, the destruction of the bridge will cause more harm to working men and women than to vacationers and the monied leisure class. Though it is by no means obvious exactly how, Paula is able to trigger some latent rage in Mühler. She is able to “draw him in,” to “recruit” him, to “draft” him—all meanings of the German verb “einziehen,” from which of course the Einzieh group takes its name. Ultimately, in what seems more Gidean-Camusian acte gratuit than political statement, Mühler does indeed destroy the bridge and gun down two policemen. And, as he and Paula laughingly acknowledge earlier while discussing the destruction of the bridge, the result of his act is simply public inconvenience (and needless carnage), and not the overthrow of the government (217).

Ulrich, along with the reader, considers the politico-moral alternatives outlined in the action of the novel. On one side, we have leftists who seek to overthrow the status quo while failing to offer a compelling vision of social progress; on the other, we find right-wing traditionalists who blindly ape the (in)glories of the past. The implication in the novel, certainly in its conclusion, is that the individual must carefully attend to the issues of the day and not be swept along by either a corrupt tradition or by corrupt visions of progress and futurity. There is obviously an existentialist overtone here and, we might say, Ulrich's tribulations throughout the novel clear the way for what is depicted at the end of the novel as an inchoate process of moral self-determination.

Protagonist Ulrich, not coincidentally a former student of Brumhold, is, until the end of the book, a study in bad faith/inauthenticity, one study among many in How German Is It. A writer, ideally one gifted in seeing and describing what others cannot, Ulrich consistently defines his world in terms of culture, fleeing the contingency of the moment for the assurance of the aesthetically pure. The primary preoccupation of his writing as well as his life is private relationships. Yet, paradoxically, he avoids a crucial personal issue until the penultimate chapter of the book. Having long suspected that the man from whom he takes his name was not his actual biological father, having long suppressed his curiosity about the matter, Ulrich finally contends with his doubts by consulting a psychoanalyst. He admits that he has been afraid to learn who his father was and what role he played in the war. To seek out his father's identity would have violated “convention” and “good taste,” and Ulrich, like his fellow citizens, has obsequiously guarded the harmonious topography of the “New Germany” through his reticence (250). The book concludes with his analyst using hypnosis to unearth Ulrich's suppressed past. Ulrich's right hand slowly rises and he nods as it does so, the entire scene marking an incipient process of historical recollection, the recollection of Hitler's “dream to end all dreams” (252).

“LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD”

Though devoid of Madonna's panache and hysteria, Walter Abish's fictions too explore what it means to live in the “material world.” Abish investigates how our desire for an untroubled self-consistency and social harmony manifests itself in the perceptible surfaces of our lives. In documenting the visible markers of our conformity—as apparent in our speech patterns, for example, the shape we give our physical environment, and the use we make of cultural goods—he divests these familiar surfaces of their familiarity and therein encourages us to interrogate our own values. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Baudrillard identifies consumption as a universal value of contemporary Western society and illustrates its operation as a morality and instrument of power. Though Abish does not share Baudrillard's sympathy for leftist politics, he does consider, like the latter, our material world and the ethical implications of consumption.²¹ In his essay, “Self-Portrait,” Abish addresses the issue of moral reformation in a typically postmodern way: “If we were to receive a message from outer space that read: Is there any other way to live? Our reply might be: No, there is not, but we try” (13). The pessimism revealed here is obviously qualified, and is not sustained in the bulk of his fiction, which has a clear moral tendency without being merely tendentious. Though Abish depicts humankind as the product of many powerful determinisms—objects, language, history, instinct—his fiction does not depict these determinisms as incorrigible or purely self-perpetuating. They are open to revision, to the influence of human agency. His fictions are not simply exercises in formalistic legerdemain.

In the 1982 interview, Lotringer characterizes How German Is It as a “machine made of broken pieces of mirror that flash elements of meaning to attract the birds” (177). Abish's response indicates his clear disagreement with this characterization (which seems to imply the absence of a clear moral center to the novel): “I wouldn't write in order to trap or fool the reader. To elicit a false response deliberately or intentionally mislead would be to reduce the meaning this book has for me as a literary accomplishment” (177). In this remark Abish effectively ties the aesthetic to the moral and implies that a “good” novel always does so.²² Though Abish rejects traditional humanism because he feels, as does Heidegger of course, that it imposes a scheme of arbitrary, absolute values upon the historically conditioned circumstances of life, he does not advance the skepticism that is much in fashion in contemporary criticism and contemporary philosophy.²³(Clearly, as Butler points out, the subject matter of How German Is It does not permit playful distortions of historical fact [64–65].) Abish realizes that life is full of moral quandaries, of inexplicable situations, yet, at the same time, he acknowledges that these aporias elicit from us interpretive responses. Abish's fictions are his response to these aporias. Though his works offer the reader few positive moral paradigms, they do suggest various moral courses that we should eschew.

Notes

1. For brief analyses of Alphabetical Africa, a work I will not discuss here, see Martin (230–33) and my review essay “Walter Abish.”

2. Though brief, Messerli's discussion of Abish's seemingly objective point of view in How German Is It is helpful (298–300).

3. On this same subject of language's capacity to shape personal ethics Adorno writes: “Fascism was not simply a conspiracy—although it was that—but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development. Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation” (The Jargon of Authenticity, 5).

4. I mostly agree with Holdheim, though one might regard Melville's “Benito Cereno,” for example, contrary to Holdheim's view, as a case in which, arguably, an author has delineated with some acuity the relationship between morality and plain stupidity. I am thinking particularly, of course, of Captain Delano.

5. Incidentally, William Kowinski cheerfully speculates that the amalgamation of malls and condominiums, i.e., “the Mallcondo Continuum,” may well be the way of the future: “The new challenge is to create the ever-beckoning Eden of the frontier within the internal worlds of the planned town, the megastructure, the dome, the mall. It's enclosing time in the Garden of the West” (388). Many will find this vision of Fortress Suburbia “post-Edenic,” even dystopian. Are we approaching the day when an entire life will be lived within an emporium? The thought gives chilling new meaning to the notion of a “captive clientele.”

6. In the McCaffery/Gregory interview, Abish cites the influence of Godard's early films on his fiction. Bontemps appears to be modeled on Godard, whose films, Abish notes in the interview, develop an “uneasy relationship between his revolutionary fervor and his aesthetic concern,” though the two never quite “merge” (24). Incidentally, like Bontemps' film, Godard's Vent d'Est also involves the physical destruction of shopping malls and their patrons. Throughout Abish's fiction we find the same themes that pervade Godard's films: gratuitous violence, materialism, and the exploitation of women. Political extremism also figures prominently in many of Godard's films as it does in “This Is Not a Film” and How German Is It.

7. A paraphrase of this same statement appears in How German Is It, but, strangely, Whitehead is introduced there as an “American thinker” (15).

8. The many recent films and literary works dealing with this subject are well known. In world affairs, Nazi atrocities continue to be a focal point. One can cite, for example, Wiesel's receipt of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize as well as the ongoing efforts of various national and international bodies to identify and prosecute Nazi war criminals. In recent years, in unrelated cases, two Canadian anti-Semites, Jim Keegstra and Ernst Zundel, have been prosecuted for violation of Canadian hate laws (Quinn; Aikenhead). (Both Keegstra and Zundel were initially convicted; an appellate court threw out the former's conviction on a legal technicality while Zundel's conviction was upheld by an Ontario Appeal Court ruling, with both appellate judgments occurring coincidentally in June 1988.) And, of course, there is the 1985 Bitburg incident when Ronald Reagan visited a West German cemetery to honor 1,900 German war dead among whom were 49 soldiers of the infamous Waffen-SS. Reagan rankled many people by suggesting that members of Hitler's armed forces were also victims of a “vicious ideology” (quoted in Rentschler, 88). Rentschler's article provides an excellent analysis both of the Bitburg incident and of current attitudes toward Nazism, particularly as presented by the news media and film.

9. Formal English gardens are mentioned recurrently in the novel, e.g., Munich's Englischer Garten (16), Geneva's Jardin Anglais (47), and the Englischer Garten of Egon's city (127).

10. The principal formal differences between the story and the novel are, first, that the former has a first person narrator and the latter a third person, and, second, consistent with the necessary economy of the form, the action of the short story is brisker and more concentrated. The suppression of historical truth is, of course, the primary theme of both. Brumhold, Durst, and the Holocaust's victimized Jewry are emphasized more in “The English Garden” than in the novel. See Arias-Misson for a discussion of “The English Garden” (117–18).

11. In “On Aspects of the Familiar World as Perceived in Everyday Life and Literature,” an unpublished conference paper from 1981, Abish emphasizes the disruptive purposes of experimental fiction: “The innovative novel is, in essence, a novel of disfamiliarization, a novel that has ceased to concern itself with the mapping of the ‘familiar’ world” (quoted in Martin, 238).

12. In fairness to Heidegger, it should be noted that, in contrast to those of the fictitious Brumhold, his “reckless speeches” are confined to a brief ten-month period. His 1933 Rector's address at Freiburg, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” is of course the most famous and noteworthy exemplar in this particular genre. Heidegger offers a spirited defense of himself in the 1966 Spiegel interview, published posthumously in 1976, in which, while acknowledging a brief infatuation with Nazism, he depicts himself as the victim of “slander,” misinformation, malice, and misquotation. As Heidegger admits in the interview, it was his view in 1933 that, given the “general confusion of opinions and of the political trends of twenty-two parties,” Hitler would bring national political cohesion (270). Published first in 1933, the Rektoratsrede was not republished until 1983 at which time it was accompanied by a foreword by Heidegger's son Hermann. The first (and only, so far as I know) English translation of the address is Karsten Harries's in 1985. In addition to his remarks in the Spiegel interview, Heidegger's “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” written in 1945 after the collapse of the Third Reich, also serves as self-apology. (The latter was first published in the early eighties; Harries's translation of it accompanies the translation of the Rektoratsrede.)

    Predictably, Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis has inspired much commentary. See Gillespie for an overview of the various positions up until the early eighties (198–99 n. 38). We are entering a new period of investigation with the recent appearance of Victor Farias's highly critical study, Heidegger et le Nazisme (1987). See Wolin for an analysis of the Farias book and reactions to it. New German Critique has recently published translations of other public political statements Heidegger made in 1933 and 1934; the same issue provides translations of two essays by Heidegger's former student, Karl Löwith. Neither Harries nor Löwith accepts Heidegger's claims, and those of later apologists, that his embracing of Nazism was a temporary, politically expedient move. Harries's “Heidegger as a Political Thinker” argues convincingly that, far from being a philosophical aberration, Heidegger's political views in the thirties build on notions developed in Being and Time: “Once we recognize that authenticity demands the subordination of the individual to a common destiny, it becomes impossible to see the Rektoratsrede as diametrically opposed to Being and Time” (651). Löwith also sees an organic link between Heidegger's ontology and politics: “The possibility of a Heideggerian political philosophy was not born as a result of a regrettable ‘miscue,’ but from the very conception of existence that simultaneously combats and absorbs the ‘spirit of the age’” (“Political Implications,” 132). Indicative of renewed interest in Heidegger's political views, Critical Inquiry devoted much of its Winter 1989 issue to the subject of “Heidegger and Nazism.”

13. Heidegger has not been flatteringly characterized in imaginative literature. In Borges's “Guayaquil” (1970) and Grass's Dog Years (Hundejahre [1963]), Heidegger is depicted as a Nazi apologist and irrational idealist, respectively. In his lengthy essay The Jargon of Authenticity Adorno emphasizes both these points. In Bellow's Herzog (1964), the protagonist includes Heidegger in his gallery of intellectual foes. Rebuking the philosopher for his denigration of the “quotidian,” Herzog claims that every person's moral worth is centered in quotidian behavior and quotidian values, not in learned abstraction: “Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression ‘the fall into the quotidian.’ When did this fall occur? Where were we standing?” (49; 106). Heidegger discusses the falling of Dasein and its causes—“idle talk,” “curiosity,” and “ambiguity”—in Being and Time (210–24).

14. Heidegger's most explicit statement regarding the promise and historical destiny of the Nazis occurs at the very end of the rectorial address. The conclusion of the speech is unmistakably supportive of the Nazis though in it Heidegger makes his familiar claims about the imminent collapse of Western culture and the exemplarity of the classical Greek tradition: “But no one will even ask whether we do or do not will [the centrality of the German university in German society], when the spiritual strength of the West fails and the joints of the world no longer hold, when this moribund semblance of a culture caves in and drags all that remains strong into confusion and lets it suffocate in madness. Whether this will happen or not depends alone on whether or not we, as a historical-spiritual people, still and once again will ourselves. Every individual participates in this decision, even he, and indeed especially he, who evades it. But we do will that our people fulfill its historical mission. We do will ourselves. For the young and the youngest strength of the people, which already reaches beyond us, has by now decided the matter. But we fully understand the splendor and the greatness of this setting out only when we carry within ourselves that profound and far-reaching thoughtfulness that gave ancient Greek wisdom the word: ‘All that is great stands in the storm’ (Plato, Republic, 497 d, 9)” (479–80).

15. And, we should note, the very name “Brumhold,” drawing as it seems to from brume, a French term for heavy fog, is in itself an authorial judgment on Brumhold's views, which are arguably “fogbound.”

16. Obviously, the German belief that language shapes national consciousness and, consequently, national values predates the twentieth century. Herder, Fichte, and Humboldt, among others, make the same claim much earlier. See Stambrook for a discussion of the language issue in the context of German nationalism in the nineteenth century (16–28).

17. Curiously, Adorno, not unlike Brumhold, maintains that German is uniquely suited to philosophical meditations, that “there is a specific, objective quality of the German language” (“On the Question: ‘What is German?’” 130). I am ill-equipped to say if this is simple chauvinism or an exile's nostalgia for the Vaterland or the truth of the matter.

18. In Abish's story, “I Am the Dust Under Your Feet,” Rainer, a gamekeeper, is a reassuring presence: “Even his twill knee-length trousers, his leather vest, his broad leather belt, his worn bone-handle hunting knife, his heavy socks, scuffed resoled boots, were a means of mapping the topography” (8).

19. In Karl Löwith's view, Heidegger, for his part, mastered the art of rhetorical equivocation well in his political addresses, which, Löwith observes, left his auditors unsure whether they should take up the study of the pre-Socratics or enlist in the Storm Troopers (quoted in Megill, 130). Megill provides a succinct overview of Heidegger's political texts from the thirties (128–36).

20. “Just When We Believe That Everything Has Changed” and “I Am the Dust Under Your Feet,” two excerpts from Abish's next novel, continue his discussion of the “New Germany.”

21. Though its emphasis is entirely different, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye also investigates the signifying practices of the material world. In that novel, black children learn racial self-loathing through the models of perfection offered by a dominant white culture. A number of images promote their self-loathing: the domestic harmony of a white household as represented in the “Dick and Jane” reading primers; the sheer “cuteness” of child film star Shirley Temple whose visage decorates a cup; blue-eyed Caucasian dolls; and even the picture of a pretty little white girl on a candy wrapper.

22. Here, it seems to me, Abish's position is very similar to Sartre's when the latter says that there is no such thing as a good anti-Semitic novel or a good novel that oppresses workers or blacks or colonial peoples (What Is Literature? 58).

23. The relationship between skepticism and the “forgetting” of history is a topic of some concern today in critical circles given the recent (1987) de Man disclosures (“Yale Scholar's Articles”). For early contributions to the de Man debate, see articles by David Hirsch, Wiener, Hartman, and Barbara Johnson. See also the various essays in Critical Inquiry 15.4 (Summer 1989).