No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages and arts of his time shall have no share. Though he were never so original, never so willful and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. … Above his will and out of his sight he is necessitated by the air he breathes and the idea on which he and his contemporaries live and toil, to share the manner of his times.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

On May 31, 1970, an earthquake and avalanche struck Peru, devastating a 125-mile-long valley between two Andean ranges, the Cordillera Negra and the Cordillera Blanca. With an estimated 75,000 casualties, it was the worst disaster in recorded New World history. Emotional and spiritual responses, among the survivors, were manifold, from the suicidal to the euphoric; but one particular reaction came to be known as desprendimiento de las cosas, detachment from things, and this had its counterpart in a kind of “social nakedness,” an experience of anonymity, loss of identity. (These notes are taken from No Bells To Toll, by Barbara Bode [Scribners, 1989]).

Walter Abish, author of 99: The New Meaning, was born in Vienna in 1931. He says, in an interview, “I spent my childhood in China, seeing an incredibly corrupt society slowly disintegrate. It was as if all the life processes were accentuated and crowded into the period of time I lived in Shanghai.” He now lives in New York City.

For Walter Abish, born in dying Vienna, making a childhood escape from Hitler, and growing up in decadent Shanghai, the twentieth century must have seemed like one endless earthquake-avalanche, inducing an inescapable desprendimiento.

Abish again: “I have always thought that all the life networks that enable us to proceed wherever we are going, or prevent us from doing so, are predicated on a system we called language.”

Again: “I try to strip language of its power to create verisimilitude that in turn shields the reader from the printed words on the page that are deployed as signifiers.” This is crucial, not only to Abish, but to other contemporary prose writers and poets. To undo the traditional work of language. And the idea of this process becomes obsessive to the author.

One section of 99: The New Meaning is called “Skin Deep,” and Abish refers to this as a “literary infringement.” A feeding back on his own European heritage. Paul Bowles once wrote a story (“Here to Learn”) about a Moroccan girl, born into ignorance and poverty, who is rescued by an American, flown to Europe and eventually to Los Angeles. Crossing the Atlantic, in the middle of the night, she becomes convinced that the plane is not moving. “We're standing still. The plane is stuck.” And Claude Levi-Strauss tells of having, in flying from Europe to any point in the Western Hemisphere—New York, the Brazilian jungle—a kind of mental adjustment, a click in his brain, as the plane touches down. A new dimension. Desprendimiento … and reconnection.

In an earlier volume, In the Future Perfect, a collection of short stories, Abish writes a more conventional prose. But already the process of dismantling is apparent. In story after story, the only sure connection between characters is through sex—what Quentin Crisp calls “the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.” All other connections, all other ways in which human beings interact, are suspect.

Desprendimiento. Anonymity. Following are quotations from 99: The New Meaning:

“I'm aware that a good many perfectly intelligent people can't stand parenthetical comments while a story's purportedly being told.”

“The more a story is told in a proper well-spoken straightforward way, in an even tone, the easier it is to reverse it, to blacken it, to read it inside out.”

“(I am breaking the process into its components for the sake of analysis.)”

“Suppose I wanted to replace all the words of my language at once by other ones; how could I tell the place where one of the new words belong? Is it images that keep the places of the word?”

“Neither is there any end: you never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, everything is the same after two weeks.”

“The self is not only hateful: there is no place between us and nothing.”

“And how much fine joy, how much graciousness ever do we owe precisely to our contempt!”

“I loathe unexpectedly catching sight of myself in a mirror. …”

“What is thought, but disease of action.”

In his preface, Abish speaks admiringly of Kafka, in The Castle naming his protagonist, simply, “K.,” thereby voiding “any necessity to provide or explain the character's antecedents. Kafka's marked disinclination to furnish K.'s credentials—K. has no identifiable or censoriously traceable past—greatly contributed to the heightened immediacy of The Castle.”

And elsewhere he speaks of the hotel guest who had no memory: each time he entered the lobby the desk clerk had to tell him his name, and which room he occupied.

After the Peruvian earthquake, each survivor, almost without exception—his city a tabula rasa—wanted to rebuild on the exact site of his original home. These instincts—the sense of history, the sense of place—run deep in human experience. In the work of Walter Abish—making Literature rather than Life the subject of the work—they are among the casualties.