Can narrative be truly self-referential? Is it possible for a novelist, burdened with the conceptual weight of words and doubly hampered by the sequential order of story, to be as much an abstract expressionist as the painter or the musical composer, whose daubs of paint or notes of sound need not refer to anything other than themselves? One way is to treat the materials of fiction as objects in themselves—not as familiar cues to the reader (which trigger conventional responses and so set formulaic narratives to action) but rather as semiotic integers within the syntax of human behavior. This has been precisely the method Walter Abish has pursued through four books of fiction. (p. 416)

Walter Abish has been showing how the supposed realities of life (the stuff of conventionally realistic, mimetic fiction) are made of purely surface phenomena (the signs of semiologists). Because of this disposition, Abish has been called an irrealist, the polar opposite of a mannerly moralist like Updike or Bellow, with little pertinence for the workaday world.

How German Is It … refutes this charge and shows how Abish has been writing about the ultimate reality all along. Ostensibly a situational narrative about life in "the new Germany," Abish's life study … reflects the manner of his more obviously experimental work. Behavior, Abish shows, is far more than a puppet show devised by a choreographer of popular morals. Instead, it is a matter of syntax, prime material for the metafictionist. And as the signifiers of language have no inherent relationship to the things they describe, so the patterns of our lives are equally an arbitrary and free-floating grammar, to be analyzed as a topology of surfaces and needs. Morals and manners in the novel are thus manipulated as verbal objects for our post-structuralist times.

Alphabetical Africa … was Abish's first novel, an emphatically abstract work which by its self-conscious construction placed Abish at the farthest remove from the social realists. We can see now how that was a strategy to keep the reader on the page, where the relationship of characters and needs was inescapably artificial. In this early work, Abish proposed a rigorous discipline for both writer and reader. The initial chapter was titled "A," and used only words beginning with that letter. Chapter "B" added words starting with the letter B, and so forth through the alphabet, as the book (and its linguistic possibilities) expanded…. At each point the reader would be aware of just how the book was composing itself—especially from midpoint on when Abish ran his persons, places, and things through a regressive structure of another twenty-six chapters titled backward from "Z," with familiar components dropping out as each letter vanished into the history of Abish's receding alphabet.

A lifeless, antiseptic technique? Not at all, as Richard Howard pointed out [see excerpt above]. Alphabetical Africa, he wrote, was "a novel of erotic obsession, in which language itself has received the transferred charge of feeling" which otherwise might be dissipated in the puppetry of suspended disbelief. The syntax of these characters' lives, by virtue of their expanding and contracting possibilities (the names of subjects available to satisfy their needs), was forever the book's real subject. Alphabetical Africa, then, was that allegedly impossible achievement: an abstract expressionist novel, in which the words referred primarily to themselves yet remained charged with human energy.

How German Is It uses no such obvious device; it has a realistic setting, believable characters, and a theme which bears the test of contemporary history. But the artificiality of the whole enterprise still takes center stage. The novel has a theme and setting, but its realism is constructed to emphasize their provisional, syntactic nature. "How German is the new Germany?" this novel asks, implying an entire set of relationships constructed between one provisional order (The Third Reich) and another (The Federal Republic). The setting for this theme is fully artificial: the planned community of Brumholdstein, a spanking new city of several hundred thousand built to the specifications of current need. Named after a Heidegger-like metaphysician, Brumhold, whose discipline had been the questioning of "the thingness" of things. Brumholdstein is most noted for its surface quality. This new city is laid out on the site of a concentration camp…. (pp. 416-17)

How form alternately expands and constricts meaning was one of the object lessons of Alphabetical Africa, and the topology of Brumholdstein makes the same point. The city's form, like the shape of Abish's earlier novel, is self-evident. No illusions here of random growth or the accumulations of culture over many centuries. Brumholdstein is above all an idea, a statement on the needs and fulfillments of life in postwar Germany, constructed on the boundaries of the very past it seeks to efface. Everywhere the past's temporal and spatial reality is present…. By Brumholdstein's own design, the past feeds the present as if to contradict the future so carefully planned.

Part of Abish's earlier practice was to find ways of emphasizing the words themselves—signifiers, not signifieds—as components in his stories. In Minds Meet … he presented a story based on alphabetical variations ("The Abandoned Message," "Abashed by the Message," "Abashed While Receiving the Message," etc.), which nevertheless enhanced his theme regarding the frailty of human communication. In the Future Perfect … collected stories even more mechanical: one piece featured block paragraphs titled alphabetically with the basic vocabulary of the story ("Ardor/Awe/Atrocity") and had each of its key ninety-nine words identified by a serial superscript as it appeared in the narrative; in another story, block paragraphs of conventional narrative were preceded by their component words ranked alphabetically (so that readers would have all the words in advance of the message). With such an emphasis on the makings of language, its mere assemblage was more obviously a game, and readers could appreciate how artificial and contrived (and hence humanly flawed) that game could be. No wonder the protagonists who emerged from these tales were confused, paranoid souls; no wonder the narrator was forever being excluded from the action; and no wonder everybody else seemed to be satisfied, while the story's personal center remained forlom. Life in Abish's hands was a narrative written by a self-satisfied author willing to plot anyone else right out of existence.

How German Is It uses no such mechanical devices, other than those conveniently supplied by the Brumholdstein situation. But for the making of his narrative Abish selects certain characters for key roles, and runs their lives together in a way that demonstrates the made quality of their enterprise—and how, as in all such situations, intentions can be frustrated, communication blocked, and needs left unfulfilled.

Abish peoples his new Germany with a credible family of characters. Principal are the Hargenau brothers, Helmuth and Ulrich, whose father—now described as a patriot—was executed in 1944 for his part in the officers' plot against Hitler. The brothers are alternately constructing and deconstructing the postwar fatherland: Helmuth through his municipal architecture (sincerely believing that at the end of Greek and Roman and medieval achievement stand his prize-winning post office and police station) and Ulrich by his chance association with a group of young terrorists. The emphasis throughout is how both their actions disrupt the equilibrium and eventually undermine the order of life itself, as Helmuth effaces what remains of life in the thirties and forties, while Ulrich's group in turn destroys his public buildings. (pp. 418-19)

By the end of How German Is It we learn that Ulrich has no substantially real subject at all, just these syntactic projections of lives built on the surface of immediate need. All about him is preached the permanence and continuity of "what is basically German," but life as he lives it presents nothing to him but lies and lurking disorder. He keeps asking, "Could things be different?" and "Is there any other way to live?"—but the limits of syntax allow only this unsatisfying, one dimensional life.

By Ulrich's failure Abish shows how conventional realism cannot be written in our time, given our knowledge of the structures of human communication. But a superrealism is possible. Much like the superrealists in painting—especially Richard Estes and Ralph Goings—Abish depicts his subjects with an eye toward emphatically glossy surfaces. As a result, he defamiliarizes the soporifically familiar, and also draws our attention to those peculiarities of surface which define so many of the objects of our need…. [Running through much of Abish's work is a philosophical quote] that "perfection cannot bear endless repetition." But that's what the surfaces of Abish's world are: endlessly repeated forms with no real content at all, just the shiny and compulsive surfaces of Richard Estes' "Drugstore" or Goings' colorfully painted trucks and cars.

Defamiliarization itself is … a reminder that as we become accustomed to seeing things in their customary light we cease to see them at all. Abish's own unique way of breaking clear from the familiar is to describe his scenes in a copybook manner, a decidedly flat style of writing which is not the result of any suppression of talent but just the opposite: by removing all hierarchal values from his perceptions, Abish sees for once how things really are. Once we humanize, he implies, we become subject to all the flawed rules of human communication from which his characters suffer.

To fully experience persons, place, and event, Abish seeks a neutral value in his writing, by which the reader is able to experience more than a simple pantomime of signs. How German Is It takes one through the paces of modern Germany so that everything is given careful note. (p. 419)

The value of a novel like How German Is It is the picture it gives us of contemporary morals and manners working themselves out in a world strictly defined by historical and philosophical limits. A planned community anticipates human needs, but once built it perpetuates those needs rather than remaining adaptive to new contingencies. In his earlier collection, Minds Meet, Abish used the American mania for shopping malls to consider just how such institutions create the needs they serve, and especially how characters are defined by the surfaces and boundaries within which they exist. Language, Abish shows, follows the same model.

The drama of these fictions? Human beings are larger—and their ultimate needs run deeper—than the structures improvised to contain them. By his fidelity to the surface Abish frames the energy which is always fighting to break loose. He puts that energy in the very structure of his sentences, and so becomes an action writer with words. He is one of the most legitimately expressive writers of our time. (p. 420)