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Walter Abish's Fictions: Perfect Unfamiliarity, Familiar Imperfection
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
Writing somewhat sceptically of “recent experimental fiction” in 1975, Morris Dickstein saw a great deal of it as “ebulliently parricidal and cannibalistic,” but detected at the same time “the celebrated ‘cool’ tone…, a cleanness of manner that partly redeems the pervasive irony and emotional distance.” In the case of Walter Abish, the “hot” is the high-spirited inventiveness which grows out of the self-set limitations of a predetermined system; it is part of his own response to the craft of writing: “I was crossing the parade ground in Ramle during my second year in the Tank Corps when quite suddenly the idea of becoming a writer flashed through my mind. A moment of pure exhilaration.”
Abish, who was born in Vienna in 1931, spent the formative years of childhood and adolescence in Shanghai, then eight years in Israel, and finally settled in New York City, where in 1960 he became an American citizen. In his writing (a collection of poems, two novels, and two books of short fiction) he has retained an affinity for things European and for the literature of the German-speaking world.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983
References
1 Letter from Walter Abish to Richard Martin, 26 September 1982.
2 Dickstein, Morris, “Fiction hot and kool: dilemmas of the experimental writer,” Tri-Quarterly, 33 (Spring 1975), 261, 264Google Scholar.
3 Abish, Walter, “The Writer-To-Be: An impression of Living,” Sub-Stance, 27 (1980), 112Google Scholar.
4 For biographical information on Abish see “Self-Portrait,” in Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America, ed. Sondheim, Alan (New York: Dutton, 1977), pp. 1–25Google Scholar; “The Writer-To-Be…,” pp. 101–14Klinkowitz, Jerome, The Life of Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 59–71Google Scholar.
5 Duel Site (New York: Tibor De Nagy, 1970)Google Scholar; Alphabetical Africa (New York: New Directions, 1974)Google Scholar; Minds Meet (New York: New Directions, 1975)Google Scholar; In The Future Perfect (New York: New Directions, 1977)Google Scholar; How German Is It (New York: New Directions, 1980Google Scholar; London: Carcanet, 1982, and Faber, 1983).
6 “The-Writer-To-Be…,” p. 103; Klinkowitz, p. 67;Abish, Walter, “Wie Deutsch 1st Es,” Semiotext(e), 4 (1982), 161Google Scholar.
7 Klinkowitz, p. 67; Howard, Richard, “The Dark Continent from A to Z,” New York Times Book Review, 29 12 1974, p. 19Google Scholar.
8 Baker, Kenneth, “The Thingliness of Words,” Boston Phoenix, 14 05 1974 n. pagGoogle Scholar.
9 Klinkowitz, p. 66.
10 Abish, Walter, “Minds Meet,” originally in Tri-Quartery, 26 (1973)Google Scholar. “I couldn't have attempted to write Alphabetical Africa without first having written ‘Minds Meet.’” Klinkowitz, p. 60.
11 Klinkowitz, p. 68. Note, too, “By rendering words as neutral as paint on film, Abish transforms them into whatever emotionally charged surface he chooses. Images, not words or phrases, linger in the mind.” Levinson, Daniel, review of Minds Meet, Aspect, 66 (01–03 1976), 45Google Scholar. The last sentence is peculiarly applicable to Abish's later work.
12 “On Aspects of the Familiar World as Perceived in Everyday Life and Literature,” paper read by Abish at the Second International Conference on Innovation/Renovation in Contemporary Culture, Milwaukee 1981, MS, pp.3, 7a, 8.
13 First published in Seems, 5 (1975), n. pag.
14 See Levinson, p. 44.
15 “On Aspects of the Familiar World…,” p. 11.
16 Arsas-Masson, Alain, “The Puzzle of Walter Abish: In The Future Perfect,” Sub-Stance, 27 (1980), 118Google Scholar; Malin, Irving, “In So Many Words,” Ontario Review, 9 (Fall–Winter 1978/1979), 112Google Scholar.
17 This text is, perhaps, an extension of the earlier “Inside Out,” which was published in Personal Injury, 4 (n.d.), and which simply put together 79 sentences, phrases, and paragraphs from different sources to create a sequence based on the supposition that “all books published in English represented a vast dictionary that made sentences available to a writer”: p. 57
18 First appeared in Fiction International, 4/5 (1975), 35–49Google Scholar.
19 “Wie Deutsch 1st Es,” p. 161.
20 In an earlier published version of the second section of the novel, Ulrich was himself the first-person narrator; a device Abish abandoned in the final version, perhaps for reasons of distance and defamiliarization: “The Idea of Switzerland,” Partisan Review, 47 (1980), 57–81Google Scholar. The discrepancies between this version and the published novel are touched on by Betty Falkenberg in her review of How German Is It, largely to make comparisons which are blatantly unfair to the novel. “Literary Games,” New York Times Book Review, 4 01 1981, pp. 8–9Google Scholar.
21 Discussing this incident in the Semiotext(e) interview, Abish comments, “In life we are forever, it seems, confronted by situations that defy explanation…Puzzles and mysteries, if used well, energize the text.” “Wie Deutsch 1st Es,” p. 166.
22 “On Aspects of the Familiar World…,” p. 13.
23 Kearns, George, “Fiction Chronicle,” Hudson Review, 34 (Summer 1981), 304CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Knowlton, James, review of How German Is It in American Book Review, 3 (03–04 1981), 12Google Scholar.
24 Here I am indebted to Walter Abish's own comment on the final tableau of the novel, “To me the salute contains an ikonic position in a time frame. Hence, it is a gesture that cannot be made innocently. The memory of a dream to end all dreams is a vague statement. I had Hollywood in mind.” Letter received from Abish, 21 November 1982.