The Puzzle of Walter Abish: In the Future Perfect

Abstract

Combinations, copulations, permutations, deletions, transferences, transgressions, substitutions, cross-references, doublings: Walter Abish fabricates puzzles-puzzles of sex, of minds, of death-and words and images, letters and numbers are the matter of a puzzle. In his first novel, astonishingly amusing Alphabetical Africa, section A is assembled only with words beginning with a, section B only with a's and b's, C only with a's, b's, and c's and so on to Z, then into reverse, deleting first all z words, then z's and y's until in the last section, A, only a's are left again. A fabulous letter-land thus expands and shrinks, even describing a shrinking Africa progressively colored orange in the second part, in a linguistic slapstick where meaning jumps from word to event and character and back again to words and trapdoors fly open in the text with real persons falling through, all with the verve and speed of a Marx Brothers adlib. Under the extraordinary constraints exercised on the language, WA displays a virtuoso mastery of articulation; under the pressures of alphabet (the dual, structuring principle of language: phonetics/writing), his fictions constantly collapse into syntax and semantics and are as constantly resuscitated. In the Future Perfect, WA's third work of fiction, a collection of stories, enriches the alphabetical instrumentarium with numbering-cogs and wheels and tightens the humour to a razor-cutting edge. puzzles of life are brought to disquieting incandescence. If the labyrinth is the matrix symbol of a Borges, WA has put the puzzle at the obscure heart of his own fiction. peculiar interest of an examination of his work is the ultra-violet light it sheds on the problems of contemporary fiction. In the Future Perfect is not written in the future perfect. In the gap between the tense of the title and the tense of the book lies a puzzle. More exactly, the future perfect is the tense of the puzzle-the tense of the ready-made possible. Kierkegaard said, Poetry commands the possible;' WA puts the stress on commands. future perfect is determinative. In one of the stories WA writes, The immediate future, the immediate, immaculate future lies mapped out in the brain cells. . Persons and events lock into place like pieces in a puzzle. Essential to the puzzle is that its artificial itineraries, slots, sums provide predetermined solutions. In his Self-Portrait1 WA writes, I read over and over again a story by Borges, called Death and the Compass which bears a resemblance to a mathematical equation a + b + c = On first reading the story one is unprepared, accepting at face value the contrivance that entices the detective in the story to move from a to b then to c, finally as surprised as the reader to die at x. arbitrariness of WA's constructions, their superdetermination, corresponds to the intrinsic indeterminacy or randomness of character and action.