SOURCE: “The Self-Apparent Word,” in The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction as Language/Language as Fiction, Southern Illinois University Press, 1984, pp. 86–95.

In the following excerpt, Klinkowitz examines the techniques Abish has employed to create an “awareness of the author's role in the composition” of his fictions.

The novella “This Is Not a Film. This Is a Precise Act of Disbelief” forms the centerpiece to the author's first collection, Minds Meet.¹ How we live, what our needs may be, and the form our hopes will take are all determined by the available surface of things surrounding us, this piece of fiction argues. Strongly narrative in form, it uses the methods of city planning (the trade which brought Abish to America after living in Austria, China, Israel, and England) to show how the structures available to us actually create, rather than serve, our needs. The occasion is the planning of a new...