I read this book and didn’t like it—it wasn’t really close. But it’s a strange and unique book and I feel on shaky ground telling you why I didn’t like it, because if I read it again in five or ten years I might discover that the things I disliked were superficial and that the enduring strangeness of this book and the sheer commitment of its author had somehow managed to get under my skin. The author clearly knows what he’s doing and goes about his task with intensity and intelligence. But there was little or no payoff for me as a reader.
The back cover of this book gives us the setup: “The sound of children’s speech has become lethal. In the park, adults wither beneath the powerful screams of their offspring. For young parents Sam and Clair, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther.” Interesting premise. But that summary doesn’t really even begin to convey the weird logic that rules the universe of The Flame Alphabet.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon imagines an hallucinogenic drug he names oneirine. An oneirine trip is called a “haunting”:
Oneirine hauntings show a definite narrative continuity, as clearly as, say, the average Reader’s Digest article. Often they are so ordinary, so conventional—Jeaach calls them ‘the dullest hallucinations known to psychopharmacology’—that they are only recognized as hauntings through some radical though plausible violation of possibility: the presence of the dead, journeys by the same route and means where one person will set out later but arrive earlier, a printed diagram which no amount of light will make readable.
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is something like an oneirine trip. The single detail that cannot be reconciled is given to us in the first line: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” Every other detail of Gregor Samsa’s universe is pretty much as it was before his transformation. Nobody else turns into a bug. And that’s what makes the story so perfect.
Sam and Clair in The Flame Alphabet live in upstate New York, and that stray prosaic fact stayed with me because it was almost like the opposite of the oneirine trip’s single plausible violation. It’s the rare (if not single) detail that relates their universe to ours. Because we learn pretty quickly that we’re not in Kansas anymore, much less upstate New York. As the book progresses, it isn’t just children’s speech that makes people ill—all and any language, including written language, becomes thoroughly poisonous. Of course, this is a novel, made of language, so in a sense we are consuming a poison that Marcus has concocted for us.
Sam eventually ends up working for an organization that is trying to discover a form of language that isn’t toxic. We get endless pages about his inevitably hopeless endeavors, in this vein:
Of course I tried codes. In modern Roman letters I encrypted a suicide note, some gentleman’s last words, with the Caesar cipher. From there I recreated what I could remember from historical texts—the Gettysburg Address was one—and fed them into simple substitution ciphers, homophonic coding, and a modified Vigenère cipher. If this worked, it would mean that our own scripts were too obvious and needed to be concealed, encrypted. But it didn’t work.
He knows it didn’t work because these efforts are then sent down to a courtyard to be presented to test subjects, who promptly expire. Are we to equate the act of writing with the crimes of Josef Mengele? Marcus is nothing if not provocative.
Sam’s efforts become ever more bizarre. It wasn’t always possible to understand his strategy and objectives:
From my drawer I retrieved the Hebrew balloon shrapnel. The deflated letters had dried and curled over the last few days. Some of them stank of the sea. On a stretching board I revived the pieces, ladled oil into their skin until they were slick, pulled others too long until they tore, and with my molder I formed a new set of dense cubes, like square rubber erasers, with which to build, perhaps, a Hebrew letter heretofore unseen.
It’s obscure, and also a little disgusting. Sam is the narrator of The Flame Alphabet, and is forever explaining, elaborating, testifying to the reality of his experience. Alot of that experience takes place in various holes, ditches, and tunnels. Damp, dark, smelly places. Indeed, there is a relentless dreariness that pervades The Flame Alphabet. I’m pretty sure Marcus is counting on provoking a certain repugnance in his readers. I’m just hard pressed to know why—my best guess is that it’s a very dark kind of comedy, which is why I wonder if I might not be better prepared to get the “joke” on a second reading. I had a similarly negative reaction the first time I saw David Lynch’s first film: Eraserhead. There are interesting similarities: in The Flame Alphabet language is toxic; in Eraserhead, it’s febrile, meaningless. Both works are mildly disgusting, each in its own unique and charming way. The second time I saw Eraserhead I thought it was brilliant—and funny. But Eraserhead is a relatively short and simple movie—it’s like a dream. Similar to The Metamorphosis in this regard. It should really be the first thing they teach you in Surrealism 101: If you’re going strange, be brief.
But now that I think of it, not all dreams are simple. Sometimes you wake up and you remember a whole series of vaguely related episodes. For a few minutes you hold enough in your memory that you can imagine scribbling for hours to get it all down on paper. No doubt 98% of it would evaporate off the surface of your consciousness before you even sat down to get started. Maybe The Flame Alphabet is like that kind of dream. The kind that you might ponder for a few minutes, thinking “Did all that really come out of my brain?”
It’s not that the notion of “language as virus” isn’t both shocking and profound. We believe language is as essential to us as, say, our hands. But other creature walk, crawl, and swim the earth without language; what’s more, they have not come up to the point of destroying the planet. If there really was a “Great Designer,” he or she might be just at the point of backing this “feature” out right now. “No, no, that speeds things up too much and only leads to trouble.” But Marcus isn’t working this angle—he’s not asking “What if language is a virus?” He’s taking that as a given. It may be that he’s not giving us an idea, the product of his thinking, but a postulate, a starting point for our own ideas. But meanwhile, there’s a lot to slog through.
