I read this book and didnât like itâit wasnât really close. But itâs a strange and unique book and I feel on shaky ground telling you why I didnât 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 heâs 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: âThe sound of childrenâs 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.â Interesting premise. But that summary doesnât really even begin to convey the weird logic that rules the universe of The Flame Alphabet.
In Gravityâs Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon imagines an hallucinogenic drug he names oneirine. An oneirine trip is called a âhauntingâ:
Oneirine hauntings show a definite narrative continuity, as clearly as, say, the average Readerâs Digest article. Often they are so ordinary, so conventionalâJeaach calls them âthe dullest hallucinations known to psychopharmacologyââthat 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.
Kafkaâs The Metamorphosis is something like an oneirine trip. The single detail that cannot be reconciled is given to us in the first line: âOne morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.â Every other detail of Gregor Samsaâs universe is pretty much as it was before his transformation. Nobody else turns into a bug. And thatâs 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 tripâs single plausible violation. Itâs the rare (if not single) detail that relates their universe to ours. Because we learn pretty quickly that weâre not in Kansas anymore, much less upstate New York. As the book progresses, it isnât just childrenâs speech that makes people illâall 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 isnât 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 gentlemanâs last words, with the Caesar cipher. From there I recreated what I could remember from historical textsâthe Gettysburg Address was oneâand fed them into simple substitution ciphers, homophonic coding, and a modified VigenĂšre cipher. If this worked, it would mean that our own scripts were too obvious and needed to be concealed, encrypted. But it didnât work.
He knows it didnât 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.
Samâs efforts become ever more bizarre. It wasnât 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.
Itâs 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. Iâm pretty sure Marcus is counting on provoking a certain repugnance in his readers. Iâm just hard pressed to know whyâmy best guess is that itâs a very dark kind of comedy, which is why I wonder if I might not be better prepared to get the âjokeâ on a second reading. I had a similarly negative reaction the first time I saw David Lynchâs first film: Eraserhead. There are interesting similarities: in The Flame Alphabet language is toxic; in Eraserhead, itâs 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 brilliantâand funny. But Eraserhead is a relatively short and simple movieâitâs like a dream. Similar to The Metamorphosis in this regard. It should really be the first thing they teach you in Surrealism 101: If youâre 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 âDid all that really come out of my brain?â
Itâs not that the notion of âlanguage as virusâ isnât 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; whatâs more, they have not come up to the point of destroying the planet. If there really was a âGreat Designer,â he or she might be just at the point of backing this âfeatureâ out right now. âNo, no, that speeds things up too much and only leads to trouble.â But Marcus isnât working this angleâheâs not asking âWhat if language is a virus?â Heâs taking that as a given. It may be that heâs not giving us an idea, the product of his thinking, but a postulate, a starting point for our own ideas. But meanwhile, thereâs a lot to slog through.
