“I think of language as being tremendously potent. It causes deep feelings in us, so much so that its effects would seem nearly chemical, medical.”
In his interview with journalist Adam Boretz for The Millions, author Ben Marcus explained the genesis of his 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet with the words above. Imagining language as a kind of drug, Marcus asked in the same interview: “What would happen if the drug of language was toxic to some people if taken in high doses?”
As a novel that investigates the threatening yet perception-changing possibilities of language, The Flame Alphabet manifests how Marcus took this question to heart. In the book, an epidemic disease — language toxicity — strikes most of the world, and children’s speech becomes lethal to their parents. Through this toxicity, however, language asserts its force and makes clear its potential to change one’s perception of oneself and the world.
The novel presents language as a physical force that hurts, dehydrates, and suffocates adults. Rather than mediating communication, informing, or regulating, language constantly imbalances by “crush[ing]” (p. 4) or leaving a body “dried out and saltless” (p. 16). Hair loss, breathing difficulties, a shrinking face, and other symptoms follow. In return, the adult world organizes around fixed linguistic codes and its binaries shatter.
We follow the protagonist and narrator, Sam, his wife Claire, and their daughter Esther, who live in Rochester, New York, as Esther’s presence begins to threaten her parents’ lives. Any letter Esther writes “look[s] like a fat molecule engorged on air, ready to burst;” her voice sounds with “a noxious mineral content,” and her words feel “oily” (p. 39) to her parents. The Flame Alphabet’s multilayered engagement with language undertakes a series of critiques of family, religion, and consumerism-driven society, as well as big tech; here, however, I want to draw attention to a specific concern in the novel, which is the low-tech, homemade medical equipment devised by Sam, and self-care techniques he employs.
Throughout the novel, by turning their kitchen into a low-tech lab, Sam conducts a series of experiments while organizing their domestic life around a set of devices to ease or cure the disease:
I stashed field glasses, sound abatement fabrics, and enough rolled foam to conceal two adults. On top of these, I crammed a raw stash of anti-comprehension pills, a child’s radio retrofitted as a toxicity screen, an unopened bit of gear called a Dräger Aerotest breathing kit, and my symptom charts.
This was the obvious equipment, medical gear I could use on the fly, from the car, at night. (…) My secondary supplies consisted of medical salts and a portable burner, a copper powder for phonic salting, plus some rubber bulbs and a bootful of felt. Eye masks and earplugs and the throat box that was functioning as the white noisery, to spew a barrier of hissing sound over me. (…)
In my pocket I carried the facial calipers, even if by now finer measurements weren’t required. You could perform the diagnostic just by looking. (Marcus, 2012, p. 3)
Sam’s inventory, which shuffles between the mundane and the technical, introduces a new vocabulary to daily life. His personal striving for survival and health transforms the body’s relations not only to itself but also to its surroundings as the mobilization of different kinds of materials—glass, fabric, foam, salt, copper—and the becoming-apparatus of the body—earplugs, throat box, eye masks— becomes manifest. These DIY medical gear activate an informational exchange to create protection from toxicity. However, this act is so spontaneous and intuitive that it does not provide any understanding on the part of the user. Sam’s experience is not far from our own times. We don’t know the reasons behind things, but we are exposed to their effects at an unprecedented rate and are expected to protect ourselves individually.
Sam’s impromptu health practice is informed by the medical methods and technology at hand and reformulated by their very act of domestication. Sam’s daily practice and his medical interventions into his family’s life recall Nikolas Rose’s conceptualization of the somatic individual, that is, the individualization of risk and management as individuals “who experience, articulate, judge, and act upon [themselves] in part in the language of biomedicine” (Rose, 2007, 26). As the novel unfolds, Sam’s homemade practices of testing, gathering, measuring, and medical experimentation become part of a more extensive scientific network as Sam joins a religious community/profit-driven research lab named Forsythe. Sam’s somatic individuality is a conclusion of the social and religious practice he inhabits, and it is a part of his subjugation as his practice of health turns into a mode of (failed) production and surplus.
Sam appropriates both the methods of official medical practices and their language. He mobilizes his kitchen equipment— counter, furnace, and mortar — and repurposes the kitchen as a lab, where he conducts “ambient air quality tests,” examines “sediments of speech” (p. 54), prepares tonics, and blends “anti-inflammatory tablets” (p. 71). At a time when “experts [have] been demoted,” and it is impossible to get any insight from medical authorities, “eager amateurs” (p. 146) like Sam take the stage.
Sam’s unpaid, emotionally invested labour, which demands a particular kind of entrepreneurial ethos, promulgates a form of immaterial labor. As theorized and discussed by Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt concerning the capitalist economy, immaterial labor creates “knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response” (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 108). “Immersing in the corporeal, the somatic” (Hardt, 1999, p. 96) Sam’s practice —the language-oriented, data operations concentrating on the bodies’ informational content— comes to preoccupy his family life. He produces unfinished and unconventional products that are constantly being modified. He works through the subversion of established practices by hacking and domesticating, none of which are adequately incorporated into the capital in circulation. Sam himself, as a patient, becomes a consumer-producer of specific mechanisms and social formations and a constituent of these mechanisms that keep the disease/capital alive. Despite this imbalanced relation, the reader notices a reorientation in the disorientation of Sam, whose sense of self is destabilized by the distorting language. Sam’s homemade medical work highlights the system’s shortcomings and opens up possibilities for new actions and vocabulary, not to fight against the system, but to understand and navigate it.
Bibliography:
Boretz. A. (2012, January 31). Lethal Language: Ben Marcus Urges Writers to March on the Enemy. The Millions. Retrieved from https://themillions.com/2012/01/lethal-language-ben-marcus-urges-writersto- march-on-the-enemy.html
Hardt, M. (1999). Affective Labor. Boundary, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer), 89-100.
Hardt, M., Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press.
Marcus, B. (2012). The Flame Alphabet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Rose, N. (2007). The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century. Princeton, Nj: Princeton University Press.
Image Credit:
Cover of The Flame Alphabet, © Alfred A. Knopf. Used under fair use provision (book review).
