Ben Marcus has made a career of exploring the mythic materiality of language. In early novels such as The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women, he documents fantastic societies for whom language is an elemental power: at once a weapon, a weather pattern, and a chemical process. If characters wad their mouths with towels, the cotton will absorb their speech, creating “thought rags” that can communicate messages when chewed. If hundreds of characters murmur all at once, they will generate a Voice Blizzard, which produces hailstone-like nuts of hardened meaning. If characters shout menacing sentences at one another, in an attempt to “burst the body with words,” the victims will eventually begin to vomit, vesicate, and explode. These are books in which all utterances are performative. They’re like bizarro playgrounds: sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will make you break out in hives.

Marcus’s latest novel, The Flame Alphabet, pushes this preoccupation with language to its logical extreme: the apocalypse. After the world is swept by a sudden language plague, meaning becomes toxic. People can no longer hear speech or even read text without suffering weakness, fever, and death. Only children are immune, and roving bands of them soon take to the streets, browbeating adults with bubonic monologues. The kids have to be quarantined in fenced compounds, where tall radio towers blare fairy tales to ward off parents. The novel, narrated by one such parent, is a sort of journal of his plague year. Sam recounts how he is forced to flee, then attempts to reunite with, his ailing wife and sadistic teenage daughter. Along the way, he meets mysterious cultists, unscrupulous researchers, and (literally) underground rabbis.

The Flame Alphabet marks a unique entry in Marcus’s corpus, as his most narratively straightforward and dramatically streamlined book so far. It is also the post-apocalyptic novel he was born to write: here language itself—rather than modern warfare—wipes out civilization (imagine Omega Man meets the OED). It’s available from Knopf in January 2012.

Recently The [tk] Review had an opportunity to exchange some emails with Marcus about the novel. Topics discussed include: editing his stories for The New Yorker; his conceptual crutches as a fiction writer; his interest in Kabbalah; and his background in philosophy.

TK: The Flame Alphabet is your most narrative book so far: it features a single first-person narrator, who chronicles events in a more or less linear fashion. In a recent interview on HTMLGiant, you remark that the novel was exciting to write for just this reason. After playing around with pseudo-encyclopedic forms, you had to teach yourself how to employ “the basic narrative building blocks,” which felt “totally foreign and difficult.” Could you talk more about this difficulty? Which building blocks in particular were most challenging to master?

BM: The movement of time was new for me, the ticking clock, things happening in order, events begetting other events, everything from before bearing down on everything after, the pressure of narrative. I also, for some reason, had trouble getting characters from one room to another. In an early draft, I had to get the narrator and his wife out the door and into their car, and I think it took me thirty pages. I felt responsible for their movement at the cellular level, as if I had to understand their biology to command them to walk. It was ridiculous. It didn’t occur to me that I could write: “Then they got in their car and drove away.”

TK: That’s funny. I think James Wood wrote somewhere that the hardest task of the novelist is to get a character to leave the house. Where do you think that that impulse was coming from, for you?

BM: It sounds simple, but I did it because the story grew more fraught to me because of it. The house, and everything inside it, was exhausted. I’d picked it clean and the corpse was boring. The energy and the threat and the peril were outside the house, so it wasn’t much of a conflict. I do love some pretty eventless fiction, and I’ve written my share of stuff where characters have parking boots on and can’t move. But this was different and I wanted to try something new.

TK: It sometimes seems as if your novels are set in the same mythical world, where language is endowed with physical force. The societies in each book tend to develop similar technologies for harnessing it: the “noise shirt” and “listening frame” in The Age of Wire and String; the “thought-rag” and “listening grease” in Notable American Women; the “Hebrew letter” and “speech-enabling grease” in The Flame Alphabet. The books also seem to share a common roster of proper names: Perkins, Thompson, Burke. There is even a recurring language scholar, Sernier, whose research keeps getting invoked by all of your narrators. To what extent do you think of these novels as inhabiting a single universe? What draws you back to it?

BM: Probably this reflects the limits of my imagination. I return to these ideas and these characters usually against my will. They are the family I wish I didn’t have, because I think I know too much about them.  I swear them off going forward, only to find them on the page again when I write. I have lately begun to think that if my imagination is so constricted, if the conceptual territory I return to is so severely limited, then I have to work hard to vary my technique, to write with a different skill set. This is another reason why I’ve been exploring more narrative momentum, more explicit storytelling, because, to me, the writing tools might help me find different reaches of content, different kinds of stories. It only seems to be working a little bit.

TK: Well, you have been exploring different kinds of fictional content lately. Some of your recent short stories have been set far outside the Marcusverse, in more recognizable environments: office jobs, family reunions, and so on. Are these the “different kinds of stories” you had in mind? What was it like to stage them in such new conceptual territories?

BM: I’ve been looking to feel vulnerable, in writing, and that means giving up on some of my crutches, the anchoring objects of strangeness I sometimes stash in my fiction. An early version of a recent story, “Rollingwood,” had some unattributed machines flying overhead, something you couldn’t really account for, but in the end, [New Yorker fiction editor] Deborah Treisman suggested that the external strangeness wasn’t helping, wasn’t resonant of much. It was just a distraction in that particular story. I use that stuff almost the way a soundtrack in film cheats feeling onto the screen. When I don’t have it, it scares me a little—and it makes me search for substance elsewhere, in a character’s interior, or in the dramatics between people—and that’s interesting to me at the moment.

TK: When you are setting your fiction in an invented world, one of the hallmarks of your prose style is the terminological immersion that you favor. You’ll often throw a reader into the deep end, alluding to things like “noise shirts” and “math guns,” without immediately defining them. So in the first paragraph of The Flame Alphabet, Sam casually rattles off all his plague equipment: the “anti-comprehension pills” and “sound abatement fabrics,” plus a face mask and “throat box.” What attracts you to this strategy? At what stage in the world-building process do you begin brainstorming these technologies, and how can you tell when one will end up playing a major narrative role? In this novel, for instance, the “speech-enabling grease”—which grants temporary immunity to language toxicity—becomes a significant plot device. Whereas something like the “mercy tent”—in which people can commit language suicide—remains relatively marginal: just a fun idea that you toss out and riff on.

BM: I remember when I was very young, reading things I didn’t fully understand, just a single word in a sentence, or a term or phrase, and how unsettled it made me feel. Usually I couldn’t help myself from imagining the unknown thing, inventing something unreal to fill out the space of my ignorance. Maybe this is part of why as a writer I like to invent names and terms without instantly defining them. Also some of these things are self-explanatory—a throat box that functions as a white noisery—what’s so unclear about that?

As to how these things come to take part in the narrative, that’s harder to answer. I like to think that all of these objects are relevant, part of the inventory of the novel, there to be used and abused by characters, to be bought or sold, eaten or killed. And in terms of the mercy tents, I had a much bigger role planned for them. In an early draft of the book the narrator escapes the research lab and gets involved in some of the mercy tents. But when I started editing, this stuff just had to go. It was too bloated.

TK: Throughout The Flame Alphabet, Sam finds that he can’t use clichés innocently anymore. Now that speech is toxic, various figurative commonplaces about language have become literal. So if his daughter shouts mean things at him, it actually causes him physical pain. These are words that “hurt,” that are “literally, hard to hear”; when she aims them at him, he is within “earshot.” Is this one of the emotional motors of the novel for you? What happens to these truths about language—about the ability our loved ones have to hurt us with words—when they are literalized? And what happens when you push those truths to their apocalyptic limit: when they are affecting, not just one household, but the entire world, via a language plague?

BM: I was hoping the predicament would continue to intensify, so it wasn’t just a whole family, but their neighborhood, and then their town, and then who knows how much further the speech fever has spread?  To me there were more dramatic possibilities when the language toxicity kept seeming to change, to worsen.  The narrator meets a mysterious character named Murphy, who seems to know something, and who guides the narrator in his navigation of the crisis, but then even this scenario is tested.  Maybe, in retrospect, it’s more clear that I wanted to unsettle the book if things ever seemed too peaceful.

TK: The language plague isn’t the only high-wire conceit. There is also an invented religion: a covert sect of Jews who meet in private “Jew holes,” woodland dugouts where they convene to hear encrypted transmissions of rabbis’ sermons. I don’t want to spoil how these two conceits—the language plague and the Jew holes—end up converging in the novel. But could you talk about how they were connected for you conceptually? Why did it feel important to examine an invented religion—a cult of Judaism, in particular—in tandem with a language plague?

BM: The central crisis of the book was already on the table, and I remember thinking that things had to escalate. Whatever isolation the narrator and has wife were experiencing had to intensify. I invented a Jewish cult, and I enrolled the narrator and his wife, and then it was a kind of problem, or circumstance, I had to support and put pressure on. There wasn’t a lot of planning for this. But I did endless drafts of the Jewish stuff, since it felt inert for a long while, without any real impact. I knew that if I was going to keep it, it had to press down hard on the characters and the world they inhabited. It couldn’t just be an invention for its own sake. Narrative utility, I guess I was thinking. Which is sort of why any religion is invented, maybe.  Along the way, though, I found resonant material in my research.  Kabbalah, as I understand it, both chases after and tries to protect what can’t be known, what can’t be thought, what can’t be understood.  It’s not hard to see language itself as a kind of folly, in this light.  At times I didn’t feel that the language plague was much of a stretch.  Judaism, at least in terms of its mystical side and Kabbalah, seemed to accommodate, or at least not forbid, some of the crises that arise in the book.  It seemed that we could persuasively devise a mythology in which we are punished for our use of language, for presuming to know anything, and there are days when I think that all I’ve done is illustrate and dramatize some of the warnings I’ve read.

TK: At several points in the novel, Sam speculates that—without speech—people might lack recognizable conscious experience. “Perhaps a raucous inner life produced shattering notes inside us,” he writes; but “without a way to say it, there was no reason to even think it.” Elsewhere he wonders: “What might [people] say to each other if they were suddenly given a language that worked?” These passages reminded me of that wonderful Wittgenstein line: “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.” And they made me curious: does this novel have a philosophy of language? If so, what are its intellectual influences? Which thinkers and theorists of language—if any—have been especially important to you in your writing?

BM: The narrator has trouble thinking he can exist without language, and his worry seems fair.  If human experience is hermetically sealed inside bodies, if it’s essentially unshareable, then what value can it have?  He seems to think that whole swaths of behavior will simply expire, and he watches this happen.  At the end, he kind of makes a case (in his way), for an inner life that exists beneath language.  It’s as close as the book gets to pinning down some kind of belief system.  But this is a novel, not a work of philosphy.  It’s not trying to answer a question.  Probably it wants to make the question even more unbearable. I was a philosophy major in college, and I read linguistics and philosophy of language, but most of it was lost to me, or else fully absorbed, by the time I started writing this. I was considering graduate school in philosophy, but I lost interest when things got technical, more mathematical.  If I have a philosophy of language, it probably comes more from novelists than philosophers, such as Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, although I did read Wittgenstein and some of the logical positivists, along with Adorno and the other usual suspects. In The Flame Alphabet I tended instead to focus on the loneliness of life without language. The isolation, the seclusion, just how walled off we become from each other when we cannot communicate. Late in the book the narrator comes upon an underground room, where a man beckons him inside, and he refuses. I was fixated on the dramatic problem of what people are meant to DO with each other when they can’t communicate. There’s no real philosophy of language in this. It’s not a philosophy at all. It’s a worry, a fear, an anxiety. And a huge one.  I am far more provoked as a writer when I am unsettled, uncertain, without any safe ground to stand on.

TK: In a recent New Yorker fiction podcast, you read a Kazuo Ishiguro story, then recommend that listeners check out his masterpiece, The Unconsoled. And in the November 2011 issue of Harper’s, you reviewed some new translations of Raymond Roussel. Who else have you been reading and recommending lately?

BM: There are two books I’ve just read that aren’t out yet. Both are terrific. John D’Agata’s The Lifespan of a Fact, which is going to ignite some intense arguments about literary nonfiction, and then a novel, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, by Mark Leyner. One of the funniest books I have read in a long time. Hyper smart and crazy.

TK: Six years have now passed since your 2005 Harper’s article, in which you look at Jonathan Franzen’s career and try to deconstruct a prevailing aesthetic dichotomy, the so-called “experimentalism vs. realism” divide. In the time that’s elapsed, Jonathan Franzen has published a new novel; David Shields has reinvigorated public debate over the dichotomy with his manifesto Reality Hunger; and Laura Miller—whom you sort of chide in your article for criticizing the esoteric taste of the National Book Award judges—is once again criticizing the esoteric taste of the National Book Award judges. How much do you think has changed in the American literary landscape in the past six years? If you were writing that article today, would you have to alter many of your main theses?

BM: In the last few years I haven’t worried about the distinction between different kinds of writing. I read what excites me, and it ranges from the transparent and traditional to the complex and strange. I find that the urge to classify has abandoned me entirely, perhaps because I don’t trust the prevailing classifications that much, and I’m sure they are likely to get overturned. There are many ways to make art from language. I am endlessly curious about what people are trying, how writers are making feeling with words. And I care less and less about where a particular work stands with respect to this dichotomy. Then again, I haven’t been aware of any conspicuous, public positions taken that question the motives of non-traditional writing, so that may be why my defenses are down.