“By reading more, and more variously, we decimate our immunity, increase our vulnerability to this substance, but our private wiring does something profoundly subjective to this material that would seem unique from body to body. Language turns out to be the most unruly of medicines, the most unknowable, and yet, provided we collaborate with it, still among the most powerful.” (Electric Literature, 2018) One may argue that The Flame Alphabet is nothing more than a dystopia among many others, a novel telling the story of a world gone wrong. However, in this case, the downfall which the reader witnesses is not caused by a despotic government trying to take away its people’s freedom or by dehumanizing scientific progress which has taken over. In The Flame Alphabet, …show more content…
The Flame Alphabet is more than a novel, it is also Samuel’s manuscripts and archives, a story he has written himself to document his journey. This inevitably leads the reader to question the authenticity of the story as well as Samuel’s reliability, as the narrator and author. If language has become toxic, how was he able to document it so thoroughly? The protagonist, who is powerless in the eyes of the reader, is stuck in a loop. Just as there is no escape from the mimetic side of language, from imitation and representation, Samuel cannot free himself from language and finds himself dependent on it (“For that I blame the craven desire to speak, to write, to be heard.” (Marcus, 2012, 277)), in quest of something new, that is to say a permanent solution to speech fever. He is obsessed with a creation and a goal he will never achieve since, in spite of his experiments, he does not manage to create a new type of language. Nonetheless, he still uses the language he cannot escape from, the one which has become deadly. One may wonder if this desire to use language is indeed a desire or rather a necessity, that is to say, something inherently