The Lem Reviews 2020 - #2 "Asking to Zorro"

Rumours about Daisy Flettine’s “Asking to Zorro” first began circulating in the late 1990s.  A book unlike any other, they said.  The rumours continued through the noughties: a book that required its own language, they said.  And into the second decade of the new millennium: a challenge, a revelation, a shift in the very axis of literature.

What on earth were they on about?, I wondered.

I found out when the review copy arrived – almost two years ago.  “Embargoed until March 2020” explained the covering letter in large red type.  Embargoed for two years?!  What on earth are they on about?

It soon became clear.  “Asking to Zorro” did indeed require its own language – a language Flettine spent the bulk of those decades developing.  And it is a language that any prospective reader has to master before they can access what is – in the end – a truly remarkable piece of fiction.

At its heart, AtoZ addresses the great dilemma of our age: how can we communicate?  Two protagonists, seemingly stuck in a Beckettian wilderness, are in dialogue.  One character is trying to explain something to the other.  Each effort at explanation proves inadequate.  Follow-up questions seem only to deepen the dilemma: in order to explain this, I have then to explain that; and in order to explain that, I have to explain this.

We may or may not be accustomed to such recursion; but we are certainly accustomed to the manner in which to tackle the problem: we use words.  Or, at least, that is our custom.  But what if the words are not enough?  Or even - and worse – what if the words are actually in the way?

The anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell (who invented the word ‘kinesics’) estimated that “no more than 30 to 35% of the social meaning of a conversation or an interaction is carried by the words”.  The rest of the meaning is conveyed by non-verbal behaviours such as gestures.

Various attempts have been made to catalogue these non-verbal forms of communication. The French ’pataphysician Francois Caradec produced a ‘Dictionary of Gestures’ in 2005, for example; while as long ago as the seventeenth century John Bulwer wrote books on ‘chirologia’ (“the natural language of the hand”) and ‘chironomia’ (‘the art of manual rhetoric’).  There is even an academic journal devoted to the study of gesture, run by Adam Kendon, author of the seminal “Gesture – Visible Action as Utterance”.

Drawing on such materials, Flettine devised not merely a dictionary but a lexicon, an entire repertoire of markings and symbols to represent these non-verbal forms.  For every gesture (and Caradec catalogued 850) she has specified something akin to an ideogram (think of Chinese symbols, or Egyptian hieroglyphics).  But she has gone further.  She has done the same thing for facial expressions (including not merely the raising of an eyebrow or the furrowing of a brow, but the degree of raising or furrowing); and she developed a complementary schema for the very many noises we as humans make that do not take the form of words.  (Think of something as seemingly simple as ‘hmm’: how long a ‘hmm’?  How intense?  With an emphasis at any point, or any inflexion of tone?  Flettine has devised a visual script for indicating precisely what kind of ‘hmm’ is meant, precisely what kind of ‘uh-huh’, and so on.)

The results are, to say the least, intimidating.  The complementary annex to ‘Asking to Zorro’, which sets out the ideograms, signs and etchings that correspond to gestures, facial expressions and non-word sounds, runs to nearly 900 pages.  The actual book itself is a mere 110 pages.

The resultant demand on the reader utterly dwarfs – for example – the challenge set by Anthony Burgess in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ or by Russell Hoban in ‘Riddley Walker’.  In those cases, much of the underlying appearance and logic of the language we know remained intact.  The task for the reader was ‘merely’ to learn a handful of neologisms (in the case of Burgess) or to adapt to a dialect form (Walker).

With Flettine, this approach is impossible.  Whilst the two-volume solution permits the reader to have both texts open simultaneously, the process of looking up each symbol or mark on a one-by-one basis as one goes along is unbearably slow.  The only alternative is to ‘learn’ the lexicon, and then to read the text.  Hence the two-year embargo.  It took me the best part of eighteen months to familiarise myself with the ‘language’; and a further three months actually to read the book.

But what a book it is.  In a dialogue conducted entirely by means of gesture, expression and wordless-noise, this is a story about the near impossibility of true communication - in a language that is almost impossibly inaccessible.  It is a story of our desperate need to communicate, in the language that, in the physical world, is actually the dominant manner of our discourse.  A story grounded in Beckett’s agonising wait – and which forces us, too, to wait – and which, like Beckett, offers no easy redemption; but which does, ultimately, offer us a glimpse of what deep connection with ‘the other’ might offer.

In the end, few will read it.  But how many have actually read Joyce’s Ulysses?  Or Proust’s A la recherche?  Or Musil’s The Man Without Qualities?  These are texts which transformed literature: I am convinced that AtoZ will do the same.