Sans Teeth, Sans Eyes, Sans Taste, Sans Everything

The opening of The Giant’s Fence by Michael Jacobson suggests a number of readings. The circle could be an “O,” that small round awe-filled word that announces a formal address, maybe to an audience arranged in a circle around a fire, an audience so large that it surrounds the small fire in two concentric circles—so that, from above, the scene appears to be an open eye (pupil, iris, and sclera clearly defined) or a wheel about to roll into a story.

The story is wordless, yet it is told with words, none readable. Jacobson has written each of these words in what he calls a “trans-symbolic script” that he says leaves the narrative open to any interpretation. But there is a beginning and end to the story. Every page, except for the opening and closing pages, consists of fourteen tight lines of text, the fourteen lines reminding us of the sonnet, which is constructed to lay out a careful argument in a certain pattern. A couple of the pages in the book we could interpret as Petrarchan sonnets, a few others as Shakesperean, and the rest as something as yet undefined.




The script itself is pictographic. We can see people and animals moving from left to right through the story. The script reminds me a little of the Rongorongo script of Rapa Nui (that is, Easter Island), which is a script that appears to be a series of roughly interlocking glyphs that might suggest a story. Or that might not. Attempts at interpretation have either failed or failed to be convincing. But, visually, Rongorongo (which might be nothing but pictures arranged in lines) still entices. This is also how The Giant’s Fence works.

In the text, rooms, occasionally, appear—spaces where the story can rest before continuing its journey. On quite a few pages and usually more than once on each page, the eye that opens and closes the book intrudes into the text, pushing a nearly blank oculus into the text, disrupting multiple lines on the page, and representing possibly a conflict or a narrator inserting its own vision of the story.


Jacobson’s script is so dense that we might interpret each page as a paragraph, or as a single word. We might do the same for the book as a whole. Maybe this is the longest one-word story of all time. But a careful examination of the text shows that there are breaks in most lines, that some of the characters are completely unattached to others, that sometimes a single line is an uninterrupted sequence of characters, a single word stretched out until our breath gives out while we try to recite it.


A good piece of asemic writing needs a good sense of the printer’s fist (even if that printer was a calligrapher), and that is what Jacobson gives us. He has invented a writing system different from any other, one that has internal consistency even in the face of remarkable variety, one that might be nothing more than a woodcut novel sans words, a story told in pictures. But we know these glyphs cannot be pictures, since we cannot simply look at them and understand them.

This story is also never-ending. The final page ends with a wheel-like construction of three concentric rings, and it is identical to the same wheel that opens the book, except that it is upside-down. This simplest of tropes instructs us to turn the book upside-down and read through the book in the opposite direction, until we hit that other wheel and turn the book around and . . . .

_____

Jacobson, Michael. The Giant’s Fence. Barbarian Interior: Minneapolis, Minn., 2006.

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Below the Bar
My son Tim, who is a senior in high school, made his stage debut, these past two weeks, in the role of Jaques in his school’s production of As You Like It. Nancy and I were amazed by the great job he did, performing with brio, a strong voice, and a real physical presence. In his role, he had the opportunity to perform one of the most famous monologs in theater, which begins with “All the world’s a stage” and ends with these four lines, which are the most powerful part of the speech:

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

I was too interested in Jaques’ speech during that monolog to think to capture it digitally—I did, however, capture the entire play on 8mm analog tape—but I did use my digital camera to capture this exchange from later in the play:


My daughter Erin also sent us a rough cut of a scene for a television pilot her Two Penny Productions is putting together, a beautifully shot farce that shows a good sense of how to write a funny line. So today reminds me that my children are all about the performing arts, something I still can hardly believe.

ecr. l’inf.