The Giant’s Fence by Michael Jacobson. Reviewed by Lynn Alexander.
The Giant’s Fence is a visual novella by Michael Jacobson, eighty pages of something many people have not experienced before: asemic writing.
I’ll get back to what “asemic writing” is and what it isn’t to the extent I can, but The Giant’s Fence is an asemic work comprised of what Jacobson calls “trans-symbolic script”. The symbols are laid out in rows as many traditional texts might be, and eyes prone to English habits might indeed follow their paths in a linear way. They don’t have to, however, as there is no natural beginning or end outside of those habits or defined by the binding, the author has said that it is not intended to progress in a way that coincides with pages, to start at page one and proceed. You could start in the middle and come back around if you wanted to or experience the symbols in blocks, aggregate. The manner of “reading” and approaching the text is individual and the meaning is derived intuitively, the experience is subjective.
Discussing such work cannot be undertaken in the same way as we might start other reviews. It is necessary to explain some of the background of asemic writing right at the onset, in order to try to talk about what Jacobson is doing- as best we can.
Asemic writing is often compared to codes, abstract art, scribbles, preliterate symbols or approximations, and other kinds of script-like writing or visual art styles. There’s some confusion out there about the differences: What differentiates asemic writing from alphabet replacements or codes? From abstract art that is merely script-like? From the preliterate approximations of a child learning to write? Can asemic writing draw from these?
It’s true that many asemic writers intend their work to be intuitive, with an aesthetic approach not unlike abstract art. It’s also true that some see their asemic writing as “abstractions” of existing text or scripts, which leads some to again raise the comparison to codes. It’s possible that different asemic writers would have very different answers to these kinds of questions or agree with some comparisons and not others. Unlike codes or transliterate symbols, there is no effort to maintain other linguistic elements. Whereas a code would produce the frequencies and syntax patterns of a language, asemic writing does not attempt to preserve a format or an approximation of actual texts that exist in a universal and recognizable sense. These are not distortions of text either, at least from what is understood about Jacobson’s work. He does not take text and deconstruct it, abstract it, rearrange it, or skew it. He begins from the position of construction, he must create his symbols.
What I hear the most from people looking at asemic work is the basic question: “What does it mean?” Followed by “What is the point?”
Intuitive meaning is really the primary feature of asemic writing, that the writing does not convey external or specific meaning other than to attempt to present the symbols as a visual experience for the viewer or reader to interpret. It means what you think it means.
Where I become particularly intrigued by asemic writing is where the second question comes in, about the point of it.
We could make that argument about many things, or wonder why we do it, what we hope to gain. A simple beauty here is that there doesn’t have to be a point to it, or at least asemic writing does not demand it. There aren’t any burdens at the feet of this form, no baggage.
Now enter Jacobson’s Post-Literacy. Post-Literacy?
Let’s see: We are literate, we evolved, we were preliterate and now we have text. So what does he mean there? How can anyone be post-literate?
You’d have to ask Jacobson in more detail about that, and I am sure he would like you to. He’s the one who can satisfy your curiosity there. But here’s the way I see it. In the digital and increasingly paperless age, how often do we rely on graphics, symbols, emoticons, interfaces of pictures? How many times do we click with a mouse or use a symbol to represent something? Are we becoming less a society of written words, more a society of shorthand and touch screens? How will gadgets add to this?
These symbols are rooted in our current cultures, just as early symbols have little meaning to use, ours would no doubt mean little beyond their use in these kinds of examples.
Now humor me here while I struggle: Suppose an alien were to appear, and experience the emoticon of a colon and parantheses bracket, a “smiley”. This symbol certainly comes from our “literacy” base in the sense that we could use words. But would words have any more meaning to this alien? Not really. They would both appear as symbols devoid of context. However, one can possibly be understood intuitively. An emoticon could transcend language, syntax, barriers. And yet, it is not “writing”. It is post-literate. It is not asemic per se, if it is a symbol that replaces specific words, but if it is seen as an expression with meaning derived intuitively we might argue that it is asemic.
Now in full disclosure, this is not the way Jacobson describes post literacy, and this is not what he is driving at in his asemic work necessarily. This is of course my review, with my sense of what he is doing.
But it speaks to the question of “the point”, which matters here. The point is that it is an art, a form of writing that engages us with a transcendent mode of expression.
In “Action Figures”, Jacobson’s work seems closer to this post-literate idea. If some strange amnesia were to eradicate faculties of language somehow and we had to depict the behaviors of people efficiently, it might look like these figures. Some appear to be sharing objects, taking, touching. Whatever they are doing, they are interacting, they are social, and note below the idea of disintegration:
Tim Gaze, of Asemic Magazine and somebody familiar with Jacobson’s work and asemic writing in general, had this to say about The Giant’s Fence:
“Each page has several lines of linked, dancing symbols. They live, move, mutate, and die. The whole book could be interpreted both as the song of how we humans invented symbolic communication, and the telling of its slow disintegration.”
“Some pages distort the rows of horizontal lines of symbols into curves, so you can’t exercise your usual reading habits. The Giant’s Fence stimulates new ways of reading and new ways of thinking. As the introduction says, “any meaning” the reader constructs “is a correct translation”.The book’s title is a translation of Finnish “Jatulintarha”, a name given to many of the stone labrinths found in Finland. The only percursors to The Giant’s Fence are the hypergraphic novels of the Lettristes (such as Alain Satie’s Ecrit en Prose) and some of the more complex works of asemic poetry. If you want to step outside of language , and bathe in unmuddied waters, this book is for you.” -Tim Gaze
I don’t know that I have really done justice here in my attempts to describe asemic work, and Jacobson’s in particular. But I’m not sure that I need to in order to say that I responded to the experience of it, and found my own meaning as Jacobson intends for us to do.
I also think there could be more discussion in general about asemic writing as a form, and the ways it compares to other forms. For our purposes though, this was meant to be a cursory kind of summary that will hopefully encourage readers to ask their own questions, and come to understand asemic writing in their own ways.
“The Giant’s Fence” by Michael Jacobson (link to more information)
“Action Figures” by Michael Jacobson
2008-2009, Barbarian Interior.
Find out more about the author and these books at Michael Jacobson’s The New Post Literate.
