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Quite a bit to say about Ansgar Allen's The Tongue Machine. Here is a story about a tongue traveler, an anthropologist or rather a figment of an academic discourse generally called anthropology, who finds himself manifesting on/around the tongues of the unsuspecting. What does he do? Mainly listens and observes, I think, at the whim of the babble of which he is a witness. Or that's too passive. He does not appear to intervene much, though the fact of his being there is a kind of intervention in that it is the mechanism incorporating the novel's parts, i.e. its overflow of utterances, which come to seem, in a way, mad. This is not a reference to the content of any particular sentence written/cited in the book (I can't speak for what was cut, nor for those unarticulated mental impulses that found no language but which we can imagine were somehow involved in the book's writing/citation). I think here of Rabelais, the absolute absurdity of speech and discourse exhibited in his Gargantuan/Pantagruelian adventures, where no act of speech is safe from the totalizing reach of parody, not even the most Christian of oaths. (Specifically, I see Alcofribas residing under Pantagruel's enormous tongue.) Every sentence is its own ironic analog, i.e. in Rabelais the terms of language are the terms of language's self-parody. Same goes for Allen, especially when it comes to the modern university system, this tongue traveler/academic who seeks to leave academia by way of comprehensively exploiting its linguistic resources: "He could still avail himself of academic speech, so he said, or technical language, but only in such a way that the words he availed himself of did not ever escape the ambit of its ridicule. These studies had been diminished to near insignificance, placed at one remove and then at one remove again, by his repeated materialisation from the tongue surface." A scathing/hilarious enactment of the very problem of learned utterances, the quite real actuality of being nothing more than the words we speak.
Perhaps best read aloud.
The Tongue Machine
Ansgar Allen
Schism Neuronics
2026