Schneiderman and Hernandez know that all collaborations between two authors necessarily become a triangulation, a tritons genus. Emerging from this collaboration is the production of that third thing, the sense of the synthesis itself (without being Hegelian since it is not a question of Aufhebung- the raising and preserving into the new product). As if to assign some measure of control over their cooperative act of genesis, they name this third mind "Fex". And, like atomic Adams or contemporary Raymond Lullys, they perform this by the recombinant strains of orthographs. The authorial egos are dissolved and then reformed, much akin to Fex' new alphabet, into the gleaming superego of Fex himself.
If one were to consider this an alchemical experiment, one would doubtless have to involve Borges "The Library of Babel", Deleuze's "l'abecedaire", and bpNichol's "The Alphabet Game". Perhaps even a cross-reading with Anatole France's The Garden of Epicurus could inspire some dangerous liaisons and frightful hybridization of/for thought. But is there a story, some kind of sequential plot that one can follow through this labyrinthine text? No, there is not a plot, but a multiplicity, and it takes acute vision to juggle the carnivalesque episodes that mashes together and makes for a divergent run. Without a healthy appetite for narrative play that grounds and undoes its own literary methodology, the Abecedarium will just seem like some stochastic, incoherent jumble of absurdist wank - not that either Schneiderman or Hernandez would be much put out with such a derogatory claim since such censure-happy critics would be just as quick to denounce the literary precedent for this book such as Breton, Pynchon, Acker, et al.
Since the reading and reviewing of a book cannot be dissociated from certain anecdotal asides (at least not in good faith), I read this book through once, and then play it like a ritornello, and although I cannot make any such claims of largesse to state that I "get" the book, the trick is this: to "get" the book, you have to "not get" this book. I do not mean keep your dollars in your wallet and run for the nearest Clive Cussler potboiler, but rather: buy the book and actually enjoy "not getting" it, since comprehension of this "novel" only works when said comprehension breaks down. Admittedly, this is not much of a sales pitch, and far be it from me to shill a book that can quite manageably shill itself. What is there not to like in its many non-revelatory palimpsests? Heroic Fex with shades of Bob Dobbs rescuing the French from the Nazis...Surely this jams history with an overabundance of irreverent and irrelevant detail as each "chapter" seems to pivot on the red herring theme of a carnival dragon (no fooling).
Deleuze used to say that the way he did philosophy was through a kind of buggery: that is, he would take a philosopher in history "from behind" and force said philosopher to produce monstrous new offspring. In fact, that is exactly what he did alongside his collaborator, Felix Guattari. My own interpretive imposition upon this Abecedarium makes it difficult for me not to see Schneiderman and Hernandez as literary equivalents of Deleuze and Guattari.
Yet again we return to that nagging and perennial question of what this book is about. If we were to hazard to assign the term postmodern to it, we'd find the text far too wet for such a label to hold. Besides, that tricky "post" prefix tacked on to everything from post-historical to post-neo-anything is about as welcome as being cornered by the fatuous self-important pseudo-cultural socialite at the cocktail party who wants desperately for you to see how droll she is. Any description would by necessity fail to gain purchase on this book, and this is some lazy copout performed by this reviewer, but rather the undeniable fact that a detail of the plot is a meaningless enterprise that consigns the book to being a story rather than a textual event.
Teeming with feverish neologisms, clever portmanteaus, this quasi-surrealist tablature honours and defeats its own promise of laying down the foundation for an entirely new alphabet. Coquettish in parts, inflammatory in others, this is an unapologetic collaboration couched in a svelte volume of prose-poetic dissonance.