Adèle Rosenfeld: "Jellyfish Have No Ears" (Fiction review)
Elissa Greenwald
Adèle Rosenfeld’s debut novel, Jellyfish Have No Ears, unfolds at the border between language and perception. The protagonist, suffering hearing loss, visits a hospital to be evaluated for a cochlear implant. The discrimination she endures symbolizes a cultural issue: The voices of the disenfranchised often are not heard because many do not want to listen. The protagonist’s struggles to listen and hear, by contrast, develop her compassion.
Rosenfeld conveys hospital experiences so convincingly that anyone who has undergone a medical procedure can identify with her protagonist. She also describes the particular experience of losing hearing, as when her narrator converses with her mother and discovers that “the words were changing shape on her lips.”
Rosenfeld’s protagonist provides images for words from the beginning, when she uses eight words an audiologist gives her for a hearing test, including “soldier,” “woman,” and “boulder” to construct a story about a World War I soldier. Then the sounds of the words fade “like a bird’s-eye view of the Normandy coast: the tide of silence was now covering more than half the page.” Rosenfeld uses another ocean metaphor by calling the cochlea “an ultramarine labyrinth,” connecting it with the title jellyfish, then notes: “What it really looked like was an overcooked Burgundy snail.”
Rosenfeld’s narrator blends images of touch, sight, and sound: “What I really still got was a sense of the warmth of timbres, this soft sheen of wind, of color, of all sound’s snags and snarls.” Here synesthesia and alliteration make ineffable sounds concrete. She uses allusion and visual imagery to convey mood: “There was something of Turner in the coloring around his gaze, his blue eyes like a sailboat violently adrift in his anxiety.”
While the narrator’s language projects control, the world she inhabits escapes her grasp. She encounters Kafkaesque scenarios in the hospital and the office where she works. The hospital scenes show that the French medical system has absurdities similar to the American one. “My file got lost,” the protagonist laments. Various medical personnel assure her that a colleague will answer her questions “except they were all colleagues and not a single one bothered to get back to me.” Rosenfeld links discrimination based on disability with other forms of oppression when the narrator describes nurses shouting at patients in the hospital: “Even in the ORL ward, not hearing was still a class war with the hearing.”
Real and imaginary worlds intertwine when the narrator glimpses the World War I soldier she imagined behind a friend’s face. The soldier’s story, both hallucination and metaphor, is a projection of her fears.
As the story progresses, the narrator’s hearing waxes and wanes. At a party, she hears “the sound of my sneakers squeaking on the ground.” A few chapters later, her hearing has deteriorated until she repeats “disused words” to herself because “by uttering them, by feeling them on my lips, I was making a pact with language.” The narrator defines herself in and through language.
The narrator’s story merges with those of others when she obtains a position at the government bureau that issues birth certificates, where she listens to stories of how people came into this life. This job gives her the mythic power of naming, a form of control over reality. She feels lost, though, in the bureaucratic maze that governs her life as well as those of her clients. The narrator seems to speak for a generation of young people when she claims, “I felt like I’d been plopped down, without any instructions or guidance, in a society that needed me to be exactly like every other citizen and find my place and do my job.”
The narrator has felt split in two, hearing and non-hearing parts, since childhood. Her language difficulties intensify when she leaves her native France to visit London, where problems of translation arise. Rosenfeld links her protagonist’s hearing issues with challenges experienced by anyone caught between two languages or cultures.
This book, though, translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, shows no signs of difficulty in translation. Zuckerman translates Rosenfeld’s made-up words (which the narrator imagines she hears when sounds are unclear) effectively. In a postscript, the translator mentions that he has a cochlear implant.
Rosenfeld’s humor comes through in translation. One day the narrator, working by herself at the bureau that issues birth certificates and having difficulty hearing the clients, makes up improbable names for people. After attending an orgy, she searches for her hearing aid amidst entangled bodies.
While Rosenfeld’s characterization of everyone but the narrator is minimal, her style is expansive, accommodating real and unreal characters. Metaphors of sea life lend the story mystery and profundity, as does an allusion to a black hole, “a metaphor for everything that escapes our beings.”
Rosenfeld compares the narrator’s hearing difficulties to the silences engulfing people whose stories are lost to time, such as anonymous soldiers who died in World War I. The narrator seeks to restore lost voices, countering our current difficulty hearing or heeding the past. One character asks “. . . does this society really need to be heard?” We can answer “Maybe not,” as long as there are books like this to be read.
