Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America

Listening in on Carla Harryman’s Baby

142 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century sheltered from the wind. Voices travel too far. A pick-up on the distant road returns their call. It is not meaning but sounds we make. In memory, the ubiquitous fog is stepped around. Cool feet muscle through heavy sand. The surf is uninviting but thrilling. Berlin, May 22, 2009 listening in on carla harryman’s baby Christine Hume “Let us leave theories there and return to here’s hear.” —james joyce, Finnegans Wake Language is first entirely sonic to any baby; it begins pre-birth and continues as a seamless part of the sensual world of infancy. Carla Harryman ’s recent book of hybrid genre prose, Baby, creates a highly jocular, edgy, and intellectual adventure out of sonic materiality. In this work, the main character, baby, enacts a sophisticated pleasure of active, attentive listening : “The corner of everything was smitten with attentiveness. The difference between a womb and a room lies in such corners of attentiveness. Or the technology of listening,” ends the first paragraph of the book.1 In the womb and from the mother’s womb, a baby’s first and primary sense is hearing. Hearing becomes listening there, and extends upon birth into rooms and back into the body-cavities. Baby embodies the special intelligence of audition, connecting internal and external worlds, not just as an act of sensation, but as a fundamental mode of being that opposes longstanding habits of perception, knowledge, and experience. As Harryman takes up what Julia Kristeva calls the listener’s responsibility to “pluralize, pulverize, and musicate” what she hears,2 baby’s concerns are emblematic of Harryman’s obsession with language as performance and performative language. Through three decades of books and performances, the beginnings of language and self intermesh to create new characters acting under the negative privilege of provisional existence. As such, much of Harryman’s work redresses perspectives and politics of childhood. Child in Memory Play, Caesar in Gardener of Stars, Child in Performing Objects Stationed in the Sub World, and the girl in “Fairy Tale” from There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn are strong examples of Carla Harryman | 143 non-adult characters that complicate normative notions of “childhood” and “character” itself. These sagacious, strong figures prepare us for the baby of Baby in the ways they both portray a non-adult status and embody motile concepts. Like baby, they suggest that certain kinds of meaning , knowledge, and experience can be delivered only through audition. In all of Harryman’s work, texts are meant to be heard and voiced; performances are extremely textual. Language’s relationship to embodiment resounds as textual and oral economies in a singular corpus collide, reinforcing and inhibiting each other. Throughout her oeuvre, Harryman’s characters use an “inward ear” to speak within hearing,3 but they also hear voraciously (hundred-eared, over-hearing), from roving points of audition, both public and private. Focusing on Baby, this essay serves as a primer for the vividly multiple registers of listening that inform all of Harryman’s work. In Baby, listening relies not on stringing together singular voices in an unbroken sequence or in streamlining noise, but rather on trafficking in polyvocality. Harryman reinscribes listening with both somatic impact and ethical response. She endows listening with the capacity to undo binary structures in the service of a relational model of identity. By synthesizing two contradictory modes of audition, baby creates dialectical listening: The auditor, who we call baby, enjoyed both sensations: the sensation of being led into the surrounding comfort of a story, cradled as she was in the voice of the storyteller heralding the disappearance of the material world, and the sensation of abstraction, which required she situate herself within another kind of mental labyrinth, one that engaged the effects of the material world toward objective systems of thought. (13) Listening is a cultural, rather than natural, practice, one that must be learned, and one with enormous social import. Listening informs Baby’s creation in every way, meshing internal and external worlds of the book. Baby springs forth via listening and in turn, asks that the reader engage it by listening as it triangulates with reading and speaking. Recursive Listening As a comedic counterpoint to dialectical listening, Harryman offers us TV listening: “While nutty adults in miniature did all sorts of things talking in odd theatrical voices as if they were talking to air and air could listen. The air has huge...