If you lose your hearing, how does the world around you change? What contours of one-on-one conversations become harder to make out, what details of a bustling room come into sharper focus? What creature comforts do you stubbornly cling to all the while?
Adèle Rosenfeld’s Jellyfish Have No Ears is about a woman going deaf gradually and then suddenly: an intimate novel in which the narrator’s mishearings conjures up all sorts of surreal circumstances. At a new job, an imaginary WWI soldier comments on the death certificates she has to scan; as she comes to terms with an increasingly unfamiliar city, she catalogs the sounds she’s losing as well as the “miraginary” plants through which she gets a new handle on reality—one in which she has to decide whether or not to get a cochlear implant and trade one form of hearing for another.
When the novel came out in France, it was met with acclaim and compared positively to Boris Vian’s Mood Indigo and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. As a deaf translator with a cochlear implant, it was a true treat to bring Jellyfish Have No Ears into English, and on the occasion of its publication this August, Rosenfeld and I traded emails about the book’s wildness and wonder, and the singular feeling of finding, in these imaginary characters, our real selves.
Jeffrey Zuckerman: Every time I talk about this book with my friends, they comment on how much they love the title: Jellyfish Have No Ears. In the two years I’ve been working on this book, I’ve found myself calling it two things: “the jellyfish book” and “the book about someone going deaf.” Did you have nicknames for the book, too?
Adèle Rosenfeld: I personally call it “my jellyfish” (in the plural) or even just “jellyfish,” and, with this translation, that nickname is even better, because jellyfish can and do cross the Atlantic Ocean!
While I was writing it, I had a working title, “Absourdité”—a pun on absurdité, absurdity, using sourdité, the French word for deafness. That was while I was preoccupied with the question “what is gained when one loses something?” which sums up the trajectory of a narrator growing more and more deaf.
JZ: Which was your own trajectory, too. When a novel’s narrator and its author have something in common—as with hearing impairment here—people often assume the book must be autobiographical or autofictional. But I remember you telling me in Paris that it was more interesting than that: Louise’s life was one that might be yours, but isn’t. What sparked this possibility for you?
AR: To plumb such a personal subject, I really needed to create a pure character, a literary double whose life was entirely her own, so that my creativity and imagination could take center stage and that way I could explore this topic, which had long been more or less a secret of mine. That was the condition under which I could probe deafness as honestly as possible. Mario Vargas Llosa has a phrase in Letters to a Young Novelist that I’m particularly fond of: writing as a reverse striptease. Rather than revealing herself, the author pulls on clothes that aren’t hers. I needed to have my narrator lead a life that wasn’t my own: her professional life, her romantic relationships, her friends, her family, are all pure fiction—but her unique qualities, her disability, and the particular relationship to the world that those create are all a dramatization of the feelings and the questions I had. I also felt a need to go all the way and—spoiler alert!—to have her experience what lies ahead for me, so as to get a grip on my future.
JZ: This is a book about loss, and about ways of dealing with that loss. As Louise loses more and more of her hearing, she decides to make what she calls a “sound herbarium,” where she preserves sounds like dried plants. Where did that idea come from? And did this book end up becoming, for you as a writer, a similar way of preserving something—not necessarily hearing—that you yourself were losing?
AR: My view is that any literary endeavor is borne out of a wish to preserve something on the brink of extinction: a movement, a gesture that will soon go extinct and that the writer attempts to preserve at all costs by putting it into proper language, by, as it were, translating it.
This idea of a sound herbarium came to me as I myself was setting down sounds after a hearing loss. Because I couldn’t recognize them anymore, I was trying to describe them to relearn how to hear. All the while, I’d grown interested in the herbaria of WWI soldiers. Some of those men—which we French call “Poilus”—gathered flowers on the battlefields, dried them, and sent them to their girls. And so the idea occurred to me to record sounds on paper in a poetic way, it became a literary inevitability. The metaphor of an herbarium sums up my process very neatly: glean the acoustic world, transform fleeting, living matter through poetic power into literary, hidebound matter. I also liked the thought that there would be GPS coordinates for where the sound had been gleaned, like in present-day herbaria.
JZ: There are also lots of plants in the novel that aren’t real, like the alastic lichen, which reproduces by sighs of “alas.” Where did all these “miraginary” plants come from? Are you secretly a botanist like the woman slowly turning into a tree in the book’s second half?
AR: Pretty much! I can’t get enough of botany, or at least the names given to plants and the way we talk about them: physical description, the properties we ascribe to them, their specificity. I actually made a chapbook, L’Herbier miraginaire, in collaboration with a photographer/filmmaker, where I kept going with this catalog of made-up plants, which are every bit as much emotional states which the codes of scientific language are coopted to describe. I do have a fondness for so-called encyclopedic fictions . . .
JZ: Speaking of made-up things, on the third and fourth drafts of my translation, I found myself going off the grid for weekends at a time to deal with the dozens and dozens of puns. I’d tell my friends I was busy being a pun factory for a few days. One of the most deliciously difficult constraints was the fact that some of the puns and misunderstandings take on a life of their own. Louise has to hear a particular word as “soldier” and it’s important that the word not change in translation because that very soldier ends up accompanying her through the book; he even sleeps with her friend! I felt like Alice in Wonderland: I had no choice but to play along! Did you start writing Jellyfish Have No Ears and find the surrealism sneaking in, or were you already starting to find yourself thinking in this vein and then the book came flowing out?
AR: All the wordplay had to be absolute torture for you as a translator! I can’t thank you enough for being a pun factory and not cursing me out!
What I wanted to do was to depict a personal relationship with language, to make something out of mishearings, and above all to turn a deficiency, a deformation of language, into a richness, just like Ghérasim Luca—a poet quoted in one of my epigraphs—who, by causing his tongue to stammer, draws out the many meanings of words, shows us wholly new directions, and gives us an unforgettable experience. I love that you mention Alice in Wonderland: that’s one of the books that always stayed close at hand as I wrote my novel. The underlying premise of Alice in Wonderland is that reality is shaped by words. Which I conveyed in Jellyfish Have No Ears as well: words are distorted by deafness, and so reality is distorted as well, and so the narrator can end up living with a soldier, or a dog can appear during a job interview because she picks out sounds that resemble barking. Surrealism came into the text by way of this exploration, this playfulness that reveals this warped relationship with the world. This playfulness was present from the start of my writing: it was the only way I could see of handling such a topic, of examining it, and making it, in the purest sense, “wonder-ful.”
JZ: I will say, though, for all the book’s fillips of unreality, it is deeply rooted in reality. Paris’s buses and métros and RERs crisscross the book, as do its impenetrable bureaucracy. And then there are its museums! When I was in Paris two summers ago, I knew I had to visit the Museum d’histoire naturelle, and I opened up the PDF of your book on my phone and your chapter set in the museum became my guided tour as I walked around its main room. As you were writing Jellyfish Have No Ears, did you find that particular places or things in the real world sparked scenes in the novel?
What I wanted to do was to make something out of mishearings, and above all to turn a deficiency, a deformation of language, into a richness.
AR: It’s so touching and meaningful that the scene at the Museum d’histoire naturelle led the way during your visit! Places are the true motors of writing. For me, they do exert literary force. The Museum d’histoire naturelle in Paris is a fascinating place: it still has the old-fashioned décor of its earliest years, with its handwritten display labels, the taxidermy techniques of that time. You can go and see skeletons in vitrines arranged in “live” poses, and there’s always a throng of visitors around the displays of “monsters.” Museum visits lend themselves to moments of deep contemplation. These are places where our knowledge of the world expands; they encourage introspection, I’d say, and trigger associations of ideas, poetic juxtapositions, reflections, all of which can blow apart seemingly intractable character problems, as happened with Louise in Jellyfish Have No Ears during that scene in the museum.
Places are structuring, essential frameworks that carry ambiances and histories that inspire writing and articulate the existential problem of the characters in my mind. Sometimes, it’s a little detail that’s the spark, for example a plastic plant in a waiting room, or it’s a specific sensation, as in the bathroom, which provides an acoustic space that I put into play in a scene in the novel.
JZ: I’d forgotten about the bathtub scene with Louise and Thomas whispering across the water, actually! I’ve been so surprised that when I have conversations with friends about Jellyfish Have No Ears, they’ll fixate on sections I didn’t think twice about. There’s a whole scene where Louise is on a bus and works on describing and isolating the different sounds she hears, and I hadn’t dwelled on it further until I got a text message about it. Do you ever look through the book again and feel surprised by what’s there? Would you have written a totally different book if you were trying to explore the same questions not in 2019 but in 2024?
AR: What’s odd is that I mainly remember the context in which one scene or another was written. The same way that, with reading a book, I remember where I read it, the atmosphere, the mood I was in, it’s like a snapshot of a moment, it’s the same phenomenon. Which leads me to my answer to your second question: each scene was borne out of a need. In 2019, I was dealing with a severe loss of hearing. With Louise, I was able to displace this experience and regain language.
JZ: So often, when I’m translating a book, I’ll get so deeply into it that I have a hard time letting go afterwards. Was it the same for you? What do you miss about Louise and Jellyfish Have No Ears now?
AR: Its humor!!!