Becoming Nearer to Oneself: On Eliza Barry Callahan’s “The Hearing Test”
Eliza Barry Callahan | The Hearing Test | Catapult | March 2024 | 176 Pages
Left alone, it’s only a matter of time before we start to know ourselves better. It’s something we’ve all gone through so recently – I can’t help but feel we should be better at it by now. Since the pandemic ended, most people have returned to their previous social patterns, forgetting what isolation taught them as a mode of self-preservation. But for some of us, before, during, and after the pandemic, solitude has left a more lasting impression – solitude not only of the body in space, but of the soul within the body. Illness, specifically, can do this: separate the essential from the ephemeral, the being from its flesh.
“My voice would always be the one thing I could hear, even if everything else had been shut out,” Eliza Barry Callahan’s narrator, also named Eliza, declares in the opening of The Hearing Test. “But I could hear my voice more clearly now, and even when I wasn’t speaking my thoughts felt somehow louder,” she goes out on a limb: “I had become nearer to myself.” It is this nearing on which Callahan’s novel hinges. In her mid-twenties, Eliza experiences, as Callahan did herself, a year of sudden, inexplicable deafness. She becomes the subject of familial concern, romantic convolution, and medical experiments. As a freelance composer in New York City, she can’t work without her hearing. She would be concerned about the “steady leak” in her savings “had [she] been capable at that time of entertaining any additional concerns.” The novel charts this year, and the narrator’s journey towards herself through the isolation of her condition.
This journey is, in some ways, like any other, with its own schedule and diversions. Where it differs is in its geographical idiosyncrasy: its internal landscape. It is difficult to conceive of a journey towards the self in a world which already assumes we are somehow at the self, and well-equipped to deal with it. We are subject to imperatives of self-care, self-worth, self-employment – acts that so often prove unfulfilling. It is more challenging than we expect to truly care for ourselves, value ourselves, and employ ourselves in the pursuit of meaningful achievements. And yet, the solitude of extreme illness requires a reckoning with the self: a meeting of external and internal personas. It is almost as though, in the existential expanse revealed by her condition, Eliza is able to locate herself on the edge of her selfhood, and travel further inward toward its core.
In the six months I spent in and out of hospital over the course of 2020, I came to understand that illness consisted of these two parallel journeys: that of medical recovery, and that of self-knowledge. Like Eliza, I underwent numerous scans, x-rays, biopsies and blood tests before they confirmed what was wrong with me. I had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, advanced, but treatable. Over the course of those months, I came to know my body in ways I had never imagined: what my lymph nodes looked like when they were flooded with radioactive sugar, what my heart looked like on an ultrasound, and how much pain I could bear. Of course, this understanding was primarily physical. At the same time, I was learning more about my capacity for hardship, my emotional limits, how I behave under existential threat. Only in hindsight, long after I recovered, was I able to chart this second journey myself – a journey through illness from the physical to the psychological.
At the beginning of her deafness, Eliza carries out this journey at a moderate pace. She walks her dog, cooks white fish, and calls her mother. Life goes on in this new, muted manner for a time, looping from her apartment to the hospital and back again. Her schedule is ultimately governed by what she calls, “sick time.” She is prescribed prednisone: “Small, white, dissolvable circular attempts at keeping the inflammation at bay.” While in treatment, I was also placed on a high dose of prednisone. I know what it does to the body, the way it puffs up the face and excites the appetite. I also know how it tastes, the endless attempts to mask its bitter chalkiness with juice or coffee. But the narrator is less concerned with such concrete, physical markers of illness. Instead, she charts the way her illness has altered her temporality, describing the texture of her new medicated existence: “Time was marked by doses not by days ... I quickly learned that sick-time is to be acutely outside of time and acutely aware of its passage.” Here, as elsewhere in the novel, the particularity of Eliza’s life distances her from the outside world and, by implication, closer to her internal one.
As she becomes more comfortable with her condition, she puts her foot on the gas: she starts seeing a hypnotherapist over Zoom, gets tangled up in a love triangle with her ex and his new girlfriend, and listens to “The Buzzer,” a short-wave frequency radio station which broadcasts white noise. There is, of course, the quiet hope that these more chaotic pursuits might somehow speed up her recovery, or at least bring her illness to an end. This fits a pattern within the canon of literary illness. Since Dumas’ Dame Aux Camélias (1852) and perhaps long before, ill heroines have sought out increasingly chaotic balms to soothe their panic. Even Sontag continued to smoke after her breast cancer treatment, all while writing some of the most influential illness theory of all time. This is less a reflection of literary thematics, and more one of human nature and the natural impulse to fight fire with fire, so to speak. Though far more introspective than Dumas’ consumptive courtesan, Callahan’s heroine is part of the same lineage.
But Eliza’s condition proves stubbornly resistant to treatment, conventional or otherwise. The medical tests are inconclusive, the love triangle yields only confusion, and “The Buzzer” proves more and more inscrutable. Its white noise is occasionally interrupted by Russian radio interception, whose breakthrough words are listed on an online forum by whoever happens to be listening in the right place at the right time. (Incidentally, the Russian name for the channel is “Жужжалка,” “Zhuzhzhakla,” which, to me, sounds more viscerally like white noise.): “Who was listening? I pictured versions of myself, alone, in different bodies and foreign rooms at tables leaning over small radios … I saw it then, listening as sport – like fishing, or masturbation, it takes a certain type of attention.”
Despite the uncertain efficacy of her various treatments, Eliza takes solace in her new, multifaceted identity. Here, in imagining others, Eliza imagines herself; she has recognized that extrospection can also be a kind of introspection. The unspoken revelation remains that these discoveries might never have been arrived at had it not been for the limitations of her condition.
The hypnotherapist, despite his therapeutic promise, may or may not just be another kind of white noise. “He told me to notice my hands, the way my body made contact with the cushions.” Regardless of his dubious legitimacy, he opens up moments of emptiness for Eliza which allow herself to come flooding in. The emptiness of meditative space is not far from physical isolation, particularly in its striving toward separation of the mind from its stimuli. “He told me to feel the heaviness as my body rested. He told me it is nice to feel something familiar as you learn something new.”
In one session, he asks if Eliza felt she was “waiting for something.” She says yes, that “it felt like I was waiting for a scene in a film I had seen many times. Yes, it was exhausting to live with this level of anticipation.” But more than that, there is the hope that they will teach her something which might otherwise have slipped through her grasp, accelerate her arrival at the self. She tells the hypnotherapist, “it felt like I spent most of my time interviewing myself. Each day was a long interview that seemed to carry on even in my sleep. He said that this was good, that it would help me become aware of a fuller spectrum of existence.”
In the introduction to his anthology of Deaf American Poetry, John Lee Clark writes, “The deaf poet is no oxymoron, but one might think so, given the popular understanding that poetry has sound and voice at its heart” I was reminded of Deaf American poet Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic (2019), a narrative collection which imagines the occupation of an unnamed town in Eastern Europe, where elective deafness becomes a mode of political resistance. This collection not only challenges both the notion that poetry and sound are inextricable, but also Clark’s riposte that poetry can be, somehow, “soundless.” Sound, or, indeed, its absence, is the poetic subject of Kaminsky’s poems, which include illustrations of American Sign Language. As such, the question of how to represent the poetic subject “without” versified sound becomes moot. Much the same can be said of Callahan’s novel, which, as Eliza’s hypnotist suggests, harnesses the sensorial authority of deafness to illuminate, “a fuller spectrum of existence.”
The narrator’s journey eventually leads down a diversion to her dreams: the depths of her subconscious. But not only her own – like the imagined listeners of “The Buzzer,” the novel makes space for dreamers Eliza only remembers or imagines. “There are people who lie about their dreams. They make them up as they go. They give themselves permission,” she ponders, rationalizing that, “This is usually performed by those who want to get in touch but have no reason to. They are too scared to say, I thought of you.” The narrator is bemused by both the deception and its ubiquity. “Everyone does this at some point or another, I think – I did it once and felt very strange. A dream is an unprovable lie.”
What happens during waking hours, on the other hand, is not a lie. But subjective experience is as unprovable as a dream – particularly for those whose reality is centered around their own body, and how it differs from the norm. This is what truly, inextricably binds illness to isolation. Illness makes the body a stranger to those around it, even those that know it most intimately. After recovery, the self remains altered – even if only in the self-knowledge it has acquired through its estrangement. The Hearing Test attempts to describe an experience for which it is difficult to find the words, sometimes literally. Though there are moments where it falters in its meandering, the result is successful and refreshing. At a time when isolation, illness, and difference are ever more present in the collective consciousness, we need narratives like this to set a precedent of literary attention and care.