by Hannah Ryder
August 6, 2024
Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adèle Rosenfeld, tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman; Graywolf Press; 176 pages; $17.00.
The world is filled with cacophonous sound. Verbal communication comprises one piece of our interpersonal connection but is one that many rely on without a second thought. Adèle Rosenfeld’s first novel, Jellyfish Have No Ears, translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, sheds light on what it means to have a hearing impairment and its invisible implications.
Louise, a thirty-something Parisian woman dependent on a hearing aid to assist her in being able to partially understand the myriad sounds of the city around her, is faced with a difficult decision. Her hearing is worsening and she can either undergo experimental surgery to attempt to boost her natural hearing or she can receive a cochlear implant, which terrifies Louise. By opting for a cochlear implant, her entire world will change, and the shaky hearing she’s relied on her entire life will be gone. How she’s experienced life will forever be changed irreversibly. She relies heavily on nonverbal communications and never asks a person to repeat themselves out of the fear of ridicule or the sheer exhaustion. Louise views herself as a burden of sorts and her interpersonal relationships are all a bit unsteady as a result.
Louise as a character can be seen as deeply insecure, full of assumptions, and more than happy to keep to herself. However, it’s easy to see how her struggles with her deafness and her reluctance to realize that has hindered her socially. As she begins her first job, readers meet her coworkers and see through her eyes nuanced facial expressions and nonverbal communications that her new peers use. “Jean-Luc seemed annoyed that I could act normal,” Louise says of a colleague. “I think he was fascinated by my hearing aid but couldn’t really make sense of my disability.” This begs the question of the truth: are these people really showing their distaste for her so easily? Are their negative reactions a window through which Louise views herself? Her general unease and slight shame in her condition is consistent throughout the novel.
Her reticence to be social is also understandable—Rosenfeld makes the sheer exhaustion of having lunch with her coworkers palpable on the page. After listening to a peer who was informed of her hearing impairment, Louise gets frustrated: “I turned off my hearing aid, I got snippy, and I only answered her words with bored nods.” Later, Louise “…blurted out that I really couldn’t hear her and that she was going to all this trouble for nothing.” Most of what she hears is often difficult for her to parse, leaving her confused or angry at the fact she can’t understand the first time. The frustration is palpable and reinforces Rosenfeld’s depiction of the emotional toll hearing loss can take in social settings.
The whispers and shuffles are how Louise has lived for years; finding comfort in this is easy to see. To completely take away a certain worldview is terrifying, and Louise struggles with accepting the fact that she will eventually require an implant. To attempt to combat this, Louise connects many noises, or lack thereof at times, to metaphors. This is especially where the prose shines; the selected words Louise uses to connect noises to other sounds are deliciously rendered. Dead leaves are likened to “jawbones chewing dried flies and hail is “an avalanche of baby teeth”. Louise keeps these metaphors in a notebook as a sort of memory to what she can hear as her natural hearing continues to diminish. Her desolation and exasperation are skillfully rendered on the page, and Rosenfeld’s sketch of Louise is artfully well-rounded.
Louise’s relationship with her deafness is the main conflict in the novel. In essence, she is at war with herself. Several times, she attempts to connect with others who experience a range of hearing loss, such as a man who is deaf in one ear like her and a completely deaf professor who teaches a sign language class. Neither space makes her feel seen, partially from the fact that she doesn’t associate herself in the Deaf of Hard of Hearing community. During her sign language class, the teacher asserts that she is in denial about her hearing loss. Louise reflects on this, saying, “I’d expelled from my thoughts the deaf woman who, deep down, I was. Shame was written on my face.”
That shame leads Louise’s connection with reality to be shaky. She is eventually joined by a soldier with PTSD, a cranky dog, and a quietly introspective botanist. It’s established early on that these are hallucinations of sorts, so real to Louise that she feels the dog’s fur, comforts the solider, and is shown flowers that function as lessons by the botanist. Louise’s interactions with each are highly involved and tactile; she can feel the dog, the botanist provides her a flower, and she comforts the solider. It’s not explicit why Louise sees what she sees, but the connection of audiology and visual hallucinations caused by the brain scrambling to adapt to rapid hearing loss is suggested through visits to doctors and Louise’s research about hearing impairment.
Louise as a character is multitudinous. At times, she seems hostile and assumes the worst in people. Her relationship with a kind man is difficult for her to accept, as he is something she doesn’t seem to realize she deserves. Readers see the world through Louise’s eyes and notice that she may not be the most neutral narrator to follow. This, however, doesn’t make her a bad person nor a bad character; Rosenfeld’s careful sketching of Louise makes the reader question how we in turn see the world, if we assume people give us a cutting look because of an insecurity when they may not be doing anything of the sort. Similarly, we hear through her ears too—its mumblings and grumblings and how she likens sound, or even the absence of sound, to other things to connect her better to the world.
At the heart of Jellyfish Have No Ears is the idea of connection, language in all its forms, and verbal and nonverbal communication. Through the eyes of a narrator who interacts with the world in her own unique way and the operation that could alter her entire existence, readers are given an inside look into the invisible disability of hearing impairments. With strong and imaginative characterization and heavy-hitting prose, Rosenfeld’s first novel proves she is a powerhouse on the literary scene.
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Invisible Disability Representation and its Socioemotional Effects in Adéle Rosenfeld's Jellyfish Have No Ears
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Jason Mavrommatisfrom Unsplash
Hannah Ryder holds an MFA from Savannah College of Art & Design. Her writing and photography can be found in Great Lakes Review, Port City Review, Qua Literary and Fine Arts Magazine, and Tangled Locks Journal. She serves as an Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor at West Trade Review. Find more at hannahryder.com.
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