• Marginalia: Eliza Barry Callahan

    Hannah Bonner

    07/2024

    For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Hannah Bonner—whose review “This Sort of Thing: On Heather Lewis's Notice" appears in our Spring 2024 issue—examines a passage from The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan.


    A young girl shuffles down a dim hallway in her nightgown, alligator clips holding back her dark hair. She rubs her eyes, soporific in daylight. The walls of the kitchen glint white as she lights a gas stove, moving from the window to the sink with glacial insouciance. She fills a tin kettle with water, pauses to spray a swarm of ants teeming on the wall. The minutes tick by.

    It’s a scene a director might cut—superfluous, illustrative of nothing save the passage of time. Deleuze describes this brief sequence from Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist film Umberto D. as the “cinema of the seer.” In other words, this is a scene of duration, unedited and unadorned. A scene that writer Eliza Barry Callahan might categorize in her recent debut novel The Hearing Test as “the nothings that comprise a life.”

    The Hearing Test is a work of autofiction about a woman (eponymously named Eliza) who mysteriously starts to lose her hearing. The novel is driven not by a conventional narrative framework but by chance encounters, doctors’ appointments, descriptions of art, and interior examinations of the body that are oneiric and philosophically rich. Eliza begins the Soviet film July Rain but falls asleep and never finishes it. She logs her doses of prednisone and works with her hypnotherapist over Zoom. She has a threesome with her ex and his girlfriend, an abstraction of touches as “something searched [her], as if for a ring down a drain.” The incremental silencing of Eliza’s life at once estranges her from herself and transforms her sensorial perceptions of the world.

    At the onset of her hearing loss, Eliza states,

    I had started to find that the word silence ran to me out of pages and spoken sentences. It wanted my attention—a desperate sort of flirtation. I began to note simple and unremarkable patterns around the word, such as that seeing, staring, hanging, or watching is often coupled with silence. That the adverb completely often precedes silent. That the verb fall often precedes silent. That the architecture of silence is the gaze. That silence is without transition. That silence is dressed as an injury.

    Here, silence becomes affective and embodied, personified and in perpetual ferment. Callahan’s phrase “the architecture of silence is the gaze” evokes Deleuze’s “cinema of the seer,” where to be silent is to be enraptured. The architecture of the attentive eye and ear also establishes the conditions necessary for the act of reading, for communion with the page.

    Throughout The Hearing Test, ellipses pepper the prose like Shepard tones, elongating into ether or the white space of the page. The ellipsis is a mechanism with which to drift in and out of consciousness, time, or conclusiveness. But an ellipsis is also an omission, from the Greek elleipsis meaning to leave out: a silence of, and without, transition. The ellipsis graphically underscores Eliza’s inevitable susceptibility to silence. Like the long takes of Italian neorealism that capture “the nothings that comprise a life,” so too does Callahan’s novel rest disquietingly within nothing’s “seeing, staring, hanging, or watching.” This book is a book of careful—and caring—attention that demands nothing less from us.



    Hannah Bonner’s criticism has appeared in Cleveland Review of Books, Literary Hub, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Her first collection of poetry, Another Woman, is forthcoming in 2024. She lives in Iowa.

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