Brian Dillon
You say hello, I say goodbye: Michael Erard’s new study explores the range of meanings of first and final words.
Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words, by Michael Erard, MIT Press, 327 pages, $32.95
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Among the plays of Samuel Beckett, none is more austere than Breath, which premiered in 1969 as his contribution to Kenneth Tynan’s erotic revue Oh! Calcutta!. But Beckett’s vision was maybe not so titillating: lights up on garbage-strewn stage; faint, brief birth-cry offstage; intake of breath; second cry; long sigh; the light fades. “Curtain.” Breath is a laconic take on a venerable insight or motif: the actual and spiritual symmetry of first and last words, or almost-words. “They give birth astride a grave,” Beckett writes elsewhere, recalling the idea, in Christian thinkers like Saint Augustine or John Donne, that God is listening at the start and finish, calling us back. In my beginning is my end: What might the rhyme between childbed and deathbed patter signify in cultures without a deity wired for sound? In societies nonetheless apt to believe in the equal profundity of our earliest and our final words? The linguist Michael Erard has some answers.
Last things first: following Erard’s suggestion in his introduction, I read the second half of Bye Bye I Love You, on words of the dying, before turning to the chapters on infantile babble and eloquence. (Infans: in Latin, one who doesn’t speak; a coinage related to Farinus, Roman god of first words.) The field of leave-taking language is unfortunately dominated by the terminal utterances of well-known (usually) men. Of course, these can seem revealing, instructive, or stylish. James Joyce: “Does nobody understand?” Oscar Wilde: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us must go.” (He wasn’t complaining about the curtains, as Erard has it.) Not mentioned here, Gertrude Stein: “What is the answer? . . . [silence] . . . What is the question?” But such sentences, in which the dying always sound like themselves, are probably spurious. At the end, Erard says, language dissolves into horrific or happy delirium, followed by hours or days of silence. Or it takes the form of stock religious phrases coaxed out of us by bedside family. If anybody is listening—and there’s no guarantee—they will likely make sense of us in ways we never meant.
Given the apocryphal nature of much or most departing discourse, how to study the real, but usually private, thing? Erard visits the archive of William Osler, whose “Study of the Act of Dying” detailed, in the early 1900s, the deaths of 486 patients at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. The record cards filled in by nurses did not leave space for last words, but some were added anyway, under the heading “fear or apprehension, of what nature.” As Erard discovers here and in later sources, people at the end of their lives may simply ask “Am I dying?” or assert “I’m dying.” (Of all Erard’s examples, I think “Cheerio!” is the one I’d hope against hope to exit with.) More interesting than these simple but moving formulations are the ambiguous or obscure vocalizations of the dying, and the ways these are interpreted. How intentional or meaningful is a moan or groan? And anyway, twentieth-century physicians often abandoned the patient at the point of medical hopelessness, so that many died alone and unheard.
A well-meaning focus on last words may miss a person’s last efforts at communication and connection. So too, perhaps unexpectedly, the words of the very young. Attention to a baby’s entry into language is not, it turns out, a universal phenomenon, geographically or historically. There have been, and still exist, cultures that ignore children’s phatic burble entirely, or that mark the infant’s arrival in society with their first laugh instead. In the West, it is really only in the seventeenth century, starting in mercantile Holland, that parental scrutiny of a child’s progress as a knowing and speaking being starts to be recommended. Now, families begin to hear the initial statements or observations of their babies as indicators of future personality, capacities, or success. Capitalism in the nursery: to listen to a child in this way is to think of them already as a productive (or not) individual. Erard notes that “money” was among his own first words—but also “dubbaday.” The distinction between stumbling chatter and actual steps in speech is not so clear. Basic sounds such as “Mama” and “Dada” may not mean at all what we think they mean, even in languages where they seem obviously to point toward the doting parents. Erard: “The truth is that there’s no bright line between baby babbling and crystalline enunciations of adultlike language.”
What, then, links first and last words? For sure, this shuttling between sense and nonsense, and a relationship to silence, blankness, the Beckettian nothing to say. (You might know, or might Google, the British joke about a late-speaking German child: “Until now, all was satisfactory.”) There is the expectation, too, that whatever is spoken on the thresholds of life must somehow signify, must make or remake the future or past. But Erard’s most essential point is that the recently born and the about-to-die share a state of signifying that is just beyond words: the grammar is often there, even if lexicon and import are elusive. It’s a state of vulnerability in which everything may easily be misunderstood; to care for the infant or the departing person means to listen for what is not being said, and at the same time not to rush to translate what is said into a premature greeting or goodbye. The compulsion to speak for others, of course, has its own ethical force. Erard tells us that his research into newborn and valedictory speech has been bound up with an indelible event in his own life: his accidental discovery—while picking blackberries in an overgrown area in Portland, Maine—of the “tumbled yellowing bones” of a woman, Toina Hanson, who had been dead for over a year. Imagine: with no one receiving, to die alone among the weeds, muttering your last to the earth and sky.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism are published by New York Review Books. He is working on Ambivalence: An Education.