The Babbling Baby meets Derridean Deconstruction.

Augie at 7 months.

Archie’s brother, Augie, was born August 7, 2014, and on his 8-month birthday he began his first syllabic utterances, babbling, as it’s called, strung-together consonant-vowel combos. Ah-bah-bah-bah, or Ah-dah-dah-dah. It’s an amazing moment, really, and not just because these sounds are new coming from his mouth, but also because there seems to be some meaning behind them. You watch his face as he babbles, and it seems clear that there is some thought present, some reason, some purpose for the utterance. It’s joy, or contentment, or happiness, usually, but directed joy, toward some object, or person, or situation. He looks and he babbles and he clearly has an internal moment along with the external one, some confluence of meaning, intent, understanding, and sound. Of course it’s entirely possible that the thought and the sound are separate and random, that the look on his face is coincidental, and that what I read into it is simply a projection. After all there are thoughts present presumably from the beginning, and the babbles certainly aren’t the first sounds he’s made.  There have been occurrences of thought and sound aligned before the 8-month mark, essentially what the first cries and laughter are, sounds with meaning in them. But can we call those meanings thoughts? Is hunger a thought? For that matter, is joy a thought? Can such a feeling be called a thought before it’s verbalized, when it’s just a pang or a tactile sensation?

I pose these questions because my freshmen are currently engaged in their “research” project, a dreaded, required portion of the class in which I attempt to convince them that there are other sources of information besides the top two Google hits. It’s mostly an exercise in futility, as the sources I direct them towards are hopelessly dense. I try to limit the tasks for the students, to make them more manageable, but no amount of limiting can make a database article on feminist literary theory easier to read than a Wikipedia article on the same topic. We’re in the library, and they’re pretending to search databases while sexting on Snapchat or whatever. I’m pretending to care what they’re doing while reading articles on deconstruction, one of which begins with the idea of words being arbitrary signs, disconnected from meaning in any primal, preverbal way. I think about Augie and this incredible moment he’s in, the very beginning of his verbal existence, the formation of his self that some would argue follows this verbalization, the idea that all of the meaning we find in the world, the very way we order and comprehend existence, follows from our ability to use language. When I watch Augie pulling himself up on a coffee-table corner, gnawing on the table, looking around and saying, “Ah-dah-dah-dah,” it’s hard for me to believe that there isn’t some underlying preverbal reality, call it a language, that exists before our knowledge of an entire system of signs and signifiers, if not before, then concurrent with, in a sense always and already.

Like a Republican asked a question about climate change, I’m no scientist. But unlike a Republican, I say this not to posit a ridiculous counter-argument freed from the constraints of logic because, you know, I’m no expert, but rather to admit an actual lack of knowledge. I don’t know if looking at Augie offers any anthropological insight whatsoever into how language developed in humans (around 500 years ago, right?) Of course the cavewoman’s move from utterance to sign to word to language is nothing like Augie’s babbling “Dah-dah” (which I swear is because of me, daddy). His development is entirely conscripted by the context of mine and Erin’s and Archie’s language. There is no direct line from the universe to Augie’s brain, to his mouth, to our ears. The line is always already interrupted, directed, shaped. But is the same true for the cavewoman? Was there a primal existence unencumbered by language, a point in time in which the unanswerable questions of how meaning is created could be answered by simply observing the development happen. I mean, there’ve been a lot of babies and all have first uttered. A lot of smart people have watched them and tried to figure it all out, yet the question remains.

A student asks me to help explain an article she’s found on feminist theory. She’s trying to make an argument that the speaker of “One Perfect Rose” is a feminist. Her understanding of what “feminist” means is very fixed and self-evident, having been formed long ago. Nothing in the article she’s reading will come close to confirming or refuting her understanding. It can only complicate things, which is a fun thing to do for an English teacher, but not for a science major trying to understand an assignment get an A in a required course. I don’t tell her to look at Wikipedia, or not to. She’s probably done it already. So I paraphrase a few of the lines of her unhelpful article, in hopes that she’ll at least notice where Wikipedia differs or confirms. But ultimately she’s better off at this point moving forward with her understanding, believing a fixed meaning that she can grasp.

At home Augie crawls toward the door as I walk in and stops, sits on his knees, raises his arms, and cries out, “Agghhh,” dark eyes beaming, crooked smile and no teeth. He’s the cutest damn thing you’ve ever seen. I know it and I think he does, too.  He’s glad to see me, or maybe he’s just hungry.