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SIRI HUSTVEDT, Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction

lems, and in general do be er than babies who aren’t rocked. I suspect
63
this is true of full-term babies as well. My newborn most definitely
had an “appetite” for rocking, a motion that reproduced the calming
effects my walking had on her not long before she was born. It appears
that the effects of peripatetic motion on a human being do not begin
with toddling. The measure and rhythm of the maternal walk are reg-
istered before birth.
The authors also cite work done on fetal response to the mater-
nal voice. As early as 32-34 weeks some fetuses can distinguish their
mothers’ voices from those of strangers, discriminate the music of
their own language from a foreign one, and although words are not
distinguished, the melody, rhythm, and stress of prosody are. Vow-
els, being of longer duration, take precedent over consonants. The au-
thors conclude: “Fetuses and newborns are able to produce many
rhythmic activities, most of them generated automatically at a sub-
cortical level, but modifiable by internal and external stimulation.”
They further note that although inconclusive, some preliminary stud-
ies “suggest that newborns are capable of a primitive form of SMS.” 64
The early perception and production of rhythms in various sensory
modes make it easy to see how prenatal rhythmic realities between
mother and the late-term fetus become post-natal synchronies be-
tween parent and infant.
Sensorimotor synchronization or what Patel called “beat percep-
tion and synchronization” are crucial to his “vocal learning and rhyth-
mic synchronization hypothesis,” which he believes may provide an
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evolutionary clue to human linguistic capacities. The rhythmic word-
less experiences of our lives never end, after all. The writer is always
reaching for expressions that will somehow communicate waves of
consciousness at various levels, the beats and flickerings of our per-
ceptions and feelings in time and space. But the ability to describe and
narrate human experience, to make the words to fit in, requires the

63 Ibid., 10-11.
64 Ibid., 47.
65 Patel, “Musical Rhythm, Linguistic Rhythm, and Human Evolution,” Music
Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 24, no. 1 (2006): 101-102.

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