“Far Calls weaves a fascinating thread of thought from antiquity up to modernity. What a wonderful surprise to discover that Augustine, Alfonso el Sabio, Leibniz, Poe, Breton, Freud, Proust, even Heidegger attributed the power to communicate important ‘truths’ to what ancient divinatory wisdom called kledōn or omen: that is, the hidden meaning of words uttered with a completely different communicative intention. A captivating journey through centuries of Western culture and beyond, with the help of extraordinary erudition put in the service of a lucid and compact construction."
– Maurizio Bettini, Professor Emeritus of Classical Philology, Director of the Center for Anthropology and the Classics, University of Siena

"Far Calls culls a remarkable trove of glints and inklings, omens and names, echoes, auguries, and fleeting indications of a powerfully resonant counter-sublime. Daniel Heller-Roazen is a masterful interpreter of literary interstices, openings in language that take us into an endangered place of wisdom’s alternative beginnings. This is a steeply beautiful book, stunning for its insight, erudition, and range, and—above all—for its powers of vision and audition."
– Peter Cole, author of Draw Me After: Poems

“The brilliance of this book is that it brings to the surface one of those mysterious properties of utterance that we can’t quite locate. It’s the enigmatic communication that emerges from chance, from darkness, from inadvertence, from a child’s babble, from the gods, where more is meant than was said or known. We travel through Mesopotamia, catch our breath as Scipio and Napoleon portentously stumble, and linger with Joyce’s epiphanies and Heidegger’s ‘call of conscience’, all the while observing our human inability to control the way the heavens speak to us and indulging our unstoppable desire to keep overhearing their fragmentary messages in the hope that we will.”
– Ardis Butterfield, Marie Borroff Professor of English and Professor of French and Music, Yale

An inquiry into the theories and practices of overhearing

When words are not heard but overheard, when phrases are perceived in bits and pieces, and when speakers, failing to do as they intend, state things that they never meant to say, the saying, in its unsteady relation to understanding, becomes an event. That event has long been studied by a disparate company of interpreters: prophets, priests, and rabbis, poets and philosophers, linguists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, novelists and filmmakers. All have suggested that in the contingencies of discourse, there are precious indications to be gleaned, for which special techniques are required. In Far Calls, Daniel Heller-Roazen reconstructs such arts of detection, interweaving ancient, medieval, and modern examples. From the rituals of the ancient Greeks, Jews, and Romans to Freud and Lacan, from Augustine’s catching of a salvific scrap of speech to the inspiration that Breton and Yeats, Proust and Joyce, drew from profane cries and transmissions, Far Calls explores the powers of sonorous coincidence and the varieties of reading that it incites.

Daniel Heller-Roazen is the Arthur W. Marks 1919 Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His is the author, most recently, of Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons; No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming, Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers, and The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World.