January 10, 2025

A columnist for The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi, recently published a column whose subject was its title: "Is It True That Some People Have No Inner Monologue? I Investigated. Her investigation consisted of inquiries, first to friends, then to a professor of psychology who has studied the question empirically. The psychologist summed up the results of his experiments by saying, “some people never have words going on, and a few people have words going on all the time, and a lot of people have words going on some of the time”. Mahdawi was quite surprised, because, as she says, “I have an inner voice that won’t shut up.” She adds lightheartedly:

Before you get too alarmed, the voice isn’t telling me to do dastardly things, or trying to convince me that I’m Jesus. It’s just a constant inner monologue. This inner voice isn’t a bad thing per se; often it’s useful, occasionally it’s entertaining. Sometimes it’s annoying as hell, though: it keeps me up at night replaying past conversations I’ve had and coming up with all the things I should have said. When things get stressful – and the world has been very stressful lately – then all this inner chatter can get very overwhelming.

We are all curious about what goes on in other people’s heads and wonder, sometimes a bit anxiously, whether it is the same as what goes on in ours, or whether we are “weird.” So Mahdawi is not only surprised but obviously a bit disconcerted to find that she is different from some other people. What is normal? She even wonders whether this is a proper subject for a column or whether it should remain a conversation with her therapist.

Mahdawi is a writer, though, a verbal type, and for such people it is, as Wallace Stevens says in a poem called “Description without Place,” “a world of words to the end of it.” They do not experience the world through their senses and then find labels for its elements, signifiers to express various signifieds, as a linguist would say. Rather, at least much of the time, they experience the world not only through language but as language. That is what Stevens’ poem is about:

Thus the theory of description matters most.
It is the theory of the word for those

For whom the word is the making of the world,
The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

Some philosophers and critical theorists would dismiss this as naïve Idealism, but to Stevens it is their “realist” or commonsense notion of language that is naïve. Mahdawi is surprised that some people’s consciousness is apparently non-verbal because to her reality is inherently linguistic. She expresses her astonishment through somebody’s joking tweet: “There’s really 50%+ of the population out there walking around with NOTHING going on in their head?? Everything is starting to make much more sense.” I understand how she feels, because I too am a verbal type with a voice in my head that seemingly never shuts up. But only seemingly: no one is verbal all the time. Words go away, at least temporarily, when we are absorbed in a sensory experience, as when I am rapt in wordless wonder at the awesomely huge and beautiful pileated woodpecker on the suet feeder, or when I saw the northern lights. They also are repressed when we need to focus on a physical action, such as hitting a ball with a bat. Language in that moment is only a distraction, maybe even a confounded nuisance. Somewhere in his notebooks Northrop Frye talks about the kind of performance anxiety while playing the piano that consists of a nagging voice saying, “It’s time for you to make a mistake now.” There is also a witty poem by Howard Nemerov that says that we are always thinking about sex, “Except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.”

So there are doubtless many people who spend much more of their time than Mahdawi and I do living through their senses and their active bodies. This is the level on which we began, as animals, living a life of sensory experience and actions regulated by instinct, with not as much need to think about anything. That is not an inferior way to live—most of the time I like animals better than people. But that statement immediately needs to be qualified, because it does oversimplify the animal condition. Animals are not mindless automatons running on the software of instinctual behavior patterns. Like us, they have a divided identity, because, in addition to their sensory and physical nature, they have a consciousness capable of solving problems and of using language. Animal language is simpler than human, consisting of a fixed and fairly limited number of signals—a bird may have a mating call, a distress call, and so on. But the “higher” animals are capable of understanding a fair amount of human language, as anyone knows who has a dog in front of which certain words like “walk” or “outside” have to be spelled out lest they trigger paroxysms of excited leaping and barking.

When he titles an essay “The Language Instinct,” linguist Steven Pinker makes the question even more complicated. By that phrase, Pinker is describing the theory of the most famous linguist of the 20^th century, Noam Chomsky, who said that in certain ways we are hard-wired for language: that what he calls the deep structures of language are inherent in the human mind. While the surface features of human languages are all quite different, on a deep level their differences are variations on a common ground plan, so much so that Chomsky even speaks of a “universal grammar,” although this is on a level much deeper than that of the particular grammar of any given language. There remains an element of controversy about Chomsky’s theory, first expounded in the landmark book Syntactic Structures in 1957, because neuroscience has yet to affirm the existence of linguistic structures in the brain. However, powerful circumstantial evidence for the idea that at least some aspects of language are innate emerged right around the time Chomsky began publishing, in the form of studies of language acquisition in children. All human children acquire the rudiments of their native language (or languages—bilingualism is more common than monolingualism around the world) by the age of one to three, and they do so almost entirely on their own. Some parents insist that they taught their child to speak, but they are mostly mistaken. At most, they taught a number of nouns, verbs, and modifiers.

What they did not teach is what the title of Chomsky’s book points to: syntax, the assembling of words into relational patterns of subject, verb, object. Syntax can be expressed by word order: “The boy hit the ball” does not mean the same thing as “The ball hit the boy.” Or it can be expressed by inflections, word endings—nominative for the subject, genitive for the possessive, and so on. No parents teach their children inflections to any great extent. Nor, in word-order languages, do they try to define for their kids those relational and connective words we call prepositions and conjunctions. It is impossible to define words like “of” or “to” or “for”—if you doubt that, look at their definitions in a dictionary. Moreover, the rules about word order or inflections make up ordinary grammar. But Chomsky points out that there are also deeper rules that a native speaker does not even recognize as rules. In English, we can say “the big red ball.” We do not say “the red big ball.” If someone does, we assume their native language is not English. We are not aware that there is a rule: it simply doesn’t sound right. We don’t say it that way. Any language is made up of hundreds of rules governing both grammatical and deeper structures. That children should learn the greater part of them by the age of five is inconceivable without assuming that children come pre-wired with the deep structures that are then filled in by the phonemes, words, and grammatical rules of some native language or languages. Language is buried in the child like a seed in the ground, waiting for the necessary elements—water, nutrients, sunlight—to trigger its germination.

The implications of this theory are momentous. Perhaps the biggest implication is that no one invented language: it evolved. The dualistic distinction between nature and culture is confounded. Language is not an artificial cultural construct, not “other.” It is not something added on to biological human nature, as we add on clothes, as we pick up and use a tool that is extrinsic to us. Yes, the software has to be programmed for a particular language—children do not emerge from the womb already talking, at least not outside of Stephen King novels. Yet the idea that we are “naturally” creatures of the body and the senses and that language and all the things language can do, amount to some kind of abstract head trip, is not true. The idea of a pre-linguistic stage is, if not false, at least misleading. Language acquisition specialists say that a child begins learning language as young as 6 weeks. It listens to the language in its environment, to the language of its caregivers, and begins to isolate the units of significant sound that are called phonemes. Eventually it learns how to recognize discrete words in the continuous flow of speech, a process so difficult and mysterious that the experts are not sure how it is accomplished. From as early as about 6 months, the child begins practicing, learning how to form its native language’s particular phonemes. It goes through a stage called “cooing” (the actual term for it—really!) in which it is actually practicing the skill of forming the vowel sounds, and a slightly later stage called “babbling” in which it is practicing the consonant sounds, which are more difficult, since they involve momentarily stopping or impeding the vocal flow rather than just shaping it. They also begin to learn vocal inflections—expressive tones, as when a rise at the end of a sentence in English signifies that the statement is a question, right?

In short, language is part of who we are. Language belongs to me as intimately and inseparably as my hand does. The radical French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan spoke of a child’s development from an early Imaginary stage to the point where it is inserted into a Symbolic order. He saw the Symbolic, which he identified with language, as alienating. The Symbolic is a construct of the social order, to which the child has to be made to conform, in the name of “socializing” it. There is a certainly a truth to this, but it is more accurately identified, at least in modern societies, with literacy, with the acquisition of reading and writing, which the child typically learns from the educational system. However, the so-called Imaginary stage is already linguistic. A famous Lacanian aphorism is that the unconscious is structured “like a language,” by which Lacan meant that the unconscious functions according to the rules of language: rules governing combination and relation (i.e., syntax), and rules governing association and identification (i.e., what in language would be word choice). This resembles what Chomsky meant by deep structure. The rules of language and the rules of the mind on the deepest level are one. I am oversimplifying drastically, and no doubt taking some liberties, but my point is that language is an intimate aspect of our identity, down to the deepest physical and neurological level. The old idea that there is a primitive “natural man,” a “savage” or “brute” animal who just grunts or at most has a simple, crude language and a civilized man who makes sophisticated and rarefied conversation over tea is a false distinction, and a racist, colonialist one.

This line of thought leads to a further question, one that to my knowledge has not been raised. When we ask, what is the purpose of language, the obvious answer is that it is external and social, the way in which our isolated subjective selves reach out and communicate with others. The title of one of Northrop Frye’s essays is in fact “The Bridge of Language.” And of course there is no doubt that that is one purpose of language. However, what if the social and extraverted function of language is secondary? What if it has a prior function, an introverted function by which we talk to ourselves, just as Mahdawi and I do? Why should we need to talk to ourselves? Well, in a very early issue, the Fantasic Four—the very first group of Marvel superheroes—encounter the Impossible Man. The issue was Stan Lee’s experiment with a bit of satire: the Impossible Man comes from the planet Popup. One line of it has stuck in my head for 50 years: asked for his name, the Impossible Man replies, “We Popupians have no names—we know who we are!” Clearly his people are a superior race, for we know not who we are. We are other to ourselves. Lacan—one of those thinkers who throw out aphorisms that turn out to be useful on multiple occasions—said that the ego is “constituted by a split.” The idea of “wholeness” as a psychological norm was to him not just wrong but wrongheaded. The bridge of language stretches between and ego and an alter ego. An internal dialogue or conversation, (a word that literally means back-and-forth: the root “verse” means turn), is what keeps the personality from dissociating. Moreover, there is not just one but a number of internal others: Jung called them complexes. If they become “autonomous,” the psyche is in danger of what used to be called multiple personality disorder. Jung developed a method called “active imagination” that involved having conversations with our inner complexes in personified form. This may sound like a silly self-help notion, but it is actually more akin to a Renaissance Magus summoning up spirits and hoping he can question them without losing his sanity.

It is true that the internal voice, like the external, sometimes attempts to become a monologue, in which case it becomes narcissistic, even solipsistic. We have all been buttonholed by people who dominate the converation, not letting the other person get a word in edgewise. Our job is clearly to become a passively appreciative audience. In more extreme cases, the buttonholer seems almost to forget that the listener is there, to be lost in an endless monologue like a raft on an endless ocean, and we may even begin to wonder about mental illness. But in healthier people, the inner voice is dialogic.

The literary conventions that attempt to capture the internal voice are all modern, which means from about the 17^th century or so, the more concerted rhetorical strategies only emerging in the 20^th century. There does seem to be some truth to theories of cultural history that distinguish traditional from modern society by the latter’s increased subjectivity. It is not that people of earlier ages had no interior life. But when poets represented a character’s mental conflict, they projected the character’s interior voice outwardly, as if it were a speech—in other words, a soliloquy. When Hector is alone on the battlefield in the Iliad, waiting as Achilles approaches for their final showdown, his mind races as he desperately raises and discards various futile options. It is too late to try to go back inside the walls of Troy, and anyway he is afraid of being mocked as a coward. Should he offer to give Helen back to the Greeks? But he knows that at this point Achilles cares nothing for Helen, only for revenge upon the killer of his beloved Patroclus. The effect of a mind under terrible duress, grasping at straws, is brilliantly captured: and yet it is delivered rhetorically as a speech, not an interior monologue. Shakespearean characters do have reason for soliloquizing: drama is the most objective literary form. All that we know of the characters’ mental state is what we can infer from their words and actions. But again there is no attempt to mimic the fragmented and associative quality of the inner voice. Hamlet’s soliloquies play to the house, even though he is not supposed to be aware that there is a house. Indeed, he is in danger of violating his own advice to the Players and out-Heroding Herod. Of course, that’s Hamlet, the most theatrical personality in all of literature. But the soliloquy in general is a formalized and externalized way of presenting the internal voice, turning it into a kind of oratory.

An early step towards capturing the internal voice more realistically was the development of the dramatic monologue. Some dramatic monologues do stick close to the objective model of stage drama. Browning’s “My Last Duchess” reads as if it were a speech carved out of a Shakespearean-style drama. There is setting, situation, and another character. The Duke is speaking to an emissary, arranging for his own marriage to someone’s daughter, and he is not just rambling. The speech is manipulative: he is giving a warning in the form of telling what happened to his previous young wife, namely, that she was murdered on his orders for being too sociable in a way that aroused the Duke’s jealousy. And yet we sense a solipsistic self-absorption about the Duke, whose wife did not exist for him as a genuine other but only as a possession. When she insisted on being a genuine other, he had her killed and turned into a real possession: her portrait, which he totally controls. He is being cleverly manipulative in a transaction, yet we sense he is also justifying himself, puffing himself up. In short, he is doing what comic book super-villains do. Superhero fans laugh at how, time after time, the villain has the hero trapped and vulnerable, but blows his chance to kill him out of a compulsion to deliver a long, bombastic, self-justifying speech, thus giving the hero enough time to contrive a way to escape. It’s hokey, but there is something true to life about it, capturing the psychotic mind’s desperate attempt to rationalize its psychosis to itself. When you see street people who are talking to people who aren’t there, they often seem to me to be angrily or defensively arguing.

In “real life” of course there’s Trump, whose speeches at rallies are really the externalization of his inner voice, which is why they are rambling and incoherent. In fiction, we have Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, who buttonholes the reader in a similarly obnoxious and aggressive way. The Underground Man is deliberately, perversely contrarian because he is determined to rub our noses in the fact that human beings are not rational. In our time, he would be an Internet troll trying to “trigger the libs.” What amuses me is that these days this compulsion to rant so often chooses what would seem the vehicle most antithetical to its nonstop nature: the tweet. I don’t get it: it means that when they really work themselves up, instead of delivering a three-hour Mussolini-style speech, Trump and Musk have to tweet 84 times in a row. Trump stays up until the wee hours of the morning doing this. I don’t read them, but the effect must be like being assaulted by haiku. Or maybe by Chinese fortune cookies.

When the dramatic monologue is removed from any external situation, what results is, in both poetry and fiction, what is usually called the interior monologue. This is the phenomenon with which we began, the mind talking to itself. There are gradations of internalization here, however. The inner voice may still address some real other person as if they were there. Mahdawi imagines saying what she should have said to someone in a conversation. After a relationship breakup, you may spend hours mentally addressing your now-ex, explaining, defending yourself, attacking, analyzing to exhaustion. Or lovers may address those they have lost to death. It was a common story when I was young that the comedian George Burns went for decades to the cemetery, sitting by the grave of his wife Gracie Allen and talking to her.

I find myself wondering whether any interior monologue is truly in the end a monologue. T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” qualifies as a dramatic monologue by virtue of its opening line: “Let us go, then, you and I.” But the “you” disappears thereafter, leaving only the sound of a mind explaining itself to itself. Eliot’s “Gerontion” is a voice that explains itself as thoughts of an old man in a dry season, but again the old man seems to be talking to himself. But in literature, characters never talk just to themselves, despite the convention, because there is always the reader, who overhears them, so to speak. Here is the ending of arguably the most famous interior monologue in literary history, the closing lines of James Joyce’s Ulysses, whose final chapter is a run-on, unpunctuated monologue of Molly Bloom:

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Interestingly, though, this is usually spoken of as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. We feel it is spoken to someone, even though it is Molly’s silent thoughts in bed in the middle of the night with her husband asleep. Molly was partly modeled on Joyce’s wife Nora, a country woman who was illiterate when he met her, and yet the language is rhetorical and poetic. Well, those Irish, with the gift of the gab. Molly is her own audience, as we all are when we talk to ourselves. But through the imagination, we are put in the place of the other to whom she is speaking. She is talking to herself, but is unknowingly talking to us as well.

We have arrived at the subject of reading, which turns out to be unexpectedly complex, so much so that it has inspired a remarkable study, Alberto Manguel’s The History of Reading. One chapter of that book is called “The Silent Readers.” Its point of departure is an anecdote in the Confessions of St. Augustine recounting Augustine’s surprise at witnessing his mentor, St. Ambrose, reading silently. We are in turn surprised at Augustine’s surprise. Yet Manguel says:

The implication is that this method of reading, this silent perusing of the page, was in his time something out of the ordinary, and that normal reading was performed out loud. Even though instances of silent reading can be traced to earlier dates, not until the tenth century does this manner of reading become usual in the West. (43)

This is another symptom of the historical development of culture from the objective and public increasingly towards the subjective and individual. Many if not most of us probably regard reading as the ultimate private experience. Phrases like “curled up with a good book” imply that reading is an internal refuge, an escape into an interior realm. But such interiority apparently was a development over time. This phenomenon has some remarkable corollaries. We are used to thinking of reading aloud as part of the extraverted function of language: it creates a bond between people, from a parent reading a bedtime story to a child to the accounts of 19^th century families sitting together at night while someone read from Bunyan or Sir Walter Scott to the public readings of contemporary creative writers. But reading aloud when alone seems limiting. It takes work to recognize, form, and project all the phonemes. When someone who is not a very good reader reads aloud from a text in the classroom, their physical effort is obvious. Reading aloud is physical work: it is relatively slow, and is tiring at any length. To read 50 pages of a novel aloud at one sitting would be exhausting. Moreover, students are likely to read aloud in a monotone, because their whole attention is devoted to formulating the words and not to what the words mean. Silent reading removes that secondary task, so the reader may concentrate on the meaning, the signified, rather than on speaking the signifiers. As Manguel puts it:

But with silent reading the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal. The reader had time to consider and reconsider the precious words whose sounds—he now knew—could echo just as well within as without. And the text itself, protected from outsiders by its covers, became the reader’s own possession, the reader’s intimate knowledge, whether in the busy scriptorium, the market-place or the home. (50-51).

Already by the mid-7^th century, “the theologian Isidore of Seville was sufficiently familiar with silent reading to be able to praise it as a method for ‘reading without effort, reflecting on that which has been read, rendering their escape from memory less easy’” (49).

But in silent reading, there is still an internal voice. The meaning does not pass directly into the mind from the page: we still hear a voice speaking within us. Or I do, anyway. Once again there is the question whether what goes on in other people’s heads is the same as in one’s own. But I always hear a voice, and that voice is an important part of the reading process, for that voice conveys not just expression but the writer’s individuality. If we are reading fiction, the voice we hear is the voice of a narrator. The narrator may be a character, whose distinctive voice transforms the whole reading experience: Huck Finn would be a different novel, and a much inferior one, if it were narrated by a conventional narrator. But even when this is not the case, the narrative voice envelops and contains the characters and narrative. I have often wondered why so little critical attention has been paid to this. Especially in some novelists, including George Eliot, Henry James, Dickens, Thomas Mann, and Thomas Pynchon, the characters live within a distinctive narrative voice like fish in water. It is a meditative voice, and some poets manifest it too—Wordsworth in The Prelude, for example. Critics may be uncomfortable with it because its omnipresence implies an omniscient author, even though that is not always the case. And ironic fiction may parody this all-containing voice, especially through the device of an “unreliable narrator,” through whom we experience the story while finding out that the voice of our narrative guide through it is not to be trusted.

The internal voice we hear when reading is important outside of fiction, however. Journalistic writing is supposed to demand “window pane prose” where the words are a transparent medium that we look through to see the facts, and such writing minimizes voice and personality. But if we read op-ed writers, we relate to the writers’ distinctive voices and personalities, not just to their opinions. Those that I read regularly—Amanda Marcotte, Arwa Mahdawi, Heather Digby Parton, David Brooks, John Stoehr—are instantly recognizable by their speech rhythms. So are nonfiction writers like the historian Heather Cox Richardson and economist Paul Krugman, at least in their newsletters, which are about objective matters but with a personal slant.

In the realm of criticism and scholarship, there are a few writers who refuse to conform to the demand for a faceless “academic prose” and who write with a real sense of voice. These are invariably writers whose work is the vehicle of some kind of vision. Foremost is Northrop Frye, whose lucid, graceful, sane, and witty voice is inseparable from what he has to say. In addition, I spent 15 years immersed in the notebooks of Northrop Frye, co-editing them for publication along with Robert D. Denham. Frye wrote in those notebooks for over 50 years. They are the voice in his head put on paper, and to read them is to overhear Frye talking to himself. In fact, all of the writers who have influenced me most deeply have distinctive voices that are part of the effect of their writing: Jung, Joseph Campbell, Abraham Maslow, Loren Eiseley, George Bernard Shaw. This is also true of other writers, such as C.S. Lewis. We read some writers as much for the pleasure of hearing their voice as for what they have to say. Modern genres have sprung up to provide vehicles for this pleasure. One is the familiar essay, starting with Montaigne. Another is the journal or diary. The diaries of Virgina Woolf and the journals of May Sarton are valued not so much for what they have to say, which is often simply an account of ordinary life, but for the sensibility that processes that life. That sensibility is manifest in the writer’s voice. And, to point out the obvious, the newest of such vehicles is the Substack newsletter.

I first teach my writing students to jettison the pseudo-formal style in which they have been unfortunately forced to write in high school and to begin to write conversationally, in their own voice, as if they were talking, just with the bad grammar cleaned up. I tell them to listen to that voice, because it is them, and it is precious. Our voice is part of our humanity. The pseudo-formal voice of all too much academic, scientific, and bureaucratic prose belongs to the alienation of Lacan’s Symbolic order, but most of its heavy abstraction is not necessary, merely a product of conformism. Listen to the voice inside you, and it may lead you to your own depths.

If you go deep enough, as some poets do, you may find that a voice that is other rises from a place beyond your ordinary ego and speaks through you, so that, to adapt a famous phrase of Paul’s, it is “I, yet not I,” but another identity speaking through you. Milton describes this experience in the repeated invocations to his muse in Paradise Lost. Blind, cut off from the external world, he listened inwardly, and from a source that to him was the inner presence of God would come “thoughts, that voluntary move / Harmonious numbers” (3.37-38). Frye writes in the closing lines of Words with Power:

When we become intolerably oppressed by the mystery of human existence and by what seems the utter impotence of God to do or even care anything about human suffering, we enter the stage of Eliot’s “word in the desert,” and hear all the rhetoric of ideologues, expurgating, revising, setting straight, rationalizing, proclaiming the time of renovation. After that, perhaps, the terrifying and welcome voice may begin, annihilating everything we thought we knew, and restoring everything we have never lost.

It may be that that voice will not be the thunderous voice of God speaking to Job from the whirlwind. Perhaps it will be more like the still, small voice that spoke to Elijah:

And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:11-13).

Not everyone is a poet like Milton or a prophet like Elijah, but, according to Abraham Maslow, everyone needs to listen inwardly to what he called the “impulse voices” of our deep self. We may hear them if we listen inwardly. Perhaps that is what—or who—our inner voice is talking to. And perhaps such an inner dialogue is a better way to spend one’s time than listening to the voices of social media, to what Eliot called “The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.”

Reference

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. With a New Introduction. Penguin, 1996, 2014.