I'm Hearing Voices

A child learns to read amidst and after years of being read to—slowly, in mono and disyllabic words they can digest; in silly, distinct character voices; in bed or during circle time or at the dinner table as they eat. When a child learns to read, they begin by reading single words, then groups of them, then full sentences, aloud—sounding out each syllable individually, then gently nudging them together and learning to bridge the divide. As their skills develop, kids are encouraged to read silently, listening to the voice in their minds rather than its externalization. I recall as early as second grade, having silent reading time in school. I would crawl under a corner desk in Mrs. Nagle’s second floor classroom, back against the wall, and devour children’s chapter books. Reading, then, was freedom. It was unlocking a dimension of reality that had previously only been available to adults and my older sister. It was going to the grocery store and picking items out by name, rather than by packaging. I remember the moment I realized I could read everything. I was in third grade, doing a reading comprehension test with my teacher, Mrs. Woods. She said I had the reading skills of a fifth grader, and I remember thinking that, if I could read like a fifth grader, I could read everything in the world.

When I got to college I took a class on existential philosophy and was faced for the first time with dense texts, the kind of convoluted, malicious academic prose that laughs in your face as you reread sentences and paragraphs, over and over. They took me hours to read—I had never doubted my comprehension skills before, but then, I was really, really struggling. A friend of mine asked if I heard my own voice when I read. I said, of course I do—doesn’t everyone? He didn’t, he said, and for its absence, he read at twice the speed he used to. So I tried it out. I tried my hardest to silence the voice in my head. I googled solutions, and tried them all: humming, chewing gum, counting to five as I read each line, listening to instrumental music, tapping my foot, slamming the book shut and throwing it out the window and giving up on reading altogether. For everything I tried, I couldn’t silence the voice. 

Subvocalization, is what it’s called: the act of inaudibly and imperceptibly articulating words with the speech organs as one reads, thought to increase reading comprehension at the cost of speed. Most people have it—most people hear the words as they read. Hearing the words as you see them creates quasi-auditory sensory input, so it stands to reason that absorbing the same information through two senses at the same time might result in better retention. The silent-reading voice, the voice in your head, is genuine sensory input—what musicologist Lawrence Kramer terms in his book, The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening, “the audiable” (Kramer 4). Kramer defines the audible as “the material promise of sound,” or the precursor of sound to come that is, nonetheless physical, “experienced through hearing” (4). The future tense of the auditory. In the context of silent reading, the audiable is the heard experience of the author’s tone, utterance, the music in the written word, that makes the act of reading feel like “a distinct encounter with the writer’s voice” (4).

Subvocalization, the audiable, allows the reader to hear the prosody of a text: the rhythm, stress, and intonation—the “melody”—of speech, conveying emotional tone, emphasis, and meaning beyond literal words. In conversation, prosody is the upturn of pitch that indicates differentiates a statement from a question, the stumbling over or speeding through words that might indicate a level of anxiety, or a flatness in pitch that indicates disinterest, or sarcasm. Attention to prosody is a crucial aspect of one's ability to read social cues and communicate effectively. On the page, prosody is subtext. Through subvocalization, the written word takes on a similar capacity to convey additional meaning. A sentence, which, for example, in its construction, makes use—necessarily or unnecessarily—of excessive commas, em-dashes, semi-colons, colons, or any other means of punctuation, might communicate, to the reader, a level of convolutedness, or measure, or highfalutinism, real or feigned; on the other hand a sentence that completely lacks punctuation could indicate frantic speech or internal monologue or maybe even excitement or great panic. Similarly, a sentence might flow, seem sweet and lush when softened or lengthened by the use of liquid ls or sibilant c and s sounds; meanwhile, a particularly tough or biting phrase might be built using tons of plosives—dense, airblocking b, p, d, t, k, and g sounds. Each of these sentences reads differently, is spoken distinctly by the voice in the reader’s mind, and in this way, subvocalization enables the reader to listen to the tone of a text.

Good sentence-writers are able to construct an emotional architecture that is perceptible through the sound of the words alone, existing before and below their individual or collective meaning, bolstering them, doubling down with emphasis. Without subvocalization, without the material promise of sound, this is lost upon the reader. It is the connection between the word as it is written on the page and the word as it is heard in one's mind that creates this effect, mimicking the way we read conversation partners for the meaning behind their words. In this, subvocally reading prose is not unlike a form of listening Roland Barthes discusses in his essay, “Listening.” He argues that, beyond listening for danger or to decipher, there is listening behind what is said, and—as psychoanalyst Denis Vasse argues, whom Barthes draws from and quotes—this type of listening offers “precisely what the speaking subject does not say” (Vasse qtd in Barthes 255). Even in the audiable, in the reading voice in our minds, we hear tone, inferring a character’s “joy or their pain,” as Barthes put it—“their condition” (Barthes 255).

Silent reading is not silent at all; through subvocalization, prose becomes a form of internalized sound, allowing the reader to hear rhythm, tone, and meaning beyond the semantic level of words. Only recently have I accepted that I will never eliminate that voice, and only recently have I decided I don’t want to. As a musician, in my songwriting and in my listening I am primarily concerned with the sounds of strings of words, of language. How the sound of the last word can, and should determine the sound of the next. How the rhythm of the last line—its duration, syllable count, scan—can, and should determine the rhythm of the next. Where speed matters, where length matters. As a prose writer and a close reader of literature, I have adopted the same mindset; the difference being that most of the listening takes place in my head, through subvocalization. I have come to trust the reader in my mind, and in turn it has enabled me to discover, and write, really good, musical sentences. It has encouraged me to read more closely, slower, and to listen to the words on the page. To this end, I would like to turn to some of my favorite sentences and offer close readings, picking apart their formal techniques as evidence of what I believe makes them so effective in their ability to architect a feeling.

1. “They flew off and came back, semi-hovering, nine, ten, eleven birds, others fixed to the window screen, some in trees nearby, not singing exactly but whats the word, twitter or peep or squeal, and they attacked each other on the rungs or scrambling in midair, the color-changing birds, the name-saying birds, the birds that feed upside down.”

—Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (73)

In this sentence, DeLillo constructs meaning through rapid accumulation—“nine, ten, eleven birds”—forcing the reader into a mode of extended listening. The sentence unfolds in a long chain of dependent clauses, the voice in my mind growing breathless as birds and their behaviors are noticed and denoted. The commas continually extend the idea, compelling the reader’s voice to continue forward without rest, frantically buzzing and flapping its wings as a hummingbird does. As a result, the sentence is experienced as a stream of perception, unfolding in real time. This formal tactic—the succession of clauses without coordinating conjunctions connecting them—is called asyndeton, and its effect is to accelerate the rhythm of the phrase by omission of connecting language. The repetition of “the birds” at the end of the sentence, along with the parallel-syntax of “color-changing” and “name-saying” create a circular rhythmic pattern and so, after the speed of the previous clauses, the sentence falls back on itself, mirroring the birds’ own looping, erratic movement. 

The phrase, “what’s the word,” interrupts this flow, a moment of hesitation in the prosody that collapses the distance between narration and thought. In the subvocal reading, this hesitation is embodied: the reader’s inner voice searches alongside the narrator, lingering over possible sounds—“twitter,” “peep,” “squeal”—and the “or” that connects them. Or—along with to, for, and, nor, but, yet, so—is a coordinating conjunction. In contrast to asyndeton, the use of multiple coordinating conjunctions in a sentence is polysyndeton, and its effect is to slow the sentence down, equally emphasizing each clause. Here, the “or” becomes audible in the reader’s mind, drawing attention to the act of selection itself and momentarily suspending meaning in favor of sound and mimesis. 

DeLillo also selects words that sonically enact their semantic meanings. “Twitter,” “peep,” and “squeal,” for example—though not all strictly onomatopoeic—share high-pitched, sharp phonetic quality, built from tight vowels and quick, clipped consonants that mimic the small, rapid sounds of hummingbirds. In subvocal reading, these words register as the burst of sound they claim to denote—in my mind, I can hear the high-pitched squeal, the soft, sharp peep. DeLillo deliberately chooses words that lessen the distance between language and the noise it attempts to capture. 

2. “Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.”

—Cormac McCarthy, The Road (19)

Here, McCarthy compresses language, distilling meaning into a sequence of hard, monosyllabic beats. The sentence is spare, stark, skeletal, and the rhythm is tightly controlled, forceful in its oscillation between stressed and unstressed syllables:

now CALL down your DARK and your COLD and be DAMNED

In subvocal reading, the stressed words land with weight, striking for both their place in the scansion, the rhythmic pattern of the sentence, and the percussive consonants—c and d—that begin them. They strike like blows, they fall down upon the reader-listener with great authority. They’re mean—plain mean. The repetition of “and” here—similar to DeLillo’s use of “or”—creates a measured, incantatory cadence, a form of polysyndeton that distributes emphasis across the line, supporting it from below. The inner voice is forced to slow down, lingering on each beat, giving the sentence an almost ritualistic, biblical quality, and meaning is produced through tone and emphasis as much as semantics. The final phrase, “be damned,” is a terminal drop, the voice falling on a stressed syllable at the line’s close. The sentence’s power is in its imposition.

Interesting, too, is the inclusion of the pronoun, “your.” The subvocal voice can take on a number of personas, depending on the individual and the type of text they read. The voice might be one’s own, or a neutral, narrative voice, or the voice may change with different characters. In the case of this sentence and its context in The Road—McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic, scorched America—the sentence is directed at no one in particular, delivered by an omniscient, third person narrator. The sentence is in the imperative, but its recipient remains abstract, unknown, unstable. In subvocal reading, the reader must decide whether the command is pointed outward or inward. If one considers the subvocal voice their own, the sentence becomes a form of self-address, the reader both issuing and receiving its force, a kind of self-condemnation; if the voice is someone else's, the effect is perhaps more diffuse—a moral pressure that belongs to the world of the novel rather than the reader’s interior. It is overheard, rather than received, as the reader oscillates between subject and witness.

3. “I thought of him walking on the scoured cement of shopping centers with plastic bags blowing past his knees, and his face dirty, his eyes tired.”

—Jesse Ball, Census (225)

Census follows a dying man and his adult son with Down syndrome as they travel across the country, taking the census; this sentence comes just before the man dies, as he imagines what his son's own death might look like. In this sentence, Jesse Ball constructs meaning through attenuation and stumbling consonance that mimics the fatal fall to one's knees, as their body reaches the limits of what it can take. 

The line moves slowly, almost defeatedly, through two instances of graphemic alliteration: the repetition of the same initial letter regardless of its sound. Here, “scoured cement” and “shopping centers,” as well as “plastic bags blowing past” produce a kind of friction between the eye and ear. The repeated initial letters promise continuity, but the diverging sounds force the reader to register each word as a separate effort. The sibilance in “scoured cement” and “shopping centers” supports this difficulty, as “scoured,” “cement,” and “centers” begin with scraping, hissing consonant sounds that constrict airflow, and “shopping,” though softer, cannot fully smooth the line, resulting in a continuous, strained exhalation. The clustered plosives and assonance of “plastic bags blowing past” further this friction: the words catch in the mouth, and the repeated p and b sounds, too, obstruct the flow of air, and the sentence labors over itself, trudging through the wind to its own death. 

The syntax mirrors this exhaustion. The final clauses are stripped of verbs, reduced to a series of descriptors that slow the subvocal voice almost to a stop. Each comma introduces a brief hesitation that accumulates into a feeling of weight. The voice softens and thins, almost disappearing by the end of the sentence. In this way, meaning is inseparable from cadence: the sentence enacts fatigue and loss, its attenuating rhythm and faltering soundscape producing an anticipatory sense of grief that is as much sonic as it is semantic.

I firmly believe that, to be a good writer, one must be a good sentence writer, a reader and a listener. What allows me to create art the way I do is reading closely, and making it my job to listen to the world around me. It is how I understand myself and my creative practices—careful attention to formal properties and the affectual responses they produce. The body from which art is born exists in many states, and the burning question within every creative is how to put oneself in a state that facilitates practice. My work is in close reading, in determining what formal properties draw me in, what criteria must be fulfilled in order to produce an internal state conducive to creation. That pursuit is necessarily interdisciplinary—it’s everywhere, it has to be everywhere. Life is inter-textual, meaning is derived from multiple mediums, and it’s all formal. Reading really good sentences makes me want to write really good sentences, and I study so that I might learn how to practice.