The Voices Within by Charles Fernyhough

Author:Charles Fernyhough
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465096817
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

12

A TALKATIVE MUSE

I DO NOT HEAR VOICES. I never hear words being spoken and then turn to look where they might be coming from, only to find nothing there. I have had the reasonably common experience of hearing a voice calling my name when there was no one around, and I have quite often hallucinated the presence of one of my children at my bedside, particularly when they were small. I have a vivid inner life, but I always know where the chatter of my internal conversations is coming from. I am not a hallucinator.

I hear people speaking, though, people who aren’t there. They don’t address me directly, but I can hear how their voices sound, their accents and tones of expression. I know they are not really there because I have invented them—or at least I have hashed them together as creative composites of lots of different people I have known. I give them names, faces, and histories; I know what music they like listening to, how they dress on a lazy day, and what they keep on the sill of their bath. On the pages of a novel, I can tell them what to do. (That doesn’t mean they can’t sometimes surprise me.) I never mistake these fictional characters for real people, but I do hear them speaking. You could say that I need to hear them. I have to get their voices right—transcribe them accurately—or they will not seem real to the people who are reading their stories.

One fiction writer put it like this: “As the writer it is as if I am eavesdropping on a conversation, or conversations. I don’t make up the dialogue. I hear the characters speak and write down what they say—like a shorthand typist taking dictation.” For another writer, communing with fictional characters is a more subtle process of “tuning in”: “It is intimate, like being let in on their thoughts. They don’t speak to me, I don’t speak to them. It’s more like being given access to their interior lives.”

The characters will say what they will say. And so will the story. I remember laughing out loud, that day on the Tube train, at the line about the funny slices of cheese at Wembley Arena. The thought came unbidden, so much so that it surprised me into a public display of mirth. But how? You can’t tickle yourself, because you know (probably through the same kind of efference-copy transmission that usually ensures that you know that your inner speech is your own) that it is you who is performing the action. If you already know the joke, you shouldn’t laugh at it—unless perhaps it’s a reliable classic that has made you chuckle before. If I’m making myself laugh, there must be some element of surprise—but how, if I have generated the idea myself? Surely I know what I’m going to think. I’m choosing these words, aren’t I?

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