A paradoxical privacy: solitude and the inner voice in the writings of Denise Riley

Speaking apart, I hear my voice run on

in the red heart of an ear, an ear coils round me

disturb the text; you don’t disturb the world (Riley, 2019: 35, ‘Ah, so’).

My inward ears will jam wide open to internal words that overlying verbiage can’t smother (Riley, 2019: 120, ‘Affections of the Ear’).

Both in her poetry and her prose, Denise Riley presents to her readers an inner voice, a ‘voice without a mouth’ as she titles the opening essay in her 2004 The Force of Language. The phrase is borrowed from Samuel Beckett’s ‘Texts for Nothing’:

‘Whose voice, no one’s, there is no one, there’s a voice without a mouth, and somewhere a kind of hearing, something compelled to hear … ’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 7).

‘There is no one … ’: in her essay, Riley styles inner speech as ‘solitude’s talk’, a ‘tangible aspect of the self with itself in solitude’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 16). It is a descriptor, as she says, with a thick history: the solitariness of inner speech is a topos stretching back at least to Socrates. The history is not Riley’s particular concern but her writings draw on it in richly productive ways; many centuries’ worth of solitude-talk finds an echo in her poems and essays.

Inner speech is the touchstone of a privacy which needn’t depend on the isolation of its silent speaker, for it may mutter forcefully in our ear even when we are among some animated social gathering. The very topic of inner speech conjures an aura of loneliness, whether hapless or wilful … It is reassuringly or irritatingly there on tap … offer[ing] us the unfailing if ambiguous company of a guest who does not plan to leave (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 8).

This article examines the ‘aura of loneliness’ conjured by Riley’s meditations on inner speech. It does so in part from a historical perspective, positioning her writings within millennia-old traditions of inner voice hearing. The traditions are diverse, encompassing divine and diabolic voices, inner soundings of the dead and of angels and spirits, as well as the many schools of western philosophy that have assigned a key role to inner speech. For Socrates, famously, internal discourse defined human thought. Thinking, he declared in the Theaetetus, is ‘talk the soul carries on with itself’: ‘[T]he soul, when thinking, does nothing other than discuss, asking itself questions and answering them, affirming and denying’ until reaching a conclusion ‘not articulated to someone else but in silence to oneself’ (Duncombe, 2016: 106). In silence, Socrates conversed with an alter-self who in Hippias Major he jokily described as ‘a very near relative of mine [who] lives in the same house’, subjecting him to incessant cross-examination in pursuit of the truth. ‘That man’, Socrates told Hippias, with a show of indignation, ‘is continually refuting me’: ‘So it has come about … that I am abused and reviled by … him. But perhaps it is necessary to endure all this, for it is quite reasonable that I might be benefited by it’ (Plato, [390BC?] 1925: 304c–304e).

The Stoic Epictetus likewise depicted the thinking individual as conversing with himself. ‘He who is alone is not therefore solitary’, he wrote, but ‘in his own company’, engaged in soul-dialogues that cultivated reason and judgement (Epictetus, [108CE?] 1890: 3:13). For the Stoics, like Socrates, seclusion was requisite for these dialogues: not the physical seclusion of wilderness retreats but mental solitude as prescribed by the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius whose Meditations counselled withdrawal into ‘the little field of self’ (1964: 64). This was a prescription reiterated throughout the long tradition of Stoic-inspired spiritual exercises documented by Pierre Hadot (Philosophy as a Way of Life) where the aim, as Hadot writes, was liberation of the self ‘from the state of alienation into which it has been plunged by worries, passions and desires’ ([1995] 2005: 102–103), freeing it into an independent ‘moral person[hood]’ ([1995] 2005: 91) grounded in interior dialogue. ‘Man, if you are really a man, then walk by yourself, talk to yourself, and don’t hide yourself in the chorus,’ Epictetus instructed ([108CE?]1890: 3:14).

Documenting in detail this philosophic tradition of solitary inner speech is beyond the scope of this article. Its most striking modern rendition, as Riley notes, is Hannah Arendt’s Socratic account of thinking as a ‘two-in-one’ dialogue, ‘furnish[ing] the self with itself as its own companion in solitude’ (Riley, n.d.: 34). ‘Nothing’, Arendt wrote in her The Life of the Mind, ‘ … indicates more strongly that man exists essentially in the plural than that his solitude actualises his merely being conscious of himself, which we probably share with the higher animals, into a duality in the thinking activity’ (Arendt, [1971] 1978: 185).

‘Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company … ’ (Arendt, [1971] 1978: 185).

Solitude becomes loneliness when the ‘I’ cannot achieve duality, when the self, Arendt writes, ‘can no longer find the redeeming grace of companionship’ ([1966] 1976: 476). Why would someone be unable to find self-companionship in solitude?

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What kind of dialogue can you conduct with yourself when your soul is not in harmony but at war with itself? (Arendt, [1971] 1978: 189).

I am prey to whatever noisy inscriptions have run in advance of me (Riley, 2000b: 99).

From where does the inner voice originate? Until recently, Riley’s answer to this followed the drift of those philosophers of language (Volosinov, Bakhtin) who have emphasised the exteriority of inner speech. Inner speech, she writes, comes to us ‘from the outside, in the shape of the common and thoroughly external unconscious of unglamorous language’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 55). We are ‘spoken’ subjects, constituted by language ‘whose working through and across us is indifferent to us, yet in the same blow … constitutes the fibre of the personal’ (Riley, 2005: 1). The argument appears straightforward enough but, as usual with Riley, it is laced with provocative ambiguities, interrogatives, direct and covert challenges, to the point where at times her texts read like inner dialogues, quasi-Socratic exchanges with Riley as her own gad-fly (‘There’s a hum of language at my ear, I swat it away, it rises to resettle in thick clouds. It’s outside me, I do not make it up, and it doesn’t quite make me up. I go on struggling inside this doubled failure of origination’ (2000b: 60)). Her more recent writings pick up on these equivocations to take the argument in a rather different direction. I return to that below. But first I want to explore how the externalist argument works with the darker elements of Riley’s meditations on the inner voice – shame, guilt, abjection – and the loneliness intrinsic to these.

*

There was such a brilliance lifting off the sea, its aquamarine strip

blocked in behind white-dashed mimosas, that it stung my eyes

all morning as I stood in the old playground, pushing the swing

steadily, looking out across the water and longing to do without

these radio voices, and without my post as zealous secretary, as

transmitters of messages from the dead, who’d issue disclaimers

that they’d ever sent them – all the while a slow hot cut spreads

to baste me now with questions of my own complicity in harm

muttering thoughtfully about patterns until I’m stamped out as

an old paisley shawl or worn kelim, do I look good in this one

or should I be less loud or less repetitive? and on the top of my

wardrobe, familiar spirits cluster and hang on to chatter, lean over

to peer down interestedly at me, vivaciously complaining about

the large amounts of fluff I’ve left up there, ‘that’s just as we’d

expect’; meanwhile the out-to-kill person is not, or so she or he

shrugs, pulled at by voices, but dead at heart stands amnesiac

plumped out with the effective innocence of the untroubled –

This gloss is taking me on unconvincing dashes down blind

alleys I mistrust, since desperate to see things straight I can’t fit

apt blame in to self-damnation … (Riley, 2019: 104–105, ‘Seven Strangely Exciting Lies’).

The Beckettian ‘voice without a mouth’ that provides Riley with the title for her 2004 essay on inner speech is a voice that its auditor is ‘compelled to hear’, and it is this compulsion that provides the theme for another 2004 essay. ‘Bad Words’ is a powerful investigation into malediction: insults, curses, accusations – linguistic ‘shards’ that work themselves into the hearer until they become part of her, until the hateful words become her own (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 55). Much of Riley’s oeuvre is dedicated to exposing the ‘gripping power’ of such predatory speech: ‘If inner speech can sing, it can also tirelessly … and obsessively reproach itself. It can angrily fondle those names it had once been called … There is an anxiety of interpellation, in which its subject ponders incessantly to herself, “Am I that name, am I really one of those?”’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 50).

‘Am I that name?’: the question that the falsely accused Desdemona puts to Iago in Othello was the surtitle of Riley’s (1988) very influential book subtitled Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History. There she explored the discursive interpellation of biologically female persons into subaltern ‘women’ in male-dominated cultures. Composed in the twilight years of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the book concluded on a cautiously optimistic note, offering the possibility that subjectivating languages of gender might be countered by ‘a contesting politics of the subject’: a complex hope that today looks very complicated indeed (Riley, 1988: 99). But the possibility of resisting language inimical to human flourishing is a theme carried forward into Riley’s meditations on inner speech, although here the struggle against the ‘violence of interpellation’ is deeply personal, painfully fraught and often bitterly lonely (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 71).

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I can’t believe in a selfhood which is other than generated by language over time … 

What purports to be ‘I’ speaks back to me, and I can’t quite believe what I hear it

say (Riley, 2000b: 61).

My autobiography always arrives from somewhere outside me … (Riley, 2000b: 58).

In an autobiographical essay published in 1985, Riley described growing up as an only child with adoptive parents in postwar Gloucester. Or rather – because ‘I cannot describe it’ – she provided brief vignettes of her life up to age eleven, evoking a childhood of sustained verbal and physical violence, of imprecations, threats and jibes hurled at her by her adoptive mother, accompanied by slaps or kicks. Love was nowhere; sadistic talk was everywhere. The child (addressed throughout in the second person) tries to hide in the garden, yearns to be the family dog. She imagines herself locked in a prison cell, and rehearses word games for her incarceration. She travels into herself, wordless under the barrage: ‘You sit in silence through the crashing external noises like a snail in its shell. You nestle, are hunched inside your own skin and clothes. You pursue inwardness more and more forcefully. When you look outwards, you must also look upwards to see people’ (Riley, 1985b: 238).

In bed with a high fever, the child sees her adoptive mother at her sickroom door, ‘a figure in a dress with the head of a wolf’. Where to escape? ‘Concealment. Privacy … What have you hidden? What have you got there? Perhaps, in the light of day, nothing’ (Riley, 1985b: 245). But of course there was something there, in that desperately-sought inwardness, for that was the place from which the writer later emerged. Throughout this heart-breaking essay, Riley insists that what she is describing is commonplace, a ‘monstrous ordinariness’, and of course it is true that unconscionable cruelty of this sort is all too frequent. But its effects have rarely been evoked with such power and poignancy:

… fixed at the sites of institutionalised pain of which yes, you can have as much as you like you can remember everything that is said that killed you, you are word-perfect 28 years of rehearsing got it off by heart for you you examine it each night lovingly where it is all yours for always (Riley, 2019:32.‘Our youth and mine’)

My body’s frame arched to a drum houses a needle. A splinter of this world has stuck in me, snapped-off, floated down syrupy blood. It points me on. This thick body can’t dim its brilliance though it vexes the car of my flesh. Sliver of outside that I cradle inside and which guarantees me my life also. (Riley, 2019:81. ‘True North’)

*

Injurious speech echoes relentlessly, years after the occasion of its utterance, in the mind of one at whom it was aimed … Where amnesia would help us, we cannot forget (Riley, 2005: 9).

The companionable inner voices of Socrates and the Stoics (and intellectual descendants such as Montaigne and Rousseau) were internally generated, mind-products intrinsic to thinking. But it is invasive external voices that have arguably played a larger part in the experience of inner speech. Some of the speakers have been benign: God or gods; divine oracles (such as Socrates’s daimon); guardian angels; dead or absent loved ones. But malign voices that colonise the self – ‘injurious speech’ in Riley’s phrase – also have a thick history. Spiritual traditions have been a key source for this: subjectification through malediction has been a common fate of religious believers. There is an intriguing moment in Riley’s writings on inner speech where she refers directly to this. Judith Butler, in her 1997 Psychic Life of Power, had delivered a sharp critique of Althusserian subjectification as a theological concept with guilty conscience as its psychic driver. Giving ‘scriptural embellishment’ to Butler’s argument, in her Words of Selves Riley describes the fate of Adam and Eve as interpellation via the Word of God, with the hapless couple named and shamed and exiled with God’s angry voice ringing in their ears as they ‘hand in hand, with wand’ring steps and slow,/Through Eden took their solitary way’ (2000b: 86; Milton, 1667: Book X, 1539–1540).

Biblical history is replete with tales of divine and diabolic malediction, as are the lives of the religious themselves, from desert fathers and mothers assailed by devilish voices to John Bunyan, tortured by Satan urging him to ‘sell Christ’ (Bunyan, [1666] 1998: 39), and the poet William Cowper made desperate by inner voices assuring him of his damnation (Cowper, [1772] 1979: 25–37). In a brilliant study of seventeenth-century English Puritanism, John Stachniewski has highlighted the ‘despair of self’ produced by its persecutory linguistic culture, a despair often reinforced by family dynamics, as in the case of the diarist Richard Norwood whose sense of himself as an irredeemable reprobate was encouraged by his parents’ ‘severe disposition and carriage toward me’ which Norwood regarded as ‘suitable to that mass of sin and folly which was bound up in my heart’ (1991: 109). Like many Puritans, Norwood was a loner whose solitariness, Stachniewski observes, was ‘relational; not so much aloneness as alienation. The feeling of aloneness was associated with … rejection’ (1991: 108). Terror of divine dereliction, that most absolute of solitudes, was confirmed by parental disapprobation. Abandoned by God, lone sinners would be left to the gloating maledictions of Satan, while even God’s Elect were warned against solitude as Satan’s realm.

Riley’s adoptive parents were nominal Protestants, members of the Church of England, but Riley herself was sent to a convent school. She did very well there, winning her first gold star at age five for an essay on the startlingly unchildish topic of the Mortification of the Flesh at Lent. But ‘this account of achieving grace by the easy means of a self-chosen deprivation did nothing to mitigate the earlier shame; some original wrong had been done and at home this was known. All the gold stars at school could not prevail against it’ (Riley, 1985b: 239). At home, Riley was understood to be incorrigibly evil; being academically clever offered no redemption. I do not want to make more of this than Riley does, which is not very much, although in a discussion of ‘word-wounding’ in Words of Selves she offers as a ‘domestic illustration’ an account of ‘a child, regularly called “evil”‘, who ‘[s]oused in the diction of Christianity’ finds herself caught by ‘the power of that language’, by an ‘interpellation’s authority that works’ because ‘it’s not just [that of] the parents’ (2000b: 142). Divine judgement reinforces parental condemnation. But then where else does subjectivating power reside, for a small only child, but in the tyrannical deities of home?

*

[A] moment of damnation can resemble an unholy baptism (Riley, 2000b: 141).

Imagine someone who habitually ends up in a position of pleading with those deaf to all her appeals to act humanely, when it was long clear that they would not do so … She compulsively redesigns a scenario in which her question ‘Am I a bad person?’ can be asked and answered in its own unhappy terms; for she cannot get her ancient interrogation taken seriously by someone who’s not already her opponent … She is reluctant to be emancipated from her distressing situation, only because that rescue would make retrospective nonsense out of a wrong that she was forced to live out as if it had a rationale … she must know it was deserved (Riley, 2005: 14–15).

Perhaps she would rather take the blame on herself for the harm of the past … than to admit it had happened arbitrarily, in that she was then (as a child) truly helpless (Riley, 2005: 15).

A child, any child, would rather experience herself as culpable than utterly defenceless. Assumed guilt draws parental condemnation inward: ‘damaging speech … mutates into … profoundly inner speech’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 55). This devastating account of childish vulnerability, from a 2004 essay titled ‘Malediction’, is described by Riley as ‘a (fatally exhilarating) vein of psychologising speculation’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 14). Riley has always been wary of psychological interpretation, but the starkness of these passages encourages me to take the speculation a bit further.

A child, the psychoanalyst Otto Isakower wrote in 1939, ‘has to build up his speech from linguistic material which is presented to him ready-made’. In a recent essay on ‘Psychoanalysis and the Voice’, the Lacanian analyst Darian Leader has developed Isakower’s insight using studies of baby–mother interactions to propose that baby-talk evolves through an infant’s ‘experience of being addressed’ by its mother to which it ‘has no immediate defence’. It is through the ‘intrusion of another speaker’ that speech takes shape, ‘in the form of a dialogue, whether we know it or not’, a dialogue that for some children, Leader writes, is ‘a terror factor’ (2017: 3–9).

Riley’s mother-tongue was terrorising: to talk back to it was criminal, lunatic. The child did not dare to speak openly – yet there was defiance. Described repeatedly as evil, she murmured to herself the name of an insect encountered in a story of American cotton fields: ‘Boll-weevil, evil, evil boll-weevil’ (Riley, 2000b: 142). Habitually referred to as ‘she’, she began calling herself ‘she’, in a ‘low-grade kind of irony’ (Riley, 2000b: 143). Enjoined to examine her conscience, she scrutinised it for evidence that parental accusations were justified and, failing to find this, was left with ‘a severely inflamed sense of injustice’ (Riley, 2000b: 144). This discrepancy between what was said of her and what she felt herself to be opened a space of resistance to the malignant inner voice that later evolved into a strategy for linguistic disinfection, leaching the toxic affect from ‘bad words’ by depersonalising them, exposing them as stock hate-talk drawn from the ‘stout dictionary of unkindness’, ‘ersatz rhetoric’ that speaks through its utterers who are ‘played like a pipe’ by its ‘disinterested machinations’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 60). Cruel words, stripped of their origins, are left to dangle in emotional irrelevance. Language separated from utterance becomes a liberating force, freeing Riley from an ‘unhappy and unproductive’ self-designation as a victim into a stoic indifference to her one-time tormentor (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 59–60). But this freedom does not come easily: to ‘sever the word from its speaker’, she must re-enter ‘its peculiar blackness unprotected’. Only ‘absolute fear’ will bring its negation: ‘To enable my release, my initial infection by the bad word with virulent fear and the most relentless self-doubt is necessary. A mild anxiety will not suffice. My entire self-conception must have tottered’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 61). Recovery comes, if it comes, only by ‘conceding my own sheer contingency as a linguistic subject’:

I am a walker in language … I become myself only by way of fully accepting my own impersonality, too – as someone who is herself accidentally spoken, not only by violent language, but by any language whatsoever – and who by means of her own relieved recognition of this very contingency, is in significant part released from the powers of the secretive and unspeakable workings of linguistic harm (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 62).

Not quite an exorcism, although the pain described here is a compelling reminder of the deadly grip of sadistic interpellation. Riley has long resisted biographical readings of her writings, insisting that ‘who … I am is nothing to the work’ (2000a: 74): that far from being the originator of her words she is their conduit: ‘it’s the voice of language itself which is trying to speak’ (2018a: 69). ¹ Yet, if this is so, for this reader at least the voice in which language speaks, especially in her poetry, is both intimately engaging and deeply affecting. If inner speech is the language of solitude, here its lyrical expression reaches out for response, sometimes explicitly – ‘Are you alright I ask out there/straining into the dusk to hear./I think its listening particles of air/at you like shot’ (Riley, 2019: 56, ‘A Shortened Set’) – but more often by drawing the reader into the intensity of Riley’s experience: ‘Insane with loneliness I wring/the tissues of the air to force to/the full words that would answer me’ (1985a: 56, ‘Two Ambitions to Remember’).

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Solitariness in Riley’s writings has many registers, from the sturdy assertiveness of a 2005 essay, ‘The Right to Be Lonely’ (a compelling defence of unorthodox living arrangements that has a proud prehistory in feminism) (2005: 49–58), to wry and/or melancholic depictions of ‘a perfectly democratic loneliness’ (2000a: 37) of the type familiar to all but the most socially blessed:

‘Walking by many on London streets in a despair which carries me I look from face to face like a dog going in the social democracy of loneliness. (Riley, 2019: 59, ‘A Shortened Set’).

But it is the solitariness of the writer struggling with the internalised injuries of her past that is most movingly evoked, in poems of remembered pain – ‘So get up speed./So you’re sick with fear again so what so what/Though in the past you screamed you wept you are still here alive’ (Riley, 2000a: 76, ‘Seven Strangely Exciting Lies’) – and others that address the reader in the lonely voice of the present:

 … the social-worker poet in me would like her revenge for having been born and left.

What forces the lyric person to put itself on trial though it must stay rigorously uninteresting?

Does it count on its dullness to seem human and strongly loveable; a veil for the monomania

which likes to feel itself helpless and touching at times? Or else it backs off to get sassy

since arch isn’t far from desperate: So take me or leave me. No, wait, I didn’t mean leave

me, wait, just don’t – or don’t flick and skim to the foot of a page and then get up to go – (Riley, 2019: 96, ‘Dark Looks’).

The addressee is called upon to listen comprehendingly, to stay the course, to break into the poet’s isolation: ‘I still wait for a really human sign/as light and shocking as/an annunciation –’ (Riley, 2019: 97, ‘Red Shout’). Behind the entreaty lies the possibility – the hope? – of a readerly response that assuages the writer’s loneliness by appreciating the beauty and truthfulness of its lyric articulation. The wish – if such a wish is indeed present – seems to me a very proper one: to draw the other into our ‘inner air’, in Riley’s phrase, is a primal impulse (n.d.: 1). Our capacity for solitary self-companionship, as Hannah Arendt has argued, depends on this, on a psychological connectedness to others who ‘are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought’ ([1966] 1976: 476).

It is perhaps with some acknowledgement of this that sometime after the publication of her 2004 essay on the inner voice Riley began writing differently about it, suggesting that its externality, its ‘imported otherness’, is a supposition that has ‘worn thin’ (n.d.: 1). Instead, she now proposed to position the inner voice at the ‘breaking edge of the very notion of speech’, in a ‘silent sounding’ of ‘surreptitious affect’ that ‘hangs between people’, which took her back to Arendt’s sociality of self, the two-in-one of inner dialogue that ‘mitigates one’s loneliness’ by turning it into a ‘palatable solitude’ (Riley, n.d.: 2, 3, 6). ‘Solitude’s talk’, to repeat Riley’s descriptor of inner speech, is not always cruelly accusatory: the inner voice can speak of love as well as hate, kindness as well as aggression (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 18). It is, as Riley says, invariably crammed with the detritus of the overheard: with ‘irrepressible puns, insistent spirits of ancient exchanges, archaic injunctions from hymns, and the pastel snatches of old song lyrics’ (incorporation of song lyrics is one of Riley’s signature poetic techniques) (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 20). And the inner voice ‘carries the voices of the dead’, speaking ‘as the inner speech of the living’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 18).

*

The souls of the dead are the spirit of language:

you hear them alight inside that spoken thought (Riley, 2019: 165, ‘Listening for Lost People’).

In 2008, Riley’s adult son, the eldest of her three children, died suddenly. Four years later, she wrote ‘A Part Song’, a monody first published in the London Review of Books (Riley, 2012) which won the Forward Prize and later appeared in her prize-winning collection Say Something Back (Riley, 2016). The poem is addressed to her son, who she strains to hear as he speaks within her:

Outgoing soul, I try to catch

You calling over the distances

Though your voice is echoey,

Maybe tuned out by the noise

Rolling through me – or is it

You orchestrating that now,

Who’d laugh at the thought

Of me being sung in by you

And being kindly dictated to.

It’s not like hearing you live was.

It is what you’re saying in me

Of what is left, gaily affirming.

(Riley, 2019: 143, ‘A Part Song’).

*

Few modern poets have anatomised the self with Riley’s precision, or written so movingly about its vicissitudes. Her writings on the inner voice are a major addition to the long tradition of literary reflection on solitude’s talk. Inner speech is both utterly familiar and endlessly mysterious, disturbing our distinctions between self and other, inner and outer, thought and dream. This article has touched on only a few elements in Riley’s treatment of the theme, leaving others to those better qualified to deal with them. Literary critics write about her employment of repetition and irony as ways of countering malign interpellation (Brady, 2011). Poets experiment with her use of Echo, that paradigmatic figure of lonely self-talk, as a model for lyric poetry (Lehóczky and Skoulding, 2018). Philosophers discuss her ideas about linguistic interiority, while voice-hearers compare their experiences with her accounts of inner speech (Lecercle and Riley, 2004: 65–76; Hodgson, 2015; Fernyhough, 2016). There is much here still to explore, and Riley herself is now adding to it by investigating the cranial aspects of interiority (2018a). Paradoxically then, thanks to Riley’s rich and inventive writings, the ‘voice without a mouth’ finds itself part of a lively ongoing conversation of the kind that Riley has always welcomed. A deeply original voice that reaches out with generous openness to its audiences is hearing back, in dialogues that beautifully enhance our understanding of solitude’s talk. ²