SMITH, CHRISTINA JEAN. What Disappears and What Remains

Chapter ThreeStuck Between Past and Present: The Pre-Linguistic Presentof Butler's "Speech Sounds"In her short story,"Speech Sounds", Octavia Butler is interested in the loss oflanguage as an apocalypse in itself. No large-scale, natural disaster has occurred; there is nofire from heaven, no bomb or great wall of water overthrowing the towns and cities. InOctavia Butler's vision, the apocalypse is precipitated by a loss of complex spoken andwritten language, which, in turn, highlights the ways in which our complex linguistic systemis so intricately tied to our complex societal systems. Only because of our ability tocommunicate with such nuance, she suggests, are we able to sustain large cities andcommunities that house, feed and transport hundreds of thousands of people everyday.Without effective communication, these systems fall into disrepair. Thus, for Butler,language is the most essential binding element of any complex society. Without it, a societyreverts to one based not on a nexus of rules and metarules but, instead, on the atavistic lawsof nature, which are just beneath the surface of our everyday lives.In "Speech Sounds" this transition from language-rich social order to anarchy is notyet complete but is in medias res. This falls in line with what Jenny Wolmark sees asButler's tendency to be "concerned with the exploration of transitional states in whichboundaries between self and other become fluid" (Wolmark 29, qutd. from Sands). Andwhile there is certainly that thread of the ellision or breakdown of personal identity in theface of some formidible new force (Rye struggles to reconcile the old vision of herself withher new role in the Post-Apocalyptic wasteland), I aim to focus more on Butler's overarching45