Stylistic techniques and ethical staging in Otavia Butler's 'Speech Sounds'
Résumé
Octavia Butler's short Story « Speech Sounds » does not depict an encounter with alien beings on unknown territories. It is humanity as we know it that the author defamiliarises for us: in this post-apocalyptic world, a virus has deprived humans of their ability to speak and read, bringing the species back to prelinguistic animality, with some individuals like Rye and Obsidian trying to resist the inevitable regression. Using human language to depict wordless humanity runs the risk of implausibility. Yet we will show how Butler manages to make us forget the predicament. Drawing on Text World Theory and cognitive stylistics, we will see to what extent Butler's dystopia can be said to be based on metonymic cognitive processes which are a characteristic of the genre (Stockwell 2000). There are ethical implications to language loss that “Speech Sounds” implicitly highlights: in the absence of what makes ethical social life possible, not only has the socio-economic superstructure collapsed on itself, but ethical care for the other has been replaced by violence and indifference.
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