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Identity is, in part, a linguistic construct.
One of the more poignant details in “Speech Sounds” is the importance of names and the near-impossibility of communicating names accurately. When Obsidian and Rye show each other their “name symbols,” neither can be sure of the other’s name. Rye decides on “Obsidian” because she can remember that name, but his name could be “Rock or Peter or Black.” Her own name symbol depicts wheat, and Rye can’t know how Obsidian interprets it. Names, whether people use those that their parents give them or invent their own, are intimately tied to identity, so the loss of this signifier of identity matters. Readers know that the loss is painful to Rye because she knows that Obsidian “probably thought of her as Wheat” and that she “would never hear her name spoken again.” Her sadness foreshadows the optimistic surprise of the story’s final line, in which she tells her name to the children, who can understand and repeat it, “savoring the words.” She will learn the children’s names, which are part of their identities, setting them apart from the nameless impaired children whom Rye compares to animals running about the city.
Another example of how identity relies in part on language is Rye’s deep regret over her lost ability to read and write, activities that were central to her teaching career and to her research. The books in her house, which she can’t bring herself to repurpose as firewood, are a constant reminder of this “most painful” loss. Ironically, she can’t even read, or recall much of, the manuscripts she herself wrote. This is a loss that, at least as far as the story’s events take readers, is permanent. Rye can teach the children by speaking with them, but Obsidian could have taught them to read as well.
Community and its systems rely on shared codes and expectations.
The loss of language is the most developed of the pandemic’s effects in “Speech Sounds,” but the story also deals with related losses of shared codes of understanding and accepted expectations for human behavior in communities. Language underpins these other shared systems because people use language to communicate them, to teach them to children as they mature, and to enforce them as needed. The loss of language undermines these systems, creating the destabilized and anxious society that characters must navigate.
For example, the scene on the bus upends social expectations for passengers on public transportation and for drivers whose responsibility it is to keep passengers safe. The bus is no longer part of the public system that once routinely helped Angelenos get from place to place. It is now the private domain of the driver who, far from ensuring passengers’ safety, snarls at a frightened woman and swerves dangerously to shut down the fight. That the bus’s schedule is random and the road it travels is full of potholes is more evidence that this system has collapsed, as is the men’s refusal to behave in a civil manner during the trip.
The photos plastered to the bus’s exterior draw attention to another shared system that has collapsed: the use of currency to do business. With the institutions that issue currency and manage monetary policy gone, as they certainly must be since they rely heavily on spoken and written language, a barter system based on visual representation is the best that the driver and passengers can manage. Other systems of trade have also come into play, as with the two women who tolerate the filthy neighbor “in exchange for his protection” from worse threats. These new systems provide a way for people to establish expectations and get through their days together.
The spoken and written word is a human distinctive and need.
With the loss of language, the characters in “Speech Sounds” must fall back on non-linguistic communication. Gestures, postures, and physical movement serve to communicate general ideas, and wordless sounds stand in for speech. Humans use all of these forms of non-linguistic communication daily, of course, but these extralinguistic forms of communication enhance speech. In the story, these forms gain exaggerated importance because they must replace words.
In Rye’s opinion, this unavoidable substitution debases communication, forcing people to communicate as animals do so that people strike her as more animal than human. When Obsidian, whose ability to read is not impaired, tries to stop the man with the knife, for example, he can only repeat a single sound—“Da, da, da!”—that is more like the repetitive bark of an animal than a human utterance. Gestures and sounds can communicate basic ideas and emotions, but they cannot capture or represent more complex or abstract ideas that tell the whole human story. They belong to the present moment, not to future generations.
The loss of speech is not an inconvenience or a way station to a new form of distinctly human communication in “Speech Sounds.” It is a loss of connection and community and of continuity of human progress. These losses drive Rye to despair while discovering that the children can both speak and comprehend speech renews her hope. Her “mind leaped ahead” as the possibilities suddenly occur to her. If these children can speak, as she can, then likely other young children also are unimpaired. If so, then a restoration of human language, which sets people apart from all other living things, is a realistic goal. Readers can sense Rye’s satisfaction as she says her name, Valerie Rye, “savoring” the sound of the words and the knowledge that the children understand them.
