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The post-pandemic world of “Speech Sounds” requires people to communicate with whatever proxies they can manage. Some of these work-arounds rely on metonymy, a kind of figurative language in which one word or phrase is substituted for another that is closely related to it. For example, journalists may say, “Today the White House announced” to mean “Today, the current presidential administration announced.” Because words and phrases are lost to most of the story’s characters, objects, gestures, stances, and actions create a metonymical form of language that does not enhance speech but stands in for it.
Metonymy is in use, for example, in the display of weapons. Rye “never went unarmed” because her gun makes a declaration to the men, or “animals” as she thinks of them, who would gladly rape her, kidnap her, and put her to work for them. Obsidian displays his gun to convey to the bus driver and violent men that they must back down, and they understand the message. Other examples of objects that act metonymically are Obsidian’s LAPD uniform and the pictures that the bus driver has pasted to his bus, necessary because another system of communication, currency and valuation, has also collapsed.
The objects that people carry to indicate their names are an especially poignant example of metonymy. Rye can’t be certain what the black stone Obsidian carries means, perhaps “Rock or Peter [a name that means “rock”] or Black.” And her own “name symbol” is ambiguous. Not only does it suggest only her last name, but it’s only close. A stalk of wheat is not a stalk of rye. It hardly matters, though, since as Rye says, she may never hear anyone say her name again. The namelessness and need for the approximation of metonymy suggest the depth of the people’s losses.
