Speech Sounds: Interior World and Radio Imagination

In Speech Sounds I was particularly interested by Rye's description of the new world's hierarchy: "The least impaired people tended to do this--stand back unless they were physically threatened and let those with less control scream and jump around. It was as though they felt it beneath them to be as touchy as the less comprehending. This was an attitude of superiority." In this diseased society communication has seriously deteriorated, and I found it interesting that the new basis for a class hierarchy here was based on ability to communicate. Also, the violence that came out of this seems crucial--the higher classes (those with more ability to communicate and understand) were able to contain themselves and not react with violence to the lower classes (the more impaired). In a society that is largely a society of interior existence, as these people have trouble understanding and communicating with each other, people turn to violence. Then, it seems that people can only rely on violence as a means of communication, and everyone is out only for himself or herself. Is this human nature on its most basic level, when the confines of society and codified means of communication are destroyed?
In this story, I was very aware of Butler's 'Radio Imagination.' In the 1997 interview she describes how characters often live in her head, have voices, motivations and are created without any real sense of a physical presence. In Speech Sounds, I definitely noticed this, as each character, especially Rye, has an extremely evolved inner life, and virtually no physically descriptive presence. In fact, the main focus of the story for me was on how people cope with their own interiors, and looking at the human interior through the lens of a disease that has severely impaired the interior and ability to communicate in a lot of ways, is an excellent way to do this. Ultimately, it comes down to violence and basic human emotions: jealousy, lust, greed, anger, fear. I found the world that Butler constructs here to be very much a reflection of her 'radio imagination' and an interesting lens to look at basic human nature. It seems that Rye has a major advantage, as she is less impaired than most, and I would honestly have liked a glimpse into the mind of the people with more severe impairments. For example, the man who kills the woman at the end. I think it would have been incredible to hear the thoughts (however basic) going on in his mind as he murdered his wife and the stranger (Obsidian) who attempted to save her. On the other hand, the moment in the car when Rye and Obsidian reveal to each other their strengths is a fantastic insight into this. Watching them both experience and suppress a wave of bloodthirsty jealousy explains a lot about how Butler imagines the human interior.

Show and Tell

I’m interested in Butler's portrayal of sight, particularly in Bloodchild and The Evening and the Morning and the Night, in connection with her description of her own “radio imagination.” In both stories, the trauma of characters seeing, particularly seeing their own futures, seems to gesture toward representation problems. Gan has long been prepared for what awaits him with stories, diagrams and drawings, but he does not really understand it until he witnesses Bram Lomas’ horrific birth experience. In The Evening and the Morning and the Night, Lynn does not fully understand DGD until she comes face to face with patients in the ward, and Alan develops a more complicated perspective on Dilg, despite having read copious literature on what to expect, once he actually looks around there. Since seeing is so crucial for to each character's understanding of the world, I’m interested in why Butler often obscures the vision of her own readers. How are we to really understand if we cannot see?

Like Ellen, I initially imagined Lynn as a man (perhaps because I was overcompensating for assuming Gan was a woman until he revealed that he wasn’t). Furthermore, even when physical descriptions were provided, they did not always help me. For example, I could never quite conceptualize what T’Gatoi looked like. Butler provides a meditation, if not an answer, in her description of her own “radio imagination,” casting physical appearance almost as an afterthought in her work. She has never thought first in terms of what her characters looked like. This connection between not seeing and representing comes into play with Naomi Chi’s art. Having gouged out her own eyes, she works as a sculptor, representing what she can feel and, at least in Lynn’s assessment, representing it well – “in a way that seemed impossible for a blind sculptress” (56).

I feel, then, like there are conflicting messages on the need to see. In some ways, in the acts of representation that Butler and Naomi perform, it appears words and imagination are sufficient. Maybe the key is feeling, not necessarily in the tactile sense, although that’s where Naomi’s inspiration comes from. As I said, I couldn’t see the characters, but when they described the awful spectacles that had made them understand the truth far more vividly than words could, I could conjure up a sense of what they saw. Not necessarily an image, but a feeling, an understanding of the disgust of being exposed to the violence of bodily destruction.*

I’m left grappling with Gan and T’Gatoi’s discussion of seeing at the end of Bloodchild. T’Gatoi concludes that “humans should be protected from seeing,” but Gan argues instead for being “shown.” I don’t think Butler's exclusion of physical descriptions is meant to protect her readers. She shows us the truth in other ways, and reveals that vision in terms of feelings can be just as strong as vision in terms of sight. Even Gan couches his argument for showing in terms of the tactile, explaining that all Terrans see of birth is “pain and terror and maybe death” (29). I feel like I’m left struggling to put my understanding of vision in Butler’s world to words, but I guess that’s appropriate.

*Of course, I imagine I couldn’t feel it as strongly as the character could, since my main exposure to such drastic bodily harm still comes in the form of representation, though visual representation. I was impressed that Gan’s description of the birth scene could produce such a visceral reaction in me, but also wondered if I would have shuddered so much if I couldn’t produce some vision in my mind, a mixture of medical TV shows (the documentaries and the fictionalized) and, most recently, the disturbing imagery in Black Swan.

Butler's Utopia Story

“The Book of Martha” is technically not science fiction at all. It reads as a romantic dream fantasy - Butler calls it her “utopia story” (214), and it ends the second edition of the Bloodchild stories beautifully. It also serves as an excellent way of thinking through some of the concepts Butler discusses in the “Radio Imagination” interview with Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise Keating.

When God offers Martha, an author, a chance to alter one facet of humans in order to prevent them from destroying themselves, she claims that she doesn’t believe in utopias - “[I]t’s [not] possible to arrange a society so that everyone is content, everyone has what he or she wants” (202). God agrees - humanity is dominated by covetousness, the aggression inspired by wanting what one’s neighbor has (and more). This, to me, seems strikingly similar to the “human contradiction” that Butler writes about in the Xenogenesis Trilogy - “human beings have two characteristics that don’t work well together… Hierarchical behavior and intelligence” (“RI” p. 53). Martha hopes that by allowing everyone to have vivid dreams about their own “private, perfect [or imperfect] utopia every night… it might take the edge off their willingness to spend their waking hours trying to dominate or destroy one another” (204). The idea of private dream utopias traces back to Butler’s idea that one utopia cannot be ideal for everyone - a utopia is usually “perfect” only to the person who envisions it.

In “The Book of Martha,” utopia is relative, just as Martha’s image of God is relative - as God first appears as an old white man, then a black man, then a black woman who looks related to Martha, Martha learns that “you see what your life has prepared you to see” (209). That is, I think, the basis of “radio imagination”- Butler mentions in her interview that “I realize that I have been writing about people for years and I’ve never seen any of them. I have the kind of imagination that hears. I think of it as radio imagination” (48). Her interviewers believe that “in radio narration, the socially-built body… in Butler’s fiction…. Is initially displaced and delayed…. The ‘punch’ of such an aesthetics… allows readers to ‘see’ and to ‘hear’ characters’ situational relations and ‘problems’ before classifying those relations within familiar idioms of race, gender, or sexuality” (48). So, in “The Book of Martha,” we can see Butler’s fascinating concept of radio imagination extended to “relative utopias,” which offers a way to subvert the hierarchical/dominant thinking inherent in the “human contradiction.” Beautiful.

And then I became slightly confused about “The Book of Martha” - as God prophesied, Martha will become the lowest rung on the new social hierarchy she creates, simply because she has created “the end of the only career [she’s] ever cared about” (213). She and God (and Butler) seem to take it for granted that “pleasure reading” would suffer in a world where people live inside their own fantasies every night (212). This, to me, seems like a fairly pessimistic view of what human intelligence means - socially constructed worlds that people are born into naturally prevent them from seeing beyond normative ideas of race, gender, sexuality, etc. As Butler claims in “Radio Imagination,” she aims to “stretch minds” (53). Without pleasure reading, the ability to read about alternate possibilities of life, how will people stretch their dreams beyond their daily experiences? I'd like to hope that in Martha’s ideal dream utopia world, the market for pleasure reading (especially novels that present entirely new or speculatively realistic worlds) would actually spike. I hope that the “intelligence” aspect of the “human contradiction” would motivate people to think beyond their own imaginations and strive to understand other people’s. Would individual utopias - more specifically, the inherent “hierarchical” inclination to privilege one’s own utopia above anyone else’s - prevent people from cooperating to enact changes? What would a humanity that doesn't perceive a need for speculative fiction look like? Does the end of fantasy writing in "The Book of Martha" contradict Butler's fictional aims to stretch the human mind?