The Voice of Violence is Silence

Disclaimer: I love reading, I love science fiction. I came across an old, tattered copy of Octavia Butler's "The Patternmaster" and though I had read this book many years ago, I re-read it. It inspired the following pondered thoughts. I figured why not share them with you?

The novel “The Patternmaster” by Octavia Butler is a study in the resonances and layers of silence, and how violence and violation travel along the vibrations created by these. Silence empowers, but it also victimizes, abuses, and disinherits.

Through the main character’s discovery and recognition of the violence shrieking in the silence, the reader is taken on a journey of personal confrontation with the voices of reason that silence the pain. Teray comes out of school as an apprentice and faces moral and ethical challenges preparing him for his, as yet unaware of, future. By the end, his journey has transformed into a rite of passage from which he emerges with his father telepathically telling him, “you have the right combination of abilities” (185).

The voice of violence in this novel is crowded, clamoring, and soundless in a way that is reminiscent of the 18th and 19th Century colonial era with its agricultural slavery of voicelessness and industrial servitude of unheard screams amid the unnatural noises of warfare. Published in 1970, a time of intense decolonization against a backdrop of human rights advocacy movements, this story recreates the societal conditions of silent violence of current bygone eras that resulted in the very loud explosion of voices demanding civil rights of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The choice, by the author, of silence and its many layers and resonances to map the reach and web of violence is evocative of the many levels of silence that impact her own life as an African American woman living in a violent, chaotic environment. Only one character, Amber, is independent; a patternist without master who is not an outsider, she represents the author. Just as the author does, her voice is the one that speaks for the voiceless. As a healer, her ears are attuned to the soundlessness of violence because its lack of voice does not diminish its material ravages. As she tells Teray, “I’m a good healer. I can’t help knowing” (64).

Resounding at different volumes, the soundlessness vibrates through the dampening silence between the current Patternmaster and his subjects.

Consequently, silence is the strongest voice, the most audible. It is violent in a physical, solid way, capable of amazing damage. As Teray loses his status, the reader is compelled to join his quest, rife with inaudible, but real violence. Even knowing that “a patternist could strike a blow through his own solid shield” (35) as he soundlessly fights his brother Coransee, Teray learns the extent of physical damage possible.

He mutely absorbs from Amber via telepathic transfer that some masters, outsiders, and journeymen are not above cruelly feeding on the powerlessness the mutes embody through their voicelessness: “what she handed him made him feel as though he had suddenly been dropped into a cesspool” (62). Through his friendship with Amber, Teray learns to navigate the layers of silence that weave his emergent understanding of each character’s experience of violence and violation.

The enemy, the Clayarks, hide in the silence, shield themselves with it and use it to attack, but the mutes are victims without the possibility of reprieve unless they survive a Clayark attack and become one themselves. Teray shares his thought with the reader that “mutes who were not tortured to death and who did not die of the Clayark disease became the worst of their former-masters’ enemies” (9). Sadly, his attitude creates a bubble from which he has been unable to hear the abuse heaped upon the mutes by his peers, and especially his “betters” – the master patternists. However, a drastic, downward change in his own situation, from apprentice to outsider, creates the opportunity for the reader and Teray to see beyond his initial limited scope.

Suliana, the only mute we meet, suffers serious repetitive abuse at the hands of an outsider. The revelations of these abuses bring an instinctive reaction of anger and revenge. Though it may be enough to limit the violence endured by the mutes for whom Teray cares, the hopelessness and helplessness at the impossibility of stopping it altogether are shared between him, Amber, and the reader.

Tangibly embodied by the mutes, exploited by the three classes of patternists – master, apprentice, outsider - and used as protection by the collective enemy, silence is the voice they violently share. In the spaces between each thread on the Pattern, Teray learns to use this silence to inflict unexpected death on the enemy, the Clayarks; these ‘others’ who threaten the status quo can’t be heard, or found, with the patternist mind; but who can, however, be attacked successfully by skillful patternist thought, “he swept over them like an ocean wave. A wave of destructive power, killing” (113).

In this world, covered by the Pattern, post-apocalyptic, and hierarchical, Butler brings the different textures of silence to the forefront of the reader’s experience with systemic structures facilitating oppression through the violence expressed by, between and against the classes that comprise the totality of humans on Earth. It is impossible to miss the importance of the lack of sound and voice when weighing it against the significant materiality of silent telepathy exhibited by strong patternists such as Teray.

Nevertheless, the hierarchy of this world is recognizable to us with the Patternmaster as the Monarch, the masters as the aristocracy, the apprentices/journeymen set as the middle-class, the outsiders representing the working class/servants, and the mutes cast as the slaves; all with a common enemy, an opposing ideology. On an Earth that is near barren, “an outsider (is) a permanent inferior, an apprentice (is) a potential superior” (12) and mutes are “all carefully bred and trained” (11). The levels of silence between power and powerlessness remain in the voices and lack thereof, of the inhabitants, who are interdependent because of the society - the Pattern in which they live.

With the reader listening in, Teray muses about this as he runs away from his own disenfranchised position answering a silent invitation from his father, the Patternmaster. Another layer of silence, between father and son, thickens the density of noiselessness. In order to protect one son from the other, the Patternmaster communicates in the form of a letter, layering the auditive silence of the ear while denying the telepathic voice of the mind.

Yet this very silence allows space for the reader to also grapple with these obstacles alongside Teray. Another layer whispers, this time between the author and reader, about the impact of each decision made, each thought unvoiced. Even telepathic and strong, one must tentatively find one’s way with eyes that have limits, as shown through the lives of the disruptive Clayarks. Their silence is their safeguard, their strength, but it limits their impact on the pattern as a whole, reducing them to pesky beasts. They can’t be understood or integrated. They are the rejected humanity, too imperfect and misunderstood, resulted of mutated and diseased mutes.

But, through the silent sensitivity of an artist, Teray experiences the closest thing to rapprochement, “abruptly, shockingly, Teray was the Clayark” (19). A person capable of grasping a moment in such a way that another can share, that taciturn artist is but a fleeting character with a lasting reverberating impact. Though it is only a glimmer, the reader has a hope, through Teray’s encounter, that conversation may indeed become possible in the future.

Whereas the majority of mutes and hushed outsiders represent the ones who haven’t found their own voice yet, the Clayarks represent the portion of slave descendants and working-class citizens in 1960’s America who have begun to raise their voices against the violations allowed by the earlier silences. A voice heard and magnified by Butler’s use of silence to depict how violence lives.

The strength of one’s ability to manipulate silence acquaints the reader with the reason for the mutes’ fragility as Teray ponders the need to be gentle with them because of the pain a strong patternist can cause them. Having no mental voice themselves, there is a very real possibility of killing one unintentionally, but he learns “how much mental force mutes could tolerate without harm” (51). The necessity to be kind in answer to their inherent weakness makes him likable and entices the reader to follow him.

In conclusion, the patternist voice is omnipresent, telepathic, ultimately soundless: its most powerful aspect. Heard as thought, patternists can use the pattern that is their society and through it control every aspect of their lives, yet all manual labor that creates comfort and ease of living is done by the weakest people. While silence gives power to the upper echelons, the strongest people on the Pattern, for others it is abusive and allows for easy violation. Teray’s quest becomes a journey for the reader willing to listen to the sounds of silence in order to hear the clash of violence inherent to it. Butler reminds us that the strongest is just as dependent on the weakest to create security and ease the difficulties of living, as the weak may be on the strong and that, through it all, silence is, more often than not, not a comfort.

Source:

Butler, Octavia E. Patternmaster. Headline Book Publishing, 2021. Kindle Version