The Party’s decision to liquidate Tvář was officially justified as an exercise in ‘improving the journal’. The hypocrisy was typical of the times, as Havel had emphasized in his attack on ‘evasive thinking’. It was epitomized by a recent tragi-comical incident in Prague’s Vodičkova Street, where a loose stone window-ledge happened to fall below on to a woman pedestrian, whose instant death caused a local scandal, which was then reported officially as proof that socialism was making enormous progress.164 That is to say, the combined effect of the pressures from above and below to liberalize the crisis-ridden regime led by President Novotný was to produce much confused double-talk, especially so within the thawing alpine regions of the Party hierarchy. The criticisms and reform proposals of the liberalizers — ‘the antidogmatics’ Havel called them — were for instance still normally labelled by their defenders as ‘socialist’. They were mainly articulated through the mainstream official channels, which meant that — just like their ‘establishment’ opponents — they carried the birthmarks of inflexible and intolerant ideological thinking. And the reform proposals often came from the very same lips of journalists, scholars and writers who, not much more than ten years ago, had sung sweet songs of praise to Stalin and did everything they could to hound ‘bourgeois’ opinion out of the ranks of the nomenklatura.165
The air was so ripe with whiffs of confused hypocrisy that Havel decided to make it the target of his wonderfully absurdist satire The Memorandum. The ribald two-part, twelve-scene drama unfolds within the offices of a large department that is somehow connected to a larger, undefined, bleak bureaucracy. The stage set of Jan Grossman’s first production of the play at the Theatre on the Balustrade included special fire extinguishers with removable coats of arms, one for each new director; filing cabinets containing nothing but clerks’ cutlery, wrapped in plastic bags, withdrawn and replaced with chronometric precision; an empty can, front stage, into which water drips with deadening regularity; and contrastingly loud snatches of bouncy music, resembling some terrible mixture of Nabucco and Lohengrin, designed as a counterpoint, to make the audience laugh.166 Laugh it certainly did when the department director, Josef Gross, discovers in his morning mail a memorandum written in a strangely jumbled language. He is surprised to find that his subordinates already know that the language exists. It is called Ptydepe. So Gross tries to have the memorandum translated, without success. His secretary hasn’t yet grasped the grammar of Ptydepe, while his other subordinates haven’t been authorized to attempt the translation. Entangled in red tape, feeling ever more isolated, Gross slowly realizes that he has been disempowered within his department, that there has been a plot behind his back, and that his deputy, Baláš, is responsible for the introduction of the strange new lingua franca.
The bewildered Gross, hanging on for dear life to his director’s post, finds that the stated aim of the newly circulating language is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization by eliminating imprecision of meaning. Whereas the old natural language produced misunderstanding and inaccuracy, the new language of Ptydepe is supposed to usher in transparent communication. Its grammatical rules are straightforward. It is said to be a ‘strictly scientific ... thoroughly exact’ language blessed with an ‘unusually broad’ vocabulary and a grammar constructed with ‘maximum rationality’. Similarity among words is purposefully minimized. Professor Perina, the organization’s language expert and teacher, explains that ‘words must be formed by the least probable combination of letters’. Here the so-called principle of 60 per cent dissimilarity comes to the rescue. 60 per cent of the letters in any word in Ptydepe must be different from any other word of the same length. The vocabulary of Ptydepe is built on another logical principle as well: the more commonly used a word, the shorter it is. In Ptydepe, the word for wombat has 319 letters. At the other extreme, a word like ‘whatever’ — a favourite of amoral cynics — is the second shortest word, ‘gh’. The ‘f’ word, we are told, is being held in reserve, just in case science should discover a term more commonly used than ‘whatever’.
It is easy to see that The Memorandum is a satirical attack on an imaginary world — a world only a few notches away from Havel’s current reality — defined by the absence of communicative interaction and the complete destruction of freely expressed public opinion, that is, a pure totalitarian order in which the exercise of power no longer needs to be legitimated because nobody is capable of speaking and interacting with others. Ptydepe’s rules of vocabulary and usage are based ultimately on the principle that language itself should become obsolete in human affairs. ‘The greater the redundancy of a language,’ says the wise professor, ‘the more reliable it is, because the smaller is the possibility that by an exchange of a letter, by an oversight or a typing error, the meaning of the text could be altered.’ Ptydepe is more than a super — new and improved — synthetic language. It is an anti-language, for it seeks to reduce its speakers to mechanical creatures who have neither ethical self-awareness nor even the capacity to distinguish between the language itself and the context in which it is embedded.
Little wonder, then, that throughout the play Gross’s secretary sits at her desk, props up a mirror on her typewriter, and combs and teases her hair; or that Gross is constantly precluded from communicating with anybody else, or that the secretary of the Translation Centre has no contact with the outside world except for her shopping trips in search of lemons, melons and onions, and the continual ironing of the Chairman’s underwear. Ptydepe is admittedly a rigorous language. It is designed to eliminate the need for communication. From here on, says the deputy director, no one will be led to think that being injured is the same as being helped. But it has several disadvantages. First reports received from the pilot projects where it had already been introduced showed that the trouble with Ptydepe was that it soon began to assume some of the degenerate characteristics of a natural language: various imprecisions, ambiguities, emotional overtones. Then there was the close-to-home difficulty of figuring out its grammar and vocabulary. Although Ptydepe classes had been set up for the employees, almost everybody found it utterly baffling. Only the departmental teacher and the staff of the Translation Centre understand its intricacies — although even the Head of the Translation Centre confesses that progress is slow, and that he’s only on his second translation.
During the first part of the play, Gross — who resembles a Communist of the 1948 generation and repeats several times that he’d like to be a little boy again so that he could live his life differently, and claims as well that he is unfriendly towards Ptydepe because he is a humanist believer in Man — suffers defeat at the hands of the amalgam of words called Ptydepe. Gross, who received at the outset a text from the authorities in Ptydepe explaining their ruling that the language was from here on the official one, is victimized by the authorities’ supplementary ruling that no person can be granted a translation of a memorandum in Ptydepe text until his or her own memorandum has been translated. Gross is subsequently kicked downstairs to the post of staff watcher.
Yet towards the end of the second part there is an apparent reversal of power relations within the organization. Havel here uses the circular structural pattern typical of absurdist plays to drive home the point that everybody in the play is caught up in the amoral tumble and scramble of the organization. The authorities order the liquidation of Ptydepe. A new and improved synthetic language called Chorukor is invented. Its aim is to put a stop to the unreliability of communication caused by Ptydepe’s strenuous pursuit of words as dissimilar from each other as possible. Chorukor tries to achieve this through the — opposite — rule that the more similar words are, the closer their meaning. So Monday in Chorukor is ‘ilopagar’; Tuesday is ‘ilopager’; Wednesday is ‘ilopagur’; ‘ilopagir’ is Thursday; Friday is ‘ilopageur’, while Saturday is ‘ilopagoor’ and Sunday is ‘ilopagor’. But won’t words intermingle, or get mixed up? And won’t confusion result? The recipe is flawless, the consequences quite predictable, Professor Perina says reassuringly. Perfect interaction will result. And if a typist asked to arrange a staff meeting makes a mistake, then no harm will result. In typing ‘ilopager’ instead of ‘ilopageur’, all that will happen is that the meeting takes place earlier than expected — on Tuesday, rather than on Friday — so allowing business to be worked through well ahead of schedule.