The Memorandum is one of Václav Havel’s most
representative plays, using ironic humour to incisive effect in a brilliantly
sharp satire of authoritarian bureaucracies and their word games. It‘s about
the dehumanizing effects and the tyranny of language in any system that causes
the disintegration of human identity. This essay talks about the play itself,
about its birth and influences, not only the performance I saw.
The
twelve scenes are set in a deliberately generic large organization, the purpose
of which, like that of any amorphous self-serving bureaucracy, is not plain.
Josef Gross, the managing director, and the development of his personality from
the introduction to the abolition of the artificial language Ptydepe are both
central to the play. Gross cannot decipher a memorandum directed to him because
it is written in Ptydepe, a new office language introduced apparently without
his knowledge by deputy director Ballas and his cronies and taught in classes
in which every employee seems to have enrolled. Ptydepe is presumably rational
and precise and therefore superior to ‚dilettantish‘ natural languages, with
their vagueness and ambivalence. Its goal is to eliminate imprecision by
limiting all similarity between words and thereby achieve the highest possible
redundancy in language and ensure terms are so precisely defined that documents
are error-free. The result is
monstrously long words that are formed by the least probable combination of
letters. Artificial language, paradoxically, produces an infinite number of
misunderstandings, becoming more ambiguous as natural language. This, of
course, will inevitably lead to an absurd actions in the mercenary world of
officials, in which ambitions play a major role, causing the breakdown of human relationships and their replacement by
unscrupulous struggles for power. 
Compared to other plays, strictly in the spirit of absurd theatre, the story of Ptydepe has a clearer storyline. Gross goes from office to office, learns more about Ptydepe and the structure of organization itself and its employees, who attend the Ptydepe classes if they're not acting like they are doing their jobs. Characters have more distinctive personalities- Gross is avid humanist who "places the struggle for the victory of reason and of moral values above a peace bought by their loss", Ballas is intriguer who acts according to his own tactics, revealing and saying what suits him at that time. Rest of the characters also has their specific traits, like robotic, mechanical behaviour of secretary Hana, blandness of clerk Thumb during teacher Lear's ponderous Ptydepe classes, or even Mr. Pillar, the silent character who's just standing, watching, somewhat apart, and they also have clear behavioural motives. For example, when Gross tries to find out why Ballas, without his consciousness, has begun to introduce Ptydepe, he tells him that everything is being done for the good of the office and explains that they were aware of the resistance on his side, "therefore they arranged it so he wouldn't see what they were after until they were strong enough to surmount his obstacles". Later he announces he's aware that "they have sinned and now they must accept courageously and without any feeling of being sinned against, the full consequences of their activities and with a redoubled energy struggle to remedy the damage they have done", which, in reality, means putting the blame on Mr. Pillar and continuing to blackmail Gross in order to preserve the position of deputy.
Gross
portrays Havel's typical protagonist type, a character whose failures are
highlighted the most - borrowing of the banknote stamp, buying notebook without
authorization, signing of the supplementary order for the introduction and the
use of Ptydepe within the organization - but who is, in fact, not the stand-in
for government officials, but a character who stands-in for himself. But at the
same time, the play ends in monologue of capitulation in which Gross
rationalizes to himself the reasons why he was giving in to Ballas and another
new language are valid, and he can't do anything for secretary Maria, who
eventually translated him his memorandum: "Dear Maria! You can't begin to
guess how happy I would be if I could do for you what you've just asked me to
do. The more am I frightened therefore that in reality I can do next to nothing
for you, because I am in fact totally alienated from myself: the desire to help
you faithfully encounters within me the responsibility thrust upon me - who am
attempting to salvage the last remains of Mans humanity - by the permanent
menace to our organization from the side of Mr. Ballas and his men; a
responsibility so binding that I absolutely may not risk the loss of the
position on which it is based by any open conflict with Mr. Ballas and his
men..."
This monologue
is a key monologue. Gross always believes in what he says, he really believes
at this moment that he cannot help Maria because he is alienated and because
the world is absurd and because we are all like Syzifos. And he never admits
that this is his own weakness. And this is the main theme of the play and the
play should be attacking or interfering with each of us, spectators, who do not
directly create these mechanisms like Ballas in the play, but allow them by
making daily compromises, and which we
often cover up by saying that we have to, and that it is a tactic and that we
are estranged, and that there is no other way anyway, but in fact, we could do
much more against it.
For a
Czecho-Slovak audience, the play was not just a bureaucracy satire, but it was
intended for people to find a metaphor of all sorts of events, problems and
attitudes in it of their recent past. Even though the "Ballas and Gross
duel" has a clear dramatic foundation, the audience at the time of first
introduction of the play, with their fresh experience of life in the 1950s, had
to sense that both characters have well-known features. After 1968, bitterness
of a kind of prophetic clarity had to be added to this understanding of how
tragicomical the subject is. What was hard to understand, outside of context,
was how just writing simple truths about the dysfunctions of the society Havel
lived in was deeply subversive. The government certainly understood, which was
why his plays were banned. In 1968, however, Memorandum premiered in New York
directed by Joseph Papp. Of course, it couldn't be directly translated into
American experience as the reality of the audience was quite different, but by
using Ptydepe as a symbol of all scientific, ideological and phraseological
systems that were originally supposed to served people, but instead they
enslaved and terrorized them, the play was reviewed by Clive Barnes from New
York Times as "funny, entertaining and current subtle political
satire", and applauded for "using artificial language as a metaphor
that undoubtedly depicts the politic systems imposed on people without respect
for human values."
In 1983,
when The Memorandum premiered in Vienna, Havel wrote a note in the program,
stating how the perfidious way Ballas dumps ashes on his head after the fall of
Ptydepe to secure his position in the future era of chorukor suddenly reminded
him of the behaviour of many of Czecho-Slovak politicians in 1968, when they
publicly repented, swearing that they will never go out of the right path so that,
when the time is right, they can continue to do the same things they did
before, a little bit smarter, and therefore more dangerously. And in Gross,
who, reportedly in an effort to rescues his office from Ballas, is willing to
do anything that Ballas will order him, he suddenly saw and heard many of his
former friends and acquaintances, who then held important positions and
advocated everything they did precisely in that perverse way, in which the
values are reportedly saved by being systematically liquidated.
Memorandum,
naturally, is not a play about Czecho-Slovak history, but an universal parable
that wants to say something about man and society in general. It relies,
however, on experience his author made in that part of the world in which he
was born and destined to live. Back in the 1970s, it was banned from Prague,
but spread its message in theatres around the world. And when it finally found
its way back home, it was in time when countless Ballas' again vowed to never
lose humanity, and countless Gross' promised to never yield before Ballas. So
Havel's wish, for Memorandum to stop being valid in Czecho-Slovakia, was never
fulfilled.
Bibliography
Havel, V. and Blackwell, V.
(1967). The memorandum. New York: Grove Press, Inc.
Freimanová, A. (2013). Výzvy,
paradoxy, hry: Václav Havel -- II. Vyrozumění (25. 11. 2013). [online]
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Dec. 2017].
Velíšek, M. (2016). Václav
Havel: Vyrozumění. [online] Rozhlas.cz. Available at:
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[Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].
Koukolíčková, L. (2009). Václav
Havel – Vyrozumění. [online] Vaše literatura. Available at:
http://www.vaseliteratura.cz/ctenarsky-denik/721-vyrozumeni [Accessed 1 Dec.
2017].
Einhorn, E. (2015). Václav
Havel: Personal Truth as Political Theatre. [online] HowlRound. Available
at: http://howlround.com/v-clav-havel-personal-truth-as-political-theatre
[Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].
eNotes.
(n.d.). The Memorandum Summary - eNotes.com. [online] Available at:
https://www.enotes.com/topics/memorandum [Accessed 6 Nov. 2017].
World Cultures Festival 2013. (n.d.). World
Cultures Festival 2013 – Lasting Legacies of Eastern Europe: Václav Havel’s The
Memorandum. [online] Available at:
http://www.worldfestival.gov.hk/2013/en/theatre_memorandum.html [Accessed 6
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Illustrations
Fig. 1-3: Diddams, E. (2013). The Memorandum -
Vaclav Havel - Part One. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ic3hu16ZG4&t=7s
[Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].
