The Memorandum by Václav Havel

First published:Vyrozumění, 1966 (English translation, 1967)

First produced: 1965, at the Balustrade Theatre, Prague, Czechoslovakia

Type of plot: Satire

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: Prague

Principal Characters:

• Josef Gross, the director of an office
• Jan Baláš, his deputy
• Zdeněk Mašát, the chief of a translation office
• Jan Kunc, a Ptydepe linguist
• Helena, a bureaucratic official
• Marie, a secretary in the translation office
• Hana, Gross’s secretary
• J. V. Perina, the Ptydepe instructor
• Václav Kubš, a silent man of unspecified importance
• Jirka, the office spy
• Ivo Kalous, a small bureaucrat

The Play

The curtain rises on three similar offices placed side by side on the stage. They differ in the arrangement of furniture and so on, but, as Václav Havel says, the atmosphere in each is exactly the same. Gross, the director of one of the offices, enters and begins to sort his mail. He throws some away, then halts in surprise when he opens one letter. He begins to read aloud from the letter, which seems to be written in some nonsense language. Baláš and Kubš enter the office and Baláš explains to his boss that this letter is written in Ptydepe, a new experimental bureaucratic language which Baláš himself has ushered into use at Gross’s office without the latter’s knowledge. Gross, understandably, is taken aback at this effrontery, yet what surprises him most is that a language which so few bureaucrats can understand should be introduced into the bureaucracy as an efficiency measure. Gross is left with a document that may be very important, yet which he cannot read. Hana, his secretary, informs him that a translation office has been installed in order to deal with such problems.

After a short scene 2, in which the audience witnesses a Ptydepe class in progress, the action shifts to the translation office. Getting the translation proves to be no easy matter. Trying to explain his problem to Mašát, the head of the translation office, Gross is constantly interrupted by people coming in and going out. It seems that Mašát, and most of the other officials as well, have only one thing on their mind: lunch. Besides the fact that Gross simply cannot get Mašát to pay attention to him, it seems that he has stepped into another, totally incomprehensible world: A man of tradition and humanist culture, he is constantly addressed in the familiar by Helena, a total stranger, which is socially unacceptable in polite Czech speech.

Getting the text translated will be an impossible task. Mašát cannot allow the text to be translated for Gross until he has official permission from another bureau. Permission, on the other hand, cannot be granted until this latter bureau knows what is in the Ptydepe text, and they cannot read Ptydepe. Gross, it seems, is the only person who can hand over the text for translation, but he cannot do so without permission from this second bureau—and so it goes: a vicious circle.

Gross finally decides to go about the matter in an unofficial way. Playing up a bit to Marie, the translation secretary, he proposes that she translate the text for him on the sly. Jirka, the office spy (concealed in the wall), is privy to this exchange, unfortunately for Gross and Marie.

Gross, understandably, wants to do away with Ptydepe. Baláš, however, backed by the ominously ever-silent Kubš, overrides Gross’s determination in scene 4 with a bit of three-penny blackmail. Gross now “realizes” how indispensable Baláš is to him, especially as far as Ptydepe is concerned, and proposes that they run the office on an equal footing. This short scene is not yet complete when Baláš subtly declares himself the new chief of the office, and Gross agrees to become his deputy.

In scene 5, the new deputy takes part in Ptydepe class and fails miserably to understand the basics of this incomprehensible tongue. Unable to learn Ptydepe, Gross resumes the sisyphean labor of trying to get his text translated. He returns to the translation office and finds the same confusion and party atmosphere as in scene 3. Again unable to get anyone’s attention, inundated by the devolution of conversation into blabbering Ptydepe, Gross finally screams out “Quiet!” Everyone freezes. Gross, relieved that at last someone is listening to him, does not realize that Baláš has just entered from behind with Kubš. This is the reason for the sudden stillness. Gross continues his tirade against the vicious circle of Ptydepe, inveighing against the new language in no uncertain terms—still unaware of Baláš’s presence. At the end of the scene, Gross dutifully confesses his “crime” of little faith and bureaucratic sabotage and is fired by Baláš. Jirka, the office spy, is named Baláš’s new deputy.

The increased duties of office head, however, are beginning to weigh upon Baláš. Having to deal with Ptydepe himself now, he is beginning to see the difficulties that Gross originally faced. In the seventh scene, when Gross arrives to finalize the details of his expulsion, Baláš reconsiders and offers Gross the now-vacant post of office spy.

Now the fortunes of Gross begin to rise as those of Ptydepe continue to fall. The number of Ptydepe students has dwindled to one, as the audience learns in scene 8. In scene 9, there occurs a curious, intimate exchange between Gross and Marie. The secretary of the translation department, ever sympathetic to the director fallen from grace, tells him that she has found a position for him at the theater where she has a brother. Gross is moved, yet declines with thanks, as Baláš has made him his deputy once again. He does not particularly relish this, as the matter of blackmail, which Baláš holds over his head, still clouds his future. Marie, with naïve faith, is sure that all will come out right in the end. Gross gently scolds her naïveté, as his own humanistic leanings and intellectual, dreamy nature have only won him trouble in this practical world. At the end of the scene, Marie translates Gross’s letter from Ptydepe. Ironically enough, it is a note from higher-ups expressing satisfaction with Gross and praising him for his fight against “anti-humanistic” Ptydepe.

Gross demands his position back. Baláš hands it over with melancholy, yet characteristic sangfroid, and Gross is once again director. However, nothing has really changed in this bureaucratic morass. In scene 11, by another bureaucratic edict, Ptydepe is replaced with a new artificial language called Chorukor, which, although based on completely different linguistic principles, promises to be just as incomprehensible and inefficient as the fake tongue it replaces.

At the conclusion of the play, Marie, fired from her post for her unauthorized translation of Gross’s missive (which Jirka, renamed office spy, witnessed), asks her friend for some help. Gross, however, afer a long, moving speech, in which he cites Hamlet, refuses her petition and goes to lunch with the rest of the bureaucrats.

Dramatic Devices

Ptydepe (pronounced “petty dip”), the language invented by the bureaucracy, is the play’s chief dramatic device. It stands between people and their ability to fulfill themselves through labor, and creates a situation in which a person, the animal who talks, is no longer the master of language but rather its slave. Havel’s bureaucratic tongue owes much to the governmental “Newspeak” in George Orwell’s prophetic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (pb. 1949), yet it is all the more threatening in that it is not made up of familiar, if truncated, words, but is a totally alien jumble that allows one no familiar entry point into its disturbing linguistic maze.

Havel built his satire on communist bureaucracy around the incomprehensible artificial tongue in order to emphasize as concretely as possible the inhuman, inefficient, and absurd nature of the bureaucratic system itself. Communication is the basic requirement of all human enterprise, and when the possibilities of communication are minimized or destroyed, cooperation and progress necessarily come to a standstill. All “business” in such a situation loses touch with reality and becomes nothing more than an empty ritual, a fake. When an institution or government is unable to order its own affairs, it cannot pretend to order the affairs of others. Thus The Memorandum is not only a satire that makes light of communist bureaucracy; indeed, it is a satire on the communist system itself, a system which subordinates all to ideology, including logic.

This point is further emphasized with the introduction of Chorukor, the new artificial language of bureaucracy which is to replace the “outmoded” Ptydepe. One might think that with the failure of Ptydepe, the bureaucracy would have learned its lesson and resigned from all such foolishness. The introduction of Chorukor shows that, on the contrary, the bureaucratic system of communism is already so soaked through with incompetence, absurdity, and corruption that it is unable to find a way out of a situation that it recognizes as unproductive.

This emphasis on the vicious circle of red tape about which Gross complains, and which cannot be escaped in a society such as the one described by Havel, is the main reason behind the introduction of the new language in scene 11, as it really plays no role in the denouement of the play. Also suggested by Chorukor is the ease with which a communist society dispenses with the “truths” of yesterday, replacing them with the new “truths” of today. (This process is excellently demonstrated by the workings of the “Ministry of Truth” in Nineteen Eighty-Four.) It is also possible to find a subtle pun suggesting the excessive docility and lack of independence of Gross’s society (and, in the end, of Gross himself) in the name of the new language, as the word chór in Czech means “chorus.”

Further adding to the atmosphere of threat is the unseen stage presence of the “office spy.” The audience hears other characters converse with him time and again, yet he is seen onstage only rarely. He crawls out of the woodwork like an ominous cockroach from time to time, yet his (sometimes vocal) presence can be felt in all three identically arranged offices which make up the stage scenery. He is a comic figure, if threateningly so. His clownishness (he emerges from the wall backside first) is a jarring picture which thrusts the following question at the audience: If these people are so absurd and inefficient, so comical in their incapacities, what is it that is making the audience so afraid of them, so willing to put up with the boobish eye of Big Brother in the casement? This dramatic device, which can perhaps be seen as the cornerstone of absurdity in The Memorandum, suggests that the common people in such a society are downtrodden because they agree to be used as doormats by the laughable dolts who “govern” them. As in Polish poet Stanisław Barańczak’s verse “Ci mężczyźni, tak potężni” (“Those men, so powerful”), The Memorandum makes the point that, if only “we” would for a moment cease to be so afraid of “them” at the top, we would see that it is really they who are most afraid.

Critical Context

The Memorandum must be understood in the context of the everyday situation of the citizens of the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War era. As is clear from the numerous “stupid policeman” jokes which color the contemporary humor of these peoples, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and Hungarians were accustomed to looking on their governmental systems with a large dose of satire and irony. However, as mentioned above, as incompetent as the socialist bureaucracies of Eastern and Central Europe were, they were not to be taken lightly. In addition to the external threat of reprisal against nonconforming citizens (which saw Václav Havel imprisoned several times), there existed also a no less serious internal threat, that which destroys Gross: the danger of acquiescing to the system and renouncing one’s own inner self for the external peace of an obedient, well-fed beast of burden.

Sources for Further Study

Goetz-Stankiewicz, Markéta. The Silenced Theatre: Czech Playwrights Without a Stage. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1979.

Goetz-Stankiewicz, Markéta. “Václav Havel: A Writer for Today’s Season.” World Literature Today 55 (Summer, 1981): 389-393.

Goetz-Stankiewicz, Markéta, and Phyllis Carey, eds. Critical Essays on Václav Havel. New York: G. K. Hall, 1999.

Kriseova, Eda. Václav Havel: The Authorized Biography. Collingdale, Pa.: Diane, 1993.

Schonberg, Michal. “A Biographical Note on Václav Havel.” Modern Drama 23 (March, 1980): 1-5.

Schumschida, Walter. “Václav Havel: Between the Theatre of the Absurd and Engaged Theatre.” In Fiction and Drama in Eastern and Southeastern Europe: Evolution and Experiment in the Postwar Period, edited by Henrik Birnbaum and Thomas Eckman. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, 1980.

Trensky, Paul I. Czech Drama Since World War II. White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1978.