Three Accounts of Utopia, II
The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.
William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays
Z thought of himself as leading a rather ascetic lifestyle, all things considered, except in this one regard: each morning at half past eight, he allowed himself the luxury of standing a long time before the bathroom mirror. At all other times (and one means all) he dedicated himself utterly to his career, to his station, to public values. This little indulgence alone was consolation enough for him, although (and he would never tell anyone this) he was quite certain the ritual could not be forborne without putting his well-being at considerable risk.
Z kept the room well lit and as clean as possible; there could be no stain on the mirror, no crack, and the whole ritual must be performed in the aura of the startlingly white light fixture, looking upon which he could not help but be drawn to ideas of purity, of divinity. He bathed and brushed his teeth with only such perfunctory ceremony as the tasks required, and then stood over the sink under that divine light, observing himself with the keenest interest, and speaking:
– We do not ask only that you speak our language, sir, but that you speak only our language. It is a matter of import. Your participation must be enthusiastic and it must be exclusive. Leave mother tongues for mothers, for mothers must be left behind when one wishes to join something greater than a family.
He never broke eye contact with his reflection during these pronouncements, for all the gesticulation that accompanied them. That was crucial.
– As the venerable N puts it, ‘a nation’s strength, like that of a work of art, depends wholly upon its cohesiveness.’ In a poetic idiom, we may quote W:
Whilom, a city stood on grounds
Of mutable diversity
Her walls builded of mismatched stones
An you will look an will you see
That chaunged ben these misthought walls
Into a rubble by the sea.
These quotations nobody was ever sure about. They might have been real words from the half-forgotten generations before the war, or the sudden inventions of Z’s peculiar genius. They were sufficiently impressive either way—even those he told only to the mirror. And these were many; little that he said to himself there made it into his actual speeches without significant reworking. This was, after all, an indulgence, and not work.
On this particular morning, the first day of the thirteenth month of the nation’s fifty-seventh year, when Z was not exactly old but one could no longer reasonably describe him as being in his youth, on this particular morning, Z was not finished speaking to himself in the mirror when somebody knocked at the door.
A minute later, now dressed in a shabby green suit (which hung baggy from his shoulders though he was not especially thin) and standing by the front door, Z took a deep breath. The handle turned, and the door swung open without ceremony. For a man of his station it was considered indecent to open one’s own door for official visitors. The heavy door missed him by an inch when it opened. (He was just far enough back; he had checked.) Two figures, a man and a woman, stood outside in brown suits.
– Z, said the woman.
He nodded.
– We’ve come from the Ministry, said the man.
Everyone knew this referred to the Ministry of Propaganda.
– Go on.
He glanced at his watch without taking anything in from the hands and numbers. For effect. The other man looked at his own watch quizzically before replying.
– They want you to come in. We want you to come in. There’s
– A situation, the woman said.
Z shrugged.
– Irregular as ever.
He heaved a dry chuckle, which the others appeared to resent.
– Are you coming? said the woman with a level gaze.
Z got his hat.
The Ministry, a building of frightening proportions and irregular layout, with which Z was intimately familiar from his years of service, now rose before him with a new quality he could not define. It was nothing in the colour or the shape. Perhaps the weather was different. Had he ever seen the place in a light fog before? He must have. The uncertainty bothered him: one could not have words failing one. They were essential.
– Peculiar this morning, he said.
The man and the woman ignored him and the three of them walked on together, climbing the wide public staircase leading to the Ministry’s grandiose arched entrance. Z lagged a little behind. Bothersome. Words kept escaping him this morning which he would rather have kept to himself, and he found even the words he did intend were getting the wrong reactions. Irregular as ever. Stupid, stupid. This was what they got for disturbing his indulgence: a sloppy performance. Must keep an eye on it.
Z struggled to keep up with his impatient guides as they ascended the last few steps. At the top was a series of arched doorways, leading not into a single large foyer as one might expect, but each opening onto its own corridor. One was expected to know where one was going. Out of sorts and always a touch disoriented by the place, Z found himself glad of his escort. They held open a set of double doors for him, one standing on either side.
– This way, Z, said the woman, gesturing down the corridor beyond.
– Thank you, thank you, he said too quickly, too submissively.
He entered and took a few steps down the corridor, his boots echoing against the marble floor. He turned his head to look over his shoulder, still walking, more confident now that they were behind him, and began to ask
– So, what’s
which was as far as he got before noticing the doors had slipped silently shut, and the man and the woman had not followed him in but instead separated and dispersed into the sea of anonymous faces outside. Or so he supposed; he faced only the doors. This shook him more than he felt it had any right to. It was never exactly inviting, this place, but today’s harshness felt of a different quality. Z stopped in his tracks and gazed down the corridor ahead of him, which snaked side to side in a way which, given his knowledge of the adjacent corridors’ presence, seemed to flirt dangerously with architectural impossibility. He supposed, feebly, that someone would be there to meet him up ahead, if he just followed the corridor. This thought kindling him, he set off. Doors lined the corridor on either side, but all were shut. Finding this liberating, he forged ahead. Usually clearer instructions were provided, and then after visiting the same destination enough times one knew one’s way by feel. Consequently, he could no longer recall the numbers of the rooms; the numbers one needed only the first couple of times, a key to decode the space. After that the architecture, however bizarre, became a real physical presence in one’s life (for it was almost always the same room one was to seek out) and the numbers evaporated. Adrift, Z now cursed the slothful instinct which had allowed the numbers to be forgotten.
The corridor swerved first left then right, and at one point seemed to turn completely back the way Z had come, in a broad curve. Knowing this could not be correct, he put it from his mind.
At last he found himself proceeding in a straight line. This stretch wasn’t without its oddity: mirrors at little intervals, some concave, some convex, none regular, and always the one type facing its opposite, lined the corridor up to the stairs at the end. Above each mirror was written either CONCAVE or CONVEX on a small plaque. Z found the sight distressing in a way he could not have articulated, and hurried on before he could catch himself staring.
He had almost finished shuffling down this corridor, eyes fixed ahead, when he noticed a door standing open to his left. In the room a lot of people sat staring at a projection on the opposite wall. It was a new proposal for a poster or something of the sort, apparently. It contained an image of the large, pale face of a strong-featured man evidently intended as a sort of masculine ideal. Accompanying the image in very large print were the words
100% NATURAL.
Z struggled with it for a moment. What could it be intended to mean? He felt that it was inarguable insofar as it was divorced from the possibility of meaning. The image was self-evidently doctored, an amalgam of people. What did NATURAL signify? From whom was the trait NATURAL to be supposed absent? Z was well used to sophistry, but there was a brazen quality about this display that began to unnerve him. Not now, he told himself, and hurried upstairs before he could be noticed.
Z waited in a chair outside an office, having found himself, without much further diversion, in what appeared to be the right place—though one could never be sure. The sign on the door said K. Opposite, a statue of some young dark exotic creature: K’s big break. They had made such a fuss about it at the time. Evidently retired from the museum now, some other novelty in its place. Privately, the statue bothered Z. He did not like to look at it; it was one of those with the eyes that seem to follow one everywhere.
K came out wearing a suit of some dark blue utilitarian material, and nodded at Z, who stood to shake his hand.
– Good to see you, Z.
– Good to see you, K.
– Trouble finding the place?
– No, no, said Z, sensing an unwelcome subtext.
– Shall we?
They stepped into the office, a long narrow room with a window at the end, and settled into comfortable chairs on either side of a large desk near the window. K waited a moment with the white midday light framing him, a moment Z would usually have filled with some impressive talk. Seeing that none was forthcoming, K said
– To business. You are here because there is a situation.
– I’ve heard as much, Z replied with disdain that did not quite fit him.
– Somebody upstairs is pushing through something big. A new surveillance bill, from what I can glean. I don’t know the details—doesn’t matter. What matters is the mess it’s stirring up. Threats of terror. Nothing’s materialized yet, but they’re credible. You need to spin this. Turn the threats into the justification for the surveillance bill, the old turnaround.
– The old turnaround.
– I don’t know, manipulation is your job. Handle this.
Z let the spiel wash over him, baulking a little at ‘manipulation’, and afterwards thought it seemed a little thin. This was what they had dragged him up here for? He was supposed to be preparing his regular speeches, drafting announcements, doing the work of the government’s pet philosopher, not wasting a day on something that could have been incorporated into his regular schedule. Something was wrong, but his mouth, caught up in the excitement of a new object of rhetoric, had already started talking.
– No. That’s too easy. Different angle. Q once said that ‘even in a hypothetical perfect society,’ (a society like ours, ladies and gentlemen, yes, a nice flourish) ‘a certain percentage of people will always rebel. These people are not mere degenerates, but neither are they legitimate dissenters; rather, they can be considered a statistical and genetic certainty.’ If these people will always revolt, then we must make it our task et cetera et cetera. A hard sell, yes. Too esoteric?
K, grinning and a little more at ease now, said
– The man for the job. They want you to give the speech tonight, in the auditorium upstairs. There’ll be a live audience and a broadcast.
Z felt his doubts rise to the surface again, tried to phrase them diplomatically.
– And there’s really nothing more to this, K?
– Nothing, he said, and span his chair to face the window. There’s a room down the hall where you can work, third on your left.
As Z got up to leave, K said without turning, and with a greater wistfulness than was strictly appropriate,
– It’s always good to see you, Z.
Z had written the speech down for show but would not actually read from it; he never did. The thing usually needed finessing, when you actually said it out loud, and for that purpose it was better to go off script. The paper stood on the lectern in front of him, where he shifted it with his fingers, a tic, and the letters swam. He glanced out the window: evening closing in. He looked at the audience assembled in the auditorium before him: a little off, again. He was accustomed to a warm reception, but today the crowd buzzed with anticipation of a different timbre. He looked behind him, trying to catch the eye of any of the several guards stationed along the back wall, but they stared straight ahead, impassive. Absurdly he glanced at the camera over to his left as if to ask its advice. It went on filming him, impassive. He noticed K’s absence as a sort of presence.
Something felt very wrong, but his experience told him that one’s only recourse in dealing with a wrong one could not control was to argue for its rightness, and besides he was not sure how to do anything else. So somebody signalled that the presentation should begin, and the dazzling white lights shone on Z, and he gripped the lectern, and he shifted the papers, and he said
– Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It will startle you to learn that, per the venerable philosophe Q, some percentage of the people in this very room represent a threat to the very fibre of Utopia. Q asserts that dissent is ‘neither the product of mere degeneracy, nor legitimate protest against the state, but rather a predetermined element in that state.’
Nobody had stirred. It was intended to be stirring. The French a mistake, certainly.
– A predetermined element! A deterministic viewpoint, ladies and gentlemen, would usually posit decisive action as a futile, meaningless endeavour, given the inevitability that what shall come to pass shall come to pass. Are we to treat the presence of dissent in our society, then, as a case that will resolve itself or will not, but cannot be positively addressed? Q does not answer this question directly, but a passage from R proves illuminating
He was about to enter into this verse when all the blood drained from his face at the sight of K bursting into the room through the double doors to his left, raising an accusatory finger after a beat. The camera swivelled to face the interruption almost before it had happened. K’s face which was harder than it had been before seemed to move mechanically to form the word
– Traitor.
And Z knew that this was the very wrong, and he knew also that one’s only recourse in dealing with a wrong one could not control was to argue for its rightness. If it was to be a show trial, he would show them his philosophy could wrap itself around that too. He had not put this much work into assimilating, into taking the unspeakable into his heart, only to become a simple mute traitor for the benefit of one of their irrationalist games. And perhaps this was to be the final test—whether one could generate one’s own condemnation out of the ether. So he turned back to the crowd before K could speak on, and he thought amor fati, and he thought Job rebuked by his selves, and the camera swivelled to face him, and gripping the lectern tightly he spake unto them:
– Ladies and gentlemen, I asked K to come before us today because, indeed, the thing he says is true. The accusation came at the right moment. I was just explaining the inevitability of dissent, and here I stand, living proof! I have strayed. I am rightly censured. Let no man jump to my defence. Only, let me explain. Ladies and gentlemen, the crime I have committed is not an obscure one; indeed, it stands in plain sight. I have erred precisely in assuming that the nation
(and here raising his hands towards the light)
– that the nation requires my justification. The nation needs no support, no foundation. It is sovereign, and the presumption I have displayed in speaking for it, in assuming the voice of the one sovereign state, is rightly marked intolerable, indeed, traitorous, by my complainant K. I stand before you humbled and obeisant. I stand before you, in point of fact,
Z had said accidentally the only true thing. He had not had time to work out that under the circumstances it was exactly the wrong thing, that the only practical conclusion to be drawn from it on his part was silence, immediate and permanent. He glanced once in K’s direction and caught a mixture of pity and annoyance in his face that should have warned him but did not.
Before Z could go on any longer with his amicable babble, the room filled with cries and jeers as an anonymous figure stepped up behind him and broke his neck.
