11a

The play is a very witty work about a British academic, Professor Anderson, who
is flying to Prague to attend the „Colloquium Philosophicum Prague 77,‟ an
international conference of scholars. He is scheduled to give a lecture on the topic
„Ethical Fact in Ethical Fiction‟ and also attend a football match – both, obviously,
Václav Havel completely unpolitical activities. However, during his visit in Prague, Anderson is
Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz inevitably drawn into a political situation. A former student of his, Pavel Hollar, who
is now reduced to cleaning lavatories at a bus station, appears in his hotel room and
What power–what group–finds it eternally necessary to make people as character- asks him to smuggle out a thesis arguing that the ethics of the state must be based on
less and submissive as possible? ... Why must peoples‟ support be won only at the the fundamental ethics of the individual. Anderson, well-versed in ethical problems in
price of their moral devastation? fiction, finds himself in a very real ethical dilemma: after all, as a guest of the
LUDVÍK VACULÍK government he felt he could not, with a clean conscience, smuggle out what that state
considered to be subversive literature. However, in the end Anderson performs an
When Tom Stoppard, the well-known British playwright of Czech birth, had action which could or could not be considered ethical, depending on the
completed Jumpers1 which opened in London in February 1972 and became an circumstances: he puts Hollar‟s thesis into the briefcase of an unsuspecting colleague
immediate international success, nine years had passed since Václav Havel had who unwittingly carries it out of the country. „Ethics,‟ Anderson concludes when
written The Increased Difficulty of Concentration which anticipated Stoppard‟s play in informing his stunned colleague of the latter‟s unconscious act of political smuggling,
several ways. The heros of both plays are scholars (Stoppard‟s is a moral philosopher, when their plane has left Czechoslovakia far below and behind, „is a very complicated
Havel‟s a social scientist) who are trying to define – in hilarious, utterly confused business.4
lectures and dictations which provide much amusement for the audience – the When Top Stoppard created the figure of Pavel Hollar, he obviously thought of
existence of moral absolutes and the essence of man. In both cases, however, these Václav Havel, although he was aware that Havel „would be the first to object that in
valiant, if grotesque, attempts are thwarted because the thinkers are constantly inter- mentioning his name only, I am putting undue emphasis on his part in the
rupted by the mad ways of the surrounding world. When the plays end, their heros Czechoslovakian human rights movement. Others have gone to gaol and many more
are not one iota closer to either the nature of morality or the nature of man. have been victimized. This is true. But I have in mind not just the Chartist but the
Although their characters have similar problems on stage, the authors themselves author of The Garden Party, The Memorandum, The Audience and other plays. It is to a
have been leading – particularly during recent years – drastically different lives. Since fellow writer that I dedicate Professional Foul in admiration.‟5
early 1977, when he was arrested and imprisoned as one of the three spokesmen for A short time after writing these words Stoppard went to Czechoslovakia in June
Charter 77,2 Václav Havel‟s name has been appearing in the Western press with 1977 (for the first time since he had left it as a small child thirty eight years ago) in
increasing frequency. In 1978, when Tom Stoppard dedicated his television play order to meet Václav Havel.6 They met in Havel‟s converted farmhouse for a few
Professional Foul to Václav Havel, the latter moved as it were officially into the intense hours – two outstanding writers, born within a few months of each other in
consciousness of Western writers. „I had ill-formed and unformed thoughts of writing the same small country, whom life had led such drastically different ways. The two
about Czechoslovakia for a year or two,‟ Stoppard writes in the spring of 1977 in his men knew they were kindred spirits and knew they were trying to do basically the
introduction to Professional Foul. „Moreover, I had been strongly drawn to the work same thing: to show in their creative medium what they conceived to be the truth
and personality of the arrested playwright Václav Havel. Thus it would be natural to about our age and its people lost in the network of vast societies. But only one of
expect that the setting and subject matter of Professional Foul declared themselves as them is allowed to speak, to have his plays produced, to see international audiences
soon as the Charter story broke ...‟3 respond to his humour, his thought, his brilliant histrionics. The other one is isolated
from any stage, any audience; he has to let his plays, like bottles on the ocean, be
1 Tom Stoppard Jumpers (London 1972)
2 Charter 77, signed by over 300 Czech and Slovak writers and intellectuals, has become a production of Macbeth put on in a Prague apartment by Pavel Kohout and his friends, some of
symbol of the struggle for human rights and freedom of expression; the Charter urged the them banned from the Czech stage (see illustration).
Czechoslovak government to carry out the promises it made at Helsinki in 1975, and pointed 4 Every Good Boy & Professional Foul 93

out that anyone who tried to claim these rights was persecuted. 5 Ibid, Introduction 9
3 Stoppard, Introduction to very Good Boy Deserves Favour & Professional Foul (London 1978) 6 For a lively discussion of the surprising parallel between the two playwrights see Kenneth

8. More recently Stoppard has written Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, the second part about the Tynan „Profiles‟ The New Yorker (19 Dec. 1977) 41ff.
carried to foreign shores. This is an incredible contrast in fates between writers who while reflecting on the highly problematic nature of the very term „Theatre of the
have such similar views of the world. Absurd,‟ we considered the way a mere working definition, conceived for the sake of
clarity, can create an absolute order which proliferates itself with surprising
In an essay contributed to the Times Literary Supplement in 1967 Václav Havel makes reproductive powers. It is precisely this type of situation that makes up the core of
the comment that theatre „attains immortality only through its topicality. It can only Havel‟s theatre: an exploration of the tremendous power of the word or phrase which
achieve lasting value by the profundity of its topical value.‟7 Nine years later, in an becomes the unquestioned property of all, prevents anyone from thinking, and is the
author‟s comment published in the first edition of his suppressed plays, Havel makes prime enemy of common sense and reason.
the same point but modifies it this time with a sad undertone because it is no longer Critics and commentators never fail to mention the inherent „logic‟ of Havel‟s
possible to attain that concrete realization of his plays on a Czech stage. He tells us writings. Jan Grossman was the first to apply the word11 to Havel‟s works and it has
that „I must lean on something I know, on the concrete background of my life, and been mentioned in variations ever since. One has indeed the feeling that events in
only by means of that authenticity can I – perhaps – give account of the times ... I Havel‟s plays follow each other with inevitable logical causality. Its particular quality,
must open myself much more fully to what was missing in the poetic structure of my however, needs some consideration. Havel‟s plays work with the causality of
older plays, to what I would call the existential dimension of the world.‟8 mechanism. His is a unique combination of logical thinking and the inevitability of a
In approaching Havel‟s brilliant and startling plays it might be useful to become mechanism set in motion. Take an electric carrot-slicer. It will go on cutting as long
aware of how the main theme of his work, which had been formulated as „the as it receives an object of a certain shape – that of a carrot. It will go on slicing,
relationship between man and the system‟9 in 1968, expanded and deepened to what irrespective of any other considerations. We are reminded of one of Charlie Chaplin‟s
the author himself calls the „existential dimension of the world.‟ Perhaps the most brilliant scenes when he is working on an assembly line and, by failing to react
development Havel has undergone in his relatively brief career as a dramatist can be predictably, upsets the smoothly running mechanism of the whole establishment.
followed best by starting with a simple proposition: that social systems make their – Here we have the stuff Havel‟s plays are made of: the insoluble tension between the
more or less pronounced – demands to organize individual man into a system, in individual who knows that a carrot is a carrot for reasons other than its shape alone,
order to achieve certain – more or less laudable – aims which in turn are to serve the and the system which identifies a carrot as a carrot solely by a mechanical reaction,
interests of man. Already we see a suggestion of a vicious circle in the argument: man leading, more often than not, to a logical disaster.
is an organism, the system functions as a mechanism; one must subdue the other or Ionesco, too, was concerned with this problem. Take, for example, the male
be subdued. Around these tensions Václav Havel builds his unique, grimly comic characters in The Bald Soprano. When it occurs repeatedly that there is no-one at the
theatre. door after the doorbell has been ringing, they base their speculations on logical
Since the mid-sixties, when his first two plays were translated into English and theory: „When one hears the doorbell ring, that means someone is at the door ringing
German, Havel – together with the Polish writer Slawomir Mrożek – has become to have the door opened.‟ The female characters, however, base their reasoning on
known in the West as the prime example of the Theatre of the Absurd in Eastern the logic of experience: „That is true in theory. But in reality things happen differently
Europe. Havel‟s actual connection with the playwrights of the Absurd is that he read ... Experience teaches us that when one hears the doorbell ring it is because there is
them, loved them, and most likely derived some ideas from them. Nevertheless, the never anyone there.‟12 Both lines of reasoning, since made without the „logic‟ of
absurdity of his own plays is highly original and of a different brand than that of common sense, are proved wrong; and Ionesco leaves it at that. Another case in
Ionesco, Genet or Adamov. Havel‟s theatre explores language as the primary agent in point is the conversation in Beckett‟s Waiting for Godot in which Vladimir and
man‟s absurd situation.10 The real hero of his plays is the mechanistic phrase, uttered
from habit, repeated with parrot-like readiness, which decides people‟s actions,
composes events, and creates its own absurd reality. At the outset of our first chapter,
11 Grossman „Předmluva‟ in Havel Protokoly (Prague 1966) 12-13. Jan Grossman, who

worked very closely with Havel and directed both The Garden Party and The Memorandum at the
7 Václav Havel „Politics and the Theatre‟ Theatre On the Balustrade in Prague, informs us that Havel‟s world „consists of real
8 Havel „Dovětek autora‟ Hry 1970-1976 (Toronto 1977) 306. This is the first publication in components, existing everywhere, even banal in their daily occurrence‟; and that the
Czech of five of Havel‟s plays which were not allowed to be published in Czechoslovakia. playwright‟s method in presenting them is „exactly as real, we might even say “logical.”‟ The
9 This idea is formulated in Hořínek „Člověk systematizovaný‟ Divadlo (Oct./Nov. 1968) 4- fact that these considerations caused Grossman doubts as to whether Havel could be counted
10. among the „absurd‟ playwrights merely shows how vague the term itself has remained even in
10 Another way of revealing the absurdity of language on stage is reflected in the the minds of people who have given it some thought.
experiments in silence of Samuel Beckett and the Austrian writer Peter Handke. 12 Ionesco The Bald Soprano in Four Plays tr Donald M. Allen (New York 1969) 23
Estragon are discussing the possibility of hanging themselves. Estragon, having leadership) and analyses its consequences with minute logic. Regarded on the surface
warmed up to the idea, wants quick action: the absurd has no place at all in Havel‟s work. But then, in the fashion of some
Surrealist painters, he injects into this perfectly sane situation one absurd element
ESTRAGON Let‟s hand ourselves immediately! which inverts the whole meaning and stands it on its head. As in our examples from
VLADIMIR From a bough? they go towards the tree I wouldn‟t trust it. Ionesco and Beckett, human reasoning is again proved irrational. However, with
ESTRAGON We can always try. Havel the point at which the „reversal into absurdity‟ takes place is identifiable: it is
VLADIMIR Go ahead. the moment when the project in a man‟s mind – an idea, let us say – can create a
ESTRAGON After you. mechanism which, once it begins to function, adapts everything to its function and
VLADIMIR No, no, you first. makes it part of the mechanism. The theme of mechanization in Havel‟s plays is the
ESTRAGON Why me? search for that concealed point at which reasoning becomes absurd. The same theme
VLADIMIR You‟re lighter than I am. in the Western branch of absurd theatre revolves around the claim that this point can
ESTRAGON . Just so! never be found.
VLADIMIR I don‟t understand. Martin Esslin has pointed out that it is a fusion of the worlds of Franz Kafka and
ESTRAGON Use your intelligence, can‟t you? Jaroslav Hašek – metaphysical anguish and low-life clowning both peculiarly rooted
Vladimir uses his intelligence in Czech tradition, which we find in Havel‟s plays.14 This combination is obviously
VLADIMIR finally I remain in the dark. reminiscent of Beckett‟s plays, yet any comparison is very tenuous. The latter writes
ESTRAGON This is how it is, he reflects The bough ... the bough ... angrily Use in a language that seems to be transparent and makes us realize the superficiality of all
your head, can‟t you? dialogue; the conversations of Beckett‟s characters seem like fences put up to
VLADIMIR You‟re my only hope. designate some kind of – perhaps arbitrary – order in the vast spaces of the unknow-
ESTRAGON With effort Gogo light – bough not break – Gogo dead. Didi heavy able. Havel sets up his language as a barrier to knowing and realizing anything at all.
– bough break – Didi alone. Whereas– Where Beckett questions without an answer, Havel answers without a question.
VLADIMIR I hadn‟t thought of that13
The stage settings in Havel‟s plays resemble each other. On the one hand they
Vladimir hoped to convince Estragon with a logical argument: Estragon was remind us of Kafka‟s oppressive houses with no way out; on the other hand they
lighter. Estragon proceeds to reveal the fallaciousness of this reasoning by another bring to mind Beckett‟s bare stage, where a leafless tree, a chair, handbag or step-
type of logic. Each reasons to his own advantage; the situation dictates their ladder each takes on a vast importance beyond its actual usage and becomes a sign
reasoning. Vladimir‟s logic says the lighter man should try first because the bough indicating the nature of the characters‟ lives. The most distinguishing mark of Havel‟s
should undergo the easier test first and, having passed it, could be submitted to the stage is a kind of standardized neutrality: the characters move about in the aridity of
more difficult test. Estragon‟s logic says if the bough passed the difficult test first, functional rooms and offices.
logically it would also bear up under easier tests. Vladimir has based his logic on But even the private homes in Havel‟s plays are deprived of any touch of a homey
testing the branch as such, Estragon on its performing the required function. This atmosphere. They are like cells in a beehive where everything (even a gothic madonna
double display of reasoning, however, is proved irrelevant a moment later when the in a window-recess) must be „just the way it was planned,‟15 where certain things are
two realize that actually they have no idea as to who is heavier. „There is an even expected to take place at certain times, and events are regulated by frozen habits
chance. Or nearly.‟ Estragon muses. which seem to have acquired an uncanny inevitability in the characters‟ minds. Lunch
As in Ionesco‟s play, the chain of reasoning is proved useless because the premise and dinner have become facts of life like birth and death – events which we all share
is wrong or unknown. This deep mistrust of human reason permeates the absurd and which provide the only certain ground of communication between the characters.
theatre of Western countries – it is obvious in the plays, say; of Harold Pinter or The effect of this rigid patterning on the audience is paralyzing in its inevitability.
Wolfgang Hildesheimer. But Havel‟s case is different. He takes a seemingly rational When we hear Mrs Huml in The Increased Difficulty of Concentration rummaging
subject (the creation of a new way of communication, a man‟s adaptation to his new backstage in the kitchen and drawing her husband‟s attention to the pot of beef he is
job, the difficulties encountered in sociological experimentation, opposition to poor
14 Esslin, Introduction to Three East European Plays (Harmondsworth 1970) 16. For a more

detailed discussion of the relation between Hašek and Kafka see Kosík „Hašek and Kafka‟ 84-8.
13 Beckett Waiting for Godot (New York 1954) 12 15 Vernissage in Hry 1970-1976 276
to heat for his lunch, we have visions of thousands of similar pots of beef, thousands chief.‟18 The mechanistic predictability of man counterpoints the action like an
of similar husbands putting them on thousands of similar stoves. electric instrument paying a certain tune at a set time.
The first production of The Memorandum at Prague‟s Theatre On the Balustrade Another point to consider is the naturalistic precision with which the playwright in
under the direction of Jan Grossman was designed to bring out the standardized his stage instructions to The Increased Difficulty of Concentration indicates what is eaten
barrenness of Havel‟s world by reducing the visual aspect of the performance to the for lunch or dinner in the Humls‟ house and how it is served: on the tray there are
same collective cliché which makes up the texture of the whole dialogue. The stage „two plates with steaming stew, a pot of mustard, a basket with bread, glasses, beer,
set included an empty can front stage into which water kept dropping constantly and knives and forks.‟19 Sometimes the tray is brought in by Vlasta, Huml‟s wife, at other
with deadening monotony. In almost unbearable contrast with it were loud, bouncy, times by Renata, Huml‟s mistress. The two are interchangeable like the directors in
optimistic snatches of music – a symphony orchestra blaring out some terrible The Memorandum, but the lunch, like the fire extinguisher, remains the same. We are
mixture of Lohengrin and Nabucco16 – the agitated bursts of laughter from the reminded of a scene in Dürrenmatt‟s „absurd‟ play An Angel Comes to Babylon in which
audience providing a kind of counterpoint, recreated with varying patterns during outside the king‟s palace there is a huge royal statue with an exchangeable head.20
each performance. The numerous filing cabinets on stage turned out to contain Every time one king is replaced by another, only the statue‟s head is changed and the
nothing but the clerks‟ knives, forks, and spoons, wrapped in plastic bags, and taken state saves great expense in material and labour. Matter has taken over man‟s
out and replaced again with metronomic precision, according to the daily ritual of existence. Man himself has become exchangeable like a part of a machine.
going to lunch. Special fire-extinguishers which go with the office of director,
indicating his stature like a coat of arms, were set up and removed according to who A Czech critic said of Havel that when watching his plays one has the impression
occupied the director‟s desk: fire-extinguishers remain the same, directors are inter- of listening to conversations between two rather primitive cybernetic machines which
changeable. This prominence given to physical details on stage (as well as in the have at their disposal only a very limited range of answers to a very limited range of
dialogue, as we will see later) maps out the area in which Havel‟s characters move. It questions. In Havel‟s first full-length play, The Garden Party, we are even made the
is limited on one side by the sterile, fixed phrases of abstract language (be it of a witnesses of the schooling process of such a machine, a young man named Hugo
politico-bureaucratic, proverbio-folksy, or private-emotional nature), and on the other Pludek. In the course of the action he rises from being a monosyllabic, chess-playing
side by physiological needs like eating, dressing, combing one‟s hair, and going to the son of an obscure middle-class family to the honourable position of heading a newly
bathroom. The stage instructions for the director‟s secretary Hana in The Memorandum, established ministerial commission which is to solve the political impasse in society
for example, read as follows: „Hana hangs her coat on a coat-rack, sits down at (we never find out which society nor which political system – and it does not matter
typist‟s desk, takes a mirror and comb out of her bag, props mirror against typewriter in the least). On closer inspection it appears that the impasse is a strange one indeed:
and begins to comb her hair. Combing her hair will be her chief activity throughout the difficulty turns out to be a linguistic one; it is language that has created an acute
the play. She will interrupt it only when absolutely necessary.‟17 When we have seen political problem. How does Havel go about putting such intangible and undramatic
the play we realize that these instances of absolute necessity occur only when she runs material on the stage? He builds his play quite logically around one point of language
out to get milk, rolls, or peanuts. and leads his audience on an extremely comic four-act exploration of the power of
Another example is the Chief Censor Aram in The Conspirators. During the first and language itself. At one moment words seem to provide the only logical element on
the last scene of the play when most of the characters are assembled on the stage, stage, at the next moment they create complete confusion. The audience, unable to
Aram consumes sandwiches with the punctual monotony of an egg-timer. Whenever stop laughing, is taken through bounds and leaps of reasoning, across swamps of
the conversation stalls, he leans over to the hostess and utters a soft „may I?‟ pointing phraseology, as it watches sense turn into nonsense and nonsense into sense.
to the sandwich plate on the table. Having received her mechanical response, „of The Garden Party is about the bureaucratic ordering of life – public and private. The
course,‟ Aram, according to stage instructions repeated six times during these two setting is a utopian (though thoroughly Czech) society. Its various organizational
scenes, „takes a sandwich and eats it hungrily, then wipes his hands on his handker- organs must have identifiable labels and there must be order in every sphere. Under
no circumstances may there occur any confusion between, say, the „Secretariat of

16 Andreas Razumovsky „Der Mechanismus von Feigheit und Macht‟ Frankfurter Allgemeine 18 Cf Spiklenci in Hry 1970-0976 scenes i and XV.
Zeitung 5 August 1965 19 Havel The Increased Difficulty of Concentration tr Vera Blackwell (London 1972) 16; original
17 Havel The Memorandum tr Vera Blackwell (London 1967) II; original publication: publication: Ztížená možnost soustředění in Divadlo (May 1968)
Vyrozumění in Protokoly 20 Dürrenmatt Ein Engel kommt nach Babylon in Komödien I (Zürich 1963) 244
Humour‟ and the „Ideological Regulation Commission.‟21 That might result in a weapons are phrases – repeated, inverted, declined, distorted, yet unassailable in their
confusion between an idea and humour, and that would never do. This is where the ready-to-use compactness. At the end Hugo has landed a new job in the Ministry and
social system represented in The Garden Party gets into trouble. The government has we know that he is on the road to a brilliant career.
made the decision to initiate some form of liberalization, the first step of which is to In the third act, which takes place in one of the offices of the Ministry of
liquidate the Ministry of Liquidation. Expressed in words, the issue seems simply a Inauguration, the linguistic deadlock between inauguration and liquidation is reduced
matter of bad stylistics, and if we substitute the words „close down‟ for „liquidate‟ we ad absurdum in a series of official discussions, and the mechanistic logic of the
have solved the problem and can proceed. But in Havel‟s world language is taken author‟s dead-pan humour is bound to delight audiences East and West. Eastern
seriously and above all, literally. If it says „liquidate,‟ it means it! But since liquidation European audiences, trained in the simplified logic of popularized synthetic dialectics,
is a measure that can only be performed by the appropriate body, which in this case is roll with laughter because they recognize how close such scenes are to their daily
the Ministry of Liquidation, the politico-linguistic deadlock is already upon us. experience. Hugo Pludek has now succeeded in the system. High-handedly he
This deadlock turns out to be the springboard for the central character‟s rising bestows clichés of friendliness on the official whose favours he had courted in the
political career. By adapting himself with supreme linguistic agility to the ways of the previous act. At the end he is even honoured as having been the only one to prevent
officials in the bureaucratic structure he attains one prominent position after another. the terrible mistake of wanting to liquidate an institution that was in charge of
The whole play consists of a biting and very amusing demonstration of how he liquidation.
succeeds on the basis of linguistic talents alone. In the first act Hugo Pludek says very The fourth act takes us back to the Pludeks‟ household where telegrams are
little indeed. Except for one or two monosyllabic comments on his chess game, his delivered, congratulating Hugo in turn on having been appointed chief official of
conversation is limited to variations of „just fine, Ma,‟ and „pretty bad, Dad.‟ Only Liquidation, then of Inauguration, and finally heading the illustrious „Central
toward the end of the act does he give an indication of his budding talents, by Commission for Inauguration and Liquidation.‟ Now Hugo‟s bureaucratic personality
quoting one of his father‟s twisted proverbs: „if we don‟t realize in time the historical takes over completely. He is so depersonalized that he refers to himself in the third
role of the middle classes, the Japs, who don‟t need the middle classes, will come, person singular – he has lost his „I,‟ his self. Moulded by the system into a
remove them from history, and send them to Japan.‟22 Grammatically the statement is standardized form, he is also the co-creator of this form. The circle is closed: man
correct: the conditional if clause is duly followed by the main clause, the relative invents a system that in turn shapes him. Toward the end of the play Havel –
clause describing the antecedent subject is in place, and the predicate consists of three following Shaw‟s advice to tell the audience what you have done after you have done
verbs, one of them intransitive, the other two transitive, following each other it illustrates his main point once more in concrete terms: Confused by the phrase-
properly according to the chronological order of the events. Hugo‟s statement gets an spouting official in whom he fails to recognize his son, Hugo‟s father asks him who
A plus in grammar, but in logic it gets an F for Failed. Havel has prepared the ground he really is. Hugo responds with a long, extremely funny speech, explaining the
for the rest of the play. The combination of good grammar and suitable vocabulary difficulties, nay the impossibility of answering such a naive inquiry: „Me? You mean
irrespective of sense turns out to be the key to social success. who am I? Now look here, I don‟t like this one-sided way of putting questions, I
In the second act Hugo has gone out into the world to utilize his talents. Under really don‟t! You think one can ask in this simplifying way? ... Truth is just as
pressure from his parents who are worried about his career, he attends a garden party complicated and multiform as everything else in the world ... and we all are a little bit
at the Ministry of Liquidation in order to make useful connections. Beginning what we were yesterday and a little bit what we are today; and also a little bit we are
cautiously with the meaningless proverbs he had learned from his father (an example: not these things. Anyway, we are all a little bit all the time and all the time we are not
„lentils are lentils and rats are rats‟) he becomes increasingly sure of his linguistic a little bit ... some only are, some are only, and some are only not so that none of us
powers. By keeping his eyes and ears open and committing to memory the impressive entirely is and at the same time each one of us is not entirely .‟24 Although this can be
phrases of two secretaries, he soon commands a truly striking repertory of taken as a parody of Engels‟ explanation of motion in terms of the dialectic law of
expressions that vary from hazy tautologies like „lyrico-epical verses,‟ to false scientific contradiction, it is primarily an example of statements nullifying themselves, of
language like „the chemification of liquidation practice.‟23 Hugo scores his first socio- circular logic run wild. What remains is not meaning but an exercise in grammatical
political victory by defeating a high official in a battle of rhetoric in which the construction. This is Havel‟s main concern: the power of language as a perpetuator of
systems, a tool to influence man‟s mind and therefore one of the strongest (though
21 Havel The Garden Party tr Vera Blackwell (London 1969) 21; original publication: secret) weapons of any system that wants to mould him to become a well-functioning
Vyrozumění in Protokoly
22 Ibid 16
23 Ibid 19, 36 24 Ibid 73-4
part of a system rather than a free spirit – unpredictable, ernng, imaginative, experience. He does not wake up as a giant beetle, as does one of Kafka‟s characters,
mysterious in his tireless search for the truth. but he suddenly feels himself similarly alienated from his habitual existence. On his
desk he finds an official memorandum of the type he has found a thousand times
The Memorandum,25 although again highly amusing, is an even more relentless before, but this time it is written in an incomprehensible language!
exploration of language as a tool of power. The subject is grimmer than that of The This is the kind of situation which the playwright himself has defined as absurd.
Garden Party, not only because the hero‟s absorption into the system is represented „The feeling of absurdity,‟ Havel writes in his essay „The Anatomy of the Gag,‟ „results
not as a career but as a matter of survival, but also because Havel has by now from estrangement ... [the person] no longer sees the appearances of the world in their
mastered the art of placing the action against a background of „real‟ life in an office traditional function ...‟ By means of examples that vary from Tolstoy to Chaplin the
hardly distinguishable, as a Czech critic says, „from the office where we were author explains that the first phase of a gag merely states the situation. It is the
yesterday.‟26 The setting is deceptively naturalistic and only some time after the second phase that „alienates the first phase and reveals its absurdity, thus being the
opening of the curtain does the audience begin to adjust to the fact that only the “subject” of alienation. It is the active force which brings absurdity into the gag; it
surface looks normal, everything else is absurd! Or does this realization itself make it turns into nonsense that which made sense before, it denies the given situation,
realistic in the deeper sense of the word? It seems that this secret tie – almost reverses and negates it.‟ This is precisely what happens to the hero of Havel‟s play. To
complicity – between the absurd and real emerges in the works of many of the best find a message on your desk is nothing strange, but not to be able to decipher it
modern writers. Jan Grossman calls it „trying to render reality more concretely and means that what had made sense before does so no longer. „How is it,‟ argues Havel
more intensely.‟27 in his essay, „that prior to the alienation the given reality did not seem absurd to us?
In The Memorandum Havel has shifted the whole action into one of those huge For a simple reason: sense is outlived by the illusion of sense; the sense of the past
bureaucratic establishments on the periphery of which part of the action of The emerges; what is at work here is persistence, automatism.‟29
Garden Party took place. It is a world where complex hierarchies wield power, where Recovering from the shock of finding himself in this absurd situation, Josef Gross
coffee-breaks and lunch-hours regulate the office work. The whole play is like an is informed by his secretary that the memorandum is composed in the new official
extended parody of Parkinson‟s Law (in itself an excellent description of an absurd synthetic language Ptydepe which was introduced into the official procedures without
situation): Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. In order to make Gross‟s knowledge. The absurd incident thus seems to have a rational explanation,
procedures and official communications allegedly more precise (while actually but only for a non-thinking bureaucrat whose mechanical reaction to the new way of
complicating everything ad infinitum), a new synthetic language, called Ptydepe, has communication is simply that he shrugs his shoulders and gets down to his copy of
been invented. Ptydepe, regarded as a sacred text by those who have not learned it, Ptydepe for Beginners.
and used with reverence by those who have, is regarded as the utopian solution to all On another level, that of an outside observer – in this case the audience – the
problems because it „guarantees ... [the] truly humanistic function‟28 of language. In whole proposition reveals itself as absurd. It soon becomes clear that the new
reality, however, it becomes a symptom of the establishment itself – useless, existing language is infinitely more cumbersome and complex than the old „natural‟ language
for its own sake, proliferating fake values and hollow communication – a monstrous it is replacing. Gross, however, well-trained in the ways of bureaucracy, is on the
off spring of bureaucracy for its own sake. inside of the situation. Unaware of its absurdity – his moment of alienation, his
The Memorandum consists of twelve scenes. The place of action is, in turn, the discovery of the memo, has gone by unused – he immediately gets busy and makes
Director‟s Office, the Ptydepe Classroom, and the Secretariat of the Translation several unsuccessful attempts to have the memorandum translated. Now he finds
Centre. This pattern is repeated four times, thus indicating the mechanical nature of himself in a truly absurd situation: he has become a stranger in his own office (where
the events. Into this closed four-sided structure which seems like a square link in an clerks break into Ptydepe conversations at the drop of a hat), just as Kafka‟s Gregor
endless chain, Havel builds his play. Director Josef Gross, an innocuous official who Samsa became a helpless, mute beetle in his own home. Ptydepe has taken over; an
has been functioning for years in his assigned slot, has one morning a kafkaesque expert on Ptydepe usage, a Ptydomet, has been hired; Gross‟s deputy, Baláš, takes
over the director‟s desk; in the Ptydepe-classes Gross cannot remember a single word
25 The Play won the 1968 Village Voice award for the best foreign play of the Off Broadway while others rattle off vocabulary and get an A plus. Gradually Gross loses all official
season.
26 Machonin „Vyrozumění‟ Literární noviny roč. 14 č. 40 2 Oct. 1965 5 29 Havel „Anatomie gagu‟ Protokoly pp. 126, 127, 129. (Havel has found a fortuitous way of
27 Jan Grossman‟s contribution to a discussion on theatre, „Politishes Theater in Ost und rendering the Brechtian expression „Verfremdung.‟ „Ozvláštnění‟ carries the implication of both
West‟ Theater 1965 53 „alien, distant‟ and „strange.‟ The English „estrangement‟ is no happier a translation than the
28 The Memorandum 45 French „distantiation.‟)
power and Baláš and his followers threaten to reveal some minor instances of his In his next play, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, Havel again manages to
having side-stepped bureaucratic procedures. In this way Gross moves from one amuse us while he unfolds before our eyes one of the grave problems of our century.
demotion to another. The cooler critical reception abroad is likely due to Havel‟s rather misleading „image‟
By the half-way mark of the play the hero‟s fortunes have reached their lowest as critic of social circumstances in Czechoslovakia. Faced with this new play in which
point. In the second half we are shown his gradual recovery and renewed rise to the the playwright takes on contemporary society in general, Western criticism until quite
position of director. Just as his downfall had been paralleled by the relentless rise of recently has tiptoed cautiously around the play, without a sign of having recognized
Ptydepe, his ascent now takes place against the background of Ptydepe‟s dwindling its genius.32 In Increased Difficulty of Concentration Havel reduces his setting even
fortunes. As things get more hectic and the opportunists try to switch sides again, further and focuses on a small unit in society, a simple household. This, as we know,
Gross finally finds out the content of the fateful memorandum. The person who has been done by Ionesco, Pinter, Albee, Genet, and others. But Havel goes about it
translates it for him is the secretary Marie, the only person in the establishment who in a new way and the result is not only highly entertaining but also very disturbing.
seems to have preserved some non-mechanized human qualities like sympathy and One Czech critic, realizing the universal nature of the play more clearly than Western
kindness. What Gross finds out sounds like a parody on the Gatekeeper‟s message in critics, warned that it should not be regarded as merely a further comment on local
Kafka‟s The Trial30 – it renders all preceding efforts of the receiver of the message social problems but that it reflected „the problems of modern technical civilization.‟33
totally futile. The memorandum informs Gross that he has been exonerated from his Here Havel has shown more than ever that he is a writer of world stature.
minor failings and praises his steadfast opposition to the „confused, unrealistic and The hero is, as defined in the play itself, „a condensed model of human
antihuman‟31 elements of Ptydepe, recommending at the same time that he be individuality.‟34 Anyone who opens a book on behaviouralistic psychology becomes
ruthless in purging his office of any further subversive activities of this sort. aware of the numerous variations of such terminology, used in all seriousness and
Now Gross is given the opportunity he had yearned for when his fortunes were with the disarming conviction of „scientific‟ accuracy.
low: to be able to start all over again and do things differently. But in the last moment Now let us see what Havel does with this theme. The action takes place in the
Havel crushes our hopes. The symmetry of the play suddenly reveals itself not as house of Eduard Huml, a scholarly writer working for the humanist section of the
reflecting the rise of goodness and fall of evil, as it had seemed to, but rather as a National Research Council. Huml is in the process of composing a radio talk for the
constant, rigidly mechanized process. The theme of mechanical adjustment which „Third Programme‟ of the BBC, which he keeps dictating throughout the play to his
was treated with bright exuberance in The Garden Party is struck here on a more young secretary who comes to the house.35 The rest of the time this „condensed
sinister level. Against his better convictions and allegedly humanistic ideals, Gross model of human individuality‟ is occupied in trying to keep some kind of balance
succumbs in turn to the absurd order of the Ptydepe movement, to the empty between the demands of Vlasta, his wife, and his lady friend, Renata, who keeps
slogans, promises, and flattery of the opportunists, and finally to the new but equally coming for lunch and other less innocuous activities, romping about in Mrs Huml‟s
absurd order of a new synthetic language, Chorukor, introduced at the end of the dressing-gown while the latter is busy at her job as manageress of a toy shop. Each
play.
Havel has made his point. Gross becomes a tool in the hands of those who keep 32 An American publication, for example, regards the broader vision of the play as reducing
functioning unperturbed in the name of new slogans. Like Brecht‟s Mother Courage rather than increasing its appeal: „The satire is less sharp, for its only object is the absurdity of
they do not care under whose flag they do business, so long as the business scientific attempts to analyze man in the name of humanistic goals‟; Jarka M. Burian, „Postwar
flourishes. The spark of Gross‟ insight into the absurd nature of his mechanized Drama in Czechoslovakia‟ Educational Theatre Journal 25 (1973) 311. A German critic,
existence that might have flared up when he discovered the incomprehensible commenting on the poor quality of the Berlin production of the play, reveals his own lack of
message has been extinguished for good. His final phrase-ridden speech to Marie, understanding by arguing approximately as follows: Since German producers, unlike Czech
who is fired as a consequence of her act of loyalty in translating the memorandum, ones, need not camouflage their sociological opinions, this Czech „revival of absurd theatre‟
shows that he will never be capable of experiencing that revealing moment of inspires them less for its concealed political implications than for its comical scenes that can be
played straightforwardly for good laughs; Peter Iden „Spiele mit det Zeit oder: Schwierigkeiten
alienation which, Havel tells us, makes a man recognize the absurdity of his being tied
mit der Verständigung‟ Theater heute 10 Jg. Nr. I (Jan. 1969) 42-3. However, in his recent article
to a mechanized process. Gross has become part of the process. on Tom Stoppard, Kenneth Tynan has drawn attention to the importance of Havel‟s play (cf
ch. 2 note 6).
33 Hořínek „Člověk systematizovaný‟ 7
34 Concentration 60
30 Kafka Der Prozess (Frankfurt/Main 1946) 255-7 35 It is this particular aspect of the play which anticipated Tom Stoppard‟s Professor Moore
31 The Memmorandum 88 in Jumpers by four years.
woman feels that Huml ought to be hers alone, each plies him with demands to free that he has been selected as a random sample of behaviour patterns, to be tested by a
himself from the other. Vlasta wants him to break off his relationship with Renata, research team which promptly arrives at his house with a computer called endearingly
while Renata wants him to get a divorce and marry her. PUZUK. The machine, though cared for and pampered like a moody child (it is in
Huml is obviously unable to do either and lives an exhausting, tenuous existence turn warmed and cooled, cleaned, and allowed to take a rest), is obviously totally
under mounting pressure from both ladies. This pressure, however, is constantly useless. As PUZUK becomes more and more humanized in its sensitivity and unpre-
interrupted – hence eased – by the various demands of daily life: helping Vlasta to get dictability, Huml gets impatient, which in turn upsets Dr Balcárková, a member of
ready for work, warming up lunch in the kitchen, putting on the coffee-pot, having to the research team. As Huml pats her back to calm her down, he suddenly finds
dress and undress, bringing coats or hanging them up, and so forth. Convenient himself involved in a passionate embrace, and the next thing he knows is that she has
interruptions of embarrassing questions, these daily chores become a sort of haven established herself as a new woman in his life by the disastrous question: „May I ring
for Huml, to which he turns like a predictable mechanism when things get too you tomorrow? Will you have some time for me?‟‟37 The play ends as it began, with
uncomfortable. As the play proceeds, the pressure of the ladies‟ demands is lessened Mrs Huml bringing in supper on a tray and asking the by now time-honoured
by another pressure, mounting imperceptibly before the audience‟s eyes and revealing question: „Well then?‟ – meaning „Did you get rid of her yet?‟
itself as much more dangerous and destructive: the pressure of repetition. Here Havel The particular originality of the play lies in the playwright‟s having shuffled the
is master of his trade. He succeeds in creating a kind of tightening-grip effect that events in Huml‟s life, like a pack of playing cards and interchanged their
shows the impossibility of Huml‟s ever escaping the treadmill of his existence. The chronological order. In a comment for the director of the play Havel says that the
women echo each other more and more in their demands and reactions. As they play is not „a jumbled up representation of a logical event, on the contrary, rather the
begin to sound the same, Huml reacts to both with exactly the same answers. The logical event is ... merely a jumbled up, and therefore distorting representation of the
effect is strong. As amusement changes to dismay, the audience witnesses how play as such.‟38 The result is surprising. It appears clearly that the logical sequence
characters become interchangeable, how a basic human situation becomes does not matter at all. To show the workings of causality becomes superfluous
mechanized and duplicated. because the entire web of situations – private, scientific-professional, meditative – is
In addition to these interlocked vicious circles there are two other areas in Huml‟s based on stereotypes. Again, as in Havel‟s earlier plays, language reveals its
life which at first seem to provide him with the possibility of breaking out of his rut mechanizing power with frightening obviousness. Each thought and each emotion
but, as the play proceeds, turn out to be variations on the same theme. There is first that is expressed is dictated by stereotyped language. The hollow ring of duplicated
of all Huml‟s magnum opus, a treatise on man‟s happiness. Will he sublimate his words pervades the whole play.
practical frustrations with his theoretical speculations? Not very likely. When he gives It is in this play that Havel has mastered the task of revealing language as a killer of
us a sample of his philosophizing, we soon discover that his arguments have the same intellect and feeling. Man is no longer the victim of the system as shown implicitly in
shape as his actions. They are like snakes biting their own tails. Huml‟s definition of The Garden Party and explicitly in The Memorandum. Rather man perpetuates the system
value, for example, which begins with the pseudo-analytical statement: „By a value we by modelling his own life on it, and he depends on it as his stronghold. At first he
mean that which satisfies some human need – semicolon,‟ continues with the most fails to recognize that it is also his prison and tries to escape from this anonymous
banal truism: „We distinguish material values ... from spiritual values ... full stop. monster that schematizes his daily life and mechanizes his emotions. But the way he
Various people have at various times and in various circumstances various needs.‟36 goes about escaping shows that the harm has been done: Huml wants to escape not
The second reason for the failure of Huml‟s work to keep him „human‟ is that his by breaking but by doubling the system, and he thus creates a new mechanism which,
dictation sessions are counterpointed not only by coffee-breaks but also by his far from destroying the old one, neatly fits into the spinning cogs. By necessity Huml
attempts to make love to his secretary. She, in turn, controls her properly righteous himself becomes doubly mechanical and begins to repeat his own responses with
indignation, and has such experience in regaining her secretarial calm that this machine-like exactitude. The events on stage appear as in a broken and endlessly
situation, too, has the desperate air of perpetuation about it. So much for Huml‟s repeated mirror-reflection and as the play proceeds, we feel an increasing certainty
professional career. about being able to predict with machine-like precision the actions and reactions of
What remains is to consider him as a member of society. In this respect Havel, the individual characters.
laughing grimly, shows us his hero only in the robot-like proportions of socio-
behaviouralistic research. While harassed by all the other complications, Huml finds
37 Ibid 74
38 Havel „Nachbemerkung‟ to Erschwerte Möglichkeit der Konzentration tr Franz Peter Künzel
36 Concentration 29 Theater heute 10. Jg. Nr. I (Jan. 1969) 56
 Imperceptibly the playwright makes us adopt the position of PUZUK, the revolution never gets beyond the language lab. Havel‟s pen is getting sharper, his wit
computer, which registers a sample of individual behaviour. And as the machine is getting more sinister. The mood of The Conspirators is dark indeed.
seems to become more and more humanized, unsure of itself, unpredictable, and The theme of revolution is developed in several very intricate ways. At the risk of
finally having something like a nervous breakdown, the audience becomes more and oversimplification I might suggest three ways. First of all, there is the official
more certain of the predictability of events. The „representative sample of individual Revolution. It is in the title, after all, and the audience is not permitted to forget it for
behaviour patterns‟ has turned out to be such a stereotype that it can be registered by long. People greet each other with „Long live the Revolution!‟ and there are numerous
a stereotyped reaction. Havel has achieved a surprising tour de force. By making the references to the great revolutionary victory which was achieved when the nation was
audience adopt an almost automatic reaction to the characters on stage, he has shown freed from the bloody dictatorship of Olah whose past regime of terror is amply
that the tendency to mechanize the process of living resides secretly within the referred to in „official‟ discussions. So much for the „official‟ Revolution.
individual character and is therefore both more intangible and more dangerous than But there are two other forms of revolution in the play – unofficial, but much
we take it to be. more significant than the well-advertised, institutionalized national Revolution of the
If The Increased Difficulty of Concentration explores man‟s notorious tendency to past. In the first and the last scenes – the only ones that take place in a private house
mechanize his life and thus reduce it to the primitive level of adapting to and and not in offices – we are permitted to glance beyond the isolated world of political
functioning in a certain environment, Havel‟s next play, The Conspirators, is a test of bureaucracy. What we learn in the first scene is coloured by hope. In the town,
what happens when this idea is applied to a political situation. The Conspirators, students demonstrate, demanding the release of an allegedly subversive political
finished in 1970, is a merry-go-round of political power. The play is constructed with prisoner, whose harmless character (he reads philosophy, and lives a quiet life with
mathematical precision. In fifteen scenes which follow one another like hammer his cat) is illustrated at various points during the play. The „revolutionary‟ spirit of the
blows, the struggle for political power unfolds with the inevitability of a mechanism demonstration grows out of a belief in justice and the dignity of the individual.
set in motion. What sets it in motion is man‟s greed for power which, when rigidified But when we are given our second glance at the outside world in the last scene, we
and mechanized by a social system, becomes a sine qua non of his life. He tries to rapidly lose what we gained in the beginning, the reassuring sense of the people‟s
attain it by any means and his claims about high ideals – the common good, the search for truth which seemed to reassert itself under any conditions. In the last
nation‟s welfare, freedom from oppression – are merely cover-ups for his ruthless moments of the play we hear that Concord Square has now become the scene for an
struggle to get where he wants to be. All in all this is not a highly original theme: from agitated mob clamouring for the return of dictator Olah and setting up gallows for
Macbeth to Büchner‟s Danton’s Death and Brecht‟s The Rise of Arturo Ui man‟s craving the present government. The fact that the newly formed Revolutionary Committee
for political power has proved to be among playwrights‟ main sources of inspiration. (consisting of our friends, the chiefs of the temporal authorities) is a step ahead of the
However, Havel‟s signature on the play is unmistakable. Reduced to the bare population – they have already decided to appoint Olah their leader – does not
essentials, the struggle for power of four „public figures‟ (the chief prosecutor and the lighten the grim picture we get of the will of the people.
heads of the police, the military, and culture) is stylized into a grotesque circular At a third level of the play revolution is synonymous with greed for power. This
dance of greed and deceit in which moves are as predictable as the periodical return version of revolution fills the action of the play. The struggle concerns the position of
of, say, the fiery white horse or the leaping lion on a moving merry-go-round. The the leader of the new Revolutionary Committee and takes place primarily between
central mechanism (provided in this case by the system) has taken over and the Chief Prosecutor Dykl and Chief of Police Moher. Each proclaims himself in turn the
characters seized by its rhythm not only succumb to it but, as it were, propel its new leader, as he convinces other possible contestants of his opponent‟s unsuitability
motion into greater smoothness by their own weight (the make-up of their characters for the job. In the course of a series of (very amusing) discussions in which everyone
– in turn formed by the system). argues a point in order to achieve an aim that has nothing whatsoever to do with that
By saying that The Conspirators is about the struggle for power, we have indicated point, the desired job swings back and forth like a pendulum at regular intervals (Dykl
the inner meaning of the play. On the surface – as far as the characters themselves are seems to have gained it in scenes iv and ix, Moher in scenes VIII and XII). In the
concerned – it is a play about revolution. Again, as in Havel‟s other plays, it is meantime the job is offered as a decoy to the other two contestants in the game, the
revolution studied in a test tube. Not for one instant does the action even remotely Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces (a sports-minded simpleton whose
approach a concrete problem. It remains suspended in the thin air of theoretical muscles are no real competition for his intellect – he has to take a quick swim in
abstractions, and in the lengthy discussions „freedom‟ and „political oppression,‟ order to perform in the bedroom), and the Chief Censor (a voracious, vulgar nin-
„democracy‟ and the „evils of anarchy,‟ „unifying action‟ and „reactionary groups‟ compoop who starts to think only when he can denounce someone).
remain linguistic labels which have never been exposed to a real situation. The
 There is a woman in the game too, the widow Helga, well known to all in every play is tortured and brainwashed into making two diametrically opposed admissions
sense of the word. Clearly favouring the man with the job, she manipulates and of guilt. Moments before the fateful telephone call from Monte Carlo, the message is
changes her position with great agility according to who has the most chance of brought that Stein has hanged himself in his prison cell. The one character who had
becoming the boss. In the course of the play she ushers the Commander-in-Chief made some attempt to distinguish between a lie and the truth prefers to be absent,
into her bedroom, establishes herself in the Chief Prosecutor‟s opinion as „the only and the dance of power continues uninterrupted by anyone handicapped with a sense
person who really understands me!‟39 and romps about the stage in an orgiastic of ethics.
flagellation-game with the Chief of Police. In a revealing comment on his „forbidden‟ works, Havel tells us that The
We may remember that in Arthur Schnitzler‟s at first notorious, later famous play, Conspirators, his first play written after he had been severed from any contact with the
Der Reigen, the game of sexual greed is presented as a closed circle. One partner keeps stage, suffered from having been conceived during a period of bitter struggle against a
changing until the last partner couples with the first and the dance of desire can start feeling of „lack of air and senselessness.‟ He feels the play is „lifeless, over-organized,
all over again. Havel‟s dance of power also has a circular structure, inevitably and yet bloodless, lacking humour as well as mystery ... a cake which has been left in the oven
imperceptibly moving back to the beginning. The image of the exiled dictator Olah too long and is completely dried out.‟41 This stern judgment, though not really doing
undergoes a gradual and disturbing change. In the first half of the play Olah and the justice to the challenging play, is interesting because Havel thinks he wrote it in too
„-ism‟ he stands for is a synonym for everything that is antisocial and destructive. As abstract and too consciously „universal‟ a manner, rather than writing it in the way he
the play continues, however, Olah is mentioned less and less frequently. Since by now felt he should, namely „as if my plays could be performed even here, and to address
we know that in Havel‟s world things are the more important the less frequently they my concrete countrymen in their concrete world.‟42 Once this realization had become
are mentioned, we develop an increasing sense of the return of terror, the clear to him he seemed to be able to overcome the critical hiatus. In his next plays he
reappearance of Olah. At the beginning of the play he had been thought safely dead; does just that.
toward the end he is reported to have made an appearance in Monte Carlo. One of the paradoxes of Havel‟s career as a dramatist is that his next play, The
In the last scene, when all the power seekers are assembled at Helga‟s house (as Beggar’s Opera, was actually written in response to a demand. Some time earlier, during
they were in the first scene), by now aware of the fact that no one will let anyone else a period when it still seemed remotely possible that such a play could be performed
assume power, the Chief of Police launches into a speech of circular logic which on an official Czech stage, one of the Prague theatres asked Havel to write a new
inevitably closes the vicious circle: „my friends, let us finally stop beating about the version of Gay‟s classic. Havel tells us that he wrote the play with joy and ease – a
bush! After all, we all know that one man exists who is able to establish order here, to considerable difference from his labours over The Conspirators. Some hope of seeing
return the nation to the path of disciplined work for its native country and thus the play actually staged, coupled with admiration and love for Gay‟s original work,
secure true freedom and a truly democratic future! ... is it his fault that he governed made it a pleasure for Havel to work with the text, and the final result was „a play that
just at a time which made it impossible for him to complete the task for which he is is alive.‟43 It is interesting that The Beggar’s Opera has not been very successful abroad.44
naturally predetermined? ... Seriously, my friends: if we do not want the leadership Havel himself ascribes this regrettable fact to the Western cult of Brecht and the
qualities of this man to be misused to the detriment of the people, why could we not subsequent reluctance of Western theatres to stage a play based on a theme „that had
at the same time use them for the benefit of the people? ...‟40 The silence of his been touched by the great B.B.‟45 Whether this assessment is valid or not is a moot
listeners is interrupted by the maid who announces a telephone call from Monte point. At any rate the response is regrettable because Havel‟s play is an important and
Carlo. As the curtain falls, Moher walks resolutely to the telephone to invite tyranny thoroughly delightful work. Moreover, Brecht‟s play is doubtless a product of the
to assume the leadership of the New Revolution. 1920s and it is largely the lasting impact of Weill‟s magnificent music that keeps it as
The bleakness of Havel‟s vision is hardly tempered by the sympathetic figure of fresh as it is today. Havel‟s work is a play for the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Alfred Stein, the political prisoner and adjustable scapegoat, who in the course of the It is bound to be recognized as such sooner or later.
Let me recapitulate very briefly the content of Gay‟s play: Macheath, a gallant
39 Unlike the other quotations from The Conspirators, this quotation refers to the German
highwayman, has secretly married Polly, shopkeeper Peachum‟s daughter. Peachum,
translation of an amended version of the play, Die Retter tr Franz Peter Künzel (Reinbek 1972)
95. Because of the great difficulty in communicating with these writers in Czechoslovakia, Sixty 41 Havel 'Dovětek autora' 307
Eight Publishers in Toronto, who produced the attractive volume of Hry, included an earlier 42 Ibid 308
version of The Conspirators in which the above quotation reads: 'You are the only one who is 43 Ibid

able to breathe life into me' (60). 44 To date it has been staged in Italy, Germany, and Canada.
40 Ibid 101 45 Havel 'Dovětek autora' 308
backed by his wife, opposes the relationship. He finds Polly useful in his shop and come together again as motives become transparent and mystifying in turn. And it is
wants to keep her there; moreover he dislikes and fears Macheath as a formidable this tantalizing uncertainty that crystallizes the main theme of Havel‟s play: betrayal. It
business competitor. Peachum denounces Macheath to the police. Macheath goes to recurs in many guises and versions throughout the action, with each character in the
prison but is freed by Lucy, the daughter of the chief of the prison. Not being able to role of deceiver and deceived. Peachum, for example, the boss of a criminal‟s
stay away from the brothel where he is a favourite customer, Macheath is arrested organization, wants his daughter Polly to deceive Macheath whom she married,
again and saved from the gallows only by the intervention of the Player who claims allegedly secretly but basically with the consent of her father who is trying to find out
that „an Opera must end happily‟ and „comply with the taste of the town.‟46 Instead of the dealings of Macheath‟s organization in order to be able „finally to liquidate his
being hanged, Macheath whirls off with Polly and the others in a merry dance. And organization, confiscate its property ... and discover at the same time sufficient
so The Beggar’s Opera ends with a jolly tune, instead of representing „a most excellent evidence of his activities so that he could denounce him and achieve his deportation
Moral,‟ namely „that the lower Sort of People have their Vices in a degree as well as for life.‟48 Peachum, however, also works for the police for whom he acts as a sort of
the Rich: And that they are punished for them.‟47 intelligence agent whose duty it is to gain and keep the trust of the underworld, so
One might speculate why Havel was attracted to this play. After all, this is his first that he can act as a valuable informant. Peachum is therefore both a private
variation on his earlier theme. So far as his political surrounding is concerned, the businessman in crime as well as a government employee concerned with surveillance
source of inspiration could not have been more „legitimate.‟ After all, the main over and, we presume – incorrectly, as we find out later – the ultimate extinction of
themes of Gay‟s play – exploitation, the vices of the upper classes, the power of criminal activities.
money that can buy anything, including justice – are a perfect way around censorship As the play proceeds and new layers of Peachum‟s activities are discovered, the
because they sound like the recipe for Socialist Realist works. On the surface, audience ends up totally confused as to the capacity in which Peachum is acting at the
therefore, Havel conforms to the demands of the political climate by taking up this moment: whether he is pretending to be a police-spy in order to have a good
early „revolutionary‟ work and rewriting it for the present. After all, Bertolt Brecht, camouflage for his criminal activities, or whether he is holding on to his position as
whose credentials as a Communist playwright were (at least in theory) not to be the boss of his criminal organization only for the sake of being able to inform the
doubted, had taken up the same play and sharpened its message by revealing the police. At the end the impasse between guarding the law and breaking it is perfect.
hypocrisy of Christian ethics, by pointing to greed and ruthlessness as the pillars of We can no longer tell which is which. We fail to distinguish the pretense of crime in
the bourgeois value scale, by providing a miniature vision of revolutionary hope, order to preserve the law from the pretense of legality in order to preserve crime.
romanticized and therefore powerfully appealing, in the song about the dishwasher- As usual, the last ten minutes of Havel‟s play have yet another shock in store for
girl Jenny who administers justice and ushers in a new order. us. Lockit, the chief of police, having talked Macheath into collaborating with him,
Brecht had opposed the gallant back alley crookery of Macheath with the settles down to a pleasant dinner at home during which he casually reveals that he,
hypocritical business crookery of Peachum. Havel too makes this parallelism the basic too, is the leader of another, larger criminal organization which now has „the whole
premise of his play, but in a different sense. Both Peachum and Macheath are chiefs underworld at its command.‟ Moreover, as his wife comments when she passes him
of criminal organizations which are in competition with each other and ultimately the soup, „No one knows about our organization and everyone serves it!‟49
hope to ruin and absorb each other. Polly, Peachum‟s daughter, has been asked by The deceit and betrayal theme is concentrated in the figure of Jenny, the only
her father to use her female charms in order to get Macheath to reveal to her the woman worthy of Macheath‟s attentions. Jenny betrays Macheath three times to the
secrets of his organization. She is successful with the charms (which is not difficult police, an archetypal pattern of betrayal. Macheath, who sees through the
with ladies‟ man Mackie) but soon finds herself saddled with a similar request from machinations of everyone else, falls for her false explanations every time. So does the
Macheath with regard to her father‟s organization. Faced with the dilemma of having audience.
to betray either her father or her husband, Polly gets into increasing difficulties until The first time Jenny wins Macheath‟s trust by means of the romantic tale about the
the author mercifully removes her from the action. abandoned maiden: when she first meets Macheath she tells him he seduced and
In The Conspirators we witnessed the tricks of the power game and recognized them abandoned her five years before (Mackie‟s memory, overcrowded with such incidents,
as such. In The Beggar’s Opera we no longer know when anyone is pretending and cannot check the accuracy of the story), and she claims to have been pining away ever
when he is not. As in a Pirandello play, the role and the player seem to fall apart and since, untouched by men, faithful to his memory. As Macheath melts and they fall
into each other‟s arms, she calls for the police and charges him with attempted rape.
46 John Gay The Beggar's Opera and Polly from the original editions of 1728 and 1729 (London

1923) 82 48 Žebrácká opera in Hry 1970-1976 121

47 Ibid 83 49 Ibid 184
 The second time (Macheath, as we know, usually gets out of prison as quickly as eighteenth-century propriety, and Brecht‟s equally „scandalous‟ Dreigroschenoper two
he gets into it) she wins his trust by claiming to have been forced to betray him by the hundred years later, Havel‟s play had an extraordinary first night performance. But it
political system. „They promised me,‟ she tells a sullen, suspicious Macheath, „that if I was of a different kind than Gay‟s tempestuous première which ushered in an
did it, my father would be pardoned. You see, he has been sentenced to death–.‟50 unprecedented long run in January 1728, and Brecht‟s equally exciting first night after
Unrequited love had moved the romantic criminal; now political oppression moves which a sort of „Threepenny Opera fever‟52 swept Berlin in 1928.
the man who believes in individualism. In the brothel Macheath waits a second time The première of the third version of this mysteriously timeless play had very
for Jenny‟s embrace but she sends the police instead of coming herself. different repercussions. It took place in the small Bohemian village of Horní
Jenny‟s third betrayal occurs near the end of the play. She visits Macheath in Počernice on November 1, 1975 – indeed an extraordinary first night performance
prison and gradually convinces him to trust her once again, by presenting him with a for a play by an author of world reputation. The play was produced by a group of
brilliant argument couched in pseudo-dialectics and logical fallacies. The gist of her amateurs and ran for one single night. The audience was composed of local citizens
argument is that her love for Macheath has caused a split in her personality, so that but also included a large number of intellectuals from near-by Prague who were
she no longer is identical with herself, which in turn means that she has ceased to closely watched by the secret police. Most of those who had come to see the
exist as an individual. In other words, she had to betray him to preserve herself – she production were then interrogated and some lost their jobs as a result. For Havel
acted in self defense. As Macheath once again passionately declares his love for her, himself, however, it meant that after many years he again experienced theatre in that
she wistfully remarks that he loves her only for her betrayals. Macheath decides to deepest and best sense: „that electrifying area of joy, truth, freedom and collective
turn down the tempting offers made to him by the various criminal organizations and understanding.‟ For the author it became the première „which I value more than any
flee with Jenny to build a new and better life „where no-one will find us,‟ but other I have ever had.‟53
moments later he finds out that the chief of police has been informed about these Although completed only in spring 1976, most of The Mountain Resort was
intentions – that Jenny has betrayed him for the third time. It is now that Macheath written before the two short plays Vernissage and Audience. This is important because
capitulates and gives in to the ways of the world. in this play the author tried to summarize his former dramatic production. The
We see that Havel has kept John Gay‟s main themes – dog eats dog, life is more Mountain Resort is meant to be, he informs us, „a peculiar scenic poem „„about
often a dirty game than not, deceit manipulates people under the guise of friendship. nothing,” a play which ... becomes its own single theme, therefore being able to tell
But he changes the thrust of the play in a significant way. Gay‟s Macheath has been about the world only that which such a play, “a play about itself,” would be able to
granted grace as a literary character whose sins and crimes were merely meant for say.‟54
entertainment. The puritan solemnity with which Gay‟s play was condemned as This somewhat abstract statement could be interpreted in two ways. First, it
glorifying vice,51 totally missed this point. represents – whether Havel himself realizes it or not – an aspect of that general
Havel‟s play could also in a sense be interpreted as glorifying vice, but it is a very malaise now affecting the dramatic genre much more than the novel. The novel has
different form of vice from that which caused dignified eighteenth-century citizens to been pronounced dead by various academic voices but (particularly among Czech
attack John Gay‟s operatic burlesque. Gay‟s Macheath is a character who escapes writers) is alive and perhaps healthier than ever.55 The dramatic genre, having born
punishment for having indulged too deeply in the ways of the world. Havel‟s the brunt of various artistic Weltanschauungen for a long time, finds itself suddenly
Macheath undergoes an initiation into the ways of the world. At the end he makes the bloodless and despite such writers as Dürrenmatt and Stoppard – short of breath. As
decision which Alfred Stein of The Conspirators could not make: to play the game and a result it has become self conscious and self analytical. Havel‟s amazingly fine ear for
stay alive. Like Wedekind‟s Marquis von Keith who throws away the revolver and the general heartbeat of the modern world seems to have caused him to share this
grabs the bank note before pronouncing his credo, „life is a roller coaster,‟ Havel‟s self-analytical tendency in his own way.
Macheath decides not to „refuse the rules of the game which this world offers to a
man,‟ shelves his ideas of honour and heroism, and joins in the game. 52 C.F. Burgess ed. The Letters of John Gay (Oxford 1966) 72; Lotte Lenya-Weill 'Threepenny
A word should be said concerning the première of The Beggar’s Opera the only one
Opera' Brecht as They Knew Him (Berlin 1974) 62
of Havel‟s plays written after 1968 that was actually, though only once, performed in 53 Havel 'Dovětek autora' 309
Czechoslovakia. Like its predecessors, Gay‟s Beggar’s Opera, that enfant terrible of 54 Ibid
55 The internationally acclaimed Czech novelist Milan Kundera commented humorously on
50Ibid 149 what he calls everyone's urge to write the 'obituary of the novel ... though this is possibly the
51See William Eben Schultz Gay's Beggar's Opera, its Content, History and Influence (New Haven least dead of all art forms'; 'Comedy is everywhere' Index on Censorship 6 no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1977)
1923) ch. 21. 6.
 Second, of course, the play is a logical outcome of the author‟s earlier work. Havel felt a little embarrassed when foreign critics talked about his having found
Throughout his earlier plays Havel had explored the impact of mechanization on himself again, and called the plays examples of contemporary „model-drama.‟
thought and behaviour. In The Mountain Resort he takes this approach to its „absurd‟ However, the success of the plays re-emphasized to him what he had known since he
conclusion by allowing it to take over the entire action. It is as if he had fed a number started writing: that he must „write for someone,‟ for a definite spectator, and this
of attitudes, actions, gestures, and dialogues into a computer and let the computer conviction may well decide the basic direction of his work in the future.
rearrange them until they represent an organized, geometrical structure. The result is Vernissage is a play about a couple who have invited an old friend to see their new
a seemingly well-constructed five-act play, in which, however, phrases, movements, apartment. When the curtain rises, the visitor, Bedřich, is standing at the door with a
and gestures have become autonomous, and the characters entirely interchangeable. bouquet of flowers behind his back while the host and hostess, Michal and Věra, are
The action takes place on the terrace of a mountain resort; the characters are a ushering him in and offering him a drink. When the curtain goes down, an hour or so
group of holiday-makers. They include, for example, a writer, a count, a middle-class later, Bedřich, who has been trying to leave for some time, has been made to sit down
couple with a tea thermos, the director of the hotel, a beautiful young woman, again, a new record has been put on, another whisky is about to be poured and the
another somewhat older woman who switches easily from knitting to mechanically whole thing can begin all over again. By now the circular structure has become
portioned-out passion in her hotel room, and a maid serving fruit juices at equally Havel‟s artistic trademark. As in the companion piece to Vernissage, Audience, the end
well-spaced intervals. But apart from punctually reappearing comments, objects, or of the play is at the same time a new beginning, the action is reduced to a link in a
gestures, like filling the tea thermos and leaving for love-making, distribution of fruit chain, and the merry-go-round character of the situation is brought relentlessly home
juices and reminiscing about glorious days in Paris, there is nothing constant in the to us.
play. The characters speak each other‟s words, remember each other‟s pasts, go Our yearning for some kind of crisis, some intimation of catharsis, has probably
through each other‟s movements. To put it in another way, the gesture or word is grown in intensity during the action, but we are denied any such resolution. We leave
there, but the character who carries it out or speaks it changes from act to act; the the theatre with the feeling that what we have seen happening goes on ad infinitum.
memory of Paris is there but in each act someone else remembers and someone else We escape while Bedřich, the poor guest, must stay on. Or need we not be sorry for
forgets. Havel tried to make these occurrences the subject matter of the play, in order him? After all, he is treated royally to music, exotic dishes, and the best whisky; he is
to find out „to what extent they are capable – all on their own – to create meaning.‟ confided in, and shown that he is important; he is given good advice on how better to
The themes of the disintegration of human identity and existential schizophrenia manage his affairs, how to help his wife come out of her depression, and so on.
which Havel has repeatedly called his main concerns, are obviously apparent again They are his friends, after all, and mean so very well! They show him all their
insofar as they can be expressed solely by these „automatized occurrences.‟56 wonderful new furniture, their objet d‟art (which Michal brought from abroad), they
Although the play depends on the visual impact of the repeated, as if scenario- tell him about their lovely little son who teaches them to live more profoundly; they
controlled, gestures and movements, it remains to be seen whether it will ever be reveal to him that Michal is an ideal father and Věra is not only an imaginative
made into a successful stage production. However, the author claims to have written gourmet cook but also – if he cared he could watch later on – an incredibly
it for himself rather than for an audience. As a laboratory piece, a sort of test for passionate and resourceful lover; they demonstrate their new almond peeler (also
summarized literary techniques, the text might have considerable possibilities if it from Switzerland, naturally) and venture the opinion – gently and benevolently, of
were used as a film scenario where the camera could act as a sort of central course – that Bedřich had simply somehow opted out: that he had passively resigned,
consciousness, observing and analyzing the fragments of human identity. because „you are disgusted by having to strive, to struggle, to cope with difficulties.‟57
He should, they both feel, finally come to terms with himself, settle things at home
The two one-act plays Vernissage and Audience (see chapter 9 for a discussion of the with his wife, start a family, fix up his apartment, economize his time, start going to
latter), both with strong autobiographical components, were rapidly written, and the sauna, live a bit more decently, healthily, rationally, and so on.
meant basically for the entertainment of friends. The author never thought that they Throughout the conversation Bedřich repeatedly tries to make the point that he
could be of interest to anyone abroad. Paradoxically, they have become more likes his wife‟s cooking and that they actually like each other, that he does not quite
successful abroad than any of Havel‟s other works written since 1968. Starting with see the reason for having a confessional as an objet d‟art in one‟s living-room, that he
the Vienna Burgtheater in 1976, they have had a considerable career on stage, radio, basically lacks the feeling that he is living a rotten life. But he hardly gets a word in
and television, from London to Israel to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. edgewise. When, however, he tries to leave, he is called „a disgusting, unfeeling,

56 Havel 'Dovětek autora' 309 57 Vernissage 292

inhuman egoist! An ungrateful character! An ignoramus! A traitor!‟ When Věra claims to be glad that there are still „some people who are not afraid to speak the
throws Bedřich‟s flowers on the floor and bursts into hysterical tears, her husband truth aloud,‟61 and avidly reads their works which circulate underground, he has
turns to the guest with gentle reproach: „See what you‟ve done? Aren‟t you ashamed steered clear of any involvement with their cause.
of yourself?‟ Bedřich hesitantly puts the bouquet back into the vase and sits down The other writer, Vaněk (a partly autobiographical figure who also appears in
again. Immediately the two hosts are entirely normal, smile and suggest they might Audience), is a playwright whose works used to be staged successfully in Czech
play a little music for dear Bedřich. As Michal eagerly puts on the record player, loud theatres but who, after a drastic change in the political climate, has become ostracized
music fills the theatre from all outlets; perhaps some international „hit‟ song, the and persecuted by the regime, writing for underground circulation only, and spending
author suggests, like Karel Gott‟s „Sugar Baby Love.‟ The music continues full most of his time and energy in composing petitions and letters of protest which find
volume „until the last member of the audience has left the theatre.‟58 their way into the press abroad but which have little effect on circumstances in his
Havel has revealed to us this realization: the closer his writing reflects a situation own country.
he knows personally, the better he writes and the broader his appeal will be. Vernissage The play consists of a visit Vaněk pays to Staněk, whose success with things in
is a parable on the hollowness of a successful life. All the clichés of „Happiness‟ general is reflected in the superbly blossoming magnolia tree outside his window, his
which have moulded the imagination of the average man from Prague to New York, recently acquired villa, and the surrealist painting in his elegant study. In the course of
from Sydney to Stockholm, are juggled throughout the play, and produce a terrible, the conversation between the two Vaněk shy, clutching a briefcase, in stocking feet;
hollow sound. It is a happiness which depends on an audience, for it is meaningless Staněk effusive, pouring cognacs, offering cigars and his own slippers – we discover
in itself; with an audience it loses its reason for being. It is remarkable that this play that after years of non-communication Staněk had asked Vaněk to visit him; we hear
emerged from a „Socialist‟ society and was written by an author who felt he „had to that Vaněk has been in prison and that Staněk‟s success is marred by his realization
lean on what [he] knew.‟ As a comment on contemporary Czechoslovakia it is that „everywhere is only selfishness, hypocrisy, fear ... sterility and intrigues.‟ We
certainly a fascinating document about a society, the official, constantly reiterated witness Staněk‟s admiration for Vaněk‟s courage, for those „protests, petitions, letters
ideals, aims, and evaluations of which bear no relation whatsoever to the values of an – the fight for human rights,‟ but also his feelings that the dissidents have taken upon
individual who thrives under this regime. However, from a Western point of view themselves „an almost superhuman task: to rescue from this bog the remainders of
Vernissage can plainly also be regarded as a critical comment on the materialistic values ethical consciousness.‟ Vaněk shuffles his feet in his host‟s slippers and objects
of an affluent society. Although Havel, with typical modesty, calls his two one-act against so strong a praise. But Staněk continues his attentions, pours more cognac,
plays „miniatures, written on the side,‟59 both succeed in communicating strong comments knowledgeably but in a rather off hand manner on other dissident writers,
meaning on an international scale. and offers knowledgeable and by no means unfair criticism of Vaněk‟s last play.
Finally, as his motivations become increasingly puzzling, he steers the conversation to
Havel‟s most recent one-act play, Protest, draws even more openly on the author‟s its inevitable aim: he would like to ask Vaněk to initiate „some kind of protest or
basic experience as a „dissident‟ writer. Translated into pithy German by Gabriel petition‟62 on behalf of composer-singer Javůrek who has recently been imprisoned.
Laub,60 it is to have its première in Vienna in the near future. In Protest Havel takes However, as Vaněk (and the audience) are trying to cope with this extraordinary
the bull by the horns and writes about the most acute problem not only of Czech request, it becomes clear that Staněk‟s motivation is not indignation about the
writers and intellectuals but also of creative men anywhere in the world where persecution of innocent people but that he has a personal axe to grind – his daughter
freedom of expression has been harnessed by a stultifying ideology. Protest is a is expecting a child by Javůrek. For once Vaněk responds with assurance and
brilliant dialogue during an encounter between two writers. There is Staněk who has efficiency. Rummaging in his brief case he produces a petition of the kind Staněk had
managed to swim with political currents, who is on good terms with the authorities, had in mind. Staněk scans it with surprise and agitation, cannot abstain from making
and whose works are still produced on television and in film studios. He knows the some editorial comments but finally congratulates Vaněk on his excellent style and on
ropes, he writes what the regime approves of. Although he admires the dissidents, the fifty signatures which had already been collected.
However when Vaněk, encouraged by so much praise and concern, ventures the
58 Ibid 296 hesitant question whether he, Staněk, would not like to add his signature to the
59 Havel 'Dovětek autora' 310 petition, the benevolent host embarks slowly but with increasing rhetorical power on
60 Gabriel Laub is a writer, critic, and pamphleteer who has been living in Hamburg since

1968. He is the author of several collections of satirical writings in German. Double Barrelled 61 Protest tr Gabriel Laub (Hamburg 1978) 14. The Czech original is circulating in

Attack (Doppelfinten), a collection of ironic essays, with Hans-Georg Rauch's illustrations Czechoslovakia in typescript as a publication of Edice Petlice.
appeared in Charles Scribner jr's English translation (New York 1977). 62 Ibid 10, 11, 14, 15, 25
an argument which proves, with irresistible logic, that he would do great harm to the the other complements: „And nobody wants to do what he is allowed to.‟65 Or we
cause of the dissidents if he did sign the document and that, due to his solidarity with may remind ourselves of the scene in which a Ionesco character reduces all
those who tried to preserve the moral fibre of the nation, he would have to abstain communication to the word „cat‟;66 or perhaps of the two Pinter characters whose
from what he basically would like to do. Before Vaněk can assure him for the third critical assessment of another man has shrivelled to whether he is „funny‟ or „not
time that he respects his decision, the news arrives that Javůrek has been freed. funny.‟67 However, we have not witnessed there a sustained display of the corruption
Generously Staněk offers Vaněk his own furnace to burn the superfluous petition in, of intellect and emotion by language. For that we have to go to Havel. Whether you
and takes him to the garden to give him a shoot of his lovely magnolia tree. choose to quote hollow statements like „I myself – sort of personally fancy art. I think
In addition to its weighty political meaning Protest is an incontestable proof of of it as the spice of life‟ ; soap-bubble morality like „He has his faults, you know, but
Havel having grasped a basic ailment of our age. Psychology, ideology, and scientific does his share‟ ; vacuous encouragement such as „You must not lose your hope, your
objectivity have taught modern man to rationalize his moves. His knowledge of set love of life and your trust in other people!‟68
patterns of behavior make him act consciously in relation to such patterns. This can One area of Havel‟s critique of language that provides ample comedy is his
be inocuous or sinister. It can spell mediocrity or evil. In his three one-act plays treatment of the unnatural quality of bureaucratic language mechanically tied to
Václav Havel expresses what he is striving to portray, namely „the existential bureaucratic procedures. Take the conversation between the director and Hugo
dimension of the world.‟63 Pludek in which they plan well-balanced training sessions for inauguration and
liquidation and arrive at the conclusion that „„Another training will have to be
In a way all Havel‟s writings are a critique of the reassuring first line of the Gospel organized. Inaugurationally-trained liquidation officers training liquidationally-trained
according to St John: „In the beginning was the Word.‟ That does not mean that he inaugurators and liquidationally-trained inaugurators training inaugurationally-trained
has created characters who indulge in the language of silence (like some of the liquidation officers.‟69
characters of Beckett or Peter Handke). On the contrary, language is „the primary But there are also some jewels of pseudo-humanist jargon: „We are concerned with
moving force‟64 in Havel‟s plays and his characters talk a lot, too much in fact. But the man in the round,‟ says one character, „a man whose complexity has not been
the more they talk, the less they say. Their conversations read like parodies of simplified, whose human uniqueness has been preserved.‟70 Ironically, these words
elementary phrase-books with sections like „How to converse about world affairs are spoken by the member of a research team computing samples of human
with a sixty-word vocabulary‟; or „how to chat about the difference between the individuality. Or listen to the sales talk of Madam Diana in Macheath‟s favourite
humanities and the sciences at a cocktail party.‟ It would take a volume in itself to brothel when she comments on the personalized service in her establishment: „I am
define and order the great and resourceful variety of stock phrases in Havel‟s plays. of the opinion that services of this kind must not be provided as on an assembly line,
All we can do here is suggest a few and point out the thing they have in common: and I abhor those large anonymous gatherings which mechanize and dehumanize the
they consist of words which no longer express reality but obscure it. Isolated from whole thing, and debase it to the level of the consumers‟ attitude.‟71 This statement is
the real world, they create a solipsistic universe of abstractions which obliterates both mechanically repeated twice verbatim to two different customers. The fact that the
rational thought and common sense. remarks are totally false as such (the girls sell only what there is to be sold and
In this sense Havel‟s language is at the end of a long line of development. It seems consider any show of tenderness a vulgar breach of business ethics), is amusing but
that the crisis in language that began at the beginning of the century has left its mark less interesting than its wider implication.
more strongly on the theatre than on other literary genres. The playwright – because Our primitive ancestors believed that once a force was named, its power-spell was
he is dealing with the spoken word – seems to reflect most acutely the new awareness broken. Contemporary man, by constantly repeating the great cliché nightmares of
that man does not use language as his personal tool but rather that language, with its his age, somehow believes he is dealing with them. Modern psychology has frequently
inherent structures and meaning, rules man. We may think of the conversation used this ancient insight: formulating your fears and doubts will help you to
between two characters of the Austrian playwright Ödön von Horvath. In a simplistic
two-pronged aphorism they summarize what they feel the twentieth century has done 65 Ödön von Horvath Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald (Frankfurt/Main 1970) 43
to human nature: „Nobody is allowed to do what he wants,‟ complains one of them; 66 Ionesco Jack or the Submission in Four Plays 109
67 Harold Pinter The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter (New York 1961) 51-2
68 The Garden Party 32, 38; The Memorandum 109
63Havel 'Dovětek autora' 3100 69 The Garden Party 53
64 Paul I. Trensky 'Václav Havel and the Language of the Absurd' The Slavic and East 70 Concentration 32

European Journal 13 (1969) 44. This article contains perceptive comments on Havel's language. 71 Žebrácká opera 158
overcome them. Havel shows us again and again that this act of the recognition of a Later we get the following exchange of dialogue:
problem can be useless if it takes place in language only. He modifies the psychology-
textbook theory as well as the archaic beliefs behind them, „if you name it you put LEAR correcting pronunciation Listen carefully: m-a-1-u-z
yourself under the illusion of having mastered it,‟ and you can then afford to dismiss THUMB eager student M-a-1-u-z
it. But under the protective shelter of your words the power of the illusion continues. LEAR Your pronunciation isn‟t too good How do you say well?
The words can prevent rather than further the act of recognition. THUMB Zyk.
In this instance the meaning of Havel‟s works for our Western society becomes LEAR And well, well?
particularly obvious. Although certain forms of standardization and mechanical THUMB Zykzyk.
conformism have for some time been the targets of attacks by some of those LEAR Zykzym!!
believing in „individualism,‟ another form of standardization has developed among THUMB I‟m sorry, I forgot.
them. The „non conformists‟ have formed another standardized group, whose LEAR Mr. Thumb! Mr. Thumb! Yippee!
reactions and type of language (not to mention clothes or haircuts) have become as THUMB We haven‟t learned yippee yet, sir.
predictable as those of the „conformists.‟ Havel‟s comment on this kind of LEAR Don‟t try to excuse yourself. You simply don‟t know it. Hurrah!
phenomenon has not been matched by a Western playwright. THUMB Frnygko jefr dabux altep dy savarub gop texeres.
Another target of Havel‟s is folksy wisdom mechanized by habitual thoughtless LEAR Goz texeres!!
usage. In The Garden Party the hero‟s father, Pludek senior, reacts to most things with THUMB I mean, goz texeres.74
comments that have the ring of proverbs but are sheer nonsense. The form is empty,
the content has gone: leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare and Milton contain Another instance is the shouted behind-the-scenes conversation between the hero
whisky bottles, the opening line of an ancient song is used to sell shaving lotion. Gross (sadly ignorant of Ptydepe) and another official (well versed in Ptydepe):
When old Pludek quotes proverbs, only the grammar is right: „Well, have you ever
seen a Hussar of Cologne carry hemp seed to the attic alone?‟72 We hear the GROSS Well, why didn‟t you answer me?
proverbial rhythm, note the implied comparison to an actual situation, the built-in GEORGE off stage I wanted to test you out.
warning and good example – all is there, only the sense is lacking. GROSS I beg your pardon! Do you realize who I am? The Managing Director!
One of the best examples of Havel‟s linguistic inventiveness is of course the actual GEORGE off stage Habuk bulugan, avrator.
creation of an artificial language, Ptydepe, which is the thematic core of The GROSS What did you mean by that?
Memorandum. A rich variety of comic effects is obtained from the actual use of this GEORGE off stage Nutuput.
language on stage. There are, for example, the Ptydepe lessons – a MUST for all GROSS looks at his watch, then walks quickly to back door, turns at the door I won‟t put up
employees of the establishment – conducted by Ptydepe teacher Lear:73 with any abuse from you! I expect you to come to me and apologize. exit by back door
GEORGE off stage Gotroch!75
LEAR And now I shall name, just for the sake of preliminary orientation, some of
the most common Ptydepe interjections. Well then, our „ah!‟ becomes „zukybaj‟, our The patterns of repetition in Havel‟s plays seem at first arbitrary, even chaotic, but
„ouch!‟ becomes „bykur‟, our „oh!‟ becomes „hayf dy doretop‟, English „pish!‟ becomes on closer inspection one discovers highly structured, almost geometric forms. Scenes
„bolypak juz‟, the interjection of surprise „well!‟ becomes „zyk‟, however our „well, are re-enacted with reversed characters; identical situations have opposite meanings
well!‟ is not „zykzyk‟, as some students erroneously say, but „zykzym‟ – ... because the context is different. Like a hall of mirrors Havel‟s work reflects itself. For
example, Huml‟s request, made in quick succession to his wife, then to his mistress,
that they straighten things out between them, is countered. indignantly by both
women in virtually the same words: „For heaven‟s sake, what would that look like!
72 The Garden Party 14 Nonsense! You have a word with her today and that‟s that!‟76
73 In the original Czech, the author has here achieved a double comic effect. The teacher's
name is Peřina, which sounds as synthetic as any piece of Ptydepe vocabulary, but a Czech
audience is bound to think of its similarity to 'peřina,' meaning feather bed. Věra Blackwell's 74 The Memorandum 72-3
choice of the name 'Lear' for this character in her English translation of the play does not seem 75 Ibid 40
particularly fortunate. 76 Concentration 49-50, 55
 What must not go unmentioned is Havel‟s sustained ability to create a grotesque HUML She insisted I should part with you. What about some lunch?
counterpoint between the characters‟ linguistic abstractions and their preoccupation RENATA I hope you didn‟t promise her any such thing!
with physical needs. Take the following example from The Memorandum. Trying to get HUML She was so insistent, I had to agree – on the surface. But deep down I kept
some information regarding Ptydepe, Gross tries to approach a group of officials: my own counsel and I didn‟t commit myself to anything definite.
RENATA Really? And then? Did you suggest to her you want a divorce?
GROSS Miss Helena HUML I said you were rather counting on it – prospectively. What about some
HELENA Why don‟t you call me Nellie, love? What is it? lunch? There‟s some stew –RENATA I‟ll have a look –78
GROSS Miss Nellie, do you issue the documents one needs to get a translation
authorized? In the same play Havel explores the most disturbing aspect of the destruction of
STROLL Goose, vodka, and a cigar, that‟s what I call living. man by language. When Renata wants to know whether he is still in love with his
SAVANT What a cigar! wife, we hear the voice of Huml (who is busy hanging up her coat back-stage) „You
GROSS I said, do you issue the documents one needs to get a translation authorized? know very well I stopped loving her long ago! I just like her as a friend, a housewife, a
HELENA calling towards side door Where do you get water? companion of my life –.‟79 In this brief scene Havel shows us how the cliché can be
MARIA off stage I‟ll get it. runs in by side door, iron in hand, grabs kettle, and runs out back used to prove or disprove anything. A clichéd image of „love‟ has taken over the form
door of the word like a parasite and pushed out its real content. Here this process of
HELENA to Gross What? forcing out the true meaning of a word is demonstrated before our very eyes. The
GROSS Do you issue the documents one needs to get a translation authorized? word we are left with becomes an empty shell.
HELENA Yes. To anybody who hasn‟t recently received a memo written in Ptydepe.
GROSS Why? Toward the end of most of Havel‟s plays the protagonist gives a lengthy speech in
SAVANT Downright heady! which he summarizes his outlook on man, society, and life in general. The speeches
STROLL I should say! are highly amusing conglomerations of logical fallacies, pseudo-dialectics, and false
GROSS I said, why? analogies. With his acute sense for the mechanizing power of the word, Havel
HELENA calling towards side door Where do you keep the cups? explores man as the victim of the language he has created. He does so by exploring
MARIA off stage Coming!77 the area where the system and the individual meet, where standardization penetrates
into every fold of life. It has been pointed out repeatedly that this is obviously the
In The Increased Difficulty of Concentration this theme has a subtle new implication. work of a man who has grasped the enormous effect of a centralized political system
The central character Huml, caught in the complex mechanics of his relationships on the life of the average man.
with women, uses the necessity of attending to his body‟s biological needs as a sort of But it would do injustice to Havel‟s dramatic genius if his work were to be
haven from the increasing pressures of his life. Observe his conversation with his interpreted merely from a political point of view. The playwright himself has told us
mistress, Renata, who is getting impatient with the situation and wants him to get a that „the theatre shows the truth about politics not because it has a political aim. The
divorce: theatre can depict politics precisely because it has no political aim. For this reason it
seems to me that all ideas of the so-called “political theatre” are mistaken...‟80 By
RENATA If it‟s not worth your while to break it off on my account, you ought to do trying to give expression to the tensions between the individual and the social system
it for your own sake – just look at yourself! Can‟t you see the way you‟re slipping? in his own society – and there is no question as to who remains the victor there –
HUML I told you, didn‟t I, I want to do it in stages. What about some lunch? Havel has also made one of the most intelligent artistic comments on man in modern
RENATA I know your blessed stages, so far you haven‟t budged! mass society in general – applicable in New York as well as Prague, Stockholm,
HUML What do you mean? Only this morning I began to prepare the ground. Rome, or Warsaw.
RENATA Did you? How? Did you tell her you love me? He does this by taking to task the nature of language itself, particularly the catch-
HUML For a start, I said I find you sexually exciting. phrase or slogan whose power, well known to dictators of all kinds, is mostly
RENATA Well, that‟s at least something. What did she say?
78 Concentration 42-3
79 Ibid 57
77 The Memorandum 58-9 80 Havel 'Politics and the Theatre' 879
misjudged by well-meaning defenders of the humanistic values of a free society. It is Josef Gross, the hero of The Memorandum, delivers his tirade on man for the benefit
here that Havel‟s main contribution to the Theatre of the Absurd is to be found. For of the loyal secretary Marie, who, by trying to help him keep his position, lost her
example, take the incident in The Garden Party where Hugo Pludek reproaches his own. By now Havel‟s linguistic weapons are sharper and cut more deeply. Again
father for a simplistic question: „You think a question can be put in such a simplified Gross begins with an indisputable truism: „Dear Maria! We‟re living in a strange,
way? No matter how you answer this kind of question – you can never attain the complex epoch. As Hamlet says, our “time is out of joint.” Just think, we‟re reaching
whole truth, always only a limited part of it.‟81 So far so good. Hugo‟s words can for the moon and yet it‟s increasingly hard for us to reach our selves; we‟re able to
hardly be disputed, and his subsequent statement about human nature is still equally split the atom, but unable to prevent the splitting of our personality; we build superb
acceptable. Who could deny that man is „rich, complex, changeable and multi-form‟? communications between the continents, and yet communication between Man and
It is only with the next words that Hugo‟s reasoning begins to crack up under the Man is increasingly difficult ... Like Sisyphus, we roll the boulder of our life up the hill
absurdity of his language. While we still find ourselves nodding in agreement, the of its illusory meaning, only for it to roll down again into the valley of its own
argument becomes the very opposite of rational. „There‟s no word, no sentence, no absurdity. Never before has Man lived projected so near to the very brink of the
book, nothing that could fully describe and contain him [man]‟ says Hugo.82 On the insoluble conflict between the subjective will of his moral self and the objective
surface the statement seems true. No book can describe man in his entirety, no possibility of its ethical realization. Manipulated, automatized, made into a fetish, Man
sentence, no word..., and here we hesitate. This is obviously a nasty cul-de-sac. How loses the experience of his own totality; horrified, he stares as a stranger at himself,
did the playwright ever get us there? unable not to be what he is not, nor to be what he is.‟84
Havel has forced us into literal logic. Beginning with a sort of Kantian proposition This is surely an irresistible string of arguments. Havel uses dialectics like a
that man cannot perceive or express truth in its entirety, he then reverses the bouncing see-saw, and hurls images and banalities with the finality of a visionary.
argument by reducing the possibilities of expression to one word. He therefore implies Marie has, understandably, no answer to all this, and her whispered comment:
that, under certain circumstances, one word could express a complex phenomenon. In „Nobody ever talked to me so nicely before,‟85 is the final stroke of deadly irony
other words, Hugo claims that one single word can wield great intellectual weight – before the curtain falls. Again Havel starts safely with a comment we might hear any
which is, of course, a fallacy, but is also an astute observation of the power of slogans day on the street. Then he brings in the well-known quotation from Hamlet which
which carry a built-in, incontrovertible evaluation. This is explosive material in quite legitimizes his whole speech by supposedly anchoring it in our cultural heritage. The
different types of modern society where slogans – whether they be „enemies of the three contrasts which follow might be a lesson to any public speaker. Their obviously
people‟ or „women‟s liberation‟ – with their absolute evaluations are part and parcel fallacious aspects (the use of verbs in a literal sense in an image that does not bear
of the daily life of the average citizen. literal interpretation) somehow strengthen the argument because the speaker seems to
Also the next page of Hugh Pludek‟s speech bears quoting: „And today we‟ve have used them quite frankly as rhetorical devices. This impression is, of course,
passed the time of static and unchangeable categories, when A was only A and B dispersed as soon as the Sisyphus image is brought in. From now on the argument
always only B; today we know very well that A can often be simultaneously B and B races uncontrollably to its disastrous conclusion – the nonsensical equation that
simultaneously A ... that under certain circumstances even F could become Q, Y, cancels itself.
indeed even Q with a nasal! ... The truth is as complex and multiform as everything Here Havel has take up the dominant themes that have caught the critical
else in the world – the magnet, the telephone, Branislav‟s verse, the magnet – and we imagination of our age: the march of science as opposed to the „static‟ values of the
are all a bit what we were yesterday and a bit what we are today; ... as a matter of fact humanist; the crisis of man‟s identity; the inability to communicate – all providing
we all are constantly a bit and constantly we are a bit not ... so that no-one among us fertile soil for catch-words and slogans to sprout and proliferate. Finally Havel
completely exists and at the same time no-one exists completely ...‟83 conjures up the figure of Sisyphus, the patron saint of absurdist writing, and creates
A political scientist in the audience might interpret this as a parody of Engels‟ an existentialist hodgepodge of images that makes our heads spin – but not enough
theory of constant change; a humanist might consider it an example of a pretentious, not to realize that the parody constantly moves precariously close to reality. And here
half baked display of scientism; while others may merely enjoy it as a brilliant show of comes Havel‟s prime move. For a brief moment he uses Gross, the main example of
lopsided logic. Havel‟s „dialogue‟ with any audience occurs on many levels. manipulated and automated man, as the play‟s raisonneur, by letting him comment
critically and lucidly on the predicament of modern man. For one flash the „absurd‟

81 The Garden Party 63

82 Ibid 84 The Memorandum 107-8
83 Ibid 64 85 Ibid 109
world of the play and the „real‟ world of the audience have become one. The effect, if aristocracy, growing sunflowers – and I have imagined afterwards, in the evening,
utilized by a perceptive director, is bound to be strong. sitting by the big Renaissance fireplace, gazing into the flames, telling each other
In The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, Dr Eduard Huml launches an impassioned about our childhood, reading together old books from the castle library, sipping mead
attack on the automatic calculator that was to register his reactions and compute – and then – slightly intoxicated – retiring to the castle bedroom – ... drowsily taking
them into an orderly, predictable sample of individual behaviour. Not only does off our clothes, and lying down together in our big canopied gothic bed and then first
PUZUK, the hapless calculator, break down, but it also goes berserk over its task. of all kissing each other tenderly for an awfully long time, and then loving each other
Huml, who considers the whole project „nothing but an unfortunate mistake,‟86 and loving each other – our hot, sun-tanned bodies intertwined in spasms of
explains his attitude by taking on the whole question of scientific predictability versus frustrated love – and then finally, ecstatically happy and sweetly exhausted – we fall
philosophical speculation. And he makes no bones about being a humanist – a man asleep – to be awakened the next morning by the sparkling summer sun, by birdsong,
who believes in feelings! For example, he remarks: „your endeavour to isolate the and by the butler, bringing in bacon and eggs and cocoa.‟ 88
element of coincidence and use it as a means of shaping human individuality bears no The playwright has managed to summon all the clichés of latter-day romanticism,
relationship to science whatsoever. Moreover, it is bound to miss its goal completely mixing confused scraps of history and former cultures with the banal desires of a
... In other words, the personal, human, unique relationship which arises between two chambermaid, and concocting an irresistible potpourri of „dreams come true.‟ Again it
individuals is so far the only thing that can – at least to some extent – mutually unveil is language which has moulded fixed images, used in order to conjure up false
the secret of those two individuals. Such values as love, friendship, compassion, pictures of happiness. The talker achieves his purpose and the stale models work on
sympathy and the unique and irreplaceable mutual understanding – or even mutual Lucy, who bursts into tears and promises to find a hacksaw and get her Mackie out of
conflict – are the only tools which this human approach has at its disposal ... Hence, prison.
the fundamental key to man does not lie in his brain, but in his heart.‟ 87 Macheath‟s second speech, also addressed to the female sex, is another feat of
Again, as in the other two speeches, the argument is circular and cancels itself: rhetoric like Marc Antony‟s speech to the Romans. It begins with a vocative, after
man‟s complexity, it turns out, can be dealt with after all; only the place that provides which it launches into a series of protestations of love and devotion. The only
the key has been switched from one area to another – from head to heart. unusual thing is that the speech is addressed to two women instead of one. Polly
Abstraction and reality never meet. Phrases like „the secret of man‟ and „unrepeatable Peachum and Lucy Locket, both of whom have a claim on his love, have come to the
human understanding‟ have taken the place of „the coherent pattern of received prison cell to get things straightened out. The scene is famous in Gay‟s as well as
information‟ or a „condensed model of human individuality.‟ Ptydepe has been Brecht‟s version. In both cases it is the women who carry on the battle of rhetoric
replaced by Chorukor. We may be surprised, indeed disturbed, by the way in which and deride the „perfidious wretch‟89 for having deceived them. In Havel‟s version the
this use of language reflects certain situations in the daily life of this society – be it in silken tongue of the man with the gift for language settles the matter again, reducing
an insurance office, or at a „teach-in.‟ the girls to tears and the realization that they have „done him wrong.‟ Macheath‟s
Macheath, the gallant big shot of the underworld, also likes to give speeches. In successful speech consists simply of expounding the situation as it is and making the
fact, he gives three of them in the course of Havel‟s The Beggar’s Opera. The playwright best of it: „What, tell me, have I really done wrong? Was it my fault that I married you
has expanded the area of his critique of language with excellent results. In his first both?90 What should I have done when I was in love with you both? Naturally what is
bout of rhetoric Macheath convinces Lucy, who is visiting him in prison, that he still more acceptable for society nowadays and more comfortable for a man, hence more
loves her, despite his rampages with other women. He paints for her a glowing usual, is another procedure, namely that a man takes as his wife only one of the
picture of an eighteenth-century lover‟s utopia from the viewpoint of an average beloved women and – making acceptable excuses to his legitimate wife – he reduces
citizen of a twentieth-century socialist state: „You must believe me, Lucy! ... If you the other one to the debasing position of a so-called mistress, that is, a sort of
only knew how much I have been thinking of you! Every day I have been conjuring superior courtesan, whose duties are almost identical with those of his wife, but
up in my mind a little country castle built of red brick ... surrounded by green whose rights, in comparison with the wife, are decidedly severely limited ... The
meadows and beech groves – and I have imagined the way the two of us setting up situation of the wife is, however, no more advantageous: the mistress knows about
house there, romping around in the meadows with our greyhounds, riding on the wife and often, one might conjecture, discusses her at length with her lover, the
horseback, hunting exotic game, bathing in the nearby brook, gathering mushrooms,
cooking ancient Old-English dishes, arranging soirees for the neighbouring rural 88 Žebrácká opera 138-9
89 Gay Opera 51
86 Concentration 70 90 Czech has different forms for singular and plural of nouns and verbs, and this renders the
87 Ibid 71-2 speech even more amusing. Some of the effect gets lost in English.
latter‟s husband, while the wife, on the other hand, must remain submerged in the ranks of those petty schemers? Is Havel serious about the uselessness of heroism or is
swamp of ignorance which naturally alienates her from her husband ... Are you aware he merely presenting us with another logical fallacy under the mask of a seemingly
how ruthless such a solution would be to both women? And you mean that I should rational argument – namely that corruption can be fought by adding more
have proceeded in this way? No, girls, if I wanted to fulfill my duties toward you to corruption? Waters run deep at the end of Havel‟s most boisterous work.
the best of my ability I could not follow the actions of other men in this matter, and I
had to strike out on my own, take a path perhaps not yet walked upon, but definitely Havel‟s most recent play Protest takes his exploration of language as a vehicle for a
more moral, namely the way, which gives you both the same amount of legitimacy certain mode of thought still another significant step further. In a long speech,
and dignity. Such is the truth: Please judge me on its basis! ...‟91 Staněk, faced with the request to sign a petition on human rights, explains to Vaněk
When Macheath finishes his speech to his two wives with a final flourish about the (who has handed him the petition) that, if he wants to act „truly ethically,‟94 he must
happy moments that the three of them will not be able to experience (after all, he is abstain from signing the document. The arguments which lead to this conclusion
going to be executed in the morning), the two women fly to his chest and weep with seem to me to contain the most brilliant tour de force of logic which Havel has
gratitude for having been spared the ignominy of being either the deceived wife or written to this point. In fact they are so irresistible in their lucidity that it remains to
the downtrodden mistress. Macheath has not only been forgiven but has also be seen whether the play will not make its impact as a plea to consider the dilemma
convinced them that he acted logically as well as morally and, above all, honourably. of those who have decided to live with the regime, to think of their families, and
By basing his whole speech on rigidly clichéd concepts, Macheath develops a avoid unnecessary destructive struggles against forces much too powerful to be
seemingly logical argument which no-one notices to be based on a false premise. affected.
With the help of two words he establishes two isolated areas of values which, though In The Memorandum Gross‟s argument had gone up in a cloud of contradictions;
based exclusively on a theadbare and banal stock image, carry great weight with Huml, in The Increased Difficulty of Concentration had indulged in a circular argument
minds that do not respond rationally but emotionally. With a humorous insight that which cancelled itself in the end; Macheath of The Beggar’s Opera moved precariously
seems to me unmatched in contemporary theatre, Havel explores the theme of „man closer to reality by raising the question of the uselessness, in fact the pig-headed
at the mercy of language‟92 – a problem that has gained increasing importance in our arrogance, of heroism in a world where betrayal had become the common form of
century. behaviour. Staněk in Protest, assessing the consequences of certain political moves in a
Macheath‟s third speech, delivered at the end of the play, is no longer a parody. It totalitarian country which tries to cope with a small number of people who try to
seems that here the playwright has ceased to use language as a false front. Macheath, show that they do not agree with the regime, does so with the foresight of a brilliant
caught in the mesh of pretense, no longer able to distinguish a lie from the truth, chess player. „Let me tell you something, Ferdinand,‟ he explains to Vaněk, „without
betrayed three times by the woman whom he had thought an exception to the general noticing myself I have become used to the perverse thought that the dissidents are
corruption, draws his conclusion: „If everyone around me betrays me, as has become taking care of morality. But they themselves – without becoming conscious of it –
obvious, it does not mean that they expect anything else from me, but the exact also got used to that idea! ... What if I, too, were yearning finally to become a free
opposite: by acting in this way they offer me some sort of principle of our mutual human being? What if I, too, wanted to renew my integrity and throw off this burden
relationship.‟93 Accordingly he decides to play along on the principle, „when in Rome, of humiliation?‟ And he continues, revealing that „after years of uninterrupted
do as the Romans do,‟ or „if you can‟t beat them, join them.‟ vomiting I would – if I were to sign your paper – win back my lost freedom and
Macheath‟s speech, supported by a number of significant arguments, strikes a dignity, perhaps even the recognition of those who are close to me ... I would be able
puzzling new note in Havel‟s work. Is Macheath, the professional betrayer of women, to look without shame into my daughter‟s eyes ... My son would not be able to go to
the boss of a shady organization, the ruthless businessman, to be taken seriously as college but he would respect me more than if I had assured his acceptance by
Havel‟s raisonneur? Like Gay and Brecht before him, Havel has engaged all our refusing to sign the petition for Javůrek whom he worships ... This is the subjective
sympathies for the gallant crook who, by means of his wit, generosity, and ability to side of the whole matter. And how does it look from an objective point of view?‟95
deal with life in a grand manner, had distinguished himself from the petty schemers It is clear that Staněk‟s description of the situation is realistic. Indeed his argument
around him. Does his parodistic „existentialist decision‟ mean that he will join the does not seem „subjective‟ at all. If the allegedly „subjective‟ point of view was so loyal
to the truth, the „objective‟ point of view would have to be more than perfect. In our
91 Žebrácká opera 160-1 age we gladly allow for distortion in what we have come to call „subjectivity,‟ but at
92 One of the section headings in ch. 3 of Peter Farb's Word Play: What Happens When People
Talk (New York 1974), a full exploration of this topic 94 Protest 51
93 Žebrácká opera 182 95 Ibid 43, 45-6
the promise of „objectivity‟ our eyes brighten with immediate credulity. The popular profound grasp of the world he lives in –, it does not really take place in Staněk‟s
credo for our times could easily be: If it is objective it must be good. Havel has mind either.
prepared us well for what is to come. Staněk‟s weighing of pros and cons corresponds to reality but only to a reality
„What happens,‟ Staněk says, launching into his „objective‟ argument, „when among within the patterns of thought which permeate a society which has been forced to
the signatures of a few widely known young dissidents ... there appears ... also my think in these patterns. Staněk has applied the reasoning process of a closed system
signature? The closed circle of notorious signers (whose signatures are gradually of thought to a simple ethical question: Should I lend my voice to try to help an
losing their importance because they do not have to be paid for by anything, since innocent man who is in trouble? The whole intricate net of reasoning which he
those people have nothing more to lose) will be broken ... The political powers will unfurls before our eyes is the type of reasoning he has been taught by the system he
want to demonstrate that they are not likely to panic and cannot be unbalanced by lives in. It is pseudo-reasoning, and totally false in absolute terms. It is, in a nut-shell,
such surprises.‟96 perhaps the best portrayal of perverted „rational‟ thinking that has ever been put on
What is left to discuss is the question of what influence Staněk‟s signature would stage in modern theatre. As such, Staněk‟s arguments are also more important than
have on the vast circles of those who are trying to conform, who don‟t ask many might appear at first sight for a Western democratic society where moral norms are
questions as long as they can afford a holiday, or in some cases a car, or perhaps a questioned and relativistic points of view have often become ethical guide-posts. A
weekend cottage. Here again Staněk makes his deductions with relentless logic: those Polish cartoon sums up the issue in a humourous way: Two men are having a
conformists basically dislike the dissidents because they see in them their own bad discussion. One has just finished his argument. The other scratches his head
conscience and as a consequence they would be bound to regard him, Staněk, as a thoughtfully: „Clearly you are right ... But ... from which point of view?‟
victim of the dissidents‟ cynical appeal to his humanism. The police, of course – no There is no question that Havel‟s plays deal with the burning issues in his own
need to conceal that fact – would support and try to spread this attitude. Moreover, society. However, they not only turn out to contain surprisingly apt comments on
„the more intelligent people will perhaps observe that this sensational news – my another society that wrestles with different kinds of problems, but they also reveal
signature – detracts from the issue itself, i.e. the matter of Javůrek, and in the final themselves in their timeless aspects – wisdom expressed in terms of excellent theatre.
analysis makes the whole protest appear in rather sinister a light by raising the Havel himself seems to know how these things work: „Drama‟s success in
question of whether you really wanted to help Javůrek or show off me as a freshly transcending the limits of its age and country depends entirely on how far it succeeds
baked dissident.‟97 in finding a way to its own place and time ... If Shakespeare is played all over the
There might even be people who would claim that Javůrek had become the world in the twentieth century it is not because in the seventeenth century he wrote
dissidents‟ victim because the latter used his misfortune for purposes which had plays for the twentieth century and for the whole world but because he wrote plays
nothing to do with his fate. Now Staněk is ready for the final moral sum-up: for seventeenth-century England as best he could.‟99 Without wanting to compare
„Considering all these circumstances, the question must be asked: What is more Havel with Shakespeare we can nevertheless see that the principle is the same. Havel
important – the liberating feeling which my signature would give me, paid for by its writes for Czechoslovakia as best he can, therefore (as he would say) his work carries
basically negative consequences? ... In other words: If I want to act truly ethically – so strong a message outside its borders.
and I feel sure you will not doubt now that I do – what shall I go by? By relentless In his by now famous Open Letter to the General Secretary of the Communist Party
objective reflection or by my own subjective inner feeling?‟98 of Czechoslovakia written on 4 April, 1975, Havel makes a statement which describes
I could easily envisage a critic who would interpret this string of oddly indisputable the arid atmosphere he is trying to reveal in his plays, by pitching his artistic
arguments as an attempt on Havel‟s part to reveal a moral dilemma where it is rarely imagination against the stultifying order of rigid values and suppression of truth.
looked for: not in the dissidents‟ glowing beliefs but in those grey hangers-on of the „True enough,‟ he writes, „order prevails: a bureaucratic order of grey monotony that
regime who compromise and keep silent, who – as Havel‟s Macheath, pushed by stifles all individuality; of mechanical precision that suppresses everything of unique
circumstances, finally did would play the game that everyone played. In a way the quality; of musty inertia that excludes the transcendental. What prevails is order
imaginary critic would be right. The moral Struggle in Protest surely does not take without life.‟100 In one play after another Havel reveals the life-destroying nature of
place in Vaněk‟s mind. But – and here we see Havel‟s finest display of a writer‟s rigid forms of „order.‟ The spectrum is vast and the consequences differ greatly in
significance; they can affect, say, a university curriculum, the categories of behavioral
psychology, or the rules governing life under totalitarianism. We cannot escape the
96 Ibid 46-7
97 Ibid 49-50 99 Havel 'Politics and the Theatre' 879
98 Ibid 51 100 Havel 'An Open Letter' Encounter 45 (Sept. 1975) 24
bitter realization that Havel in his letter not only describes the fictional atmosphere in
his plays but also the real situation in his country. And yet another, brighter, thought
is bound to emerge: abstracted from the situation in which they were written, his
words formulate a diagnosis of mass society throughout the world.

In: Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa: The Silence Theatre. Toronto – Buffalo – London,

1979.