1985

  E's a orrible unk of atefulness.

  On the other hand, the aspirate is to be retained as an emphasizer, only initially however, in such statements as, 'I said, eat up my dinner, not heat it up' (the meaning here being diametrically opposed to the meaning conveyed by a speaker of BE when uttering this sentence). This means that the presence of an emphatic aspirate has absolutely no etymological or lexical significance, being a purely pro-sodic device: The law is a hass.

  You're a hugly great hidiot.

  Coincidentally, of course, emphatic aspiration may match phonemic usage in BE, but the statement, 'You're horrible,' in WE represents no return to BE pseudo-gentility of utterance. The phoneme ng in verbal-noun terminations having been traditionally replaced in demotic, as well as rural genteel, usage by n, this usage is now formulated as regular. The fricatives found initially in thin and then are to be regarded, considering their absence in the phonemic inventories of most metropolitan speakers, as optional in speech, being replaced by f and v respectively, though the digraph is retained in writing and printing.

  We come now to the question of vocabulary and that principle of economy of lexis which, instinctually consulted in traditional demotic, is to be more deliberately and rationally applied to the development of WE as a living and progressive language. Generally speaking, the speaker or writer of WE is expected to possess a trade vocabulary, wherein amplitude and exactness may constitute factors of efficiency and safety (thus, the generic thing or wotsit or oojah or gadget will not serve in the designation of parts of a machine which have opposed functions), and a social vocabulary whose elements are of mainly Teutonic origin and serve to denote physical and emotional states and processes. WE is not concerned with the abstractions of philosophy or even science, though, for rhetorical purposes, an arbitrary sub-lexis of polysyllables of Latin or even Greek origin is available, whose lexicographical definition is regarded as otiose. Examples of such terms are verification, obstropulosity, fornicator, supercodology: I ask you in all bleeding verification whether or not you think it's bloody fair.

  I've had enough of his bloody obstropulosity and I'm bleeding well going to do the bastard.

  That fucking fornicator got his hands in my coat pocket when I'd got my eyes on the dartboard.

  Don't get working on any of that supercodology when I'm around, mate, or you'll get a bunch of fives in the fag-hole.

  (Here in deference to the BE reader's habits, traditional orthography is used.) Generally speaking, statements in WE are expected to be of a tautologous nature, thus fulfilling the essential phatic nature of speech; as modern linguistics teaches us, non-tautologous statements are either lies or meaningless: I like a nice pint when I've done my work, because a nice pint's bloody nice, mate.

  The working class is all right, because they're a very nice class of people.

  I love that girl, I can't hardly keep my hands off of her.

  They want to get rid of that new left-half, because he's no bleeding good.

  (It will be noticed that qualifiers of emphasis formerly regarded as obscene have full lexical status in WE.) As an example of the expressive capacities of WE, a rendering of the opening of a well-known speech in Shakespeare's Hamlet may here be appended: To get on with bloody life or not to, that's what it's all about really. Is it more good to get pains in your fuckin loaf worryin about it or to get stuck into what's getting you worried and get it out of the way and seen off? To snuff it is only like getting your head down, and then you get rid of the lot, anyway that's how we'd like to have it . . .

  The passage from the Declaration of Independence which Orwell regarded as untranslatable into Newspeak yields easily enough to WE, though its meaning is somewhat modified: This is true, and there's no arguing the toss over it, that everybody's got the same rights to belong to a union, to live for ever, to do what the hell he wants to do, and watch TV, get drunk, sleep with a woman, and smoke. It's the job of governments to let the unions give union members what they want, and if the governments do not do what the unions want, then they have to get kicked out.

  Epilogue: an interview

  Do you really think this is going to happen?

  A question to be answered by waiting a few years. It's always foolish to write a fictional prophecy that your readers are very soon going to be able to check. Take it that I merely melodramatize certain tendencies. In Britain, the unions are certainly growing stronger and more intolerant. But by the unions I probably merely mean the more belligerent union leaders. I leave out of account too, as Orwell did more spectacularly, the good sense and humanity of the average worker.

  I'm an American, and it seems to me absurd that the USA could ever become Unhappy Syndicalized America. American society will never be tyrannized by the unions.

  Probably not. I was extrapolating certain experiences of my own in the field of American show business. The tyranny of the musicians' union, for instance, on Broadway. It's hard to prophesy the future of the United States. That cacotopia of Sinclair Lewis's, It Can't Happen Here, still seems to me to be the most plausible projection, though it was written in the thirties. At least it shows how a tyranny can come about through the American democratic process, with a president American as apple pie, as they say - a kind of cracker-barrel Will Rogers type appealing to the philistine anti-intellectual core of the American electorate. Core? More than the core, the whole fruit except for the thin skin of liberalism. My old pappy used to say: Son, there ain't no good books except the Good Book. Time these long-haired interlettles got their comeuppance, and so on. And so book-burning, shooting of radical schoolmasters, censorship of progressive newspapers. Every repressive act justified out of the Old Testament and excused jokingly in good spittoon style.

  I think we're past the naivete of letting mere novelists do the prophesying. They're fantasists, they don't really examine trends. The futures they present couldn't possibly have their beginnings in the present we know.

  True. Novelists have given up writing future fiction. They leave that to the think-tank people. What fantasy-writers like to do nowadays is to imagine a past when history took a turning different from the one it did take, and then create an alternative present based on that past. Keith Robert's Pavane, for example, and Kingsley Amis's The Alteration both posit that the Christian Reformation never got to the Anglo-Saxons, with the result in both of the killing of the empirical spirit, which means the death of science. And so a modern world without electricity and a powerful theocracy ruling it from Rome. Amusing, stimulating, but a time-game. Prophecy is no longer the province of the fictional imagination, as I say, as you say. The question is: are the futurologists of MIT and elsewhere doing the prophetic job any better?

  It's not a question of prophecy. Professor Toffler tells us that the future's already here, in the sense that a technology and a way of life are being imposed on us that belong neither to the past nor the present. A lot of people, he says, are in a state of shock at what they regard as things alien to the present. When your thinking and feeling and, above all, your nervous system reject certain innovations, then the future's arrived and what you have to do is to catch up with it. The symptoms of rejection are hysteria or apathy or both. People drug themselves out of the present which is really the future, or else exile themselves into pre-industrial cultures. Violence, madness, neuroses of all kinds abound. We don't define the future in temporal terms, but in terms of the new stimulus that overstimulates to dementia. The future's a solid body we've never seen before - something dumped on the shore for the wary natives to sniff at and run away from. Then they come back, see what it is, accept. The future has become the present. Then we await the next new solid bodies, with the inevitable syndrome of temporary rejection.

  But what we fear from the future is not new solid bodies but war and tyranny.

  Which function by means of solid bodies. Is there going to be a tyranny in the United States - not a tyranny of the syndicates, like the British one, but a good old-fashioned Orwellian Big
Brother?

  If it happens, it will happen through war.

  Is there going to be a war - not the little contained wars of which we have, on average, two a year, but a really big Second-World-War-type war?

  Your compatriots Doctors Kahn and Wiener, of that Hudson Institute which was looking after the year 2000 for us, give us a table which shows how limited and total wars tend to form into a time pattern. An alternation of eras devoted to the two kinds of war, like this:

  1000-1550 limited war - feudal, dynastic

  1550-1648 total war - religious

  1648-1789 limited war - colonial, dynastic

  1789-1815 total war - revolutionary nationalist

  1815-1914 limited war - colonial, commercial

  1914-1945 total war - nationalist, ideological

  And since 1945 we've had thirty-odd years of limited wars conducted for various, often spurious, reasons - territorial, anticolonial, ideological, what you will. If history really follows a pattern of alternation, we can't have an indefinite period of limited wars. We have to break out on a world scale once more sometime. Consider that thirty years is the longest period the modern world has had without a global war. Perhaps our economic troubles, the inexplicable yoking of recession and inflation for instance, stem from the fact that we don't know how to run a peace economy. War economy is different - we have precedents. I've dreamed of a Malthusian world war conducted with conventional weapons - one that can only break out when the world's planners realize that the global food supply is not going to feed the global population. Instead of famine and riot we have a pretence of nationalist war whose true aim is to kill off millions, or billions, of the world's population. I even wrote a book in which Enspun fights Chinspun -

  What are those, for God's sake?

  The English Speaking Union and the Chinese Speaking Union. The third great power is Ruspun, and you know what that is. Actually, the war is made up of local extermination sessions called battles, in which men fight women. A real sex war. And then the cadavers are carted off to be processed into canned food. The recent bout of enforced cannibalism in the Andes proves that human flesh is both edible and nourishing, despite the new dietetic taboos which condemn it as so much poison. The processed human flesh is sold in supermarkets and called Munch or Mensch or something. People will eat anything these days.

  Seriously, though.

  In a way I was, am, being serious. That kind of war would be a just war and a useful one. But the world will have to wait till the year 3000 to see it. As for the new world war that's waiting in the womb of time, a healthily developed foetus, who can say what will spark it, how destructive it will be? We've already played at this war in film and fiction, indicating that there's a part of us that desperately wants it. What nonsense writers and filmmakers talk when they say that their terrible visions are meant as a warning. Warning nothing. It's sheer wish fulfilment. War, somebody said, is a culture pattern. It's a legitimate mode of cultural transmission, though the culture transmitted is usually not the one we expect -

  How?

  To take a trivial example, popular Latin American song and dance flooded North America and Europe in the forties and after because of the need of the United States to make Latin America a 'good neighbour' - we know how much sympathy for the Nazis there was in the Argentine, for instance. This meant that we all had to see The Three Caballeros and Carmen Miranda, dance congas and sambas, sing Brazil and Boa Noite. To be less trivial, Americanization of both Japan and Germany could best come about by defeating them and confining their post-war industrial production to pacific commodities. Soviet Russia transmitted her brand of Marxist control to Eastern Europe. War is the speediest way of transmitting a culture, just as meat-eating is the speediest way of ingesting protein. It used to be possible to see war as an economic mode of exogamy on a large scale - transmit your seed and produce lively new mixes, avoid the weary incest of perpetual endogamy which is the dull fruit of peace. The greatest war picture of all depicts the Rape of the Sabines. War uses international politics as a mere pretext for fulfilling a deep need in man, which he's scared of admitting because he doesn't like to relate the enhancement of life to the meting out of death.

  The Third World War?

  It could start anywhere. It will pose as an ideological war. It will use conventional weapons. It will end in a truce with a million men and women dead but the great cities untouched. Flesh is cheap and is growing cheaper all the time. Great cities contain valuable artefacts, which cost dear and had better not be bombed. Computers for example. We've read so many scenarios about the next war; you don't want another. What interests me is how a species of totalitarianism could come about in the United States through uneasiness about the enemy at the gates. A communist revolution in Mexico, helped by the Chinese, might set America dithering, looking for spies, deploying her immense cybernetic and electronic resources to keep citizens under surveillance. The enhanced power of the presidency, the temporary dissolution of Congress. Censorship. Dissident voices silenced. And all in the name of security. No war is necessary, only the threat of war and, in good Orwellian style, the notion of an enemy, actual or potential, can be the device for justifying tyranny. Orwell was right there. War is the necessary background to State repression. War as a landscape or weather or wallpaper. The causes don't matter, the enemy can be anybody. When we think of a future world war, we get quickly bored with working out the causative details, since these could literally be anything. India drops a bomb on Pakistan. An East German coup breaks down the Berlin Wall. Canada resents American capital and American military installations and tells the US to get the hell out. You remember how H. G. Wells made the Second World War start? He wrote a book in the middle thirties called The Shape of Things to Come, a history of the future and mostly, as it had to be, absurd. But he had the war start in 1940 on the Polish Corridor, which was astonishingly accurate. A Polish Jew is eating a hazelnut, and a bit lodges in a back hollow tooth. He tries to get the fragment out with his finger, and a young Nazi interprets the grimace as a jeer at his uniform. He fires a shot. The Jew dies. The war starts. That the causes of war are so vague, that the priming incident is so trivial - don't we have here a proof that we want war for the sake of war?

  I was born in 1951, but I had a vivid dream the other night about the First World War. Not about battles. I was in a London restaurant and there was a calendar on the wall showing the month to be February and the year 1918. The place was crowded, and I was sitting drinking tea, very weak tea, at a table where two ladies were talking. They were dressed in the style of the time as I've seen it in films and photographs - the decor of the dream was amazingly accurate. One of the ladies said something like, 'Oh, when will this terrible war be over?' Of course I knew exactly when. I very nearly said: '11 November this year,' but held myself back just in time. That isn't the point of the dream, though. The point is that I felt the period. I could smell the under-arm odour of the ladies, the dust on the floor. The light bulb seemed to belong to that period and no other. When I consider the future, I don't care much about the generalities - the type of government and so on. I want something more existential, the quality of quotidian living - Do you understand me?

  I understand you very well. If dreams can't do it for you, novelists and poets ought at least to attempt it. Here we are in this room in this flat in London. The year is 1978. I've worked in this room since 1960, and it hasn't changed much. The desk and chair are the same, also the carpet, which was tattered enough, God knows, when I first laid it down. It should be possible to hang on to this furniture, if not this typewriter, until the year 2000. Unless there's a wholly destructive fire, or unless the town planners pull down this block of flats, there's a sort of guarantee that things in this room will remain as they are. I, of course, may be dead, but these dead things will outlive me. So, you see, we're already in the future. We leave this room and go into other rooms. How much else will be the same? The television set, I'm pretty sure, will have be
en replaced many times over by 2000.

  I saw a photograph of President Carter and his First Lady watching television. They were looking at three programmes at the same time. It struck me that that would be the pattern of future viewing. In the United States, certainly with so many channels, it seems a pity to confine yourself to one. We'll learn the gift of multiple viewing. And listening. This will be a definitive change in our modality of response to a stimulus -

  But there'll be no change in our assumption that the domestic TV screen will be the chief source of entertainment and information. The death of big-screen cinema, and the substitution of big-screen television. More and more newspapers closing down. Stereoscopic vision? Expensive, for a long time. That's going to be the trouble with a great number of innovations - price. I don't see money going very far. I don't see a real grip on inflation, even by the end of the century. Unless a new Maynard Keynes comes along. I think that governments are going to make the price of drink and tobacco prohibitive, to save us from ourselves, but that they're going to permit the free sale of harmless stimulants and depressants. Something like Aldous Huxley's soma -

  What do you see on your wide screen?

  Old movies. Two or three at a time, as you suggest -why not? Casablanca and Emile Zola and something silent, like Fritz Lang's Metropolis. New movies lacking in overt violence, but candid as to the sexual act, which will be presented to the limit. Arguments in the press, and on talk shows, about the difference between the erotic and the pornographic. Also news. Industrial unrest, inflation, pump-priming (that means our total war may be coming). Kidnapping and skyjacking by dissident groups. Micro-bombs of immense destructiveness placed in public buildings. More thorough frisking at airports and at cinema entrances and on railroad stations - indeed, everywhere: restrictions on human dignity in the name of human safety. New oil strikes, but the bulk of the oil in the hands of the Arabs. More and more Islamic propaganda. Islamic religion taught in schools as a condition for getting oil. The work of finding a fuel substitute goes on. Gasoline very expensive. Jet travel on super Concordes, swift but damnably expensive. Life mostly work and television.