UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

"A short story shouldn't have too many characters in it," Dr. Murray declared for the benefit of his two prettiest students - Linda Bell and Pauline Dyer, who were seated opposite him at the table nearest to the door in what was, by any standards, a busy lunch-time restaurant. "Though it should have more characters than a dialogue and less than a novel. What particularly justifies a work the length of a novel is the fact that the author intends to introduce more characters to us than he'd be able to do in a short story. To write a novel with as few as two or three characters, on the other hand, would be no less absurd than to write a short story with ten or more! One would be writing a novel as though it were a dialogue or a short story, and that can only be mistaken. Unless one knows why one is writing a novel, one has absolutely no business writing it!"

Dr. Murray said this with such force of conviction, such self-righteous indignation, that both his students blushed and started back from the table slightly. It was as though they were personally being scolded by the pedagogue for having infringed the rules of literature in the above-mentioned way, even though neither of them had so much as contemplated doing any such thing before.

"You'd therefore describe a novel with only a few characters as bogus?" Linda tentatively ventured of her tutor, once she had recovered from her momentary discomfort.

"Oh, yes!" he confirmed. "You can't write a novel like a monologue or a dialogue, you know. A dialogue's a dialogue."

"Emphatically!" Pauline agreed with an emphatic nod of her dark-haired head, which contrasted sharply with her fellow-student's very blonde one. She was especially keen to agree with him, since he was both hale and handsome. Quite the most handsome man on the university staff, she thought. Although, when one really came to think of it, there weren't that many there who could be described as even moderately handsome. Admittedly, a few of them just might have been passably handsome once. But, if so, they were by now long past recognition as such!

"But can't literature kind of converge to a literary Omega Point on the basis of a one-character novel?" queried Linda, who had no personal designs on the man herself.

"No!" came his quick response. "One character would not signify progress over ten or twelve, but simply testify to the degeneration of literature to a level way beneath the accepted norm! A novelist who utilized just one character would be no novelist at all, in my opinion, but a lazy or degenerate person given to writing monologues. Now a monologue can of course be extended to virtually any length, but that won't make it a novel!"

Linda Bell felt relatively satisfied by this line of argument and decided against challenging it. Her fledgling novel had five characters at present, so it could hardly be regarded in a bogus or absurd light on that account. Should a few more characters be added before the end, Dr. Murray would doubtless find her work even more meritorious than it was already. Yet there existed a limit as to how many characters one could reasonably employ in a short novel, since too many would be even worse than too few. She frowned to herself and stared ruefully at the table.

Meanwhile, Pauline Dyer was asking her tutor whether he thought there was any real possibility of literature being created, in the future, through Esperanto, or some such international language. When, to her surprise, he wanted to know why she should ask him this, she replied: "Well, I had read somewhere that literature was destined to become more international in character, and just wondered whether the eventual use of a completely new, universal language would not be preferable to the simultaneous use, in one work, of various languages, as in James Joyce and Ezra Pound. After all, few people can understand more than three or four languages at the best of times, whereas a fresh language, understood the world over, would surely make for universal acceptance?"

"That's an interesting point!" Dr. Murray commented. "For all I know, you may well be on to something there, since the use of various languages, as with the authors to whom you allude, could well be a stage on the road to a completely new language. If so, then we needn't expect any future literature to be created on multi-lingual terms but, rather, on terms more akin to Esperanto. Yet one ought also to remember that literature is destined to become completely abstract, so that intelligibility won't necessarily be a prerequisite for its appreciation."

Miss Dyer smiled ironically and confessed that she couldn't envisage herself reading a literature that made no sense.

"Neither can I actually," Dr. Murray admitted, smiling. "Though that's no reason for us to suppose people in the future will share our limitations. On the contrary, they'd probably be unable to envisage themselves reading a literature that made sense, in that it would run contrary to their more mature post-atomic bias, a bias aligned with free-electron criteria in opposition to all forms and degrees of proton determinism. Literature, you see, can only change and, hopefully, for the better. Naturally, it is perfectly logical that each age should prefer its own level or stage of creativity to any other, since that's usually what is most intelligible at the time."

Linda Bell suddenly felt the urge to ask Dr. Murray a fresh question, and accordingly inquired whether he preferred serious literature to humorous literature, or vice versa?

"That's really a distinction between the tragic and the trivial planes, isn't it?" interposed Pauline, who found herself sliding towards Koestlerian logic.

"I guess so," Linda conceded, before turning back towards their tutor for an answer.

"Yes, well, I prefer the serious to the comic myself," he replied, blushing slightly in the process, "because, to my mind, it's an altogether superior type of literature. In the Koestlerian distinction between the 'Ha-ha' - the 'A-ha!' - and the 'Ah ...' reactions, the humorous novel appertains more to the first than to the third category, and is accordingly a self-assertive rather than a self-transcending kind of literature. It trivializes and is therefore of diabolical orientation. Huxley's earliest novels were more humorous than serious in content, and so conformed to the trivial plane in fidelity to a variety of self-assertive tendencies. As he matured as both a man and an artist, so Huxley became more moral-minded, producing a number of novels which approximate to the tragic plane in their self-transcending qualities. If I remember correctly, his final novel, Island, ended on a tragic note, didn't it?"

Of the two students, only Linda Bell had read the novel in question, and she confirmed the truth of what Dr. Murray was saying with a gentle nod. Slightly piqued, however, by what she took to be an allusion to youthful immaturity, she said: "Are we students to assume that we'd be incapable of similarly pursuing a more moral-minded stance ourselves?"

The question almost confounded her lecturer who, taken by surprise, assumed a mildly ingratiating tone in self-defence. "On the contrary, I'm confident that both of you would be capable of attaining to the tragic plane in any prospective literary endeavour upon which you happened to be engaged," he assured them. "Yet I doubt that you could hope to emulate the later Huxley much before your mature years! Youth is, I regret to say, rather more self-assertive than self-transcending, as a rule. The destructive instinct usually prevails over the, eh, constructive one.... No, in spite of the fact that I'm a university lecturer, I must confess to not holding a particularly high opinion of youth. I look back on my own with distinct misgivings, wondering how I could have done what I did and said what I said and believed what I believed and thought it all so important at the time. Believe me, youth leaves a lot to be desired - namely maturity!"

Both the students had by now become quite embarrassed by Dr. Murray's unprofessional candour, and Pauline, in particular, wondered why he had to succumb to it, especially since she and Linda were technically youths themselves.

"Naturally, one can't always be frank about such matters to the wrong people," he continued, as though he had read their minds and divined their humiliation from the shocked expression on their faces, "else open civil war would ensue between the different age-groups and classes, whereas normally it's only a covert, largely unconscious civil war that prevails. Most of the time we have to endure adversity, not speak out against it! Thus we usually keep these things to ourselves. So the fact that I've been taken for a bastard by people who knew no more about me than that my lips were rather tightly sealed at the time, is something I'm obliged to take for granted. But, in reality, no such tight-lipped 'bastard' exists in complete isolation, as a kind of independent entity. On the contrary, one is to a large extent what other people - very often fools, vulgarians, aggressive louts, boors, ignoramuses, philistines, barbarians, etc. - oblige one to be! So if one's lips are a little too tightly sealed on occasion, it's likely to be either because one is disgusted by someone or something plaguing one at the time or, alternatively, because one's facial expression is the result of long experience of such disgusting circumstances! To be sure, it would make a refreshing change if the contribution others had made to one's bastard-like appearance was occasionally borne in mind by would-be detractors!"

Although spoken in earnest and with a degree of self-consciousness, Dr. Murray's remarks produced an amusing effect upon his two students, neither of whom were prepared to regard themselves as either actual or potential contributors to his allegedly acerbic character. "Isn't it only by misunderstanding that the world goes around?" retorted Linda, alluding to a contention from Baudelaire's Intimate Journals.

"Yes, since most people, as a rule, aren't disposed or in a position to understand one's point of view," declared Dr. Murray, who broke into a broad smile, much to the relief of his two companions at table.

"Maybe in the future, when Esperanto is being spoken the world over, the degree of misunderstanding between peoples of diverse national background will be minimized?" Pauline suggested, tactfully manoeuvring the conversation back to an earlier topic.

"That would be a good thing, since a convergence to unity on the level of language is certainly needed," her tutor averred.

"Especially in the European Parliament," Linda opined.

"Frankly, I think it would be sadly out-of-place there," Dr. Murray remarked, to her surprise. "For a multilingual set-up would seem pertinent to a bourgeois/proletarian stage of evolution, a stage of transition from dualistic to post-dualistic criteria. Only a future proletarian civilization could reasonably endorse the introduction of a completely fresh language of post-nationalist constitution. A typical petty-bourgeois argument, however, will be one that insists, as many Englishmen now do, on a language like English being adopted as the official universal tongue. Yet the adoption of such a tongue universally would not correspond to a convergence to unity on the level of language, such as would signify the supersession of all traditional languages in a transcendent fashion, but amount to the adoption of one national language at the expense of the others - a no-less unacceptable procedure than the adoption of one so-called world religion, like Buddhism, at the expense of the others, or the adoption of one literary genre, like poetry, at the expense of the others, and so on.... No, a truly global civilization will require a truly universal language, like Esperanto. Those who desire to impose such a language on multinational bourgeois/proletarian civilization are simply being precocious. Everything must abide its rightful time!"

"Absolutely," said Pauline, who began to wonder whether that didn't also apply to the development of a romantic relationship between Dr. Murray and herself?