On the Structural Integrity of Empty Procedures

The cafe is below street level, which seems right for a conversation like this. You descend four steps from the pavement and the door is heavier than it needs to be. Kafka is already sitting at a table near the back, beside a window that looks out at the ankles of pedestrians. He has ordered nothing. He is watching the feet go by with the attention of a man cataloguing species.

Orwell arrives late, by his own standard — which means exactly on time — and takes a chair without ceremony. He orders black coffee, then changes it to tea, then back to coffee. “I can never decide in a place like this,” he says, meaning underground places, or perhaps European places, or perhaps places where the menu is written in chalk.

I am already seated. I have a notebook open to a blank page. I do not write anything in it for the first forty minutes.

“The premise is a man and a sign,” I say, because someone has to begin. “He has displayed this sign every morning for eleven years. He does not read the language it’s written in. One day it breaks, and he tries to replace it, and discovers that nobody in the entire system knows what it says.”

Kafka nods as though I have described the weather. “Yes. That is exactly correct.”

“But it needs to be more than a parable,” Orwell says. He has received his coffee and is not drinking it. “Havel wrote the greengrocer already. The man with the sign in the window. ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ — placed between the onions and the carrots. Havel’s point was about the ideology behind the ritual. Your premise has removed the ideology entirely. What remains?”

“The ritual,” Kafka says.

“The ritual without purpose is just habit.”

“No. The ritual without purpose is the most frightening thing in the world.”

There is a pause. A waiter passes carrying a tray of glasses filled with something amber. None of us ordered that.

I attempt to steer the conversation toward structure. “I’m thinking of his day — the morning the sign breaks, his journey through the bureaucracy to replace it, and then the night after, when he has to decide what to do.”

“You will need the offices,” Kafka says. He leans forward slightly. This is, I have noticed, the only way he shows enthusiasm. “Four offices at minimum. Each one must feel like a reasonable place to go, and each one must send him somewhere else. But — and this is critical — no single office should be absurd on its own. The absurdity must be cumulative. If you have a man behind a desk wearing a fish on his head, you’ve failed. If you have a man behind a desk who explains, very patiently, that sign content falls under a different jurisdiction, and provides the address on a correctly stamped form — that is horror.”

“Agreed,” Orwell says. “But I’d push further. Each office should teach the reader something real about how bureaucratic language works. Not invented jargon. Real mechanisms. The way a ‘standing instruction’ persists in a system long after the person who issued it has retired or died. The way a form references another form that references a regulation that references a committee that was dissolved in 1987. These things happen. I sat in enough government offices during the war to know they happen.”

“I did not sit in government offices,” Kafka says. “I worked in one. For fourteen years. The Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. I can tell you that the files I processed contained human lives compressed into case numbers, and that the compression was performed by people who were, individually, kind.”

“That’s the key,” I say, writing something for the first time. “Not cruelty. Kindness. Every official the greengrocer meets should be trying to help.”

Kafka almost smiles. “Trying to help within the constraints of a system they did not design, whose purpose they do not question, because questioning it would require an act of imagination that nothing in their training has prepared them for. Yes.”

Orwell shakes his head — not in disagreement, but in a kind of pain. “I keep coming back to the language question. The sign is in a language nobody reads. But it’s not gibberish, is it? It once meant something. Someone, at some point, composed those words with intention. What happened to that intention?”

“It evaporated,” Kafka says. “As intentions do.”

“No, it was consumed,” Orwell says. “The system consumed it. This is what political language does — it takes meaning and processes it until nothing remains but the form. ‘Pacification’ means bombing. ‘Transfer of population’ means forcing people from their homes. Eventually the words don’t even need to disguise anything, because there’s nothing left underneath to disguise. The sign isn’t covering a meaning. It is the meaning. The compliance is the content.”

I write that down. The compliance is the content. It’s the kind of sentence that can carry a story.

“What’s his name?” I ask. “The greengrocer.”

“Does it matter?” Kafka says.

“It always matters,” Orwell says. “Give him a name, and he’s a person. Withhold his name, and he’s a symbol. I prefer persons.”

“I prefer the space between person and symbol,” Kafka says. “A man whose name you know but keep forgetting. A man who introduces himself and you immediately lose it. Not because it’s unusual. Because there is something about his situation that makes names insufficient.”

I try a compromise. “What if we name him, but the name is wrong? He has a name that doesn’t suit him, that he inherited or was assigned, and he has carried it the way he carries the sign — without understanding but without complaint.”

Kafka considers this. “Perhaps. Though you are already making him too interesting. He should not be remarkable. His compliance is not an act of courage or cowardice. It is simply what he does. The way you put on your shoes in the morning. You do not question whether shoes are necessary. You have always worn shoes.”

“But shoes are necessary,” Orwell says.

“Are they? Or have you simply never tried going without?”

We talk for a long time about the bureaucratic offices, and I begin to see the shape of the day. The greengrocer goes to the Municipal Office of Display Standards. They send him to the Bureau of Public Signage. The Bureau sends him to the Regional Authority for Linguistic Compliance. The Authority sends him back to the Municipal Office with a different form. Each office is staffed by someone helpful, someone who knows their piece of the process perfectly and not one inch beyond it.

“Here is what I want to avoid,” Orwell says, draining his coffee, which has gone cold. He does not seem to mind. “I want to avoid the revelation. The moment where the greengrocer realizes the truth and it changes him. People do not change when they learn the truth. People absorb the truth into whatever they were already doing. A man learns his government has lied to him, and he continues to go to work, because what else would he do? A woman discovers her church is corrupt, and she continues to pray, because prayer was never about the church. The greengrocer will discover that the sign means nothing, and he will put up a new sign.”

“You’re certain of that?” I ask.

“Of course. That’s what people do.”

Kafka disagrees, though his disagreement takes the form of silence, and then, eventually: “The interest is not in what he does. The interest is in the night between the discovery and the action. The hours when he sits alone and knows what he knows. That is the story. Not the bureaucratic day — that is the mechanism. The story is the night.”

This is, I think, the first genuine disagreement of the afternoon. Orwell wants the story to be about systems and how they perpetuate themselves through ordinary people. Kafka wants the story to be about the interior experience of a man who has glimpsed something he cannot unsee. I want both. I do not say this, because wanting both is the laziest possible position.

“What does he see?” I ask instead. “During the night. What is the thing he now knows?”

“That the sign could say anything,” Kafka says. “Or nothing. That the system does not read the signs. The system only checks that the signs are present. The content was never the point.”

“That’s what I said,” Orwell points out.

“You said it as a political observation. I am saying it as an ontological one. There is a difference.”

“Is there?”

“The political observation says: the system is corrupt, it has emptied language of meaning to maintain power. The ontological observation says: it was always like this. The signs never meant anything. Meaning was always something we pretended the signs contained, the way a child pretends a doll can speak. The doll cannot speak. The sign cannot mean. We performed meaning, and the performance became the thing.”

Orwell sets down his cup. “That’s nihilism, Franz.”

“It is description.”

I try to articulate something about Kundera — about the weight and lightness problem, about how eleven years of displaying a sign you don’t understand could be read as the lightest possible existence (a life without conviction, floating through routine) or the heaviest (a life crushed by a duty you cannot examine). The unbearable lightness of compliance. The unbearable weight of meaninglessness.

Orwell waves this away. “Kundera is too elegant for this character. Your greengrocer is not a philosopher. He is a man who sells vegetables. When he goes home at night and sits at his kitchen table, he does not think about the weight of being. He thinks about whether he turned off the refrigerator display. He thinks about his mother, who is dead. He thinks about whether the downstairs neighbor heard him coughing.”

“But those small thoughts are the philosophy,” I say. “That’s the whole point. He doesn’t need to articulate the existential crisis. He just needs to sit in it. The reader will feel the weight.”

“Or the lightness,” Kafka says.

“Or neither. Maybe it’s just a Tuesday evening and a man at a table and an empty window.”

Kafka reaches for his water glass, which has been sitting untouched since before I arrived. He drinks half of it in one motion, sets it down, and says: “The ending should be him getting up from the table. That is all. Getting up and doing something. What he does is the least important thing in the story. That he gets up — that a decision was made, or was not made, or was made by the act of getting up — is everything.”

“I disagree,” Orwell says.

“I know.”

“What he does is the only important thing. A man can think whatever he likes in his kitchen. When he walks to the window and either puts up a sign or does not put up a sign, that is the only act that registers in the world. Interior freedom is not freedom. It is a consolation prize.”

“It is the only prize,” Kafka says.

We sit for a while with that. The waiter clears Orwell’s cup and brings another one, unbidden. The pedestrian feet outside the window have thinned; it is getting late, or it is raining, or the street has been closed for repairs. None of us check.

“One more thing,” I say. “The humor. The pitch describes it as bone-dry and cumulative. Where does it come from?”

“From precision,” Kafka says. “A man fills out a form. The form asks for the dimensions of the sign in centimeters. He does not know the dimensions. The clerk tells him he cannot proceed without the dimensions. The man asks if the clerk has a ruler. The clerk has a ruler but it is in inches. They both look at the ruler. This is the humor.”

“The humor is also in the recognition,” Orwell says. “Every reader has stood in a government office and been told they need a form they do not have. The laughter is the laughter of the damned — we laugh because we have been there, and we know we will be there again, and we know that the system does not care that we have been there before.”

“I don’t want the reader to laugh out loud,” I say. “I want them to feel the laugh trapped somewhere behind their sternum. A laugh that can’t quite get out because it’s too close to something else.”

Kafka nods. “That something else is the recognition that the joke is not a joke. The bureaucratic encounter is funny because it is absurd. It is also the actual mechanism by which a man’s life is administered. The joke and the horror occupy the same space. If they separate, you have satire. If they remain fused, you have something more dangerous.”

I close my notebook. I have written perhaps a dozen sentences in it, none of them complete. This is, I think, how it should be. The story will not come from my notes. It will come from the space between what Kafka wants and what Orwell wants — the space where a man’s interior experience and his political reality are the same thing and also completely different things, and where the act of placing a sign in a window every morning is both nothing and everything, and where the humor is the horror and the horror is just Tuesday.

“Shall we go?” Orwell says.

Kafka has not moved. He is looking at the pedestrian feet again. “I never asked,” he says. “What language is the sign written in?”

“I don’t think it matters,” I say.

“It doesn’t,” Kafka agrees. “But someone chose it.”