Hicceity: The End of the World News (1982)

Rather in the manner of a dodgy used-car dealer, Burgess has here taken three separate projects, welded them together and slapped a for-sale sticker on the result. You've Had Your Time dates the composition to the early 70s, pre-ABBA ABBA, when our man was commissioned to script an end-of-the-world disaster movie updating When Worlds Collide, plus a Canadian TV series based on the life of Freud, plus the libretto for a musical about Trotsky. As you do. He went about these three concurrent tasks by drafting short novels for each project. None of the original projects saw the light of day. Then Burgess looked at what he had drafted and, lo!, decided they were all versions of the same story. This desire to see providential harmony in the bald contiguity of separate projects is understandable, although declaring oneness doesn't magically make the three elements cohere. Indeed I suspect (though he doesn't say as much) that Burgess held back publishing it at that time because he could see that it didn't really work. I wonder if, after the success of his Big Novel Earthly Powers, his publishers didn't press him for another Big Novel, and he obligingly pulled this out of a drawer. At any rate, here it is.

In the 'Worlds Collide' segment of the story, Earth is in the path of a rogue planet, collision with which will destroy us all. This object is named 'Lynx', since that's the constellation out of which it appears to proceed. The big cat of that name, pictured on the cover art above, was so-called because of its shining eyes: the Greek λύγξ, derives from the word for shining white, λευκός. There is another meaning of the Greek word λύγξ: 'hiccough'. This is so appropriate to the novel in hand that I have to believe Burgess was aware of it. No question: the construction of End of the World News is pretty damn hiccoughy.

The three stories are interleaved with deliberately clipped-off transitions (hic!) from one to the other. This, according to Burgess’s own author note, is supposed to mimic the experience of channel hopping on the TV. It doesn’t. Instead the effect is of a hiccoughing jolt from narrative to narrative. The joltiness is made more pronounced, and harder for the reader to rodeo-ride, by the differences in quality of the three elements. Putting it simply: the Freud portion is good; the Lynx (hic!) middling and the Trotsky (икота!) bad. Heterogeneity of form may be worthwhile; heterogeneity of quality hardly can be.

According to Burgess, the three tales are all ‘about the end of the world.’ The main problem here is that, well, they’re not. Or more precisely: the end of the world strand is about the end of the world (duh); the Freud strand counterpoints the end of Freud’s individual life with the birth of a new world of psychological and psychiatric insight. The Trotsky third is about … well it’s hard to say what it’s about, except for singing and dancing across a stage-set of New York, 1917. It’s clearly not about the end of Capitalism (Capitalism still being with us), or the even the birth of Communism (it’s Trotsky after all, not Lenin), or anything very much.

Michael Wood, reviewing the novel for the New York Times makes the ingenious suggestion that with these three strands Burgess ‘means to parody the forms of writing that might survive the death of literature: the libretto, the novel ripe for a television series and science fiction.’ Not the three modes a disinterested observer would be likely to suggest, surely (is Wood really suggesting that ‘serious literature’ will fade away to be replaced by operatic libretti?) Were The End of the World News composed in equal parts of pop songs, a video game narrative and a TV Talent Show then we might have something. No: obviously the choice of modes was incident to the professional claims upon Burgess’s time as a writer in the 1970s, one high culture, two more schlocky. Later in the same review, Wood is a little more persuasive:

The stories are not all the same, and they are not exactly about the end of history. But they are all about dreams of ending, about old worlds that go off with a bang, not a whimper, leaving us with less history than we thought we had but maybe more than we can manage.

I wonder about this. It captures something of the novel's coda, where we discover that the 'core' storyline was the Lynx one; that the Freud-fable and the Trotsky-tale were diversions told (or shown) to the children aboard the space-ark. The Epilogue is a trivial 'two bits' to the novel's 'shave-and-a-haircut', wrapping things up in a manner both coherent and banal. What did the kids think of the stories of those old bearded 20th-century revolutionaries? 'It's not really history, is it?' notes Maude Abramovitz, 'a cold and clever girl'. Their instructor agrees: 'it's myth'. As such its problem is not Wood's 'more than we can manage'-ness so much as its fungibility. History that was 'about' the past becomes 'about' the present; the kids exchange and replace the terms of the story, so that it becomes 'the other myth':

The one about the bad man called Fred Fraud who kept people strapped to a couch and the good one called Trot Sky who wanted people to do what he did and run through space. [TEOTWN, 388]

One is compelled to admire the sheer bravura badness of these two puns, for all that they end the novel in a debilitatingly shaggy-dog-story way. Burgess, at least, is quite explicit: what happens to history is not that it is over- or under-supplied, but rather that it evaporates altogether. The kids refuse to believe there ever was such a thing. The teacher tells the kids that the spaceship they inhabit 'was designed for getting somewhere. A place where we can plant trees, erect buildings, feel the wind blowing in our faces'; but they're having none of it.

'Your generation talks about a journey. Our generation knows we're just here. We've always been here, right back to what they call the mists of myth. I don't believe your story.'

'We'll always be here,' said Bill Harrison. 'It stands to reason. We've always been here, we always will. All that stuff you told us is just lies.'

'Who built the ship?' asked Valentine O'Grady [their teacher], desperately.

'God or somebody,' said Fred Greely. 'It doesn't matter. It's here, that's what matters ... all the rest is a fairy story.'

Valentine O'Grady pounced then. 'What is a fairy?'

'The thing in your brain that makes you tell lies.' [TEOTWN, 388]

Here (hic). This is the lesson of Freud, as well. Things are never forgotten, only repressed. Since the Id has no conception of time, or consequences, it is actually this process of repression that separates off the past (memory) from the present. An imagined Freudian utopia would be a world without this distinction between history and the here-and-now, and would therefore revert to a kind of endless present. Burgess is not inviting us to applaud this possibility. This hicceity, the here-ness of the here (hic!) is a sort of prison. What's that? What did you say? 'Hicceity' is too a word!

Pff.

The least we must concede to the Trotsky (hic!) section of the novel is that in a formal sense it foregrounds the act of speech, and of song: a libretto is written to be conveyed from living mouths to a live audience after all. Freud dies in the novel as he died in real life, from a ghastly disease of the mouth. Burgess projects the end of the world itself into a kind of parody of that Freudian demise: 'then that same hidden fist hit harder than before, and with each punch came up a fragment of the city ... glowing briefly in the lurid light, hitting the air and going down in a ballet of atoms. Then the earth opened and drank all the waters it could, shutting at once as if to gargle. ... Then new water galloped in, rusty as the sun, and hid everything. New York was one with all the other ancient cities that had gone under the sea' [TEOTWN, 378]. The mouthiness of all this is interesting. Look again at the cover of the paperback edition: the lynx swallowing down the whole globe.  It's fitting, This is an oral, not an anal, novel (You know what I mean: 'oral-stage fixations are manifested as garrulousness, smoking, continual oral stimulus, eating, chewing objects, and alcoholism. Psychologically, the symptoms include a sarcasm, nail biting, oral sexual practices et cetera').

Or perhaps it would be better to go beyond specific developmental stages, as theorised by Freud. One thing all three storylines have in common is a fascination with what we might call the ‘surface-depth’ model, three differently weighted investments in the idea that there is something secret to be unearthed underneath mere appearances. The Freud section is strongest in part because it is the most compelling dramatization of this idea—Freud not only cures his patients, but comes to understand himself (why does he compulsively arrive two hours early at the train station for every train he has to catch? Why does he then always absent himself as the train actually starts to leave, so that he has to rush and board in a tearing hurry?) As with ‘actual’ Freudianism, it is the act of providing an explanation, rather than the veracity of the explanation itself, that is the revolutionary and liberating thing. What Freud offers us is a set of rituals apotropaic against the inexplicability of the cosmos. The larger Hitlerian context here is entirely to the point: Freud, dying of cancer of the jaw, eluding the Gestapo and fleeing Nazi Vienna for London. Is anti-Semitism tractable, explicable? Is Nazism? I suspect Burgess thinks not. Most people can do little more than gesture towards the metaphysical black box labelled ‘evil’. But Burgess's Freud at least has a theory, and having a theory is better than throwing up one’s hands in horror, or similar abdications of ethical responsibility. Christian Europe hates the Jew and wants to kill him, because ‘the Jew’ is Abraham, Moses, Freud—is, in other words, the whitebearded God the Father—and the son is oedipally (which is to say: libidinally) motivated to kill his Dad. You don’t believe that any more than I do, not as a ‘real’ explanation for the Holocaust. But it has more narrative and dramatic force, and therefore more cogency, and therefore more utility, than simply saying ‘because evil’.

The Trostky section (hic!) is the weakest for several reasons. The most obvious one is that it is a libretto with no music. The rhymes are sometimes ingenious, though not especially or zingily so; and no music is supplied. The reader plods through this. It's like watching West Side Story with the sound turned down. The main impression it leaves on the reader is of an author eager to show how clever he is. No-one is going to dispute that Burgess was indeed very clever; but admiring cleverness and enjoying a novel are not at all the same thing. The story concerns Trotsky being tempted to cheat on his wife with a 'pretty little comrade' called Olga ('Please don't you call me/Pretty little comrade', says Olga [92]). Meanwhile the Russian Revolution is taking place, and Trotsky, on the wrong side of the globe, acutely feels himself marginal to the global events. The juxtaposition of the grand narrative of History and Destiny on the one hand, and the twitching in Trotsky's trousers on the other, makes for a thudding kind of moral. '"Driven," cries Trotsky, "by secretions in my glands, driven by destiny—whatever it is, I have no shame. I want you, Olga!"' [TEOTWN, 298]. Burgess understands randiness, but he doesn't really understand (which is to say: cannot bring himself to sympathise with) the Socialist Revolutionary mindset. So we get Trotsky spouting ur-Soviet boilerplate. He believes that Revolution is the secret truth of Capitalism, that Communism is the secret truth of History; but he ends up tangled in the trivial secrets and lies of sexual infidelity.

In the ‘Lynx’ (hic!) section, the secrecy is projected outward: the government of this 1999 then-future-set world hides the truth—that the world will shortly end—from its populace, to prevent panic. Freud is present too, in the central triad of characters: Valentine Brodie, our p.o.v. ego figure (a science fiction writer and university professor—fancy that!) who loves his intellectually and physically superlative wife Vanessa, an internationally esteemed ‘ouranologist’ with the looks of a goddess, but who is nonetheless left sexually impotent before her flawlessness and instead seduces his students. If Vanessa is a superego figure, then Courtland Willett, a hugely fat and rumbunctuous actor, once a Shakespearian player, now reduced to dressing up as Santa Claus in shopping malls, is the id. There’s a certain amount of verve to the way Burgess writes Willets—fierce, gluttonous, kindly, bold, lecherous, as easily moved to tears as anger, a drinker and smoker and shagger ('Oral-stage fixations are manifested as garrulousness, smoking, continual oral stimulus, eating, chewing objects, and alcoholism ...')—though he obviously loves his creation a little too much. The narrator makes the comparison with Falstaff a little too heavy-handedly, and the character outstays his welcome. Burgess knows he’s pastiche Shakespeare rather than the real thing (he’s a Will-ette, rather than the full Will) and perhaps as a result overcompensates with great scads of tiresome Elizabethan swearing: ‘snotnosed bastard … and now that I have leisure and breath, I might add that you are a slabberdegullion druggel, a doddipol jolthead, a blockish grutnol and a turdgut’ [TEOTWN, 59]. Truly can it said: a little of this sort of thing goes a long way. And by ‘a little’ I mean: none at all, thank you very much.

Anyway, the government builds a space-ark to save the fifty best and brightest men and women on the planet, selected by computer. Perfect Vanessa is chosen, her boozy, unreliable husband not. The ‘best and brightest’ turn out to be a vision of discipline and logic and order, a collective superego. When one of the elect, called Nat Goya, refuses to join, since to do so would mean abandoning his pregnant wife, he is ‘escorted’ to the medical bay to be ‘re-educated’ via drugs and ‘special treatment’. He is too valuable to the mission to be let go. ‘You mean I’m going to be brainwashed?’ Goya blusters. ‘Into forgetting my wife and loving CAT [the project]?’ The mission leader tells him he will undergo treatment ‘until you’re made to see sense and behave in a civilised manner’ [TEOTWN, 193]. Off he goes.

We see the trouble coming from a mile off. The leader Paul Bartlett is a suspiciously health-and-efficiency type: ‘enquiries into his life and personality would disclose a total lack of vice—he ate sparingly, drank only on social occasions, had no notable sexual life—and a balanced sanity of mind and body very rare outside epic fiction’ [TEOTWN, 130]. Burgess lays this on with a trowel, rather (‘large, handsome and vital, ox-strong, steel-supple, he was a flame on the tennis court, a fish in the swimming pool, a thudding menace in the amateur boxing ring’: he is an admirer of Bonaparte, Cromwell, Churchill and Hitler). We take the point, and would have done with less prodding. A new human world made-up of only of such types would be a barren and dystopic place. Falstaff-Willetts, fat, drinking, smoking, swearing, fighting, reciting verse, weeping, has no place on the global lifeboat. In the final scenes of the novel, as the world collapses around them, Val and Willetts try and fail to get aboard the space-ark. Val (who can ‘smell and taste the end of the world like an apple’) asks: 'Why the hell should we be saved?' Willetts replies: ‘Because that's not a question those scientific bastards would ever dream of asking. That's why.’ They both die with the destruction of the world; but the ship-board regime is unsustainably repressive, and leads to a kind of in-flight revolution.

’Science’, then, is the conceptual superego and ‘poetry’ in the fullest Shakespearian sense, messy and glorious and potent, the id. The Freud strand (hic!) is partly about Sigmund’s attempts to establish psychoanalysis on a scientific footing, and his final realisation that what he has created—vital and powerful as it is—possesses more affinities with poetry than it does with science. Caught in between these two huge forces is us, frail humanity. We can extrapolate this a little and speculate that what Burgess doesn’t like about ‘sf’ (‘bad sf’, we could say, if that didn’t look tautological) is the way its worldview is weighted so heavily towards superegoical Science, the propensity of the Pulps to make its lantern-jawed space captain heroes too like Captain Bartlett, and to externalise its Id onto monstrous alien forms to be destroyed. That’s a caricature of SF, of course, but one with more than a grain of truth to it.

Late in the novel Freud dreams about Melanie Klein. She mockingly refuses to believe in either the Oedipus conflict or penis envy ('why,' she asks, reasonably 'don't men have breast envy?' [345]). Burgess has Freud ask her his most famous question, over-egging the moment slightly with superfluous capitalisation: 'I've spent thirty years searching into the female soul, and there's one big question they won't answer. And that question is: WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?' Klein teases him ('ah, wouldn't you like to know?) before repudiating the entire sphinxine paradigm: 'I haven't answered the riddle,' Freud moans, 'therefore I'm not Oedipus.' 'Nobody's answered the riddle,' Klein retorts. 'Therefore there's no Oedipus. Oedipus is only a myth, that is to say a lie. And you can't build a system on a lie.' Like the children in the epilogue, this dream-Klein seeks to banish all 'lying', all the fairies, fiction, art and history, with a wave of the hand. But the sphinx, which is death, won't go away. The important thing is not that Oedipus solves the riddle, but that he confronts the sphinx. Death, after all. is not a soluble term. It can't be beaten, but it can be defied, and there is dignity and meaning for a human being in making the hopeless stand. At the end of his life Freud starts conversing with the cancer that is killing him. 'The pain?' the tumour asks. 'Intolerable?':

Oh bear it, please, a little longer. I should hate to be parted from you. I'm not a fly, not even a dog. Do be strong. Don't give in. I don't really want to kill you. And yet, of course, I do. Resolve that paradox, if you can. Unwind the tangled skein, Oedipus man most mighty, destroyer of the Sphinx. Such nonsense. Nobody destroys the Sphinx. [TEOTWN, 368]

The truth is that the sphinx can not destroyed. It's because of truths like this that we have such a powerful need for the fairy story.

Perhaps Burgess's (hic!) jumbling-up of 1917, 1939 and the then-future 1999 is about the flattening of history as such. To banish the past is to banish the future, an attempt to live (like the spaceship children) in an endless present. Why do such a thing? Why else, except that a life without futurity—let's call such a life, ooh I don't know, apocalypse—would be a life without death. Death is the true meaning of the future. Our own extinction is never present, always to come. We'll never be in a position to look back upon it, it is by definition something never lived through. By banishing the future the ego hopes to banish death itself, and live in the eternal here (hic!) and now. Naturally, it doesn't actually work that way. The Sphinx is not destroyed. Oedipus's duty is not to win, but to make a stand, and provide us with a story.

In his 1927 critique of religion The Future of an Illusion Freud concludes by arguing that religion ('a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion') has a three-fold task. It's even possible that Burgess had this passage in mind as one of the rationales for the triadic form of his novel; he would surely have come across it, in his researching. It's pretty famous:

But man's helplessness remains and along with it his longing for his father, and the gods. The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.

In The End of the World News this last task is taken over by Socialist Revolution, the first is clearly Freud's business, and the second, the sf fabulation that clever technology will somehow enable us to escape our own mortality, is the Lynx portion. In each case, the mendacity (or if that is too loaded a term, the illusoriness) is subordinate to the efficacy. We all need our stories.

And maybe the structural awkwardness of this spot-welded three-car wreck can be taken not as a thrifty writer seeking to reuse the orts and scraps from his past, so much as a deliberate attempt to body forth a world shattering violently into great chunks. Too smooth a weld would defeat the purpose of the exercise. Or does that look like special pleading? Worlds colliding can hardly be an elegant spectacle. Death is inevitably an interruption, always unexpected, always messing up the plans and patterns of the living. Hic.