Orders in the Passive Voice
受動態の命令
The instruction arrived, as such instructions always did, wrapped in the grey and passionless wool of departmental prose.
Nowhere in the did a person tell another person to do a specific and terrible thing.
Instead, it was stated that "the ORIOLE matter should be resolved" before it could "compromise wider equities."
Resolved, in that dialect, did not mean settled amicably; it meant that a man should quietly cease to exist.
Mercer had spent his career learning to translate such phrases back into the blood and fear they described.
"It has been decided" was the memo's favourite construction, though it never disclosed by whom the deciding was done.
The passive voice, he reflected, was the finest instrument the modern state had ever devised for mislaying its conscience.
A sentence with no subject is a crime with no criminal; the deed floats free of any hand.
"Steps will be taken." "The situation will be regularised." "Assets deemed will be discontinued." Language as .
Each folded an action into a noun, and a noun, unlike a verb, need not admit who acts.
is tidier than killing; is cleaner than murder; discontinuation asks no one to picture a face.
Mercer knew the men who drafted these memos, and most were decent, mild people who watered office plants.
They did not think of themselves as ordering a death; they thought of themselves as processing a file.
The genius of the system was that was preserved, since no single signature ever bore the entire weight of the act.
Responsibility was divided so finely among so many desks that each clerk carried a portion too small to feel.
He was expected, now, to convert the passive voice back into the active, and to be the verb himself.
Someone must do what the had so carefully arranged for no one, grammatically, to have to do.
Mercer drafted a reply asking, in deliberately plain words, precisely who authorised the resolution and on what evidence.
He wrote "you are ordering me to kill a man," and watched the sentence sit there, indecently clear.
He did not send it; plainness of that kind was not so much as professional suicide.
Instead he asked, in the house style, whether "the proposed course had been fully considered at the appropriate level."
The reply came within the hour, assuring him that "the matter had received all necessary consideration," and nothing more.
All necessary consideration: a phrase containing no people, no arguments, no doubts, and therefore nothing he could contest.
He understood then that the grammar was not careless but designed, a machine for turning choices into weather.
Things happened; they were done; steps were taken; and no one, anywhere, had ever quite decided to do them.
Mercer sat with the memo until dusk, feeling the peculiar loneliness of being the only visible agent in the sentence.
The state had written the order in the passive voice so that only he would have to it actively.
And whatever he chose, the file would record merely that the ORIOLE matter had, in due course, been resolved.