‘I’m sorry,’ she said abruptly, without giving her name, as soon as I answered the phone. ‘I’m very very sorry. It was a stupid thing to do.’
‘Yes, it was,’ I said coldly. She murmured something which I didn’t catch. I turned up the volume on my phone and said ‘What?’
‘It was just a joke.’
‘Well I’m afraid I didn’t find it funny.’
‘They were clean panties.’ (This said as if pleading mitigation.)
‘I know they were clean,’ I said, unnecessarily. In the pause that followed I could sense her inference that I had examined them closely. ‘That’s beside the point. It could have been highly embarrassing if I had pulled them out of my pocket in front of . . . in front of other people.’ There was a faint sound on the line which might have been a stifled snigger.
‘You mean, like your wife?’
‘Precisely.’
‘I didn’t think of that,’ she said. ‘I was sure you would find them before you got home.’
‘Well, I didn’t.’
‘Look I’m really sorry. I promise not to do it again.’
‘There won’t be another opportunity for you to do it again,’ I said.
‘Oh, you don’t really mean that stuff about not helping me with my research?’ she protested.
‘I’m afraid I do,’ I said. ‘Goodbye.’ And I put the phone down.
It rang again almost immediately. ‘Please don’t do this to me,’ she said. ‘Let’s start over. Let’s pretend the panties never happened. I need your help with my dissertation. You promised.’
‘I only promised to think about it.’
‘But you’re interested, aren’t you? In the topic? I could tell.’
I was thinking to myself that I must propose to Fred at the earliest opportunity that we change our telephone number and go ex-directory, and wondering what excuse to give, when I realised that there was an easier solution.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll think about it. But on one condition.’
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘That you promise never to call me at home again.’
There was a brief silence at the other end of the line, and then she said, ‘OK. It’s a deal.’
Afterwards I realised that I had tacitly agreed to help her, since otherwise I would have no sanction against further phone calls. Or as the speech act theorists say, my utterance would lose its perlocutionary effectiveness.
What kind of a speech act is a suicide note? It depends of course on what classification system you’re using. In the classic Austin scheme there are three possible types of speech act entailed in any utterance, spoken or written: the locutionary (which is to say what you say, the propositional meaning), the illocutionary (which is the effect the utterance is intended to have on others) and the perlocutionary (which is the effect it actually has). But there are lots of further distinctions and subcategories, and alternative typologies like Searle’s commissive, declarative, directive, expressive and representative, indirect speech acts and on. Most utterances have both locutionary meaning and illocutionary force. The hazy area is the line between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. Is the perlocutionary properly speaking a linguistic act at all? Austin gives the example of a man who says ‘Shoot her!’ (a rather odd example to invent, when you think about it, a symptom of male chauvinism and misogyny among Oxford dons perhaps).
Locution
: He said to me ‘Shoot her’ meaning by ‘shoot’ shoot and by ‘her’ her.
Illocution
: he urged (or advised, ordered, etc.) me to shoot her.
Perlocution
: he persuaded me to shoot her. The interesting level is the illocutionary: even in this example you can see how the same words can have quite different illocutionary force in different contexts. A little exercise I used to give first-year students was to imagine such contexts. ‘He ordered me to shoot her’, for instance, might describe an SS officer’s command to a guard in a concentration camp. ‘He advised me to shoot her’ needs a little more imagination, there’s such a moral gap between the cool finite verb and the brutal infinitive; some Mafia godfather perhaps, speaking to a member of his family whose wife has been unfaithful to him. (On further reflection, only beta minus for that one: normally both the weapon and the target must be present for ‘shoot’ to be felicitous.)
What about a suicide note that consisted entirely of the words, ‘I intend to shoot myself’?
Locution
: he stated his intention to shoot himself, meaning by ‘intend’ intend, by ‘shoot’ shoot and by ‘myself’ himself.
Illocution
: there are several possibilities here. He could be explaining, to those who would find him dead, that he shot himself deliberately, not accidentally, or that he was not shot by another person. He could be expressing the despair which had driven him to this extreme step. He could be making his family and friends feel bad about not having realised he might kill himself, and not having prevented it. Without more context there’s no way of knowing. As to the perlocutionary effect, I suppose that would depend on whether or not he actually committed suicide. Or would it? You don’t need to say or write the words, ‘I intend to shoot myself’ in order to have the effect of shooting yourself. You don’t
perform
suicide in words as, say, you perform marriage. The perlocutionary level of a suicide note is inseparable from the illocutionary level - its intended effect on those who read it. But that will probably be affected by whether you succeed or not.
In practice suicide notes, even short ones, are never as stark and simple as my example. I’ve been looking at some on the Internet, and they are bundles of speech acts with many different kinds of illocutionary force. For instance:
Why did he do this to me? He said he loved me. How could he go out with her and not care how I feel. I can not handle this on top of GCSEs and Mum’s problem. The coursework is getting to much for me to copy with. I’m going to fail my exams. I wish I could just die, then I wouldn’t be a problem to anyone.
Mum’s drinking is getting worse I can not handle it. She hides the bottles and is furious if I find them and Gary is useless he just sticks up for her because he drinks himself. I’m so confused all we do is fight. Whenever I’m at home it is always fighting. I want out of all of it. Please make it all stop. Take the confusion away.
I’m all a lone, nobody cares whether I live or die. All I ever do is cause problems for everyone. How can I get him back. He doesn’t know how much he means to me and my life. I don’t have a life without him.
Mum and Gary have left me here on my own. Can’t they see how bad I am. Don’t they care. Please God do something for me and make this my time to go. I am no good at school and I’m so ugly nobody wants to care for me. I’m so stupid to think that he could’ve cared for me.
It goes on like this for another ten paragraphs, swinging between complaint, accusation, self-condemnation, self-pity, pleading, anger, fear and despair, addressed sometimes to her family, sometimes indirectly to the boyfriend who jilted her, sometimes to God, sometimes to herself, in sentences that switch from declarative to interrogative to imperative. I thought about Alex Loom’s hypothesis that suicidal despair might raise the level of the subject’s normal expressive skills and I couldn’t see any evidence of it here. But if you give the document a literary reading the context gives the naïve style a poignant effectiveness - even her mistakes acquire a kind of eloquence. ‘
I’m all a lone
’ might be Gerard Manley Hopkins. Her inability to ‘
copy with
’ her classes is like a Freudian slip revealing her recourse to plagiarism.The loose punctuation conveys the urgency of her distress and the confusion of her mind with a stream-of-consciousness effect, and as the letter goes on the present tense creates a powerful narrative momentum:
‘I keep thinking about the pills in the cabinet but I’m scared.’
The letter ends:
I’m so cold, please do something. I can’t stand this empty feeling that I’m having. My head is horrible. Stop the pounding it hurts so much. I have no control over anything in my life. I’m breaking into pieces.
Somebody do something.
If it were a short story one would say that the three-word final paragraph was masterly in its simplicity. But this of course was not at all how the letter would have been read by those to whom it was primarily addressed, or those who found it; and to respond to it aesthetically, analysing it like a literary text, seems a somewhat callous procedure, indifferent to the human pain it describes. It was a relief to discover from a footnote that in this particular case the writer survived the overdose and ‘moved forward with her life’. The letter is in fact posted on a suicide prevention website.
12
th
November
. I phoned Dad, as I always do on a Sunday evening, at about six o’clock. Because he is expecting the call he answers promptly. I bought him a new phone recently, with big number pads like an educational toy and a volume control which he keeps permanently in the ‘Maximum’ position. I had a new socket for it fitted in the dining room. Before that, when the telephone was in the hall, it could ring for five minutes before he heard it. Tonight he must have been sitting beside the phone because he picks it up and bellows ‘Hallo’ after only one ring.
At first he sounds in a reasonably good mood. He managed to cook a small lamb joint for his lunch without burning or setting fire to anything, and is feeling pleased with himself. ‘I think I’ve got that stove beaten now,’ he says. ‘And the joint will last me for a good few days.’ But it’s not long before he’s complaining of not sleeping well and having to get up four or five times in the night. We have our mattress conversation again. ‘You should get a new mattress, Dad. An orthopaedic one.’ ‘A what one?’ ‘A firm one.’ ‘What’s the point of wasting money on a new mattress at my age?’ ‘I’ll pay for it, Dad.’ ‘I don’t want you wasting your money either.’ The mention of money has the unfortunate effect of reminding him of recent correspondence with the Inland Revenue. ‘This bloke up in Scotland keeps writing to me about income tax. What’s Scotland got to do with me?’
‘I expect the administration of your tax has been moved up there,’ I say. ‘You know, to create jobs.’
‘Jobs! I bet it’s creating a nice little job for somebody, writing me letters, sending me forms to fill in.’
‘What do they say, Dad?’
As far as I can gather, the Inland Revenue are saying he is entitled to a refund of tax deducted at source on some building society accounts he has and asking him to fill in a form to that end, but he suspects a plot to defraud him is being hatched on the western seaboard of Scotland. ‘Put all the correspondence in an envelope and send it to me,’ I say. ‘I’ll try and sort it out.’
‘No, it might go astray in the post. You can look at it next time you’re down. A thieving lot the postmen are round here. And there’s another thing. I’ve found some share certificates in British Leyland. What shall I do with ’em? Sell ’em?’
‘I think it’s too late Dad. British Leyland disappeared years ago.’
‘Bloody hell! Just my luck!’
‘How many shares did you have?’
‘Twenty-five. At five bob each.’
‘Well, you haven’t lost much.’
‘They might’ve increased in value.’
I assure him that they didn’t. He then raises more financial worries, and I say, as I have said before, that if he would give me power of attorney I would sort everything out to his best advantage, but he immediately becomes suspicious and hostile. ‘You’ll be telling me to make a will, next,’ he says sarcastically.
‘Well, I do think you should make a will,’ I say. He knows this, of course: it is another conversation we have from time to time.
‘There’s no need,’ he says angrily. ‘You’re going to get everything I have. You know that. You’re my only, whatd’youcall it. Next of kin. There’s no need to pay some solicitor to make a fancy will.’
‘All right, Dad, have it your own way,’ I sigh. It will cause me some inconvenience when he dies intestate, but it would be unkind to pressure him further: I know he shrinks superstitiously from making a will, as if he feels it would be signing his own death warrant. I chat aimlessly for a while about the weather and television programmes until he has calmed down enough for me to end the call.
Then I call Anne. She’s in the sixth month of pregnancy and says she’s feeling fine, just a spot of backache, and cock-a-hoop because their bathroom is finished. She works for Derby social services, and lives in a village outside the city with her partner Jim. He’s an amiable if unconventional fellow who makes a living by buying old properties, doing them up while living in them, and then selling them at a profit, and buying another one, so they always seem to live in a state of semi-chaos, with only half their living space habitable. ‘I hope you’re not going to be moving house again in the near future,’ I said.
‘No, I’ve made Jim promise we’ll stay in this one for a while,’ she said. ‘Until the baby’s at least two.’
‘That’s good,’ I said. I confirm that she will be coming to us for Christmas dinner and staying overnight. ‘Fred is having a big party on Boxing Day,’ I tell her.
‘Oh, aren’t you having it too, Dad?’ she says. She is always hinting that Fred rules the roost here.
‘Well, I suppose I am,’ I say. ‘But needless to say it’s Fred’s idea.’
‘Will Granddad be there at Christmas?’
‘Of course.’
‘And Rick?’
‘I don’t know about your brother. He’s been invited.’
My son Richard is a scientist at Cambridge, low-temperature physics is his field. I understand hardly anything he says about it, and even less about Richard. He seems to me to have been in a low-temperature state ever since his mother died. He’s single and as far as I know celibate, lives in rooms in his college, has a passion for wine and baroque music and low-temperature physics, not much else. Sometimes I wonder if he might be gay but I don’t really think so. Would I mind if he were? Probably. I try calling him, but the answerphone is on. I expect he’s listening to a Handel opera on his state-of-the-art hi-fi, and doesn’t want to be interrupted. I have to say that he seems quite contented with his life, though to others it seems lacking in joy.