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"The Age of Ersatz"

ersatz [airzats] adj (Germ) artificial; used as substitute for superior or natural product. (Penguin Dictionary)

We live in the age of quilted vinyl, mock leather, plastic flowers and the dashboard of bogus walnut. We live on the trick, the fraud, the ingeniously contrived illusion. The meretricious is our life-style. And it is our death-style too. So many of us depart this world lain in the quilted satin of a chrome-handled coffin, vanish on electrically-propelled rollers through the velvet curtains of the funeral chapel, to the honeyed (but recorded) tones of an Hammond organ, the nodding of plastic lilies.

If future scholars call ours "The Age of Ersatz", they will arrive at the conclusion without so much as fingering a plastic banana. It will be enough for them to investigate that great ersatz medium, television. They might not be appalled by the spectacle of ersatz football, played at 2.30 in the morning in the living-rooms of New Zealand — that, after all, is a reproduction of reality. But what will they think of all those nubile maidens who worship detergent, wax lyrical over toothpaste, smile excitedly over soap? Those young children who appeal to us, as children never have, to use Dazzle on their dirty shirts, feed them with Cruncho biscuits from morning to night? And if television were not enough to convince them, then the scholars of tomorrow would merely need to investigate popular attitudes to the arts. Pop Art, for instance, Andy Warhol: what else is it but the glorification of the commercial cliche, the fraudulent gloss we find so indispensable to life? To call it art is merely to attribute substance to the gloss. And Op Art, too: is it not, in a different way, ersatz-art, the cultivation of an ingenious trickery? An eye-dazzling gloss, without substance or meaning? Then music: what a mania for the unauthentic they will find there, what a passion for the corrupted and the mongrel. What a sad world this is, in which Beethoven's Ninth Symphony reaches the public as an electronic booping in The Clockwork Orange; in which James Last improves Bizet's bewitching rhythms by playing "Toreador" to the imbecile beat of a popband; and Werner Muller obliterates the gaiety of "Capriccio Italien" with a thud like marching boots. Not to speak of all those other manglers so beloved by the Breakfast Programme.

The age of ersatz: the age of James Bond. The age of the celluloid superman-lover. The age of the spy-thriller, the sentimental romance, and that most fictional of all fictions, sciencefiction. Popular literature, as never before, is remote from our real lives, strains to sate our greed for fantasy, is exerted as never before to stretch ingenuity to the limit. Thus the age of ersatz is also the age of pornography. The inexhaustible sexuality of its heroes is as fraudulent as our plastic flowers and bogus dashboards. It is simply not the real thing.

Yes, popular literature is largely ersatz-literature. But literature is the flower of a plant called language. Is the plant, at least, still intact? No: it isn't. It is pestiferous. And that is the most serious thing of all.

There was a time, some may remember, when you took the car down to the corner-shop to buy an ice-cream. Nowadays you are more likely to be taking the Valiant down to the Foodarama to buy a kream-freeze. Your car used to be greased at the garage. No more. It is serviced in a lubritorium. And you can't take your dirty washing to a laundry. You take your laundry to the Washamatic Laundrette.

It is not just that we have chosen high-sounding or euphemistic words to replace simple ones. That has long been a human failing. The Victorians, no doubt, would have been just as pleased as we are today to call the "rat-catcher" a "rodent operative". And if anyone prefers to be buried in a "casket" because he shrinks from a "coffin" — well, that is perhaps harmless enough and after all it is his funeral. Nor am I referring to the much-bewailed encroachment on our lives of different kinds of jargon — of officialese, for example. "We would appreciate it if you would forward to the undersigned precise instruction regarding the location of your residence" is not a good way of saying, "Please tell us exactly where you live" — but on the other hand it is probably attributable to nothing more sinister than self-importance. Only self-important people, after all, insist on proceeding everywhere, rather than going there. No, I mean something worse. It is this, that language has been enrolled in the service of commerce. And having been thus enrolled, it has been prostituted. It is sold for money, is tickled by the arts of commerce into all the perversities of which it is capable. And from commerce an infested language has begun to reach out and contaminate all society. Some of us really believe in the foodarama, the lubritorium, the Washamatic Laundrette.

But even those that don't or won't, cannot help but be infected in other more subtle ways. For we are all daily infiltrated by the germs of diseased speech. But we do not notice it any more. We have become blase, deaf to the distortions and histrionic posturing which pass for truth. Sense is daily murdered, but who now hears its shrieks? We have read so many times that such-and-such a petrol gives an amazing 50% more running power, that we do not pause to reflect that the unqualified comparative is meaningless. Fifty per cent more than what? We buy cleaning-powder that is 90% faster-acting, because it must be good — unless of course we have already been seduced by the one that kills 99% of all household germs. But 99% faster-than what?

And words — words are fast losing their meanings. We are told we will be astounded by the incredible super-active power of Whizzo detergent with its new agent Hypo-dyethyl-chlora-mine: how many of us pause to consider how this statement debases the meaning of the words "astound" and "incredible"? — how much less than "astounded" we in fact would be, how much less than "incredible" the word here implies? Of those advertisements, which we have all seen, which assure you that if you are not "absolutely delighted" with their product, you may return it forthwith. The words "absolutely delighted": do they really mean what they say? Is this delight the delight Wordsworth spoke of when he wrote: "She was a phantom of delight...."? And absolute delight? A delight so total that it eclipses all other sensation? What does this "absolute" mean? Kant would scratch his head. "Absolute", in his day, had an austerer connotation. It would not have described his feelings over a lawn-mower.

Everywhere we find the same verbal inflation, the same fraudulent pumping of the balloon. We read books in which "real-life dramas" are "presented with a vividness that will leave you gasping". Gasping? Actually gasping? It's funny you don't hear people more often in the public library. And all those other words, which resounding with emotion, actually have in their context of advertisement no more substance than the gas in a balloon: words like shattering, fantastic, overwhelming, unbelievable, tremendous, one-and-only, unique, poignant, searing, shuddering, passionate. They are all stuffed with spurious meaning: this is a language as a clever prostitute, out only to titillate at all costs.

Why is this such a disaster? Because a counter-feit language both breeds (rum, and in turn germinates, counterfeit emotions. If you are told often enough that you will (I quote) "feel the pleasure and pride as you unwrap your gift volume and its full beauty is revealed", then, in the absence of such feelings, you may well persuade yourself that you actually feel them. That, of course, is what the advertiser wants. If, on idly leafing through a magazine, you are suddenly confronted with the extraordinary promise that "all your illusions about Russian women" will be "shattered for only $3.65", you may be persuaded that this is, indeed, a necessary service that Tolstoy's "War and Peace" should perform for you, that you are in a state of delusion. (Of course, if you have any intelligence at all, you will tell yourself that this is not an adequate motive for reading "War and Peace" anyway!) And if you are told: "Gape at the awe-inspiring grandeur...etc", your mouth may indeed prepare to drop obediently open — not because the grandeur is awe-inspiring, but because you have become a Pavlovian dog. You may imagine you are marvelling at the marvellous, when you are merely salivating at the sound of a bell. The trouble is that the bell sounds all the time, and we salivate all the time — but seldom get a wholesome meal.

Such counterfeit emotions are a disaster, because if our emotions are counterfeit, then we no longer know what we really feel, what we really are. If a fake language dictates fake emotions to us, it dictates also a fake existence. And to we lose the use of language: it no long-expresses what we really feel or really are; in fact it no longer even expressed what the words say. This is to reverse man's most important invention: speech, the power to communicate to others of his kind in a meaningful medium. If that happened it would be a tragedy more calamitous than any of those "tragedies" advertised on the movie page.

More than one great writer of our century, conscious of the threat of degeneration in our language, has fought to preserve and to cleanse it. T.S. Eliot was one, with his constant quest to "Purify the dialect of the tribe". Eliot complained, in much-quoted lines that:

Words strain,

Crark and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

will not stay stilt.

He had to be constantly vigilant against what he memorably called:

.... shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion.

Note his equation of language (the "shabby equipment") and feeling ("undisciplined squads of emotion"): they go together, if one degenerates so does the other, to purify one is to purify the other. And Eliot succeeded in his task. He has left us a work in which honesty and purity of both language and feeling have triumphed over all the obstacles, whether private or cultural, which rose in their path.

But he died, lucky man, before commerce took over and the ersatz age really began. His was the age of Nazism, but not of the foodarama, the lubritorium. One wonders if there will ever be another Eliot; or, if there is, if his quest will be emulated by mankind. I fear not. Instead one day, enticed by the ultimate promises of ersatz language, we may stumble up the steps to an ersatz heaven. But between the bars of seraphic music will be heard the scratch of a gramophone stylus; our robes will be of synthetics, the ambrosia will taste of artificial additives. And our God will appear on a screen, a man of flickering celluloid. There no doubt we will sit, praying in the language of the betta-buy bargain-mart that the projector may not break down and leave us in darkness.