by Peter Huber
“Don’t worry, mate, they’ll be here,” the stallkeeper said sympathetically. Then, without looking downward, he had reached under the stall and pulled out the package. He had calmly placed it into Blair’s hands. And perhaps because his mind had still been reeling at his own outburst, Blair had taken the package without comment, thrust it into his coat pocket, and turned back toward Victory Mansions.
Now, as he sat at the desk in the alcove of his room with the taste of gin in his mouth, Blair felt paralyzed again by the memory of his outburst. He was a dead man.
He stared again at the book in front of him. The gin was seething in his stomach, and he let out a belch. For a moment he was tempted to destroy the book, quickly and silently But that was useless. Whether he destroyed it or continued reading it made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed—would still have committed, even if he had never opened the book—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. Sooner or later they were bound to get you.
He wondered again: Had it always been like this? Had London always had this horrible atmosphere of suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, air-raids, machine-guns, enormous food-queues, milkless tea, shortages of cigarettes, and prowling gangs of armed men? Had men always lived under the shadow of the Thought Police? The next moment Blair started violently. There was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated. Blair’s entrails seemed to grow cold. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was expressionless. He got up and moved heavily toward the door.
THE MACHINE
The gin is foul, flat, sickly, and oily, like a sort of Chinese rice-spirit. It makes your lips purple and grows not less but more horrible with every mouthful you drink. Still, you drink it in gulps, like doses of vile medicine. You breathe it out of your skin in place of sweat, and cry it from your eyes in place of tears. When you wake with gummed-up eyelids and fiery mouth and a back that seems to be broken, it is impossible even to rise from the horizontal, but for the bottle and teacup placed beside your bed overnight.
Big Brother drinks from a different cup. His thirst is quenched by The Thing that is not Gin. Big Brother has the telescreen.
The telescreen is the key to everything else in 1984. The word “telescreen” (or “screen”) occurs 119 times in Orwell’s book, which is to say, on almost every other page. “Big Brother” appears only 74 times. Other related words get far fewer mentions: “the Thought Police,” 39; “The Spies” youth group, 14; “spy” in other contexts, 9; “watching” in the context of snooping, 8; “thoughtcrime” or “crimethink,” 14; “betray,” 24; “slogan,” 19; “propaganda,” 4. “Newspeak” appears 46 times in the body of the book and another 33 in the Appendix. The three slogans of the Party—WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH—occur 6, 7, and 6 times respectively. Other related phrases get only occasional mentions: “memory holes,” 6; “mutability of the past,” 3; “informers,” 2; “Thought Police helicopters,” 1; “ear trumpets,” 1; “snoop,” 1; “eavesdropping,” 1. Even the cardinal principle of all Oceania—“doublethink”—appears only 31 times, or about as often as “gin,” with 34 occurrences. From a strictly engineering perspective, the telescreen is the scaffold. It is the single, ubiquitous techno-spy that makes possible Big Brother’s absolute control.
The political essay set out in the middle of 1984 acknowledges this explicitly:
By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. . . . Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. . . . [But] [w]ith the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. . . . Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
And that possibility is what defines reality in 1984. The telescreen connects everyone in England not only to the Ministry of Truth, which spews out the pig-iron statistics and military music, but also to the Ministry of Love, the headquarters of the Thought Police. Day and night the telescreen bruises your ears with Party propaganda. And whether or not you attend to it, the telescreen attends to you. It listens for sedition and watches for facecrime, with an ear that never tires and an eye that never blinks. In your home and office, in your bedroom and your lavatory, in private spaces and in public squares, the telescreen is watching. Big Brother is watching. Not just the foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, and thought-criminals: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
But how exactly does the telescreen work? What’s connected to what? Where and how do all the people who are watching all the other people select whom they will watch? Orwell never explains. He is in fact remarkably unspecific about the single critical piece of technology on which his book so completely depends. A few privileged members of the Inner Party can turn off their telescreens, but most people can’t. Nor do most people have any control over what they watch. The word “dial” (in connection with telescreens) appears only a single time in 1984, and then as if by accident. Employees in the Ministry of Truth apparently can file a request for documents on their telescreens, but the documents are delivered via pneumatic tubes. If you need some ingenious, revolutionary, high-tech prop to glue your whole book together, you owe it to your reader to explain how the gadget works. Orwell never does.
All we know is that Big Brother has the screens, which convey everything. You have Newspeak, which conveys nothing. Big Brother is watching, always watching, watching everyone, watching you. And you? You are blinding yourself on Victory Gin.
CHAPTER 2
As he put his hand to the doorknob Blair saw that he had left Smith’s diary open on the table. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done. He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a warm wave of relief flowed through him. A large, stooping woman with wispy gray hair, a sacking apron, and shuffling carpet slippers was standing outside.
“Oh, comrade,” she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice. “I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It’s got blocked up. I’ve been trying to clear the pipe with a stick. But I can’t seem—”
It was Mrs. Wilkes, Blair’s neighbor. He followed her down the passage. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of a woman who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery. She looked up and caught his eye, and her expression was as desolate as any he had ever seen. It struck him that she was thinking just the same thing as he was. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as he did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling on the slimy floor of a cold kitchen in a decaying building, poking a stick down a foul drain-pipe.
The Wilkes’s flat was bigger than Blair’s, and dingy in a different way. In front of the fire there was almost always a line of damp washing, and in the middle of the room was a big kitchen table at which the family ate. Blair had never seen this table completely uncovered, but he had seen its various wrappings at different times. At the bottom there was a layer of old newspapers stained by Worcester Sauce; above that a sheet of sticky white oil cloth; above that a green serge cloth; above that a coarse linen cloth, never changed and seldom taken off. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage.
&n
bsp; It was all so typical, Blair thought. The buildings were falling apart. The electric power was horribly unreliable. Repairs, except those you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees, which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window pane for two years. Blair knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the pipe. Mrs. Wilkes looked on helplessly.
“Of course if my Vaunnie was home he’d put it right in a moment,” she said. “He loves anything like that. He’s ever so good with his hands, Vaunnie is.”
Blair knew that Vaughan Wilkes was nothing of the sort. A low-ranking guard at the Ministry of Love, Wilkes was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms —one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom the stability of the Party depended. He had no ability of any kind, least of all technical.
Blair let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe. There was a dreary logic to it all. A decaying pipe, clotted by a decaying human scalp. And with human minds rotting all around, no one knew how to fix anything any more. Nothing worked, nothing was properly maintained.
Except the telescreens. There must have been a time when science and technology had developed at a prodigious speed to create devices as intricate as these. The electric power might be off—had been off all afternoon, in fact—but the telescreens were still on. What powered them? No one could answer even a question as simple as that any more. Hardly anyone understood anything scientific; engineers worked with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation might take them to prison or the scaffold. Few of the Police Patrol helicopters, once used so widely for snooping into people’s windows, could get off the ground. But somehow . . . somehow the Ministry of Love still functioned, as it always had. It was a curious thing: the giant machine beneath the Ministry kept on working perfectly, in the midst of such universal decay
All the more curious because the system was maintained by the likes of Vaughan Wilkes. The Party despised anyone of a truly scientific bent. Some people did still know how to use a spanner or a screwdriver—occasionally Blair would see someone at the office with oily hands, who had just done some simple job on a printer. But that was about as much as the authorities could tolerate. The Party attracted people of the opposite temperament, small fat men, a breed of uninquisitive snoops, always watching and listening but quite incapable of real thought. It attracted people who simply swallowed everything. What they swallowed left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird. Science was knowledge. The Party’s strength was ignorance.
Blair took his leave of Mrs. Wilkes and made for the door. Back in the flat, he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down in the alcove again. The music from the screen had stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
Blair picked up Smith’s diary again. He meant to explore it further, but the feel of the book in his hand reminded him of the market. He remembered again the noise and bustle of the morning, the florid, fat faces of the older women, the great bellies of the men under their coarse shirts and aprons. Even the smells returned, the stink of the proles’ cigarettes, the reek of fish from a stall nearby, and the whiff of coffee, real, roasting coffee, drifting from some other corner of the market.
He had stumbled away from the razor-blade man, sick with disappointment, stuffing the brown packet into his pocket unthinkingly. The proles shouted and shoved their way around him, and he went where he was pushed, overwhelmed by the loudness of their voices and their sheer dense, smelly humanity.
“Cheer up, ducks!” a woman had said, smiling at him brightly, and he cringed at the sight of her brown teeth and garish red lips.
“Out of me way, there!” bellowed another voice in his ear, and a hulking young fellow strode by with a great box on his shoulder. Blair struggled out of the main stream of traffic, and stared around him. He found a still spot where a board fence met the protruding wall of a house.
Beside him was a steel pillar, dominating the market, but ignored by the proles. He glanced up, then immediately made his face blank. A telescreen was mounted at the top of the pillar. He brought his hand up to his face, and half turned away. It was then that he had seen him, the man they called the phreak. He was wearing an old, tattered tweed jacket with a dark shirt and tie. And without a trace of fear about him, he was facing the screen directly.
“Wotcher doin’?” a prole had shouted cheerfully at the phreak from down the street. “Tryin’ to bust something open?” The phreak had just grinned.
Only the Thought Police were supposed to touch the telescreens, but the phreak obviously wasn’t one of them. He was a tall, big-headed man, with pale-blue, humorous eyes, and a working-class look. His young face was pinched by deprivation, but sharp and inquisitive, not the dull look of a Party functionary. His wretched clothes were a far cry from Party-blue overalls. He appeared to be in his early twenties, a bit disheveled, a hieroglyphic of a man, with too many bends in his body, and not enough body. His hair was not quite combed, his face not completely shaved, his shirt not fully tucked in. He looked like a lavatory brush, with bristles of black hair on top of a gaunt face and skeletal frame.
Blair had stared at him with fascination. There he was, his face right up to the screen, fearless. He was working on the device with some tool. He bent down to Blair.
“Could yer pass up me screwdriver from me bag, please?” he asked civilly. Blair obliged him, and stared a moment longer. Then he remembered where he was, lowered his head, shrugged his raincoat up around his neck, and plunged back into the shelter of the crowd.
Afterward, on his way home with the terrible book in hand, Blair had passed by the phreak again. Their eyes had almost met as Blair worked his way back up the street, though the phreak seemed to focus a bit beyond where Blair was standing. As he passed, the phreak had said: “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” Or at least that was what Blair thought he had said. It had been said quietly, almost casually—a statement, not a command. The phreak had not paused. He had walked on, looking slightly lost, like an overgrown three-year-old, embarked on a busy day before he had quite finished with dressing and breakfast.
What was curious, Blair thought, was that at the time the words had not made much impression on him. It was only now that they seemed to take on significance. There had been a link of understanding between the two men, more important than affection. We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness, the phreak had said, and in a surprisingly cultured voice with no trace of accent. Blair did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.
The telescreen struck fourteen. Then a trumpet call, clear and beautiful, floated from the wall. “Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived . . .”
The chiming of the hour seemed to put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost, reading a forbidden truth that would change nothing. But so long as he read it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken.
BRAIN IN A BOTTLE
“[T]he logical end of mechanical progress,” George Orwell declares in The Road to Wigan Pier, “is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle.” Orwell hates the thought. Though a socialist himself, Orwell disdains the machine worship of socialism, the dismal “socialism-progress-machinery-Russia-tractors-hygiene-machin-ery-progress” of the 1930s. Humans don’t really have to do anything but eat, sleep, and procreate, Orwell observes gloomily, and when machines have advanced far enough, that is all there will be left for humans to do. Mechanical progress may be a necessary development, but it should not become a religion. Orwell is repelled by the “glutinously uplifting” view of machines put forward by a writer like H. G. Wells. “The thought he dare not face,” Orwell says of Wells, “is that t
he machine itself may be the enemy.”
The machine itself may be the enemy. That’s what Orwell believes, first and last. The machine, Orwell continues in Wigan Pier, is “getting us into its power” at “sinister speed.” Machines produce a “frightful debauchery of taste”—in food, furniture, houses, clothes, books, and amusements. “The machine,” Orwell predicts, will “even encroach upon the activities we now class as ’art’; it is doing so already, via the camera and the radio.” Aldous Huxley got it right in Brave New World: the machine leads to “the paradise of little fat men.” Countless more pages of machine-and-fat-men invective are scattered throughout Orwell’s books, essays, reviews, and letters. The “machine age” is responsible for “disgusting” artists like Salvador Dali. The “forces of the machine age are slowly destroying the family.” The “machine age” is one of “ugliness and spiritual emptiness.” “In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc., etc.”
Ah yes, gramophones, telephones, machine guns. Orwell dislikes all machines, but he hates instruments of electronic communication the most.
Until 1984, Orwell aims most of his techno-loathing at the gramophone. He alludes to the instrument dozens and dozens of times in his writings, and always with revulsion. In 1934, Orwell even composes a horrible poem, “On a Ruined Farm Near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory,” blaming gramophones for the demise of farming. The gramophone keeps popping up all the way through his 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air, where the instrument symbolizes the ruin of George Bowling’s beloved Lower Binfield. Time and again in other books and essays, Orwell’s favorite insult for party hacks who spout canned propaganda is “the gangster gramophone.” “[W]hether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment,” Orwell writes in the preface to Animal Farm, “[t]he enemy is the gramophone mind.”