Orwell's Revenge

by Peter Huber

  Films—the “synthetic pleasures manufactured for us in Hollywood”—are just as bad. Gordon Comstock, Orwell’s semiautobiographical hero in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, “hated the pictures,” “the flickering drivel on the screen,” the “drug for friendless people.” “Why encourage the art that is destined to replace literature?” Comstock wonders. Orwell the essayist dismisses films as “treacly rubbish;” politically speaking “they are years behind the popular press and decades behind the average book.” For a period, Orwell writes film and theater criticism for Time and Tide; he later characterizes the film critic as one who “is expected to sell his honour for a glass of inferior sherry.” One of Orwell’s film reviews begins, not atypically, “This fairly amusing piece of rubbish . . .”

  Radio is the worst of all. Orwell describes his own wartime BBC productions as “rubbish” and “bilge.” Coming Up for Air has an “intolerable woman” whose only recorded sin is to have purchased a wireless set. Indeed, the shallow, superficial, materialistic, or simply hateful types in Orwell’s novels all love gramophones and radio. “There are now millions of people,” Orwell reflects contemptuously in Wigan Pier, “to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds.”

  For Orwell, then, the electronic media are ugly, oppressive, mind-numbing—the enemies of quiet and the wreck of civilization. He ranks them right beside gambling as “cheap palliatives” for oppressed people. He ridicules “the queer spectacle of modern electrical science showering miracles upon people with empty bellies,” his two specific examples of this “electrical science” being the telegraph and radio. Radios and gramophones invariably figure on Orwell’s frequent lists of things the modern world would be better off without, alongside bombers, tanks, syphilis, and the Secret Police.

  And just how bad might the machines become? For a man who loves privacy and solitude as much as Orwell does, the answer is obvious. “The most hateful of all names in an English ear,” Orwell announces in “England, Your England,” is “Nosey Parker.” The key to English liberty is “the privateness of English life,” the “liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above.” For Orwell, then, the end of freedom will be the ultimate in electronic Nosey Parkers—a machine used by Big Brother to drown out the song of birds with tinny music and to spy on the citizenry with a tinny ear and eye. It’s the gangster-gramophone pushed to the limit— the phonograph, film camera, and radio transmitter rolled into one. The telescreen is the logical end of the machine age, the age of Salvador Dali and ruined families, the age of debauched tastes, the Dneiper dam, and the latest salmon canning factory in Moscow. The telescreen is the eye in the glass. It is the brain in the bottle.

  And what will it do to the human mind? It will weaken consciousness, dull curiosity, and drive people nearer to the animals. In fact, it will cleave the brain in two, and so impel humans to engage in . . .

  CHAPTER 3

  Doublethink. Blair had been dreaming of the word, and it continued echoing through his fractured consciousness when he woke. He crawled out of bed, stumbled into the living room, and spread his exercise mat out on the floor in front of the telescreen.

  “Thirty-to-forty group,” bellowed a grating woman’s voice on the screen. Blair stood up wearily. The torn underpants and ragged pullover in which he slept chafed his arms and thighs as he flung his fists out and back over his shoulders. The woman began lunging left and right in the next exercise, her sinews snapping back and forth under her skin. Blair followed, his spine cracking loudly at every turn. How could this be doing him or the Party any good? He desperately tried to recapture his waking dream, the few fantastical moments before consciousness, when he was oblivious to the bedsprings poking into his back, the rough wool of the blanket, and the cold draft from the window.

  What was it? (“Lean to your right, further, now left . . .”) He had been in an enormous building, brightly lit and warm, had been wandering in a kaleidoscope of colors and smells, aromas he could not describe or recognize, objects whose purpose he did not understand. He ran his fingers along in the air like the fins of a fish, waving them as he swam, touching the things around him with feather-light contact, the way a fish might brush an anemone. He had a feeling of tremendous safety. Then a woman had spoken, and her voice had been the most beautiful thing he had ever heard.

  He strained his neck around at the order of the telescreen, failing miserably to touch his chin to his shoulder. His pulse throbbed uncomfortably in his neck.

  “Stretch a little further, think of our soldiers at the front, get your head right round, again, again,” the instructress shouted. There had been something extraordinary about the woman who had bent over him in his dream. He seemed to know the feel and smell of her skin as well as he knew his own. He floated along behind her; then the beloved voice had come again.

  The woman on the screen was bellowing something about straighter knees. Was it a memory of some time past? He had no conscious memories of childhood; he only knew from his school training that it had been a period of “social reconstruction,” when corrupting influences had been stamped out and the glorious dicta of Big Brother introduced. What was it about the dream that was so warm and comforting, even now, as he clung to the last shreds of it? It was something about the voice, its intimate, direct quality. And with a sudden wave of warmth in his chest and stomach he understood what he had loved so much about it. The voice had been meant for him, only for him—him alone, in all creation.

  His thoughts switched abruptly to the Ministry of Love. Surrounded by barbed wire, steel doors, and towers, the Ministry was guarded by dogs and gorilla-faced guards with bulging jacket pockets and jointed truncheons. This was where all the telescreen wires converged. They passed through giant tunnels just above the sewers, and were routed into the three thousand basement rooms of the Ministry There were said to be great bundles of multi-colored wires, twisted and braided like the cables of a suspension bridge. From the basement, individual wires peeled off from the cables and terminated on towering frames, like millions of threads leading to looms to weave enormous tapestries. Then there had to be massive switches, racks upon racks of electronics. No human ever worked with this end of the system; it would have been hopeless even to try. The machines, it was said, directed the sounds and pictures up to the higher terraces of the pyramid, up to the Thought Police.

  Probably none of this was true. Many of the telescreens, Blair knew, had no wires. They were just bolted to the wall. But somehow or other they still connected with the Thought Police. From the Ministry of Love, towering, massive, central, and omnipotent, hearing all, watching all, Big Brother controlled everything.

  When had he last been spoken to as a person rather than a Party instrument—he, Blair, the thin man with the bad back and the cough? He could not recall. Blair’s vapid exchanges with the Wilkeses or his colleagues were mechanical, emotionless. There was no heart in conversation any more, there was no such thing as conversation. Crowds produced rhythmic chanting, feral roars of rage, wild beastlike sounds that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. Private communication, if it occurred at all, depended on talking by installments, on tiny snatches of conversation squeezed into any quiet space that might be found.

  It was the same with music and poetry. The Party loved songs, loved the crowds roaring out “Oceania, ’tis for thee,” songs in processions, songs to martial music, brassy female voices squalling patriotic songs from the telescreens. But the lyrics came straight from the electronic versificators, composed without any human intervention at all. The words were often clever, gnomic, or sententious, but even at their best they were always graceful monuments to the obvious. They helped you to remember, but what you remembered was always trite. Party verse supplied ready-made thought, vulgar thought vigorously expressed. No individual Party member e
ver sang alone, just for the joy of it. The Party likewise churned out reams of official books and papers and records, but if individuals wrote to each other they relied on faint scribbles on lavatory walls. Every human connection had been severed, and yet the one, all-important connection to the Party was more perfect than any despot before had ever dreamed possible.

  The woman on the telescreen continued her graceless movements, her muscles knotting and sliding under the loose skin. Blair now lay on the floor, breathing in the dust, his cheek off the edge of his mat on the cold linoleum. He desperately tried to do a pushup, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment that was considered proper during the Physical Jerks.

  “Stand up!” the woman barked, her figure redolent of hockey fields and cold baths. Blair complied awkwardly, wheezing slightly His thoughts reverted to the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. At best, you remembered bits and pieces, without context, without meaning. He knew that Airstrip One had once been called England, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London. But it was impossible to say for sure. Memories faded quickly; this too was Party policy To remember was to communicate privately with another time and place. But private communication was illegal. So no one was allowed to remember.

  Except the Party—the Party remembered everything. It made records, and then it remade them at will. Blair himself did this sort of thing every day at the Ministry of Truth. The heroic Comrade Ogilvy who had never existed in any present, would spring into existence in the past, and would then exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar. Blair had used Ogilvy many a time to replace Winston Smith, who had once had a present but who now had no past, who had been wiped out, deleted, and erased from every record. The past was not merely altered but destroyed—reformatted, as they said in Newspeak. Eliminating the past eliminated one more standard of comparison—a dangerous one, since the average level of material comfort was constantly declining. It also safeguarded the infallibility of the Party The Party always produced as much chocolate today as it had promised yesterday; the official records of yesterday’s promises always confirmed it. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

  As Blair lunged painfully in the direction of his toes, a brick-red shade flowed upward from his neck and congested his face with a threat of apoplexy. The sweat gleamed on his chest. Stick it out, stick it out! A healthy enthusiasm for physical fitness always stood you in good stead with the Party. Blair had gone through these contortions for years, every morning the same senseless sacrifice to the exacting god behind the screen. Now the instructress was staring right at him. She always did, Blair thought. Or at least she always managed to make him feel that way. Somehow, the telescreens, or the people behind them, knew exactly where to find you.

  “Stand easy!” said the woman, a little more genially. Blair sank his arms to his sides and refilled his lungs with air.

  “And now let’s see which of us can touch our toes!” bellowed the woman. “Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One-two! . . .” Blair loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from his heels to his buttocks. The marvel was that they could still make him do this every morning, in the solitude of his own home, that for a decade or more it had never even seriously crossed his mind that he might avoid this nonsense and linger in bed instead. They would have learned it at once. The Party always learned, always knew.

  How did they do it? The telescreens watched, but what could they possibly see? To look skeptical at the wrong moment was facecrime, but almost everyone had learned by long habit to look completely expressionless. This was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort. True, you could not control the beating of your heart, and it was said the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. But hearts beat fast for all kinds of reasons; a shot of Victory Gin usually sent Blair’s soaring just before it settled him into a deep calm.

  Had Big Brother somehow learned to read the human mind, then? Could he see behind the masses of blank faces? It was known that Party functionaries were working tirelessly to penetrate the skull itself. They studied with extraordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and tested the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture. But everyone also knew that these bastard psychologists, inquisitors, and executioners were not real scientists. None of their projects ever went anywhere.

  They never would. The Party consisted of people like Wilkes, the obedient drudges, the stupid and the uninquisitive. Scientific and technical progress had ceased; the empirical habit of thought could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As private communication had eroded, scientists had lost their ability to check up on each other, to record their findings and compare results. In any event, science had been abolished. The Party made the laws of nature by decree; its control over the physical world was absolute. What was commonly called “reality” was an illusion, a fraud: outside man, outside the human skull there was nothing at all. At the will of the Party a man could float off the floor like a soap bubble, ice could be heavier than water, two plus two could make five. Being omnipotent, the Party had no need for science.

  And yet . . . and yet, somehow they watched, somehow they knew. In a world with no memory, the Party remembered all; in a society with no records, the Ministry of Truth churned out records in endless supply; in a city with no directories, where it was impossible even to discover where anyone lived except by personal inquiry, Big Brother always knew exactly where you were. Big Brother was able to inspire only abstract, undirected emotion, love or hatred, anger or jealousy, which could be switched almost randomly from one object to another like a plumber’s blow-flame; but when the Thought Police came after you they found you, found you alone, and destroyed you with quick, perfectly directed efficiency. In a city of no real human contact, no links, no loyalties, no reliable connections of any kind, the Party maintained perfect connections with everyone, everywhere, all the time. It was as if the laws of physics and engineering had succumbed to doublethink, the Party’s vast system of mental cheating.

  The hot sweat had broken out all over Blair’s body. His face remained completely inscrutable. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and—one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency—bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.

  “There, comrades! That’s how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I’m thirty-nine and I’ve had four children. Now look.” She bent over again. “You see my knees aren’t bent. You can all do it if you want to,” she said as she straightened herself up. “That’s better, comrade, that’s much better,” she added encouragingly as Blair, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.

  THE MINISTRY

  For all its remarkable powers, the telescreen is really impressive at only one point in all of 1984. While Winston Smith is doing his morning exercises, his mind begins to wander. It doesn’t get very far:

  “Smith!” screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. “6079 Smith W! Yes, you! Bend lower, please. You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade.”

  This is indeed unsettling. Smith, among tens of thousands of Londoners aged thirty-something, is apparently being watched personally by Jane Fonda.

  She is watching from the Ministry. The Ministry of Truth is responsible for all books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, soundtracks, cartoons, photographs, telescreen broadcasts, and so on. The other telescreen Ministry—“the really frightening one”—is the Ministry of Love, headquarters of the Thought Police.

  Miniluv, as it is called, towers over central London, “vast and white above the grimy landscape, . . . [an] e
normous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air.” It contains “three thousand rooms above ground level and corresponding ramifications below.” The Ministry of Truth occupies an identical building next door. Every broadcast, every news report, film, and documentary, emanates from one government building, and every return signal, from every telescreen in every lavatory, living room, and public square, returns to another. The terror of the telescreen isn’t the message or the newfangled two-way medium; the real terror is the Ministry. The word itself—“Ministry”—gets 75 mentions in 1984.

  Orwell has been anticipating the arrival of such monoliths of centralization all his life. Take the problem of dirty crockery, for example— the problem of “cleaning out a frying-pan which has had fish in it.” Orwell’s little 1945 essay on the subject is lighthearted, but the self-parody is nevertheless quite unconscious: “Every time I wash up a batch of crockery I marvel at the unimaginativeness of human beings who can travel under the sea and fly through the clouds, and yet have not known how to eliminate this sordid time-wasting drudgery from their daily lives.” What is to be done? The thought of private, automatic dishwashing machines never even surfaces. Orwell considers paper plates but rejects the idea in favor of something better. We must “devote as much intelligence to rationalising the interiors of our houses as we have devoted to transport and communications.” Dishwashing is like communications? Anyone who has read 1984 suddenly knows what’s coming next: “I see no solution except to do [the washing up] communally, like a laundry.” Orwell isn’t joking. He really means it: “Every morning the municipal van will stop at your door and carry off a box of dirty crocks, handing you a box of clean ones (marked with your initial, of course) in return.” The problem of dirty dishes, in short, is going to be solved by . . . Yes! A Ministry of Crockery.