by Peter Huber
Well then, there’s hope after all! Just cut government control and abolish the monopolies, and all will be well. Free speech will flourish through the telescreen, and despots will wither. Turn the page, however, and Orwell is certain again that the outlook is “bleak”:
Something of the same kind [i.e., monopolization] has happened to the cinema, which, like the radio, made its appearance during the monopoly stage of capitalism and is fantastically expensive to operate. In all the arts the tendency is similar. More and more the channels of production are under control of bureaucrats. . . . [T]he totalitarianization which is now going on . . . must undoubtedly continue to go on, in every country of the world.
Orwell blames all this on a huge reactionary conspiracy to “prevent the common man from becoming too intelligent” and “to destroy the artist or at least to castrate him.”
Orwell makes one last effort to end “Poetry and the Microphone” on an optimistic note, but he writes without conviction. The “huge bureaucratic machines” are getting too big, he says. The modern state aims “to wipe out the freedom of the intellect” but needs intellectuals to do so; it needs “pamphlet-writers, poster artists, illustrators, broadcasters, lecturers, film producers, actors, song composers, even painters and sculptors, not to mention psychologists, sociologists, biochemists, mathematicians and what-not,” to run its propaganda machines. And “the bigger the machine of government becomes, the more loose ends and forgotten corners there are in it.” So “in countries where there is already a strong liberal tradition, bureaucratic tyranny can perhaps never be complete.”
In other words, an occasional rebel like Winston Smith may worm his way into the Ministry, and thus seditious art “will always have a tendency to appear.” To be sure, it is still “harder to capture five minutes on the air in which to broadcast a poem than twelve hours in which to disseminate lying propaganda, tinned music, stale jokes, faked ‘discussions’ or what-have-you. But that state of affairs may alter.” The best Orwell can say at the very end of “Poetry and the Microphone” is this: “The radio was bureaucratized so early in its career that the relationship between broadcasting and literature has never been thought out.” “[T]hose who care for literature might turn their minds more often to this much-despised medium, whose powers for good have perhaps been obscured by the voices of Professor Joad and Doctor Goebbels.”
This one halfhearted little essay is the nicest thing Orwell ever writes about radio. Yet it would have been so easy to write more. Maybe the Ministry monopolies won’t be maintained. Maybe there will be more loose ends to the network than even Orwell supposes— loose ends that multiply and reproduce, with each new end creating a new electronic outlet for protest and sedition. Maybe the freedom of telescreens in private hands will overwhelm slavery maintained by a telescreened Ministry
In fact, push Orwell’s own logic just a bit further, and you find that the answer to Professor Joad and Doctor Goebbels may be . . . the telescreen itself! But Orwell never does push the logic of the telescreen quite far enough.
Which raises two questions. What if he had? And why didn’t he?
PART 2: THE MARKET
CHAPTER 6
It was early evening when Blair came out of the Ministry and headed back toward the market. The day’s clouds were dispersing, blown in ragged dark strands across the sky, and pale blue showed between. The wind still made him shiver in his badly made raincoat. He put his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders, but the evening sun shone intermittently and brightened his mood. The night before, fearful and alone in the dark, Blair had resolved to slip Smith’s diary into a memory hole, and never to set foot among the proles again. By the morning he had changed his mind. As he walked, he felt absurdly cheered by the thought of a comfortable shave.
If there is hope it lies in the proles, Smith’s diary declared. It was an astonishing idea. When Blair thought of the proles he thought mostly of how they smelled. Their homes, their shops, and their streets all smelled, not of dust but of coffee and cigarettes, chocolate, bacon, sweat, and sex. The sex was the most unsettling part. Blair was accustomed to the red sash of the Anti-sex league, the hygienic ugliness of Party overalls, the brisk androgyny of the Party women. The prole women had red mouths, and blue lids, and an arch manner that he found both horrifying and tantalizing. They smelled of glutinous roses, and sugary violets, which failed to conceal the heavy underlying musk of their unwashed, lavishly used bodies. Their sinuous young shapes swelled with many pregnancies and collapsed like overripe fruit, as their teeth rotted and their hair fell out, yet still they preserved the inviting manner and salacious glances of their youth.
Did they know—did the stallkeepers and the small clerks, the shop-assistants, the commercial travelers, and the tram conductors know—that they were only puppets dancing when the Party pulled the strings? If they did, they didn’t care. They were too busy being born, being married, begetting, working, dying. Their lives were founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of proles, the greed and fear were mysteriously transmuted into something nobler.
Two huge women were talking outside a doorway The one facing him wore an apron the size of a tablecloth, and her enormous bust hung down over the waistband to meet her great round abdomen. Her rough hands were planted on her hips, and she nodded her head assertively at her companion. Blair caught scraps of conversation as he approached.
“So I says to ’er: ‘a promise is a promise. You come back ’ere with the flour and the eggs,’ I says, ’and I’ll take care of ’em jest like I said I would. You and me, we got the same problems,’ I says. ‘We’ve to look out for each other.’”
“Ah,” said the other, nodding in complete understanding. “That’s the truth.”
He felt they looked at him with mild contempt as he passed— these confident matriarchs, contemplating him as a miserable example of the Party male.
“So if she don’t bring the eggs, she won’t get no cake,” the woman concluded, turning back to her friend as Blair drew away.
The razor blades would be waiting for him when he arrived. That realization had gradually dawned on him during the day, and Blair was utterly certain of it now. In matters the size of razor blades, the proles knew how to remember. The proles kept their promises. Blair couldn’t fathom why, but he knew with deep conviction that they did. The proles are governed by private loyalties which they do not question, Smith had written. The proles are not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they are loyal to one another. The words kept coming back to Blair, a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.
The street into which Blair had turned ran downhill. From somewhere ahead there came a din of voices. He passed three men standing by a table, deep in conversation.
“Not a bad day,” said one. “Not bad at all.”
“ ‘S’right,” said the second. “And I’ve been addin’ ’em up together, all of ’em over the last fourteen months. Back ’ome I got the ’ole lot for over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes it down reglar as the clock.”
For a moment Blair thought they must be discussing the lottery At one time gambling had been the cheapest and most ubiquitous of the proles’ luxuries. Even people on the verge of starvation had bought a few days’ hope by having a penny on a sweepstake. Organized gambling had risen to the status of a major industry. But it hadn’t lasted for long. The Party had rigged the system of course. It had assumed that in the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of the country and another it could simply announce that prizes had been paid even though they never were. Somehow the proles had learned about the fraud in short order, and this attempt at doublethink had failed abysmally. The proles seemed to have found other pursuits. As he walked by the men in conversation, Blair realized they must be stallkeepers too.
“We’ve now sold two hunner’ of em,” continued the second man. “An’ I tell you, another few months like this and we can all bleedin’ well retire!”
Soon the
air was filled with a hubbub of similar human exchange. The passers-by were increasing in number, and instead of shuffling along, they strode firmly down the road. The mutter and clatter and shouting rose toward Blair like the bubbling of a stream. He was thrust onward with the human current, which increased and became more turbulent as they approached the main road, and with a feeling of tumbling over a cliff into the wild vortex he moved into the throbbing whirlpool of the market. The street was so crowded that you could only with difficulty thread your way down the alley between the stalls. The stuff on the stalls glowed with fine lurid colors—hacked, crimson chunks of meat; piles of oranges and green and white broccoli; stiff, glassy-eyed rabbits; live eels looping in enamel troughs; plucked fowls hanging in rows, sticking out their breasts like guardsmen naked on parade. His spirits rose at the sight of all the activity It was delightful—the noise, the bustle, the vitality. For a moment the sight of the street market persuaded him there was hope for England yet.
That was a curious thought, Blair reflected—hope for England, hope for Airstrip One, because the proles still dared to maintain their stalls. In the midst of all the bustle, he marveled at the civility of the place. It was deliberate Party policy to tolerate, perhaps even promote, every manner of vice and criminality among the proles. Proles were expected to be thieves and prostitutes, crack peddlers and racketeers—it was their natural condition. Yet among themselves, the proles seemed to agree quite readily who owned the cornucopia of wealth that spilled over the edges of the stalls and was often piled on the street itself.
Officially, no one owned it. Private property had been abolished long ago. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport—everything had been seized. Party histories taught that in the days of the capitalists, private property had been an obstructive nuisance. The very thought of private property was inimical to Ingsoc. Property depended on a system of reliable memory, on deeds and records, or at least recollections, to track who had cleared the land, or planted the corn, or built the oaken chest. The Party’s business was to burn books—deed books along with all the others—and so obliterate private memory. Only the Party could build an oaken chest, so a carpenter who claimed it as his own must have stolen it. Private Property Is Theft, the Party taught. It was just one more piece of the Party’s vast scheme to rewrite history at will.
Even if people did maintain hazy records of who had created what, “ownership” was an empty concept in the absence of loyalty, reciprocity, and a culture of mutual promises to respect tomorrow what each had accomplished today. Private promises had been abolished by the Party; they had in fact been the first thing to go. Building Societies had been denounced as a huge racket, and shut down. Private insurance had been officially labeled a swindle. A private contract of any kind represented a subversive attempt to control a private future. The future, like the present, like the past, belonged to the Party.
Blair threaded his way through the press of people, retracing his steps from the day before. A minute later he was back at the stall. He saw the razor blades at once, carefully set to one side on the top shelf. For an instant he felt a surge of affection for the stallkeeper.
Unable to suppress a smile, Blair handed over a bag containing three light bulbs. The bulbs worked; they had come from the hall outside Blair’s office at the Ministry. Blair had removed them, one by one, over the space of several months. Each good bulb had been carefully replaced with a dead one. Blair took the blades and thrust them deep into the pocket of his overalls.
“Might I get some more from you when I run out?” he asked casually.
“Any time, guv. We can always get some sent down. Wiv the screens,” he added amiably.
“With the screens?” Blair said blankly.
“Yeah, them telescreen gadgets. That feller comes along to turn it on, and then I tells me mate in Ipswich what I need, see, then his bruvver drives down wiv it next day. It’s got the business movin’ nicely.” The stall owner glanced back at the pillar and grinned. “Don’t exactly know the feller’s name. Some calls ’im ‘Fronky’ Others call ’im the phreak. But ’e’s an exceptional bloke orl right. One day ’e jes arrives, and next thing we know, ’e’s doing amazin’ things with them gadgets. Saved me no end of time, ’e did. I had them blades sent down for you special this morning, all the way from Ipswich.”
Blair stared back at him. The proles didn’t use telescreens. And even if they did, a telescreen could not deliver razor blades from Ipswich.
“Ah-h-h,” said the stallkeeper, reading his look. It was a long, drawn-out sound, a sound of satisfaction with just a hint of conspiracy behind. “You’d have to be asking ’im about that now, woun’ ya. I coun’ begin to tell you ’ow it works, but it does. Used it last night. I says to me mate Fred, I need them blades tomorrow morning sharp—told him over the gadget, y’a see—an’ I’ll pay for ’em in bulbs later. And Fred sent ’em right down.”
Another prole elbowed his way to the front of the stall. With a wink and grin, the stallkeeper turned away.
Blair stepped back and allowed himself to be carried along by the crowd. As he drifted down the street he saw other traders exchanging odd items just as he had done—an old hammer, a piece of cloth, things salvaged and stolen from who knew where. They received in exchange eggs, sugar, white crumbly stuff that must be cheese, and little paper packets, the contents of which he did not recognize. He went to a trestle table where the packets lay, and timidly picked one up.
“That’s first class sage, the missus’d love some for ’er cooking,” said the stallkeeper helpfully “Have a sniff.”
Blair opened the little flap at the top. Inside were a few brittle gray-green leaves. He put his nose to them tentatively, and was surprised by the strong aroma.
“First class,” he agreed, and retreated, leaving the sage on the table. How did the proles know about things like sage? Blair was not aware that any Party canteens used it, and the food that Mrs. Wilkes cooked never smelled of anything but cabbage.
He wandered on. Some of the proles did not seem to offer anything to the stallkeepers. They exchanged a few words, and goods were handed over. As he passed the chocolate stall he saw a man open the silver wrapping of a chocolate bar and break off a small square. Blair could smell the rich, dark chocolate, and his empty stomach contracted with longing.
He reached the niche between fence and building where he had paused the other day There was the telescreen above him. Was it really connected to Ipswich? How could the proles know anything about the telescreen when it was clearly a mystery to a trained technician like Burgess? He noticed that the screen was opaque— another one broken.
Blair turned to find the elongated, tweed-jacket-clad youth beside him, climbing up on to the fence again. The man was so thin that his shabby trousers seemed about to fall down, just suspended by his protruding hip bones. His elbows stuck out, knobbly and pale, as he lifted himself up. When he was balanced on the fence, he leaned down and took the bag. Nobody was taking any notice. The phreak was a silhouette against the yellow evening sky, perched on the fence with his arms raised and his head turned upward.
Clutching his blades, Blair headed back toward home. Out of the proles’ part of town, the bustle, grime, and conversation of the market gave way to gray dust and gray people, hurrying silently past the decaying buildings. As Blair pushed through the glass doors into his building, a syrupy voice was reading out a list of figures over the telescreen.
He arrived back in his apartment and checked the drawer of his desk. Smith’s diary was gone.
THE MARKET
No, the market in 1984 has no stalls glowing with fine lurid colors; no hacked, crimson chunks of meat; no piles of oranges; no green and white broccoli; no stiff, glassy-eyed rabbits; no live eels looping in enamel troughs; no plucked fowls sticking out their breasts like guardsmen naked on parade.
There are, admittedly, little shops: stationers’ shops, junk shops, cafes, and so on. There’s even a street market, which is “general
ly crowded and noisy” But 1984’s market is a dismal place. The men are interested in nothing but the lottery. For millions of proles, the lottery is the principal reason for remaining alive. Where the lottery is concerned, “even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.” There is “a whole tribe of men who ma[ke] a living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets.”
And the women? Winston Smith walks down a crowded street and hears “a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices—women’s voices.” It is “a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep loud ‘Oh-o-o-o-oh’” that goes “humming on like the reverberation of a bell.” Smith’s heart leaps. It has started! The proles are rioting, breaking loose, rising up against the Party! But no. It is only a mob of several hundred women fighting over some stallkeeper’s cooking pots. “Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another’s hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off.”
And that’s all there is to the market in 1984—no friendly intercourse, no mutual benefit, no shared profit, nothing but covetous greed. Orwell hates it, of course. Elsewhere in 1984 he satirizes the anticapitalist Party propaganda, which portrays the shoeless poor, seven-year-old factory workers, cruel masters, servants, frock coats, and top hats. He reminds us repeatedly that 1984 is a world in which shopping means rations and vouchers, not cash and carry In 1984, private property has been abolished. The dollar (which has replaced the pound sterling) buys almost nothing.
This is not to say that Orwell likes the alternative. He hates the degenerate socialism of 1984, but he hates the free market just as much. His essays and his other books are littered with criticism of markets, money, and every form of private wealth. Orwell wants people to have what they need; he just doesn’t want them to work or compete or sell to get it. Orwell wants people to consume things—in moderation and in roughly equal amounts—but not to own them.