by Peter Huber
The power and brain of the telescreen were lodged in the middle. Just below the front surface lay a battery, an inch thick, as broad and wide as the screen itself. Charge was maintained by an array of cells incorporated in the front surface of the screen, which transformed light or loud sound into electricity. When fully charged, each unit converted any additional energy it picked up into amplified light or radio signals and shared the excess power with other units on the network.
The third layer of each telescreen was a calculating device that processed and stored information. It was apparently here that spoken commands were converted into machine instructions. But the manuals said nothing about this function at all. After diligently searching for the information, O’Brien was quite sure it wasn’t there. He was equally sure the omission had been deliberate.
The best hope now was with the engineer. The man had managed to survive the great purge and ended up in a camp. He had spent ten years there, and then finally had been released into the slums of London. O’Brien found himself hoping almost desperately that the engineer would understand how telescreens really operated. Surely he would. A bit of Orwell’s genius must have rubbed off on his assistants.
Somehow or other, O’Brien knew, it was possible to control from where telescreen pictures were received and to where they were sent. Most telescreens just received Big Brother’s standard broadcasts from the Ministry of Truth. But in the Ministry of Love there had to be a straightforward way to choose which pairs of screens were connected at any given instant. The manuals even explained how this was done, but in a completely mechanical way (“Hold blue box up to screen, press button NXX, then press button NYY . . .”) that provided no insight at all into what was really going on. The telescreens in the offices, like those in the Ministry of Love, could also be set to receive information from one place (a back issue of the Times, say, from the Records Department) and send it to another (the same issue after revision, sent on to higher authority for review). O’Brien had even sent for one of the blue boxes, but it hadn’t helped. He had stood in front of his own screen, pressing buttons at random. Nothing had happened at all.
O’Brien’s car stopped in front of a low-looking pub on a corner in a side street. The windows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were merely coated with dust. He pulled himself out of the car and stepped heavily down the stairs. A sour cloud of beer seemed to hang about it. The smell revolted him. The landlady, a tall grim woman with a black fringe, looking like the madam of a brothel, stood behind the bar, her powerful forearms folded, watching a game of darts. The players were proles, with calloused dirty hands, wearing grubby overalls and heavy work boots. They stared at the darts board with casual concentration, let the darts fly in a single, deft movement, and stood back to lift their thick glass mugs of beer to their lips once again. There was a moment’s hush as people glanced inquisitively at O’Brien. He pretended not to notice that they were staring at him.
O’Brien saw his man almost immediately—a very old man, bent but active, with white mustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn. He was wearing a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair. O’Brien approached. The man’s face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and laughing. He reeked of gin.
As O’Brien stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at least, had already been middle-aged when the network had been deployed. He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of technical knowledge. Scientists had been wiped out almost completely in the great purges. If there was anyone still alive who could give you a truthful account of how the network had been built, it could only be someone like this, someone old enough to have worked with Orwell from the beginning.
The man was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation with the landlady. His white-stubbled face flushed pink. The old man turned away from the bar, muttering to himself. O’Brien moved heavily up beside him, and touched him on the arm.
“May I offer you a drink?” he said.
“You’re a gent!” said the other, straightening his shoulders.
The barlady swished two liters of dark-brown beer into thick glasses which she had rinsed in a bucket under the counter/The game of darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about black market deals. O’Brien’s presence was forgotten.
There was a free table under the window where he and the old man could talk. O’Brien carried their drinks over to it. The glasses were thick and cheap, thick as jam jars almost, and dim and greasy. It crossed O’Brien’s mind that this beer had been sucked up from some beetle-ridden cellar through yards of slimy tube, and that the glasses had never been washed in their lives, only rinsed in beery water. O’Brien swallowed a mouthful or so and set his glass gingerly down. It was typical London beer, sickly and yet leaving a chemical aftertaste. O’Brien thought of the wines of Burgundy.
“She could’ve drawed me off a pint,” grumbled the old man as he settled down behind his glass. “A ’ole liter’s too much. It starts my bladder running.” The man reminded O’Brien of many prisoners he had dealt with over the years. Either out of fear or disease, they used the chamber-pots half a dozen times during the night.
“You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,” said O’Brien tentatively
The old man’s pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the barroom that he expected the changes to have occurred.
“The beer was better,” he said finally. “And cheaper!” He took up his glass. “In those days beer cost twopence a pint, and unlike the beer nowadays it had some guts in it. ‘Ere’s wishing you the very best of ’ealth!”
In the man’s lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam’s apple made a surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished. O’Brien went to the bar and came back with two more half-liters.
“You worked with Orwell, I believe. On the network.”
The man seemed to stiffen a bit, and his shoulders straightened again.
“You can remember what it was like in the old days,” O’Brien continued. “There aren’t many like you left. Few people even understand how it was built any more. We can only read about the network in manuals, but they don’t explain very much.”
The old man brightened suddenly. “The manuals!” he said. “Funny you should mention ’em. The same thing come into my ’ead only yesterday, I dunno why. I was jes thinking, I ain’t seen one of ’em in years. I remember Orwell working on ’em. Ever so careful with ’em he was. And that was—well, I couldn’t give you the date, but it must ’a been thirty years ago.”
“It isn’t very important about the manuals,” said O’Brien patiently “The point is, can you tell me how the network operates? The Ministry, Members of the Party—they live like the lords of the earth. They watch whatever they like. The whole thing works for their benefit. You—the ordinary people, the workers—you’re always under their eye. They can use the network to do what they like with you. They can watch you at work and at home, in your lavatories and in your bedrooms. But you can’t even turn off your telescreen. You can’t choose . . .”
The old man peered at O’Brien, his white eyebrows bristling up on his forehead. “Orwell could,” he said insistently. “ ‘E knew ’ow they worked. Always laughed about that one. Can’t choose indeed!” The man grinned widely. “They ’ad the television. With the television, you couldn’t choose. You jes listened to ol’ B.B. But it weren’t enough for ’em. Oh no! The people at the Ministries, they wanted more. That was the joke, see? It was the blokes at the Ministries that wanted more. And Orwell gave it to ’em. ’E found it ever so funny.”
The man chuckled and took another long drink.
“And Orwell gave it to them?” O’Brien said after a moment.
“Oh, ’e gave it to ’em all right. He gave ’em the network they wanted. Ever
yone connected to everyone. Made the Thought Police ’appy, ’e said. ’Cos now they could watch you all the time, see. And t’other Ministry got the systems for rewriting all them papers, see, so they was ’appy too. And Orwell said, if that’s what the idiots want, that’s what the idiots’ll get. A telescreen in every ’ome, in every office.” The old man chuckled, and drank some more beer. “If that’s what the idiots want, says Orwell, that’s what the idiots’ll get.” He was laughing again—a sort of weak wheezing laugh, but the man obviously found the memory deliciously rich.
“Why was it funny for the Ministries to get what they wanted?”
“ ’Cos the screens really worked.”
“How exactly did they work?”
The old engineer appeared to think deeply. He stroked his face with a palsied finger before answering.
“It wos done with the blue box,” he said vaguely. “I recollect it as if it was yesterday. Orwell knew ’ow it worked. Quite a gent, Orwell was, though he never dressed the part. Dressed almost like a tramp, ’e did. Always pretendin’ to be down and out. But he weren’t, not a bit of it. Went to Eton, I don’t doubt. A real gentleman, ’e wos, and ’e knew the network. Well, I was young in them days, and I was ’appy to ’elp, only—”
A sense of helplessness took hold of O’Brien.
“Perhaps I have not made myself clear,” he said. “What I’m trying to understand is this. How can the screens be so selective? You have been alive a very long time; you worked with Orwell on the network. Can you explain to me just how the network decides which pictures will show up where?”
The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He finished up his beer, more slowly than before.
“Follow the manual. That’s wot Orwell taught them Party members, when e was done. That’s wot ’e told ’em. Take the blue boxes, ’e said, and follow the manual. The Party don’t need nothing more than that.”
O’Brien was about to buy some more beer when the old man suddenly got up and shuffled rapidly into the stinking urinal at the side of the room. The liter was already working on him. O’Brien sat for a minute or two gazing at his empty glass. It was no use going on. The huge and simple question—“How does a telescreen work?”—had ceased once and for all to be answerable. The few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of explaining it any more. They remembered a million useless things— the color of the boxes, the clothes Orwell used to wear—but all the important facts were lost.
O’Brien leaned back against the wall and felt an enveloping tiredness settle on his brain. A minute or two later the engineer was rambling on again, but O’Brien had stopped listening. It struck O’Brien for the first time that though slightly drunk, the man was filled with some deep joy that made all the other griefs of his life bearable.
O’Brien shut his eyes, and his thoughts began to drift. Dimly, as though muffled through a wall, he heard the old man repeating:
“ ’Cos the screens worked. ’E said so, didn’t ’e? ’E said so all along. Trust the screens, ’e said.”
O’Brien’s thoughts began to drift. If the network still worked, it was only because Orwell, who had been dead for years, still allowed it to. The Party survived at the pleasure of a single man it had vaporized long ago.
A moment later, despite the hubbub of the surroundings, O’Brien was asleep.
CHAPTER 10
Blair was dreaming. He was walking along a pitch-dark street and the air was unspeakably cold. Then through the blackness he saw a full moon that seemed so extraordinarily bright it looked like a white-hot coin in the cold night sky, its brilliance making the stars invisible. He looked up through the branches of a tree, which the moon seemed to have changed into rods of silver. The light lay thick, as though palpable, on everything, crusting the earth and the rough bark of trees like some dazzling salt, and every leaf seemed to bear a freight of solid light, like snow. He was desperately cold.
He dreamed of a golden country, where the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground of an old pasture, and the elm trees moved faintly in the breeze, their leaves swaying in dense masses like women’s hair. He saw horses, and ducks in flight at dawn, and he remembered it was forbidden to dream of such things. The cold penetrated into the deepest recesses of his unconsciousness.
He dreamed of sitting among enormous, glorious, sunlit ruins, with a woman—not doing anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things. He dreamed of the world as it would be when Big Brother had vanished, a world of privacy, love, and friendship, when the members of a family would stand by one another without needing to know the reason, when people would live together according to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. He dreamed of a just society, a Golden Age, of things that could not be put into words, a stream of nameless things, of thoughts, images, and feelings. He had the sense of being drawn upward through enormous and gradually lightening abysses.
He was dreaming, but he was also conscious of his surroundings and the bitter cold. There was a chorus of varying sound— groans, curses, bursts of laughter, and through them all the uncontrollable chattering of teeth. He realized that all these sounds were issuing from his own mouth. And he felt a desperate longing to reach out to the woman, and to know her as well as he knew himself, to connect with her, body and soul, before he died.
After some time—several more hours, he thought—he dreamed of the sea and the seashore, and of enormous, splendid buildings or streets or ships, in which he had lost his way. He had a peculiar feeling of happiness and of waking in sunlight. He felt a sort of rich warmth creep up his limbs and reach for his brain. He dreamed that he desperately wanted to sleep.
But he didn’t dare sleep. At the very back of his skull, almost in his neck, he knew that if he slept he would never awake. With a convulsive effort, he opened his throat and tried to howl. Somewhere, as if from several yards away, he heard himself groan.
A moment later, a woman was coming toward him. The gesture of her arm filled him with overpowering happiness. In a single movement she reached down toward his face and touched him, more softly, he thought, than he had ever been touched before. She drew her arm round him, and he was enveloped in the cheap scent of violets.
DOUBLETHINK
The free market is the enemy too. But whose? For the young Orwell, the answer is obvious: the free market is the enemy of the working man. Capitalism is Slavery Collectivism is Freedom.
Not just economic freedom, but individual freedom too. Through the 1930s, Orwell remains confident that “democratic socialism” will not merely tolerate but actually promote art and civil liberty Collectivism will be much more efficient than capitalism, artists will get a goodly share of the new socialist abundance, and free thought will prosper every bit as much as the economy. This is the lilies-of-the-field Orwell. This is the Orwell who in 1938, in all seriousness, can write: “The only regime which, in the long run, will dare to permit freedom of speech is a Socialist regime.”
Then Hitler scorches the bloom off Orwell’s socialist lily. By the beginning of World War II, Orwell has begun to appreciate that economic collectivism requires a Ministry, and that once people get used to a Ministry of Plenty they may accept Ministries of Truth, Peace, and Love too.
In his 1940 essay “Literature and Totalitarianism,” Orwell takes a hard look at his lily daydreams for the first time. He is still quite sure “that the period of free capitalism is coming to an end.” It’s what comes next that (for Orwell) is new. Until now, Orwell admits, “[i]t was never fully realised that the disappearance of economic liberty would have any effect on intellectual liberty.” Socialism “was usually thought [by Orwell] as a sort of moralised liberalism.” The state was going to take charge of your economic life but wasn’t going to touch your personal freedom. The arts were going to flourish far more than under liberal capitalism, because artists would no longer have to worry about money. In this 1940 essay, Orwell concedes he was probably wrong. “Now, on the ex
isting evidence, one must admit that these ideas have been falsified.”
From then on, Orwell never can quite decide how civil liberties will survive the demise of the free market, which he still hopes for, or the rise of socialism, which he still desires. “Mechanisation and a collective economy,” Orwell states firmly in 1940, lead to “endless war and endless under-feeding for the sake of war, slave populations toiling behind barbed wire, women dragged shrieking to the block, cork-lined cellars where the executioner blows your brains out from behind.” But only a few months later Orwell will write to his (left-wing) publisher: “You are perhaps right in thinking I am over-pessimistic. It is quite possible that freedom of thought etc. may survive in an economically totalitarian society We can’t tell until a collectivised economy has been tried out in a western country.” Orwell’s uncertainty about this endures for the rest of his life. In a 1945 book review he criticizes another author for mistakenly “assuming that a collectivist society would destroy human individuality.” Yet in a letter written soon after 1984 is published, Orwell summarizes his book as “a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable.”
• • •
Orwell had doublethoughts about socialism from the beginning. The Road to Wigan Pier, an underrated and often misunderstood book published in 1937, sets out some of these at length. In the first half of the book, Orwell paints a chilling picture of life in the slums of a coal-mining town. In the second half, he reproaches his comrades of the left for making a religion out of machines, which threaten to transform man into “a kind of walking stomach” without hand, eye, or brain. This is a perfectly cogent argument against too many machines. It is also a cogent argument against the idle side of socialism, and in my view is plainly intended as such. Lazy men, Orwell is telling us, can come to depend on industrious neighbors quite as easily as on industrial machines. A free market forces people to work productively which may mean killing labor in the Wigan Pier coal mines. Socialism forces people to share, which for those on the receiving end may mean brain-in-a-bottle dependency.