Orwell's Revenge

by Peter Huber

  • • •

  If Orwell had lived to the age of eighty-two, as his own father did, he would have died in 1985. A life that long would have allowed him to read history’s own review of 1984 and given him time to compose his own letter-to-the-editor in reply. Perhaps his reply would have drawn from “New Words” and “Poetry and the Microphone.” In any event, Orwell would have written, and written frankly, in a spirit of reflection and honest, self-critical inquiry. He was never a man afraid to face facts, even facts that contradicted what he himself had once believed. As often as not, he had already written the contradiction himself. Orwell thrived on doublethink.

  In fact he lived it, and in the end he died it. He described himself as a “Tory Anarchist,” by which (when describing Jonathan Swift with the same words) he meant a man despising authority while disbelieving in liberty He began his adult career as a colonial policeman in Burma, running a network of spies, and ended it with 1984. He hated the radio, and he spent two years broadcasting for the BBC. “One of the most horrible features of war,” Orwell wrote in 1938, “is that all war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” Five years later he himself was part of England’s wartime propaganda machine. “I suppose sooner or later we all write our own epitaphs,” he observed, reflecting on that irony. Yes, Orwell would have written his own answer to 1984—the book and the year too—if he had been given the time.

  But Orwell’s own epitaph was to be written long before the telescreen’s. The pinnacle of doublethink in Orwell’s own life comes during the writing of 1984 itself. In 1947, having completed only a very rough first draft of the book, Orwell learns he has tuberculosis. The best treatment is streptomycin, a new American drug that is still generally unavailable in England. David Astor, the son of an English lord, arranges through family connections in the United States to have a special shipment sent to Orwell’s hospital. “I am a lot better,” Orwell writes in a letter in April 1948. He sets feverishly to work completing his last novel. The first words of Winston Smith’s diary—“April 4th, 1984”—are probably composed on April 4, 1948, or very close to that date. Orwell has been given another two years to live—-just enough time to finish his greatest book and witness the beginning of its enormous triumph. Those two years have been given to him by the genius of American capitalism and the patronage of a rentier member of the English upper class.

  Orwell died on January 21, 1950, at the age of forty-six.

  * * *

  I Interestingly, Orwell misquotes the Declaration of Independence, omitting “just” from “governments . . . deriving their just powers.” 1984, p. 313.

  II The passage emerges as: “Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

  THE MACHINE

  The Gestapo is said to have teams of literary critics whose job is to determine, by means of stylistic comparison, the authorship of anonymous pamphlets. I have always thought that, if only it were in a better cause, this is exactly the job I would like to have.

  “As I Please” (1945)

  “I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you know.” O’Brien says this to Winston Smith toward the end of 1984. He is referring to The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the book ostensibly written by Kenneth Blythe, which occupies the middle section of 1984. But O’Brien didn’t write that book either. Blythe and O’Brien are, of course, inventions of George Orwell. Whose real name was Eric Blair. So there we have it: one book, four authors.

  Or why not five? Upon reflection—upon careful reflection, after reading 1984 many times—I came to realize that Orwell had made some serious errors. He had also written my charge:

  4.4.48 g.o. book malreported telescreen rectify forecasts misprints malquotes doubleplusungood rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.I

  Yes, Orwell expected this to happen. By 1984, “[a]U history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.” By 1994,1984 would be history too, and ready for the cleansing.

  • • •

  One of my own telescreens—the one used sometimes by my six-year-old daughter to play Mixed Up Mother Goose—is hooked up to a Hewlett-Packard flatbed scanner with an automatic document feeder. Inside the computer I’ve installed a circuit board manufactured by Calera Recognition Systems. I directed the H£ Calera, and my computer to devour the mutilated copy of 1984. I fed the pages into the scanner, thirty or so at a time. The computer and scanner hummed and groaned for about five hours, after which the book had been scanned in its entirety and converted into electronic text. As I described in the Preface to this book, 1984 was on my hard disk, in an ASCII file, occupying 590,463 bytes of storage. The rest of Orwell’s books, essays, and letters soon followed, along with Shelden’s excellent biography

  I use a very fast word processor, XyWrite III+, running on what in 1993 was a reasonably fast machine—a 66 MHz 80486—with ample RAM (16 megabytes) to contain the entire book in dynamic memory. With 1984 loaded into my word processor, I am able to jump from the first word to the last in just over 1 second. I can search through the book at will for any particular word or phrase. I can move from one occurrence to the next as fast as I can hit a single key.

  With the search power of my machine, I was able to track the patterns and themes Orwell developed in 1984 far more ambitiously than would ever have been possible by any other means. In a matter of seconds, for example, I was able to see how Orwell developed the theme of the church bells, or Winston Smith’s fear of rats, or the imagery of a piece of coral embedded in glass, or the Chestnut Tree Cafe, or the idea of meeting some day “in the place where there is no darkness.” It was now easy to trace out all of Orwell’s recurring, interwoven metaphors of isolation and connection, hate and love, alienation and brotherhood. At times I felt as though I were looking over Orwell’s shoulder as he knitted together the strands of his great classic novel. His intricate plan unfolded in front of me in a way that perhaps no one other than Orwell himself had ever seen before.

  But I had a more concrete objective in mind. My telescreen was going to go after Orwell’s handiwork. It was going to rewrite Orwell’s book beginning to end.

  • • •

  At first, the thought of recreating Orwell seemed very intimidating. Orwell, after all, had great genius, and on top of that he had fifteen years of earlier Orwell to plagiarize from. And I? Well, I had . . .

  And then I saw it: I had Orwell’s genius too. Not in my head, but under my fingertips, in my computer. I had Orwell’s brain in a bottle. If Orwell could cut and paste fifteen years of Orwell to produce 1984, I could do the same for my book. Indeed, in matters of cutting and pasting I could almost certainly surpass Orwell, for my cut-and-paste tools were far superior to his.

  The best part of it all, I soon realized, was that I had Orwell’s express permission. In fact, I am sure Orwell would have demanded it. It is Orwell, after all, who had been chewing over the possibility of machine-written books years before any one else imagined such things. It is Orwell who seizes his moment as a BBC broadcaster to concoct an “Imaginary Interview with Jonathan Swift,” and to produce a “Story by Five Authors,” which is, quite literally, written by five separate authors. It is Orwell who gives us the Ministry of Truth in 1984 itself, where the poetry and literature of the past are revised beyond all recognition.

  So, psychologically prepared by Orwell himself, I loaded 1984 into my computer and began to rewrite it line by line. My mission was simple: I would affirm 1984 even as I denied it. I would prove that Orwell was wrong by proving that he was right. It would be a triumphant act of doublethink. I owed Orwell no less.

  As I assembled Orwell’s Revenge from the bricks and mortar of Orwell�
�s own writings, I relived Winston Smith’s existence in the Ministry of Truth. I knew, for example, that Orwell despised the free market, whereas I planned to glorify it. No matter; Orwell had certainly provided some encouraging description of markets somewhere. In an instant, I could search for it through all his writings. Almost as fast as I could type the word “market” I would have in front of me a good passage to pirate. The machine in fact led me immediately to Aspidistra’s wonderful description of the fish market in Luton Road, the one in which the stalls glow with fine lurid colors, heavy-laden with hacked, crimson chunks of meat, piles of oranges, and so on. And it is Comstock who then reflects that “[w]henever you see a street-market you know that there’s hope for England yet.”

  I could do the same with “wispy hair,” or “top hat,” or “drain,” or “stank abominably,” or “entrails,” or “gramophone.” How about Blair’s girl? “Perhaps the most striking thing” about Orwell’s early writing, Shelden’s biography instantly informed me, “is that so much of it is concerned with prostitutes.” Did I need text to paint a picture of O’Brien s decay? 1984 supplied some immediately, in passages describing the wrecks of former Party members who had been purged. And then my computer proposed some wonderful passages from Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant.” The machine was right on the mark; the wrenching description of how an elephant dies when a bullet from a high-power rifle penetrates its brain seemed to work perfectly in describing O’Brien’s own collapse. Did I need help with O’Brien’s recollections as he prepares for yet another hanging? No better place to look than in Orwell’s own essay, “A Hanging,” one of the great, classic essays of English literature.

  It was in doing this sort of thing that I discovered just how much of it Orwell had done himself. My computer was merciless. If I so much as paused, for example, to admire the “red velvet” simile that Orwell had used to describe the dying pachyderm in “Shooting an Elephant,” my computer would whisper to me that Orwell had used it again in Burmese Days, and in a very similar context. As I show in the Notes, 1984 itself lifts phrases, sentences, metaphors, and scenes all but verbatim from Orwell’s own earlier books and essays. Most of the quotes and paraphrases in the Preface to this book, which I presented as if they came from 1984, were in fact drawn from Orwell’s other writings. They supply, nonetheless, a completely faithful summary of 1984. I also found that—perhaps as a little private joke—Orwell had made a point of including delicate (but obviously deliberate) allusions to his other works in a number of his own books and essays.

  If Orwell could do it to Orwell, so could I. It was the most fun I’ve ever had at a keyboard. Instead of memory holes, I had a telescreen stuffed with memory: Orwell’s literary memory, the whole of it, thousands of pages instantly accessible through the machine he hated most. When I wanted a scene, an image, or an idea, it could almost invariably be found in Orwell’s electronically pickled brain, just waiting to be retrieved. My nonfiction pages on Orwell, including some of my most colorful commentary on his work, in this and all my other nonfiction chapters, likewise draw frequently from Orwell’s own literary criticism. “Wonderful gargoyles, rotten architecture.” “Compatible with sanity in the medical sense.” “A man who lacked imagination.” This is all Orwell, turned around to reflect on Orwell himself. The Notes provide a fairly complete record of how far all this went.

  Let me add, finally, that I could easily have finished the job. Every decent word processor has a built-in thesaurus. Word by word, sentence by sentence, I could have dissolved away Orwell’s text and replaced it with my own. I could easily have obliterated all evidence of what I had done. The final product would not have been Orwell’s, or at least not identifiably so. Every word of any importance, every simile and metaphor, would have been just different enough to make my enormous debt to Orwell unrecognizable. My book would have been a sort of fossil, a mineralized facsimile of Orwell’s, the carbon replaced, atom by atom, with sand. And yet, all the real work, the structure and arrangement of sentences and paragraphs, the logical flow, would still have been his. It would have been like painting by the numbers, but to the point where no one could have seen the original lines any more. I would have transformed Orwell into Huber, and no one would have been the wiser.

  I declined to take the last step, however. I have kept the best of Orwell’s allusions, images, and turns of phrase wherever they seemed to fit. I did this not because I was too lazy to finish what I had started but because not finishing was part of my point. I did not intend to vaporize Orwell completely. It was sufficient to make him love 1984 despite himself.

  • • •

  I wrote my palimpsest with no sense of contrition; I make no apology for it here. All writing is allusion; all literature builds on common experience. The best Nonsense Poetry, Orwell once wrote, is written by communities, not individuals. Language itself, as Orwell points out in “New Words,” is created collectively To be sure, Orwell sometimes said that the novel would always remain a solitary endeavor. But Orwell never did fully understand the power of the telescreen.

  In this, the age of the telescreen, it is not just possible but obligatory to integrate Orwell into any serious discussion of teletechnology. When you agree with him, you take his thought as your own. When you disagree, you stick his words into the mouth of an O’Brien or Burgess, and then you answer them. When Orwell is boring or pedantic, as he occasionally is, you cut. When Orwell is brilliant, as he very often is, you paste, and then answer him if you can. You spot something pretty—perhaps as small as a beautiful paperweight, say—and in a second it is sitting there on the mantlepiece of a chapter where it seems to fit best. However you use him, you must acknowledge Orwell’s views on anything you write. There is no other choice. Orwell shapes your thoughts even when he is wrong, even when you disagree with him completely. Reading Orwell on (and about) the telescreen as one writes on (and about) the telescreen cannot be a passive business any longer.

  “Who controls the present controls the past,” Orwell wrote in 1984. Whether we can alter what happened yesterday, we certainly can alter what yesterday’s literary gents said would happen today. Yesterday’s prediction of what will be today is ours to affirm or deny: 1984 belongs to us, who live it, and not to him, who wrote it. So too, then, should 1984, and all books of prophecy beyond. The future is not a shall be, not a must be, not a will be. The future belongs to the living, not because they have the power to change what was but because they have the power in their own time to shape what is.

  Timshel, it says in the Bible: not “Do thou,” nor “Thou shalt,” but Thou mayest. The future of the telescreen is a may be; it is a choice. It may yet be Orwell’s. Or it may yet be mine.

  * * *

  I. In Oldspeak (or standard English) this would read: “The G[eorge] O[rwell] book of April 4, 1948, included references, forecasts, quotes, and misprints relating to the telescreen that are extremely unsatisfactory Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.” Cf. 1984, pp. 39, 45.

  LOOSE ENDS

  [T]he bigger the machine of government becomes, the more loose ends and forgotten corners there are in it. This is perhaps a small consolation, but it is not a despicable one. It means that in countries where there is already a strong liberal tradition, bureaucratic tyranny can perhaps never be complete.

  “Poetry and the Microphone” (1945)

  One was called Bell, the other Blue. The dark granite of Bell’s headquarters towered vast and luminous above the crowded sidewalks in the heart of New York City. Blue’s operations were centered nearby, in Armonk. Between them, B&B had 1.4 million employees. They controlled the two most lucrative and powerful businesses on earth. In an age when most information—and indeed most of what the human mind could create—was stored, edited, replicated, and distributed by electronic means, B&B came as close as any power ever has to controlling thought itself. [sup]7[/sup]

  The end, or at least the beginning of the end, came at one second past the hour
of midnight, on January 1, 1984. In a single stroke, the Ministry shattered Ma Bell into eight pieces. Three weeks later, to the booming strains of “Chariots of Fire,” Steve Jobs stepped out on the podium at the annual stockholders’ meeting of Apple Computer and unveiled the new Macintosh.

  • • •

  The idea of telephony, from the Greek “far speaking,” has tantalized humanity since time immemorial. Nineteenth-century inventors were the first to explore the possibility seriously. In 1831, Michael Faraday demonstrated that a piece of iron vibrating in a magnetic field produces electrical pulses. Soon thereafter, in 1835, Samuel Morse invented the essential elements of a telegraph.

  Alexander Graham Bell produced his first rough plans for a “harmonic telegraph” in 1872. Within a few years he had developed the phonautograph, which translated sounds into visible markings. In June 1875, Bell discovered the basic principles of the electromagnetic microphone and speaker, the key elements of a telephone. The famous words—“Mr. Watson, come here, I want you”—were transmitted from Bell to his assistant on March 10, 1876. Commercial telephone service was inaugurated in the United States the following year. Bell was confident that some day “a telephone in every house would be considered indispensable.”

  By 1878, Bell was installing two “telephones” at each station—one to talk into, the other for listening—so that the user wouldn’t have to keep shifting the unit from mouth to ear. It was a phenomenal advance, of Orwellian implications: the new, two-tier telephone could both transmit and receive. Initially, however, telephones were linked in pairs, directly to each other. In 1878, the budding new telephone companies grasped the necessity of a telephone exchange. The exchange— a simple switchboard at first—radically increased a telephone’s utility by enabling each telephone to reach every other telephone connected to the same exchange. Newark, New Jersey, boasted the first semiautomatic switching system in 1914.