Orwell's Revenge (2 page)

Which brings us back to Victory Gin, the opiate and anesthetic of all consciousness in Oceania. And back to the other fixture of daily life in
1984,
the thing that extends senses and heightens consciousness, which is, of course, . . .

But I am getting ahead of myself again.

O'Brien, it turns out, was a faithful member of the Inner Party all along. Winston and Julia are arrested and taken off to separate cells in the Ministry of Love.

Winston has been imprisoned, rather than vaporized immediately, because O'Brien has decided to save him. The details of the drugs and the pain machine are unimportant; the possibilities and methods of brainwashing were novel in Orwell's day but no longer are now. Suffice it to say that Winston's mind is dismantled, thought by thought. At the very end
there remains one last vestige of his identity still to be expunged. O'Brien confronts Winston with his greatest terror: rats. Winston is completely broken, and we are back to gin in the morning, gin at night, and “
two gin-scented tears.” He no longer cares about Julia, no longer even likes her. Winston has won the victory over himself.
He loves Big Brother.

“I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon,” Orwell declares in an essay published in 1946. “[I] know with some clarity what kind of book
I want to write,” he continues. In August he starts work.

Orwell has reason to know what the book will say He has been composing the drafts and notes for 1984, the scenes, the metaphors, and the images, throughout his literary life. Here is just one small example of what I mean, from a 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases . . . one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. . . . The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but
his brain is not involved.

The rewrite in
1984
reads:

His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. . . . As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking;
it was his larynx.

There is more of this self-plagiarism in
1984
—much more. If you look for it—as I have done systematically, with the aid of a powerful computer—you will find it on page after page.

Orwell knew what he was doing, of course. And gloomy though he was in 1948, it must have amused him to write
1984
with so much
reliance on scissors and paste. In 1984 itself, the Ministry of Truth churns out books on its “novel-writing machines”
in much the same way The pornographic stories that Julia helps produce at the Ministry have only six plots, which are
swapped around by machine. Sentimental songs are “composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator . . .
without any human intervention whatever.” Orwell surely must have smiled as he wrote those words, with the litter of his own cannibalized essays and books scattered around his desk.

Happily, however, Orwell's cut-and-pasting worked far better than the book-writing machines mentioned in 1984. Scissors or no scissors,
1984
is a magnificently original creation. Even today, almost half a century after the book's publication, a decade after the year itself, the mind-numbing, soul-sapping atmosphere of
1984
still seems grippingly real. You can almost feel Big Brother's electronic eye as it monitors every stroke of the pen in your diary, as it watches every slight twitch of facecrime in your living room, as it pursues thoughtcrime into the deepest recesses of your brain.
1984
makes technoparanoia seem completely rational. It makes telephobia respectable.

But—as I have said—
1984
is wrong. Not just wrong as prophecy, but wrong in its architecture, wrong in its mechanics, wrong in its central vision. Exploring why is not just an idle exercise in literary history In working out just how and why Orwell was so fundamentally mistaken, we learn a great deal about our own present, and perhaps our own future too.

I could have worked it out the old-fashioned way, I suppose, but that would hardly have done Orwell justice. Orwell, after all, expected books in our day to be written “by machinery,” with “prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of
a child's Meccano set.” Our books, he promised, would be passed “through so many hands that when finished they [would] be no more an individual product than a Ford car at
the end of the assembly line.” By now, Orwell predicted, “the
surviving literature of the past” would have to be “suppressed or
at least elaborately rewritten.” Orwell predicted it. I simply delivered.

My crime began with the physical destruction of a book—
1984
itself. I tore off the cover and cut the 314 pages from the spine. I then fed them into my optical scanner, 30 or so at a time, and transferred them by wire into my computer.
1984
lives there to this day, 590,463 bytes of ASCII text. For good measure, I scanned in the rest of Orwell's books, essays, letters, and BBC broadcasts too.
¹
To locate biographical details of Orwell's life, I scanned in Michael
Shelden's excellent
Orwell: The Authorized Biography.
Altogether, these writings now reside in 9,546,486 bytes, which is to say a hundred million slivers of magnetized ferric dust glued to the surface of a spinning platter called a hard drive.

Then I set to work. Real names and faces rose up before me from the digitized mists of Orwell's writings and life—Orwell himself most of all, in his several incarnations. Orwell the real-life Winston Smith, the man who ended his broadcasting career at the BBC feeling “
like a sucked orange,” the man who lived most of his modest life all but unrecognized under his real name, Eric Blair. Orwell again, the man who imagined the hyper-tech Ministry of Love, armed with the technology by which Big Brother is always watching
you.
And Orwell a third time—Orwell the tinkerer, the lover of gadgets, the man who, by his own account, was “perpetually seeing, as it were, the ghosts of possible machines that might save me the trouble of
using my brain or muscles.”

Around Orwell, Orwell, and Orwell, there congregated real people from Orwell's own lives. Brendan Bracken—“B.B.”—who headed Britain's Ministry of Information during Orwell's
tenure at the BBC, renamed O'Brien by Orwell in
1984.
Duff Cooper—the man Bracken re
placed as head of
the Ministry of Information. Vaughan Wilkes—the sadistic headmaster who tormented and caned young Orwell during his miserable schooldays at Crossgates. J. D. Bernal—signed up by Orwell to give BBC talks on “the future of science and the position of the scientific worker under
Capitalism, Fascism and Socialism.” Cyril Connolly—Orwell's fellow Etonian and life-long friend. And Guy Burgess—Orwell's colleague at the BBC, later exposed as
a Soviet spy.

As I wrote, I never suffered from writer's block. Whenever I needed to picture Orwell's life through Orwell's eyes, I had his own record instantly at hand. When it suited my purposes, I lifted individual words, images, phrases, entire sentences, occasionally even paragraphs from his own writings. When I felt like it, I rearranged, added, pruned, inverted, reversed, or corrupted. I felt no sense of contrition. I was simply committing the quintessentially Orwellian crime—a crime of plagiarism, forgery, artistic vandalism, and historic revisionism, a crime committed on and by the computer itself. Or was it the other way around? Was the crime really his, and my part simply the punishment?

It hardly matters. When at last I stopped, this book had emerged. Orwell's story had been rewritten. His black had been turned into white. Best of all, it had been done by his own hand.

Or almost so. I said at the outset that Orwell begins with Victory Gin, but I lied. The Gin comes second. What Orwell begins with is the very opposite of gin. And it is in dealing with The Thing That Is Not Gin, the Thing that sharpens the senses instead of dulling them, that Orwell loses his mind.

That thing is, of course . . .

¹
Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933; 378,677 bytes);
Burmese Days
(1934, 557,002 bytes); A
Clergyman's Daughter
(1935; 552,502 bytes);
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936; 493,220 bytes);
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937; 402,951 bytes);
Homage to Catalonia
(1938; 514,313 bytes);
Coming Up for Air
(1939; 465,168 bytes); A
Collection of Essays
(1936-1937; 669,623 bytes);
The Lion and the Unicorn
(1941; 190,422 bytes);
Animal Farm
(1945; 178,574 bytes); selected additional essays from
The Orwell Reader
(254,657 bytes) and
The Penguin Essays of George Orwell
(482,987 bytes) and selected pages from the four volumes of
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell
(877,328 bytes).

The telescreen was still there. It had always been there, as long as Big Brother himself. Big Brother's black-haired, black-mustachio'd visage still gazed outward from the screen, full of power and mysterious calm. Every minute of every day and night you always knew: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

It was a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be
dismembered by the wind. The wind whipped through the leafless trees and flapped the torn posters against the
gray walls of the buildings. As Blair pushed his way through the glass doors of
Victory Mansions, scraps of paper in the street seemed to scuttle along the walls of the alleys, like rats. The stairs loomed before him, their threadbare carpet a dull green in the light that filtered through the dirty window The lift wasn't working. The electric power was always shut off for a month during the Nega-watt austerity program that led up to Love Week.

Blair climbed the eight stories to his dingy apartment. The paint on the walls was blistered and peeling from the damp. He stopped on the landing to cough, and doubled up in an agonizing spasm. When he could breathe again, he fumbled in his tattered raincoat for the key,
then stepped into the chill, stagnant air of his home. He saw his reflection in the mirror that faced the door. Eric Blair— E. A. Blair—Party Number 503-330-090. He was a pathetic figure: shabby and insubstantial, looking older than his thirty-five years. His otherwise gray skin was red and rough from too frequent applications of a razor blade that had lost its cutting edge weeks ago.

The voice on the telescreen was babbling in his living room about the
production of pig iron. It was always pig iron, or the five-year plan, or the latest triumph in the never-ending war against Eastasia. The voice issued from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror, which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. The telescreen could be dimmed, but there was
no way of shutting it off completely The device received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Blair made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being
watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire
whenever they wanted to.

Blair turned toward the window, his back to the telescreen. More paint had flaked off the metal frame onto the sill. He looked out over London, chief city of Airstrip One, the
third most populous province of Oceania. All around spread endless grimy miles of decayed brick buildings, with gaps like missing teeth, filled with rubble, and patches of waste land where weeds sprouted and rubbish accumulated. Had London always been like this? The building opposite seemed to have once had some kind of dome on it—whatever covered it had been stripped off, leaving a scarred brick infrastructure. The iron railings on the balconies of the buildings had struts missing and misshapen.

A kilometer away the Ministry of Love towered vast and white above the grimy landscape, an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete. From where Blair stood it was just possible to
read, picked out in elegant lettering on the white face of the Ministry,
the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Blair set his face into the expression of quiet optimism it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen, then
turned from the window. He crossed to the kitchen, poured a teacupful of Victory Gin, and
gulped it down. It burned his throat, and brought tears to his eyes, but it also loosened the knot of fear in his stomach. Then, as casually as he could, he walked over to the shallow alcove to one side of the telescreen. For some reason the telescreen in the living room was in an unusual position, so that the alcove, once occupied by bookshelves, was just out of its
line of sight. In the alcove stood a small battered table, left there by some former occupant of the flat.