Orwell's Revenge (5 page)

Ah yes, gramophones, telephones, machine guns. Orwell dislikes all machines, but he hates instruments of electronic communication the most.

Until
1984,
Orwell aims most of his techno-loathing at the gramophone. He alludes to the instrument dozens and dozens of times in his writings, and always with revulsion. In 1934, Orwell even composes a horrible poem, “On a Ruined Farm Near the His Master's Voice Gramophone Factory,” blaming gramophones for
the demise of farming. The gramophone keeps popping up all the way through his 1939 novel,
Coming Up for Air,
where the instrument symbolizes the ruin of George Bowling's beloved
Lower Binfield. Time and again in other books and essays, Orwell's favorite insult for party hacks who spout canned propaganda is “
the gangster gramophone.” “[W]hether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment,” Orwell writes in the preface to
Animal Farm,
“[t]he enemy is
the gramophone mind.”

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 . . .

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 ever 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.