Orwell's Revenge (23 page)

In the old days of the capitalists, the press, the film industry, radio, and television,
were all stagnant oligopolies, dumping the same mind-numbing rubbish into every home. The owners of those media pitched their programs at what the great mass of people share in common—their prurience, their neurotic fears—and relied on crude polling to estimate how many people were attracted by sex and violence to endure advertisements for sugared cereal and laundry soap. All of
this will now disappear. Every hobby and pastime— cage birds, fret work, carpentry, bees, carrier pigeons, home conjuring, philately, chess—will have at least one telescreen channel devoted to it,
and often several. Gardening and livestock keeping will have at least a score between them. Then there will be the sporting channels, the radio channels, the children's comics, the large range of channels devoted to the movies and all more or less exploiting women's legs, the various trade channels, the women's soap opera channels, the needlework channels, and countless others. These dimestore novels of the telescreen will exist because there is a definite demand for them, and they will reflect the minds of their viewers as
a single national network cannot possibly do. Ours will become, once again, a nation of flower lovers and stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon snippers, darts players,
and crossword puzzle fans. The days of mindless broadcast to the mindless masses are at an end.

Amid all this freedom there will still be prurience, violence, necrophilic reveries, and the disgusting art of Salvador Dali. Yet in the universe of the telescreen, speech in public spaces no longer needs to be regulated. Public spaces—or at least the ones of any importance—are no longer surrounded by walls or gates. Bulletin boards, auditoriums, theaters, schools, stadiums, squares, subway walls—electronic replacements for all the traditional public forums—can be created upon demand. The network gives the pamphleteer and soapbox orator not just a place in Speaker's Comer but
the whole of Hyde Park. There is room for the Pacifist, the Communist, the Anarchist, the Jehovah's Witness, and the Legion of Christian Reformers who have declared
Hitler to be Jesus Christ. Temperance reformers, Communists, Trotskyists, the Catholic Evidence Society, Freethinkers, vegetarians, Mormons, the Salvation Army, and any number of plain lunatics: all will be able to speak out over the network; all will receive a good-humored hearing from anyone who chooses to listen. The network will be Alsatia, where no opinions are outlawed. There has never been any place like it before
in the physical world.

The network will supply room enough for every sight and sound, every thought and expression that any human mind will ever wish to communicate. It will make possible a wildness of spirit, where young minds can wander in adventurous,
irresponsible, ungenteel ways. It will contain not innocence but a sort of native gaiety,
a buoyant, carefree feeling, filled with confidence in the future and an unquenchable sense of freedom and opportunity. It will be
capitalist civilization at its best. It will be the new frontier, and also the last frontier, for it extends as far as any human mind may wish to range. People will assemble in any numbers, at any distance, in groups that are infinitely variable. They will be able to cry fire whenever they wish: the theater will no longer be crowded.

O'Brien leaned back in his chair and gazed for a moment at the handwriting in the diary. How had the pages even been reproduced, he wondered. A dim recollection of a science called xerography floated into his mind. He was certain the copying machines had all been confined to secure rooms inside the Ministry, but a traitor had apparently gained access to one anyway Perhaps Winston Smith himself. The man had worked in the Ministry, after all, and had undoubtedly had access to these machines. It had probably taken him no more than a few hours to produce a hundred copies of his diary. And any other traitor with a copy, and access to a machine, could produce a hundred more. There were always traitors about, O'Brien reflected. Always traitors . . . always. His shoulders sagged, and he turned back to the diary

Armed with the telescreen, the proles will leave you to yourselves and return to their own private pursuits. That is how the English always escape from Party gangsters; they sell their souls in public, then
buy them back in private, among friends, among their fellow flower lovers or stamp collectors. The proles will rediscover English liberty, which is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like with your time, to choose your own employment and your own amusements instead of having them
chosen for you from above. Freedom—the right to choose your associates and friends and live with them as you please—is now at hand.

The Party believed that with the telescreen it could close man's eyes and ears, that it could deliver an incessant stream of pictures and sound, of Party propaganda emerging from the larynx, not the brain, of noise uttered in unconsciousness,
like the quacking of a duck. The Party believed that the telescreen would drown out all other discourse, that it would be every man's hearty companion and insinuating spy

But the Party was wrong. The telescreen does not destroy communication; it creates it. The Party wanted perfect communication to repress all independent thought. But with perfect communication, independent thought is irrepressible. Without the telescreen, there can be no Big Brother. With the telescreen, there can be no Big Brother either.

The Party saw the telescreen and imagined a world of slavery The Party was right about that—right on this point alone. Every communication is an act of surrender, a loss of privacy, a confession of dependence on others. Freedom is indeed Slavery, because it is when we are free that we confide our secrets, confess our sins, and give away our love. The essence of being human is that one does not push one's privacy to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of
fastening one's love upon other human individuals. The essence of freedom is that the surrender, when it occurs, is voluntary, and the defeat is embraced gladly, as the essence of love itself.

A torn petticoat lay on the floor, and broken makeup pencils littered the dressing table. Their room, once so warm, now looked shabby and stark. It looked like a room where a whore took her clients. Blair sat on the bed, wretched without her. They were right, of course. She was in the Ministry.

He had wandered the streets of London through the night, searching for her aimlessly. About midnight he had downed five pints of beer and
a quarter bottle of gin. For a brief time his brain had seemed marvelously clear. He had seen as something far, far away, like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope, his wasted life, the blank future. He seemed immediately to sink into some immense abyss from which he rose again more gradually and with only partial consciousness of what he was doing. He was gliding smoothly through darkness stained with lights. Or were the lights moving and he stationary? It was like being on the ocean bottom, among the luminous, gliding fishes. The landscape in hell, he fancied, would be just like this. Ravines of cold evil-colored fire,
with darkness all above.

He had walked through the seedier parts of London again. The appalling faces of tarts, like skulls coated with pink powder,
peered meaningfully from several doorways. He became aware of two hard
yet youthful faces, like the faces of young predatory animals, that had come close up to his own. They had blackened eyebrows and hats that were like
vulgarer versions of Kate's. As he approached the Palace Theater a girl on sentry-go under the porch marked him down, stepped forward, and stood in his path. A short, stocky girl, very young, with big black eyes. She looked up at him and broke out into
a broad-lipped smile.

A short while later they were in a smallish, darkish, smelly hallway, lino-carpeted, mean, uncared for, and somehow impermanent. An evil-looking chambermaid appeared from nowhere. She and the girl seemed to know each other.

Another young woman came mincingly down the stairs, buttoning on a glove; after her a bald, middle-aged man, who walked past them with small mouth tightened, pretending not to see them. Blair watched the gaslight gleam on the back of his bald head. His predecessor. In
the same bed, probably.

Then Blair heard himself say, in a suicidally loud voice, “Wharr-I-shay is, perfijious Big Brother! You heard that? Perfijious B.B. Never trust Big Brother! You can't trust the bastard. You wanna do anything 'bout that?” He remembered sticking his face out like a tomcat on a garden wall as he spoke. The man with the bald head had hit him across the legs with a walking stick. Through his private mist, Blair saw in the man's face a curious blend of
fear and sadistic exaltation.

A moment later, Blair and the girl were on the landing. There was a smell of slops in the air, and a fainter smell of stale linen. They entered a dreadful room. He seemed to be lying on the bed. He could not see very well. Her youthful, rapacious face, with blackened eyebrows, leaned over him as he sprawled there.

“How about my present?” she had demanded, half wheedling, half menacing.

Never mind that now. To work! Come here. Not a bad mouth. Come here.
Come closer. Ah!

In the morning he had emerged from some long, sickly dream. He remembered the feel of more gin after the girl, as it flowed down his throat, bitter and choking. A frightful spasm of nausea overcame him. He rolled over and was
violently sick, three or four
times. His face was close to a brick wall, and at first he thought he was in a prison cell. But he was lying on the pavement.

“
I'm going to be sick!” he had muttered as he tried to stand up. And as he began to fall, a strong arm went round him.

A moment later the stallkeeper—the razor-blade man—had handed him a mug.

“ 'Ja do with a cup of tea?” the stallkeeper had said.

“Please,” Blair had replied weakly.

“You'll have to go get her,” the man had said. “It's 'cos of you and me, mate,” he had said. “ 'Cos of the diary.”

Blair had stared back uncomprehendingly.

“They get Kate, they get you nervous, you come to me, I go to me mate that copies the diary, to me friends that works on the screens—they get all of us. Lucky for us you just wandered around and got drunk.”

Blair's head had slowly cleared. As it did, the first thing he had seen, towering above him in the distance, was the vast, glittering white, windowless pyramid that was the Ministry of Love.

Then he had set off again, in search of the phreak.

The camp bed was still
in the corner of the room. Two small tables, covered with green baize, stood against the wall. Behind the spare brown desk was a high-backed, red-leather swivel chair. O'Brien was seated in it, rocking slowly. He had been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up,
like a mountain crumbling.

The prisoner sat on a wooden chair directly in front of the desk. There were no chains, no ropes. He had a forlorn, jailbird's face with a knobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose and battered-looking cheekbones above which the eyes were
fierce and watchful.

For several minutes O'Brien sat quite still looking thoughtfully at his victim. He felt unable to keep his own mind from wandering. It was easy enough, O'Brien reflected, but it was still a serious matter to kill a man. It was comparable to destroying an intricate and
costly piece of machinery.

“I would like to make this as easy for you as possible,” O'Brien said at last. “Please cooperate. I do not wish to waste time with
hypodermics and the pain machine.”

The prisoner stared back with the same hooded, fierce gaze. His
eyes had sunk deep in their sockets, and the thin blue membranes of his lids drooped down over them. Ravaged grooves ran
down his face from cheek to chin.

“Please remember, throughout our conversation, that I have it in my power to inflict pain on you to whatever degree I choose.
Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” came the hoarse whisper.

O'Brien looked down at the papers in front of him. “You are a member of the Inner Party.” It was a statement, not a question, as though he were reading from a record that was already complete.

“Yes.”

“You have betrayed the Party.”

“Yes.”

“You have been sabotaging the network.”

“Yes.”

“You have read Winston Smith's diary.”

“Yes.”

“You believe in the secret accumulation of knowledge, a gradual spread of enlightenment—ultimately a proletarian rebellion—
the overthrow of the Party. You believe Orwell's network will bring about universal liberty, fraternity, and equality.”

There was a pause. “No,” the prisoner replied.

O'Brien looked up.

“No?”

The prisoner seemed to gather himself for an effort. “The network will bring liberty but not equality.”

“And fraternity?”

“Up to a point,” the prisoner whispered.

It struck O'Brien that in almost any revolt the leaders would tend to be people
who could pronounce their aitches. For a moment the old pleasure was back. The prisoner would certainly be hanged, but first there would be good conversation. It was a privilege to explore an intelligent mind before obliterating it, a bit like deflowering a virgin or shooting a great elephant. For a moment at least, you owned the thing. You knew it was yours to possess forever, that no one else would delight in precisely the same pleasure again.

He reached for the decanter of wine at the side of his desk,
poured a glass, and handed it to the prisoner. “I shall enjoy talking to you,” he said. “Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that
you happen to be insane.” He
resettled his spectacles thoughtfully. When he spoke again his voice was gentle and patient. He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and
persuade rather than to punish.