Orwell's Revenge (38 page)

egalitarian, classless society :
With allowances for the fact that everything is being overstated, “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” clearly sets out Orwell's own political views. He repeats all its essential parts in many other essays, including several published at the same time as he was writing
1984.
See, e.g., “Toward European Unity” (1947),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 370.

shared all around:
See
Wigan Pier,
p. 171; “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” p. 203; “As I Please” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 249 (“there is, or could be, plenty of everything for everybody . . . wealth might be so generally diffused that no government need fear serious opposition”). Cf.
1984,
p. 171.

By 1948, however, just as he was finishing
1984,
Orwell was beginning to rethink this notion. In one essay he criticizes Oscar Wilde for making “two common but unjustified assumptions.” The first is that “the world is immensely rich and is suffering chiefly from maldistribution.” In fact, Orwell now declares, the problem “is not how to distribute such wealth as exists but how to increase production without which economic equality merely means common misery.” Wilde's second error, Orwell states, is to overestimate the potential of machines. There is in fact (says Orwell now) “a vast range of jobs—roughly speaking, any job needing great flexibility—that no machine is able to do.” “The Soul of Man under Socialism by Oscar Wilde” (1948),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, pp. 426-428.

military strength decayed:
“Fascism is now an international movement,” groping “towards a world-system” simultaneously in both communist and capitalist societies. Wigan
Pier,
p. 215.
Coming Up for Air,
p. 205, makes the same point more colorfully; that book places “all the soul-savers and Nosey Parkers, the people whom you've never seen but who rule your destiny all the same, the Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, the Temperance League, the Bank of England, Lord Beaverbrook, Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle.”

Orwell's earlier political essays:
“Second Thoughts on James Bum-ham” (1946), Essays, II, p. 335. The essay was originally printed in
Polemic
under the title “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” and later reprinted as a pamphlet,
James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution.
See
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 160.

the world is headed, and why:
Cf.
Wigan Pier,
p. 231: “Fascism is coming [to England]; probably a slimy Anglicised form of Fascism, with cultured policemen instead of Nazi gorillas and the lion and the unicorn instead of the swastika.” See also “Not Counting Niggers” (1939),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, p. 398: with “prolonged war-preparation”
England “may sink almost unresisting into some local variant of austro-Fascism. And perhaps a year or two later, in reaction against this, there will appear something we have never had in England yet—a real Fascist movement.” Similarly, in
Coming Up for Air,
p. 176, Orwell writes: “It's all going to happen—the hate-world, slogan-world . . . the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.”

make that unthinkable:
By 1984 there has already been one more big war and at least one atom bomb dropped on England. The
1984
atom bomb had fallen on Colchester.
1984,
p. 33.

the educated, restless middle class:
In Wigan
Pier,
p. 226, Orwell has already explained how these types will be handled. “It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party.” Both Julia and Winston have streaks of this themselves: they are middle-class snobs. Winston despises the smell of Parsons' working-class sweat. And Julia sleeps with everybody—but “always with Party members” (not proles) and never with “those swine” from the Inner Party.
1984,
p. 126. As Orwell notes elsewhere, “One thing that often gives the clue to a novelist's real feelings on the class question is the attitude he takes up when class collides with sex. . . . [I]t is one of the points at which the ‘I'm-not-a-snob\ pose tends to break down.” “Charles Dickens,” p. 76.

molding the consciousness:
1984,
p. 209.

two gin-scented tears:
1984,
p. 300.

He loves Big Brother:
1984,
p. 300. In 1940, six years before he began
1984,
Orwell had already persuaded himself that that was how things were bound to end. “[W]e are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships—an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.” “Inside the Whale,” p. 249.

I want to write, he continues:
“Why I Write” (1946),
Essays,
I, p. 316.

his brain is not involved:
“Politics and the English Language” (1946),
Essays,
I, p. 166.

it was his larynx:
1984,
p. 55.

reliance on scissors and paste:
Compare “London Letter to
Partisan Review”
(1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 189: “Scissors-and-paste anthologies and miscellanies continue to appear in great numbers.”

in much the same way:
1984,
p. 11. See also “Review,
A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays,
by Herbert Read” (1945),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 50: “It is just thinkable that books may some day be written by machinery, and it is quite easy to imagine poems being produced partly by fortuitous means—by some device similar to the kaleidoscope, for instance.”

swapped around by machine:
1984,
p. 107. Orwell himself had six novels to his name:
A Clergyman's Daughter, Burmese Days, Aspidistra, Coming Up for Air, Animal Farm,
and
1984. (Down and Out in Paris and London
is more diary than novel.)

without any human intervention whatever:
1984,
p. 139.

a child's Meccano set:
“The Prevention of Literature” (1946),
Essays, III,
p. 341. For other references to art by machine see “As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 274; “As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, pp. 229-230 (the BBC and the film companies “manage to rob literary creation of its individual character and turn it into a sort of conveyor-belt process”).

the end of the assembly line:
“The Prevention of Literature,” p. 344. Anything so produced will of course “be rubbish,” Orwell adds (p. 345).

at least elaborately rewritten:
“The Prevention of Literature,” p. 345.

Michael Shelden, Orwell:
The Authorized Biography:
(1991) (1,165,724 bytes).

like a sucked orange:
“Letter to A. S. F. Gow” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 146.

using my brain or muscles:
Wigan Pier,
p. 206. Flory, the sensitive, artistic, semiautobiographical hero of
Burmese Days,
is nonetheless
“a fool about machinery” and quite willing to “struggle with the bowels of the engine until he [is] black with grease” (p. 200).

tenure at the BBC:
As W J. West discusses in his introduction to the compilation of Orwell's wartime broadcasts, the British Ministry of Information oversaw the BBC. Its telegraphic address was MINIFORM. It was the highest building in London during the war and “towered above surrounding London in a way which we today, surrounded by skyscrapers, can hardly imagine.”
Broadcast,
pp. 64-65. Orwell could see the building from the block of flats where he lived. The rhythmic chanting of “B.B.” in
1984,
see p. 117, is an insider's joke about Bracken.

the Ministry of Information:
See
Broadcast,
p. 20.

Capitalism, Fascism and Socialism:
See
Broadcast,
p. 28. Bernal dropped out at the last moment, possibly at the secret behest of Guy Burgess, a colleague of Orwell's at the BBC. Bernal was an ardent Marxist, Burgess was a Soviet spy, and Orwell despised Russian communism (p. 30).

a Soviet spy:
As West points out: “If [Orwell] had wanted a person to act as a model for O'Brien in
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
a man who would betray him and anyone else for the Party, what better choice could he have made than his fellow-Etonian and fellow-veteran of Osterley Park, his former colleague and friend at the BBC, Guy Burgess.”
Broadcast,
p. 67.

Ironically, another Burgess—Anthony—published his own alternative to
1984
in 1978. A. Burgess,
1985,
was published by Little, Brown, which happens to be the publisher of my legal treatise,
Federal Telecommunications Law
(coauthored with M. Kellogg and J. Thome, 1992, Supp. 1993).

Chapter 1

dismembered by the wind:
1984,
p. 293.

gray walls of the buildings:
Orwell loathes posters. Gordon Corn-stock, hero of Orwell's
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936), “had his private reasons for hating them.”
Aspidistra,
p. 6. In fact, “[h]e really hated them” (p. 14). The
Aspidistra
posters are “monstrous”;
they are “plastered” all over London; one in particular is “torn at the edge; a ribbon of paper fluttered fitfully like a tiny pennant” (pp. 6, 230). In
1984,
Big Brother's “monstrous” posters are “plastered” everywhere, and one in particular, “torn at one comer, flapped fitfully in the wind.”
1984,
pp. 4, 150.

Victory Mansions:
While working at the BBC during the war, Orwell lived in a room at Portland Place. See
Broadcast,
p. 65. In
1984,
these have become the “Victory Mansions.”

production of pig iron:
1984,
p. 4.

no way of shutting it off completely:
1984,
p. 3.

watched at any given moment:
1984,
p. 4.

whenever they wanted to:
1984,
p. 4.

third most populous province of Oceania:
1984,
p. 5.

the three slogans of the Party:
1984,
p. 5.

turned from the window:
1984,
p. 6.

gulped it down:
1984,
p. 6.

line of sight:
1984, p. 7.

trading was officially forbidden:
1984,
pp. 7-8.

the compendium of all heresies:
1984,
p. 15.

had passed through many hands:
1984,
p. 184.

Blair's bowels:
1984,
p. 8.

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER:
1984,
p. 19.

greetings:
1984,
p. 29. One could organize a complete analysis, appreciation, and criticism of
1984
around this single, magnificent passage. Of almost biblical depth, it appears a few pages into Smith's diary, and it encapsulates the whole political point of the novel in two sentences. Men should not live alone, but they should not live uniformly like ants either. They should have privacy but not solitude; they should be different but not isolated; they should communicate but not live under the unblinking gaze of Big Brother. Truth must exist. The past must be immutable. The future must not be.

gazing stupidly at the page:
1984,
p. 9.

seconds were ticking by:
1984,
p. 9.

razor blades:
1984,
pp. 4, 8, 49, 61, 93, 176, 232, 234, 235, 241 (razor blades and more razor blades).

could be said to happen:
1984,
p. 11.

four-mile radius of the inner city:
“Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1946),
Essays,
III, p. 367.

'as 'er for a tanner:
“Hop-Picking” (1931),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, pp. 53-54. p. 19 like
the smoke of a rubbish fire: 1984,
p. 123.

'Ullo, mate:
Broadcast,
p. 99.

the significant thing had happened:
1984,
p. 18.

message had passed:
1984,
p. 18.

gin in his mouth:
1984,
p. 6.

contained all others in itself:
1984,
p. 20.

gangs of armed men:
Homage to Catalonia,
pp. 147, 200.

seemed to grow cold:
Here's a little illustration of how an author's style can be dissected (unfairly perhaps) on a computer. From
Burmese Days
(pp. 152, 210, 237) come these sentences: “A chilly, desolate feeling had taken possession of his entrails”; “A pang like a blade of ice had gone through his entrails”; “Something happened in everybody's entrails.” These are the counterparts in
1984
(pp. 18, 116, 222, 235): “Winston's entrails seemed to grow Cold” “For a moment it felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp”; “Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice”; “Winston's entrails contracted”; “There was another spasm in his entrails.”