Orwell's Revenge (39 page)

heavily toward the door:
1984,
p. 21.

The Machine

sort of Chinese rice-spirit:
1984,
p. 6.

mouthful you drink:
1984,
pp. 291, 296.

in place of tears:
1984,
p. 296.

your bed overnight:
1984,
p. 296.

existed for the first time:
1984,
pp. 206-207.

ears with Party propaganda:
1984,
p. 74.

as if by accident:
1984,
p. 39. There are, by contrast, eighteen references to the dial on the pain machine O'Brien uses in Part III of
1984.

explain how the gadget works:
Cf. “Charles Dickens” (1939),
Essays,
I, p. 85 (Orwell complains that one of Dickens's books involves the wonderful invention of a genial engineer but that Dickens never even tells us what that invention is).

Chapter 2

stupid thing to have done:
1984,
p. 21.

was standing outside:
A Clergyman s Daughter,
p. 58.

It's got blocked up:
1984,
p. 21.

a foul drain-pipe:
Wigan Pier,
p. 18. Orwell's original notes on this scene appear in “The Road to Wigan Pier Diary” (1936),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, p. 177.

seldom taken off:
Wigan Pier,
p. 7; cf.
1984,
p. 22.

a window pane for two years:
1984,
p. 22.

Vaunnie is:
1984,
pp. 22-23.

the stability of the Party depended:
1984,
p. 23.

blocked up the pipe:
1984,
p. 23.

devices as intricate as these:
1984,
p. 189.

prison or the scaffold:
I am quoting from A. Koestler,
Darkness at Noon
(New York: Bantam, 1989), p. 129: “Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold.”

snooping into people's windows:
1984,
p. 4.

simple job on a printer:
1984,
p. 11.

through the body of a bird:
1984,
p. 157.

the Faroe Islands:
1984,
p. 25.

dark shirt and tie:
Shelden, p. 417.

to bust something open:
Broadcast,
p. 99.

pale-blue, humorous eyes:
Shelden, p. 204.

the place where there is no darkness:
1984,
p. 26.

made much impression on him:
1984,
p. 26.

newsflash has this moment arrived:
1984,
pp. 26-27.

the continuity was not broken:
1984,
p. 28.

Brain in a Bottle

a brain in a bottle:
Wigan Pier,
p. 201.

machinery-progress of the 1930s:
Wigan Pier,
p. 208.

become a religion:
Wigan Pier,
p. 189.

glutinously uplifting:
Wigan Pier,
p. 193.

is that the machine itself may be the enemy:
Wigan Pier,
p. 203.

The machine itself may he the enemy:
See also
Wigan Pier,
p. 191 (“The machine is the enemy of life”).

clothes, hooks, and amusements:
Wigan Pier,
p. 204.

the paradise of little fat men:
Wigan Pier,
p. 193.

like Salvador Dali:
“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” (1944),
Essays,
IY p. 20.

destroying the family:
“Review:
The Reilly Plan,
by Lawrence Wolfe” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 91.

spiritual emptiness:
“Review,
Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages,
by T. S. Eliot” (1942),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 239.

the demise of farming:
“On a Ruined Farm Near the His Master's Voice Gramophone Factory” (1934), CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 134.

Lower Binfield:
Bowling sets out to rediscover his childhood home and to return to the gloriously untouched fishing pond that he cherished as a boy. When he finally gets there, the pool has been utterly mined. By gramophones. “As I got nearer the river I came into the sound—yes, plonk-tiddle-tiddle-plonk!—yes, the sound of gramophones.”
Coming Up for Air,
p. 238. The pond is now “full of young fools with next to nothing on, all of them screaming and shouting and most of them with a gramophone aboard as well” (p. 239). Bowling departs in disgust: “Couldn't stick the noise of the gramophones any longer” (p. 239).

the gangster gramophone:
See
Coming Up for Air,
p. 171 (“You know the line of talk. These chaps can chum it out by the hour. Just like a gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button and it starts. Democracy, Fascism, Democracy”);
Wigan Pier,
p. 216 [“ ‘Socialism' calls up . . . a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone)”];
Homage to Catalonia,
p. 198 (“the ‘good party man,' the gangster gramophone of continental Politics”); “Prophecies of Fascism” (1940),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 30 (“the hero is the kind of human gramophone who is now disappearing even from Socialist tracts”); “Literature and the Left” (1943),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 294 (“Numbers of them joined the Communist Party. . . . [W]hen it was found that they would not or could not turn themselves into gramophone records, they were thrown out on their ears”); “A New Year Message”
(Tribune,
1945),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 313 (“We
hold that the most perverse human being is more interesting than the most orthodox gramophone record”).

the gramophone mind:
Shelden, p. 365.

manufactured for us in Hollywood:
Broadcast,
p. 73.

literature? Comstock wonders:
Aspidistra,
p. 72.

behind the average book:
“London Letter to
Partisan
Review” (1941),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 114.

a glass of inferior sherry:
1984,
p. 376.

piece of rubbish:
Shelden, p. 324. Orwell does, however, admire Charlie Chaplin's
The Great Dictator
enormously. Even when Orwell is pointing out the limitations of the written word, he manages to make film seem worse. In a 1936 review of a book by Henry Miller, Orwell argues that writing fails when it attempts to describe the realm of “pure dream”: “[W]ords are here being used to invade what is really the province of the film.” But Orwell's example of how film escapes reality is a Mickey Mouse cartoon. “[T]he written word,” by contrast, cannot really escape “the ordinary world where two and two make four.” “Review,
Black Spring,
by Henry Miller” (1936),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, p. 231. In
1984,
the power to make two and two equal five belongs to the Party, and the pernicious implications of that power are a central theme of the book.

worst of all:
In a list of his own dislikes, compiled in 1940, Orwell itemized “big towns, noise, motor cars, the radio, tinned food, central heating, and ‘modem' furniture.” Shelden, p. 323.

productions as rubbish:
“Letter to A. S. F. Gow” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 146.

bilge:
“Letter to Stafford Cottman” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 149.

purchased a wireless set:
Coming Up for Air,
p. 182. Another piece of the ruin of Lower Binfield is that the old butcher's shop now sells radio parts (p. 236).

gramophones and radio:
Elizabeth, for example, in
Burmese Days.
See pp. 179-180.

the song of birds:
Wigan Pier,
pp. 204-205. While convalescing from tuberculosis shortly after completing
1984,
Orwell described his pleasant surroundings in almost the same terms: “Not much noise of radios either—all the patients have headphones. . . . The most persistent sound is the song of birds.” Shelden, p. 427.

for oppressed people:
Wigan Pier,
p. 90.

the telegraph and radio:
Wigan Pier,
p. 89.

and the Secret Police:
See
Burmese Days,
p. 9 (“the cinematograph, machine guns, syphilis, etc.”); “Rudyard Kipling” (1942),
Essays,
I, p. 118 (Kipling fails to foresee “the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their psychological results”);
Coming Up for Air,
p. 198 (“buses, bombs, radios, telephone bells”). The old gramophone works in Lower Binfield is now making bombs (p. 206).

Nosey Parker:
“England, Your England” (1941),
Essays,
I, p. 256.

chosen for you from above:
“England, Your England,” pp. 255-256.

with tinny music:
Coming Up for Air,
p. 22;
1984,
p. 61 (“The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music”), p. 77 (“A tinny music was trickling from the telescreens”), p. 290 (“A tinny music trickled from the telescreens”).

salmon canning factory in Moscow:
Wigan Pier,
p. 230.

people nearer to the animals:
“Pleasure Spots” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 81: “Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness. . . . [T]he tendency of many modem inventions—in particular the film, the radio and the aeroplane—is to weaken [man's] consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals.”

Chapter 3

in front of the telescreen:
Burmese Days,
p. 73. The “Physical Jerks” scene in 1984 is in fact lifted from
Burmese Days,
where pukka sahib Mr. Macgregor follows a strict daily routine of “Norden-flycht's ‘Physical Jerks for the Sedentary'” (p. 73). By the end of the book, Macgregor “has grown more human and likeable”; “he has given up his morning exercises” (p. 287). Winston, just like MacGregor, goes through a miserable routine of “painful” “lunging” “in the direction of his toes.”
Burmese Days,
p. 74: “Macgregor lunged painfully in the direction of his toes.” 1984, pp. 35, 38: “[H]e forced his shoulders painfully backward . . . with a violent lunge, [he] succeeded in touching his toes.”

woman s voice on the screen:
1984,
p. 32.

jointed truncheons:
1984,
p. 6.

thousands of throats:
1984,
pp. 17, 181, 182.

talking by installments:
1984,
p. 129.

Oceania, 'tis for thee:
1984, p. 27.

patriotic songs from the telescreens:
1984,
p. 101.

without any human intervention at all:
1984,
pp. 44, 139.

was always trite:
“Rudyard Kipling” (1942),
Essays,
I, pp. 130131.

dim period of his early childhood:
1984,
p. 33.

always been called London:
1984,
p. 33.

Comrade Ogilvy:
1984,
p. 47.

Charlemagne or Julius Caesar:
1984,
p. 48.

controls the past:
1984,
pp. 35, 251.

exacting god behind the screen:
Burmese Days,
p. 74.

a little more genially:
1984,
p. 36.

bellowed the woman:
1984,
p. 36.

facecrime:
1984,
p. 62.

completely expressionless:
1984,
p. 62.

delicate enough to pick it up:
1984,
p. 79.

physical torture:
1984,
p. 194.

projects ever went anywhere:
1984,
p. 195.

technical progress had ceased:
1984,
pp. 194, 199.

strictly regimented society:
1984,
p. 190.

no need for science:
I am not in any way exaggerating the Party's hostility to science. Orwell really believed that doublethink could be raised to the point where a party maintained all of these beliefs and yet at the same time continued to operate a network of technologically brilliant telescreens. See
1984,
pp. 190, 194, 199, 267, 268,270,281,312.

no directories:
1984,
p. 160.

plumber's blow-flame:
Cf. J9S4, p. 16: “[T]he rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp”; “Review:
The Totalitarian Enemy,
by F. Borkenau” (1940),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 26: “Hatred can be turned in any direction at a moment's notice, like a plumber's blow-flame.”

fingers under her toes:
1984,
p. 37.