Orwell's Revenge (41 page)

Cf.
1984,
pp. 198-199: “In the past . . . war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. . . . In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an airplane they had to make four.”

forgotten doublethink:
1984,
p. 269.

conquer the whole world simultaneously:
“Looking Back on the Spanish War,” p. 200.

liberal societies will no longer exist:
See also “Letter to H. J. Willmett” (1944), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 149: “[T]he exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can't say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuehrer wished it.”

not distinguishable at all:
1984,
p. 198.

like three sheaves of corn:
1984,
p. 198. “[W]e [in England] believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run,” Orwell writes. “What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modem industrialised state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?” “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” p. 200. O'Brien puts exactly the same question to Winston at the end of
1984
(p. 273).

The Gutenberg Galaxy:
Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1962.

England, Your England:
“England, Your England” (1941),
Essays,
I, p. 254.

namely literature:
“England, Your England,” p. 264. And Orwell
doesn't think all that much of painting in any event. “Painting is the only art that can be practised without either talent or hard work,” Orwell informs us in
Burmese Days,
p. 89.

separation and communication:
Wigan Pier,
p. 156;
A Clergyman's Daughter,
p. 17;
Aspidistra,
pp. 28, 71, 133, 136;
Down and Out,
p. 93; “As I Please” (1947),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 267.

Orwell writes in a 1946 piece:
“Why I Write” (1946),
Essays,
I, p. 316.

essay on Charles Dickens:
“Charles Dickens” (1939),
Essays,
I, p. 103.

Orwell and his writing:
Shelden, p. 314.

as clear as one can through pictures:
“Politics and the English Language” (1946),
Essays,
I, p. 169. See also “The English People” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 27: “The people likeliest to use simple concrete language, and to think of metaphors that really call up a visual image, are those who are in contact with physical reality. . . . [T]he vitality of English depends on a steady supply of images.” See also “Tobias Smollett: Scotland's Best Novelist” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 244: “A ‘realistic' novel is one in which the dialogue is colloquial and physical objects are described in such a way that you can visualise them.”

German Science and Jewish Science:
“Looking Back on the Spanish War,” p. 199.

sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc:
1984,
p. 194: “The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc.” See also
1984,
p. 312.

a high level of mechanical civilisation:
“Review,
The Martyrdom of Man,
by Winwood Reade” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 119.

once Socialism is established:
Wigan Pier,
p. 206. He also concedes that “the idea of Socialism is bound up, more or less inextricably, with the idea of machine-production” (p. 188).

as in earlier essays:
1984,
p. 205. “[A]U sensitive people are revolted by industrialism and its products,” Orwell declares in “Writers and Leviathan” (1948),
Essays,
III, pp. 462-463. But Orwell is quite sure that the machine also contains a promise of economic salvation. “[T]he conquest of poverty and the emancipation of the
working class,” he concedes in the same sentence, “demand not less industrialization, but more and more.”

stolen literature's thunder:
Wigan Pier,
p. 190.

technology of television:
Broadcast,
p. 27. Another talk was on the connection between science and literature (p. 30).

Orwell writes in Wigan Pier:
Wigan Pier,
p. 206.

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).

tremendously prescient about technology:
This is all the more remarkable because we know (from Orwell himself) that his early education was at a school where science was “so despised that even an interest in natural history was discouraged.” “Such, Such Were the Joys” (1947),
Essays,
I, p. 8. At Crossgates (Orwell's lower school), natural history “smelt of science and therefore seemed to menace classical education” (p. 18).

have very important effects:
Broadcast,
p. 215.

the police of totalitarian regimes:
Broadcast,
p. 215.

essay that Orwell wrote in 1940:
“New Words” (written 1940?),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 3.

all of his inner life known:
“New Words,” p. 10.

to erode class differences:
“The English People” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 23.

lying more and more difficult:
“London Letter to
Partisan
Review” (1941),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 113. And again in “As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, pp. 128-129: “[T]he BBC is a better source of news than the daily papers, and is so regarded by the public. . . . Social surveys show the same thing—i.e. that as against the radio the prestige of newspapers has declined. . . . [I]n my experience the BBC is relatively truthful and, above all, has a responsible attitude towards news and does not disseminate lies simply because they are newsy.”

will never be enforceable:
“London Letter to
Partisan
Review,” p. 119.

for intelligent programmes:
“London Letter to
Partisan
Review” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 190.

possibilities of radio have not yet been explored:
“London Letter to
Partisan
Review,” p. 190.

can listen to nothing else:
“As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 146. Orwell referred back to this column (and reiterated its point) some months later: “[M]odern scientific inventions have tended to prevent rather than increase international communication. . . . [T]he radio [is] primarily a thing for whipping up nationalism. Even before the war there was enormously less contact between the peoples of the earth than there had been thirty years earlier, and education was perverted, history rewritten and freedom of thought suppressed to an extent undreamed of in earlier ages. And there is no sign whatever of these tendencies being reversed.” “As I Please” (1945),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, pp. 328-329.

Orwell says much the same thing again in “You and the Atom Bomb” (1945),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 9: “The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and cooperation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another.” Elsewhere, however, Orwell firmly concludes that wartime radio propaganda on both sides had almost no impact at all, at least not on the enemy. See “Letter to George Woodcock” (1942),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 268. German radio propaganda was “an almost complete flop.” “London Letter to
Partisan Review”
(1942),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 182. BBC propaganda was “just shot into the stratosphere, not listened to by anybody.” Shelden, p. 348.

In the Preface to the Ukrainian edition of
Animal Farm,
written in March 1947, Orwell reports learning “how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries.” “Author's Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of
Animal Farm”
(1947),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 404.

hopefully titled 1945 essay:
“Poetry and the Microphone” (1945),
Essays,
III, p. 245.

anything except tripe:
“Poetry and the Microphone,” p. 250.

have failed to return:
“Poetry and the Microphone,” p. 250.

or great monopoly companies:
“Poetry and the Microphone,” p. 250.

in every country of the world:
“Poetry and the Microphone,” p. 250.

run its propaganda machines:
“Poetry and the Microphone,” p. 250.

bureaucratic tyranny can perhaps never be complete:
“Poetry and the Microphone,” p. 251.

obscured by the voices of Professor Joad:
Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, Irish-born philosopher, pacifist, and socialist, was a prominent radio personality on the BBC's “Brains Trust” program from 1941 to 1947.

and Doctor Goebbels:
“Poetry and the Microphone,” pp. 251-252.

Chapter 6

If there is hope it lies in the proles:
1984, p. 69. Resistance is necessary, O'Brien says to Smith later in
1984,
but hopeless. “You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. . . . There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime” (p. 177). Or, as Orwell has already put it in
Wigan Pier,
p. 158: “[E]very revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.”

how they smelled:
See
Wigan Pier,
pp. 127, 129.

mysteriously transmuted into something nobler:
Aspidistra,
p. 239.

assertively at her companion:
1984,
p. 82.

That's the truth:
Contrast
1984,
pp. 82-83.

they are loyal to one another:
1984,
p. 166. Here again we see how different Orwell's world view might have been if he had shared Hayek's faith in spontaneous order and the marketplace. Despite all his pessimism, Orwell believed deeply in the inherent loyalty of the ordinary English. He returns to the theme of private loyalty and trust repeatedly in
1984,
particularly in his discussion of family and the proles. See, e.g., p. 31 (“conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable”), and p. 166 (“they were governed by private loyalties”). The same theme appears briefly in
Aspidistra,
in the language I quote earlier in this chapter, see
Aspidistra,
p. 239. But as
1984
plainly reveals, Orwell simply didn't believe that private
loyalty could overcome public betrayal. In Orwell's universe, the Ministry is always more powerful than the sum of the individuals beneath it.

a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity:
1984,
p. 82.

deep in conversation:
Contrast
1984,
p. 84.

the status of a major industry:
Wigan Pier,
p. 89. Here is another example of how
1984
synthesizes themes and arguments that Orwell had first developed years earlier in other writings. And it shows again the very pessimistic side of Orwell's view of the proles. The proles are perfectly capable of keeping financial accounts, but only on futile things like the lottery, never in productive business.

even though they never were:
1984,
p. 85. I quote this sentence whole because it is so wildly implausible. In the age of the telescreen, with “intercommunication” perfected to the point where there is no privacy left at all, Orwell would have us believe that there is, at the same time, no “real intercommunication” at all.

hope for England yet:
Aspidistra,
p. 105. As I make clear in both text and notes later, much of this wonderful paragraph from “The street was so crowded . . .” to “hope for England yet” is lifted with only minor alteration from
Aspidistra.
(A quite similar market scene appears in
Burmese Days,
pp. 126-127.) It is an important text, for it again illustrates Orwell's own ambivalence about markets and commerce. He loves them at the retail level, the level of little stalls and shopkeepers. He loves stallkeepers, but he despises capitalism, advertising, banks, private property. He loves the marketplace, but he loathes “the free market.”