Orwell's Revenge (47 page)

Just as in
Coming Up for Air.
The men who fought in World War I are all dead (p. 133). But somehow those who didn't fight are dead too. A poet who just can't believe that “Hitler matters” is dead. “He's a ghost. . . . Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea” (p. 188).

Gordon Comstock thinks similar thoughts in
Aspidistra.
“My poems are dead because I'm dead. You're dead. We're all dead. Dead people in a dead world” (p. 83).

one of the two would he gone:
“A Hanging,” p. 11.

cut down to a minimum:
1984,
p. 304.

one clearly understood instruction:
1984,
p. 304.

Now it is known as Newspeak:
See
Broadcast,
p. 62.

one long struggle not to be laughed at:
“Shooting an Elephant” (1936), Essays, I, p. 153.

like the tolling of a bell:
“A Hanging,” p. 12.

legs sagging and head drooping:
“Shooting an Elephant,” pp. 154155.

like red velvet:
“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 154;
Burmese Days,
p. 28.

Chapter 18

a foul, musty smell:
1984,
p. 288. Rats are always popping up in Orwell's books. In
Homage to Catalonia,
Orwell returns repeatedly to
the soldier's never-ending battle with rats (p. 106). Orwell also twice quotes an “old army song” about rats (pp. 78, 106). In one bam in particular, Orwell recounts, “[t]he filthy brutes came swarming out of the ground on every side. If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over me in the darkness” (p. 183). Those same “[f]ilthy brute[s]” reappear to terrify Winston in
1984
(p. 145).

it had become unbearable agony:
Wigan Pier,
pp. 25-27.

too dreadful to be faced:
1984,
p. 286.

he despised rats the most:
1984,
pp. 145, 287-288.

devour his tongue:
1984,
p. 288.

a screaming animal:
1984,
p. 289.

away, away, away from the rats:
1984,
p. 289.

such beautiful things could be found:
Shelden, p. 284, quoting Orwell's thoughts about the leaves of silver poplars that brushed against his face as he was being hauled out of slippery trench after being shot through the neck.

he was no longer afraid of dying:
Shelden, p. 442: “I begin to despair of ever recovering. What I can never understand is why, since I am not afraid of death (afraid of pain, & of the moment of dying, but not extinction).”

one of simple resentment:
“Review,
Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages,
by T. S. Eliot” (1942),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 238.

certainty that it was possible:
Homage to Catalonia,
p. 89.

their awakening will come:
1984,
p. 221.

restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken:
1984,
p. 17.

coral plucked from the Indian Ocean:
1984,
pp. 95, 148, 224.

she said baldly:
1984,
p. 294.

the tunnel, and the rat:
1984,
p. 289.

you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer, she said:
“Reflections on Gandhi” (1949),
Essays,
I, p. 176.

clinging to him like a child:
Aspidistra,
p. 119.

still soft, still warm:
Compare
1984,
pp. 16, 124-125, 294.

knew that he loved Big Brother:
1984,
p. 300. This is how
1984
ends too, but the words there mean something quite different. In 1940, six years before he began
1984,
Orwell had already told us this was
going to happen. “[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” (1940),
Essays,
I, p. 249.

exactly as often as is necessary:
1984,
p. 41.

stretched away into inconceivable distances:
Homage to Catalonia,
p. 40.

there too will always be Eden:
Or, as Mark Twain put it, “[a]iter all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her. At first I thought she talked too much; but now I should be sorry to have that voice fall silent and pass out of my life.” M. Twain,
Adam's Diary
(Oakland, CA: Star Rover House, 1984), p. 89.

it would do the job:
Shelden, p. 294.

nitwits wanting only to be doped:
“As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 250.

Doublethink

compared with that of the capitalist:
“Clink” (1932),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, p. 90; Shelden, p. 164.

like the rules of grammar:
See generally F. A. Hayek, “Notes on the Evolution of Systems of Rules of Conduct,” in Hayek,
Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 66; Hayek, “The Results of Human Action But Not of Human Design,” in Hayek,
Studies in Philosophy,
pp. 96105.

sliding down the road to serfdom:
E.g., “Politics and the English Language” (1946),
Essays,
I, p. 156.

by coercion and central planning:
For a marvelous recent essay on this theme, see Steven Pinker, “Grammar Puss,” in
New Republic,
January 31, 1994, pp. 19-26, based on Steven Pinker,
The Language Instinct
(New York: Morrow, 1994).

the English language:
“As I Please” (1947),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 305: “English is well fitted to be the universal second language, if there
ever is such a thing. It has a large start over any natural language and an enormous start over any manufactured one.”

contrive to keep their decency:
Aspidistra,
p. 239.

alongside another book by K. Zilliacus:
“Review,
The Road to Serfdom,
by F. A. Hayek;
The Mirror of the Past,
by K. Zilliacus” (1944), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 117.

dedicates its issue to Orwell's works:
Orwell was himself at least an occasional reader of the magazine. See “As I Please” (1945),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 318.

something verging on it:
See R. Manvell, “Review, R. Coase,
British Broadcasting: A Study in Monopoly,” World Review (June
1950): 73 (quoting Coase).

Orwell loved Wells:
See “Such, Such Were the Joys” (1947),
Essays,
I, p. 17.

his troubles would be ended:
“The Rediscovery of Europe” (1942),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, pp. 201-202.

Coase could:
Coase wrote about a number of other related issues that I touch on in this book. “The Nature of the Firm,” in R. H. Coase, The
Firm, the Market, and the Law,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), discusses why people abandon the market to form corporations—which are fundamentally
collectivist
institutions. In a nutshell, the reason is to reduce transaction costs. It's cheaper to have a boss set a secretary's salary than to have an arms-length market transaction every time a letter has to be typed. Coase comes close to making a big mistake, however. He declares: “Inventions which tend to bring factors of production nearer together, by lessening spatial distribution, tend to increase the size of the firm. Changes like the telephone and the telegraph, which tend to reduce the cost of organising spatially, will tend to increase the size of the firm” (p. 46). Coase is very wrong about that, but he saves himself in a footnote: “It should be noted that most inventions will change both the costs of organising and the costs of using the price mechanism. In such cases, whether the invention tends to make firms larger or smaller will depend on the relative effect on these two sets of costs. For instance, if the telephone reduces the costs of using the price mechanisms more than it
reduces the costs of organising, then it will have the effect of reducing the size of the firm” (p. 46, n. 31).

Euripides and others perished:
“As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 178.

passed into history and became truth:
1984,
p. 35.

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

cheap motorcars:
Lion,
p. 68.

an important part of the solution:
“The English People” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 34.

along the arterial roads:
Lion,
p. 68.

invents better machines:
Wigan Pier,
p. 206: “[T]he tendency of capitalism is to slow [invention] down, because under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate profits is neglected.”

and wages war more effectively:
“England, Your England” (1941),
Essays,
I, p. 266.

the shadow of any central Ministry:
In
Wigan Pier,
p. 188, Orwell argues that industrialism and socialism are siblings, and that socialism depends on “constant intercommunication and exchange of goods between all parts of the earth.” But “constant intercommunication and exchange” does not require Ministries. What these things require is a telescreen.

willingness to share and cooperate:
See generally Michael Schrage,
Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration
(New York: Random House, 1990). Mitchell Kapor unconsciously echoed
1984
in his dust jacket blurb:
“Shared Minds
is an agile account which tells us how the new tools and methods for collaboration in the workplace make 1 + 1 = 3.” See also
Globalization, Technology, and Competition: The Fusion of Computers and Telecommunications in the 1990s,
ed. Stephen P Bradley, Jerry A. Hausman, and Richard L. Nolan (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993); Tom Peters,
Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties
(New York: Knopf, 1992); Shoshana Zuboff, in
the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power
(New York: Basic Books, 1988); Anon., “The Fall of Big Business,”
Economist
(April 17, 1993), p. 13.

mainly on herrings and potatoes:
Wigan Pier,
p. 159. “Under the capitalist system,” Orwell writes in
Wigan Pier,
p. 159, “in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation.”

first thought of writing 1984:
“Letter to F. J. Warburg” (1948),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 448.

the Empires of the Mind:
Broadcast,
p. 62, introduction by W J. West, quoting speech by Winston Churchill.

a very fashionable concern around then:
Broadcast,
p. 7, introduction by W J. West.

an enthusiast for a while:
Broadcast,
p. 47. As a BBC broadcaster, Orwell commissioned a talk on Basic.

the part Orwell liked:
“As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 210: “One argument for Basic English is that by existing side by side with Standard English it can act as a sort of corrective to the oratory of statesmen and publicists. High-sounding phrases, when translated into Basic, are often deflated in a surprising way. . . . In Basic, I am told, you cannot make a meaningless statement without its being apparent that it is meaningless—which is quite enough to explain why so many schoolmasters, editors, politicians and literary critics object to it.”

led Orwell to 1984's Newspeak:
Orwell likewise rejected “Nu Speling” and any attempt to change the British system of weights and measures. “As I Please” (1947),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, pp. 304-306.

Orwell's 1944 column on capitalism and art:
“As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, pp. 228-230.
. . . there must be a solution:
“As I Please,” p. 230.

the electronic equivalents of Boys' Weeklies:
“Bays'
Weeklies”
(1939), Essays, I, p. 279.

farthing newspapers:
“A Farthing Newspaper” (1928),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, p. 12.

and the comic art of Donald McGill:
“The Art of Donald McGill” (1941),
Essays,
I, p. 10.

garret he occupies in Brewer's Yard:
Aspidistra,
p. 205.

it is vast and anonymous:
Wigan Pier,
p. 79: “London . . . is so vast that life there is solitary and anonymous.”

restaurant, pub, and inn:
Shelden, p. 403.

as the largest metropolis:
See Howard Rheingold,
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993); Ithiel de Sola Pool,
Technologies without Boundaries
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).