Orwell's Revenge (10 page)

When he gets beyond describing the capabilities of his ghosts, however, and tries to anticipate how new machines will transform art, politics, and society, Orwell sinks back into visceral pessimism. In all his writings I have found only four, halfhearted attempts in which Orwell
looks to the brighter side of what he calls “modern electrical science.” Orwell
does
try—he's too honest a man not to—but he just doesn't get very far.

Consider two letters Orwell writes while working at the BBC. He is commissioning a talk on microfilm, which he thinks may “
have very important effects.” How? Microfilm just might prevent “libraries from being destroyed by bombs or by
the police of totalitarian regimes.” Microfilm, after all, makes huge amounts of text portable and easy to replicate. Thus, it both improves memory and facilitates communication. Push the logic just a bit further, and you find that civilization's defense against bombs and the Thought Police is . . . the telescreen! But Orwell doesn't push it.

Then there's an unpublished
essay that Orwell wrote in 1940, titled “New Words.” Words are invented, Orwell argues, on the basis of common experience. That experience is usually visual. Primitive man gestured and cried out; eventually the cry came to substitute for the gesture. First the thought must be given an objective existence; only then can it be given a name. But for many things—dreams, for example, and other complex emotions—the first step is very difficult. “The thing that suggests itself immediately,” says Orwell, “is the cinematograph.” “A millionaire with a private cinematograph, all the necessary props and a troupe of intelligent actors could, if he wished, make practically
all of his inner life known.” Perhaps this is just idle speculation on Orwell's part, but one can hardly ignore it, coming as it does from a man whose greatest writings concern the shrinkage of vocabulary and the dilapidation of language. In fact, push the logic of “New Words” a little further and you find that the answer to Newspeak is . . . the telescreen! But Orwell doesn't push it.

How about radio's power to carry culture across class and national boundaries? Once or twice, Orwell is grudgingly optimistic about this too. Radio programs “are necessarily the same for everybody,” films “have to appeal to a public of millions,” and these new media thus tend
to erode class differences. National differences too. “I believe this is the most truthful war that has been fought in modern times,” Orwell writes in a 1941 essay “[T]he radio, especially in countries where listening-in to foreign broadcasts is not forbidden, is making large-scale
lying more and more difficult.” A law forbidding people to listen to foreign
stations “
will never be enforceable.” And in 1946 Orwell is pleased to report that “after years of struggle” the BBC has agreed “to set aside one wave-length
for intelligent programmes.” “[T]here are in the BBC, mostly in its lower ranks, many gifted people who realise that the
possibilities of radio have not yet been explored.”

Perhaps so, but Orwell doesn't explore them either. And elsewhere he scoffs at “shallowly optimistic” books announcing “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”:

It is nonsense to say that the radio puts people in touch with foreign countries. If anything, it does the opposite. No ordinary person ever listens in to a foreign radio; but if in any country large numbers of people show signs of doing so, the government prevents it either by ferocious penalties, or by confiscating short-wave sets, or by setting up jamming stations. The result is that each national radio is a sort of totalitarian world of its own, braying propaganda night and day to people who
can listen to nothing else.

Finally, there's Orwell's
hopefully titled 1945 essay, “Poetry and the Microphone.” Orwell is reflecting on his wartime broadcasting work for the BBC. “[T]he formula we usually followed was to broadcast what purported to be a monthly literary magazine.” On Orwell's show, the editorial staff of this magazine were sitting in their office, discussing what might go in the next number. They would read poems, essays, and so on and then discuss them. A promising start, one might think: the radio doubling as the
Times Literary Supplement.

Orwell then turns to what he sees as the larger problem: “how to imagine the radio being used for the dissemination of
anything except tripe.” People have come to associate radio exclusively with “dribble,” “roaring dictators,” or “genteel throaty voices announcing that three of our aircraft
have failed to return.” But Orwell makes a big concession:

Nevertheless one ought not to confuse the capabilities of an instrument with the use it is actually put to. Broadcasting is what it is, not because there is something inherently vulgar, silly and dishonest about the whole apparatus of microphone and transmitter, but because all the broadcasting that now happens all over the world is under the control of governments
or great monopoly companies.

Well then, there's hope after all! Just cut government control and abolish the monopolies, and all will be well. Free speech will flourish through the telescreen, and despots will wither. Turn the page, however, and Orwell is certain again that the outlook is “bleak”:

Something of the same kind [i.e., monopolization] has happened to the cinema, which, like the radio, made its appearance during the monopoly stage of capitalism and is fantastically expensive to operate. In all the arts the tendency is similar. More and more the channels of production are under control of bureaucrats. . . . [T]he totalitarianization which is now going on . . . must undoubtedly continue to go on,
in every country of the world.

Orwell blames all this on a huge reactionary conspiracy to “prevent the common man from becoming too intelligent” and “to destroy the artist or at least to castrate him.”

Orwell makes one last effort to end “Poetry and the Microphone” on an optimistic note, but he writes without conviction. The “huge bureaucratic machines” are getting too big, he says. The modern state aims “to wipe out the freedom of the intellect” but needs intellectuals to do so; it needs “pamphlet-writers, poster artists, illustrators, broadcasters, lecturers, film producers, actors, song composers, even painters and sculptors, not to mention psychologists, sociologists, biochemists, mathematicians and what-not,” to
run its propaganda machines. And “the bigger the machine of government becomes, the more loose ends and forgotten corners there are in it.” So “in countries where there is already a strong liberal tradition,
bureaucratic tyranny can perhaps never be complete.”

In other words, an occasional rebel like Winston Smith may worm his way into the Ministry, and thus seditious art “will always have a tendency to appear.” To be sure, it is still “harder to capture five minutes on the air in which to broadcast a poem than twelve hours in which to disseminate lying propaganda, tinned music, stale jokes, faked ‘discussions' or what-have-you. But that state of affairs may alter.” The best Orwell can say at the very end of “Poetry and the Microphone” is this: “The radio was bureaucratized so early in its career that the relationship between broadcasting and literature has never been thought out.” “[T]hose who care for literature might turn their minds
more often to this much-despised medium, whose powers for good have perhaps been
obscured by the voices of Professor Joad
and Doctor Goebbels.”

This one halfhearted little essay is the nicest thing Orwell ever writes about radio. Yet it would have been so easy to write more. Maybe the Ministry monopolies won't be maintained. Maybe there will be more loose ends to the network than even Orwell supposes— loose ends that multiply and reproduce, with each new end creating a new electronic outlet for protest and sedition. Maybe the freedom of telescreens in private hands will overwhelm slavery maintained by a telescreened Ministry

In fact, push Orwell's own logic just a bit further, and you find that the answer to Professor Joad and Doctor Goebbels may be . . . the telescreen itself! But Orwell never does push the logic of the telescreen quite far enough.

Which raises two questions. What if he had? And why didn't he?

It was early evening when Blair came out of the Ministry and headed back toward the market. The day's clouds were dispersing, blown in ragged dark strands across the sky, and pale blue showed between. The wind still made him shiver in his badly made raincoat. He put his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders, but the evening sun shone intermittently and brightened his mood. The night before, fearful and alone in the dark, Blair had resolved to slip Smith's diary into a memory hole, and never to set foot among the proles again. By the morning he had changed his mind. As he walked, he felt absurdly cheered by the thought of a comfortable shave.

If there is hope it lies in the proles,
Smith's diary declared. It was an astonishing idea. When Blair thought of the proles he thought mostly of
how they smelled. Their homes, their shops, and their streets all smelled, not of dust but of coffee and cigarettes, chocolate, bacon, sweat, and sex. The sex was the most unsettling part. Blair was accustomed to the red sash of the Anti-sex league, the hygienic ugliness of Party overalls, the brisk androgyny of the Party women. The prole women had red mouths, and blue lids, and an arch manner that he found both horrifying and tantalizing. They smelled of glutinous roses, and sugary violets, which failed to conceal the heavy
underlying musk of their unwashed, lavishly used bodies. Their sinuous young shapes swelled with many pregnancies and collapsed like overripe fruit, as their teeth rotted and their hair fell out, yet still they preserved the inviting manner and salacious glances of their youth.

Did they know—did the stallkeepers and the small clerks, the shop-assistants, the commercial travelers, and the tram conductors know—that they were only puppets dancing when the Party pulled the strings? If they did, they didn't care. They were too busy being born, being married, begetting, working, dying. Their lives were founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of proles, the greed and fear were
mysteriously transmuted into something nobler.

Two huge women were talking outside a doorway The one facing him wore an apron the size of a tablecloth, and her enormous bust hung down over the waistband to meet her great round abdomen. Her rough hands were planted on her hips, and she nodded her head
assertively at her companion. Blair caught scraps of conversation as he approached.

“So I says to 'er: ‘a promise is a promise. You come back 'ere with the flour and the eggs,' I says, 'and I'll take care of 'em jest like I said I would. You and me, we got the same problems,' I says. ‘We've to look out for each other.'”

“Ah,” said the other, nodding in complete understanding. “
That's the truth.”

He felt they looked at him with mild contempt as he passed— these confident matriarchs, contemplating him as a miserable example of the Party male.

“So if she don't bring the eggs, she won't get no cake,” the woman concluded, turning back to her friend as Blair drew away.

The razor blades would be waiting for him when he arrived. That realization had gradually dawned on him during the day, and Blair was utterly certain of it now. In matters the size of razor blades, the proles knew how to remember. The proles kept their promises. Blair couldn't fathom why, but he knew with deep conviction that they did.
The proles are governed by private loyalties which they do not question,
Smith had written.
The proles are not loyal to a party or a country or an idea,
they are loyal to one another.
The words kept coming back to Blair,
a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

The street into which Blair had turned ran downhill. From somewhere ahead there came a din of voices. He passed three men standing by a table,
deep in conversation.

“Not a bad day,” said one. “Not bad at all.”

“ ‘S'right,” said the second. “And I've been addin' 'em up together, all of 'em over the last fourteen months. Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot for over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes it down reglar as the clock.”

For a moment Blair thought they must be discussing the lottery At one time gambling had been the cheapest and most ubiquitous of the proles' luxuries. Even people on the verge of starvation had bought a few days' hope by having a penny on a sweepstake. Organized gambling had risen to
the status of a major industry. But it hadn't lasted for long. The Party had rigged the system of course. It had assumed that in the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of the country and another it could simply announce that prizes had been paid
even though they never were. Somehow the proles had learned about the fraud in short order, and this attempt at doublethink had failed abysmally. The proles seemed to have found other pursuits. As he walked by the men in conversation, Blair realized they must be stallkeepers too.

“We've now sold two hunner' of em,” continued the second man. “An' I tell you, another few months like this and we can all bleedin' well retire!”

Soon the air was filled with a hubbub of similar human exchange. The passers-by were increasing in number, and instead of shuffling along, they strode firmly down the road. The mutter and clatter and shouting rose toward Blair like the bubbling of a stream. He was thrust onward with the human current, which increased and became more turbulent as they approached the main road, and with a feeling of tumbling over a cliff into the wild vortex he moved into the throbbing whirlpool of the market. The street was so crowded that you could only with difficulty thread your way down the alley between the stalls. The stuff on the stalls glowed with fine lurid colors—hacked, crimson chunks of meat; piles of
oranges and green and white broccoli; stiff, glassy-eyed rabbits; live eels looping in enamel troughs; plucked fowls hanging in rows, sticking out their breasts like guardsmen naked on parade. His spirits rose at the sight of all the activity It was delightful—the noise, the bustle, the vitality. For a moment the sight of the street market persuaded him there was
hope for England yet.