Orwell's Revenge (48 page)

island off the coast of Scotland:
Shelden, p. 402.

the possibilities in a 1947 column:
“As I Please” (1947),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 310.

conveyed to those in power:
Curiously, when Orwell quotes Jefferson at the end of
1984,
he leaves out the word “just” (p. 313).

dislikes standardised education:
“Letter to Geoffrey Gorer” (1939),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, p. 381.

a private school on every desktop:
See Lewis J. Perelman,
School's Out: Hyperlearning, The New Technology, and the End of Education
(New York: Morrow, 1992); Seymour Papert, “The Children's Machine,”
Technology
Review, 30-3 (July 1993).

listened to by no one:
Orwell might have imagined
that
very easily indeed. He himself was quite sure that the wartime radio propaganda—the huge volume of “filth . . . flowing through the air”—had no impact at all.
Letter to George Woodcock
(1942),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 268. German radio propaganda was an almost complete flop. London Letter to
Partisan Review
(1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 182. BBC propaganda was “just shot into the stratosphere, not listened to by anybody.” Shelden, p. 34.

the technologies of freedom:
Ithiel de Sola Pool,
Technologies of Freedom
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 26-27.

he first thought of writing 1984:
“Letter to F. J. Warburg,” p. 448.

Orwell writes an essay for Partisan Review:
“London Letter to
Partisan Review”
(1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 298.

original defiler of civilization's purity:
1984,
p. 13.

Part 4

one leap ahead of the truth:
1984,
p. 216.

The Future Is Passed

with typically Orwellian despondency:
“Why I Write” (1946),
Essays,
I, p. 316.

wonderful gargoyles:
“Charles Dickens” (1939),
Essays,
I, p. 96.

we have been warned:
Anthony Burgess,
The Novel Now
(New York: Norton, 1967), p. 43. Burgess goes on to publish his own answer to Orwell's
1984
a decade later, in 1978. A. Burgess,
1985
(Boston: Little Brown, 1978). Burgess's
1985
begins with an imaginary dialogue between Burgess and Orwell and concludes with a novelette that sets out Burgess's own little prophecy His theme is that trade unions are going to take over the world. Burgess turns out to be an even worse prophet than Orwell. Within a year or two after
1985
was published, organized labor entered into rapid decline in both England and America.

Apple, not Stalin:
This fact has not been lost on Apple Computer itself. See “Why 1984 wasn't like ‘1984'” (advertisement),
Wall Street Journal,
January 24, 1984, p. A7. The ad displays a large picture of a Macintosh. In the bottom left comer is a picture of the cover of 1984 with the caption: “George Orwell's classic science fiction novel ‘1984.' It turned out to be more fiction than science.” Apple was perhaps unaware that a similar ad had been run a decade before by Olivetti. It is reproduced in John Rodden, The
Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of
“St.
George” Orwell
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 257. The Olivetti ad (for Olivetti's M20 Personal Computer) is headlined, “1984: Orwell Was Wrong.” For the story of the Macintosh itself, see Steven Levy,
Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
(New York: Viking Press, 1993).

for the convictions that he lived:
Shelden, p. 268.

irrelevant by the passage of time:
“The Soul of Man under Socialism by Oscar Wilde” (1948),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 426.

his unsystematic but illuminating way:
“Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (1947),
Essays,
III, p. 419.

something resembling it could arrive:
“Letter to Francis A. Henson” (1949),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 502. In prior writings, of course, Orwell
had set forth his prophecies a lot less tentatively than that. See, e.g., “Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party” (1938),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, p. 337: “[T]he era of free speech is closing down. . . . The time is coming—not next year, perhaps not for ten or twenty years, but it is coming-—when every writer will have the choice of being silenced altogether or of producing the dope that a privileged minority demands.” See also “The Prevention of Literature” (1946),
Essays,
III, p. 335: “Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed to him from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.”

they have been given a prediction:
Shelden, p. 432.

throughout his career as a writer:
Moreover, in several of his other books, Orwell himself uses the word “prophecy,” albeit self-deprecatingly, to describe what he is doing. For example: “Sneaking off to Lower Binfield to try and recover the past, and then, in the car coming home, thinking a lot of prophetic baloney about the future.”
Coming Up for Air,
p. 270. “And this kind of prophetic feeling that keeps coming over me nowadays, the feeling that war's just round the comer and that war's the end of all things, isn't peculiar to me. We've all got it, more or less” (p. 29). “It was as though the power of prophecy had been given me. It seemed to me that I could see the Whole of England, and all the people in it, and all the things that'll happen to all of them” (p. 268).

“I still believe that—unless Spain splits up, with unpredictable consequences—the tendency of the post-war Government is bound to be Fascistic. Once again I let this opinion stand, and take the chance that time will do to me what it does to most prophets.”
Homage to Catalonia,
p. 182.

“All prophecies are wrong, therefore this one will be wrong, but I will take a chance and say that though the war may end quite soon or may drag on for years, it will end with Spain divided up.” “Spilling the Spanish Beans” (1937),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, p. 275.

Orwell wrote in Burmese Days:
Burmese Days,
p. 57.

test worth bothering about:
survival:
“Charles Dickens,” p. 98.

at any rate it exists:
“Charles Dickens,” p. 98. See also “Lear,
Tolstoy and the Fool,” p. 421: a poem “defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible.”

artist of his century:
“England is lacking . . . in what one might call concentration-camp literature,” Orwell wrote in “Arthur Koestler” (1946),
Essays,
III, p. 275. “The special world created by secret-police forces, censorship of opinion, torture, and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved of, but it has made very little emotional impact” (p. 275). Orwell changed that all right, once and for all.

produce a great work of art:
“Politics vs Literature: An Examination of
Gulliver's Travels”
(1946),
Essays,
III, pp. 392-393. My text here—“The views that a writer . . . great work of art”—is verbatim Orwell, except that Orwell was writing about Jonathan Swift and
Gulliver's Travels.

nonsensical contraptions that would never work:
Wigan Pier,
p. 190.

made the modern world possible:
“Charles Dickens,” p. 85. Dickens's “unscientific cast of mind” is “damaging”; for Dickens, “[s]cience is uninteresting and machinery is cruel and ugly” (p. 86).

social possibilities of machinery:
“Charles Dickens,” p. 85.

which they mistake for the future:
“Inside the Whale” (1940),
Essays,
I, p. 243.

the social effects of technology:
Wigan Pier,
p. 202.

the function of the machine:
Wigan Pier,
p. 202.

people feel about machine-civilization:
Wigan Pier,
p. 203.

Orwell once wrote:
“Rudyard Kipling” (1942),
Essays,
I, p. 126.

metal plaque like a dulled mirror:
1984,
p. 3.

the flexible glass mentioned by Petronius:
Wigan Pier,
pp. 206207.

once Socialism is established:
Wigan Pier,
p. 206.

Orwell writes in The Lion and the Unicorn:
Lion,
pp. 82-83.

wonks, nerds, and phone-phreaks:
For more on phreaks and hackers, see Bruce Sterling,
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
(New York: Bantam, 1992).

a year after 1984 was published:
It is worth noting, however, that in 1949 Orwell himself began to assemble a “private list of people in the West whom he suspected of being ‘crypto' Communists. He
was fearful that ‘enormous mischief could be done by ‘apologists of the Stalin regime' who pretended to be politically independent.” Shelden, p. 428. “His notebook lists over a hundred names of possible ‘cryptos,' many belonging to people he did not know personally.” Orwell had also written at least one column on “crypto-communism” that would have pleased McCarthy immensely. See “Two Letters to the Editor of
Tribune”
(1947)
CEJL,
Vol. 4, pp. 191-193 (Orwell's Reply to Konni Zilliacus MP): “the substance of it boils down to this: that he says he is not a ‘crypto-Communist.' But of course he does! What else could he say?”

this is called pacification:
“Politics and the English Language” (1946),
Essays,
I, p. 166.

Orwell asked in 1943:
“Looking back on the Spanish War” (1943),
Essays,
I, p. 200.

bloodless victory over the oligarchical collectivists:
“Our economies are propelled by information technologies,” Margaret Thatcher said in a speech given shortly before the final collapse of the Soviet Union. “Theirs are fueled by Vodka.” Victory Gin, she might have said. I don't know if Thatcher realized that she was echoing
1984,
but in any event, Thatcher was right, and Orwell was wrong.

only socialist nations can fight effectively:
“England, Your England” (1941),
Essays,
I, p. 266.

elimination of unreliable elements:
“Politics and the English Language,” p. 167.

and the killing stopped:
“Unfortunately I had not trained myself to be indifferent to the expression of the human face,” Orwell once wrote about the natives he had seen punished in Burma. Shelden, p. 112.

is aware of those facts:
“In Front of Your Nose” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 123: “[P]lain, unmistakable facts being shirked by people who in another part of their mind are aware of those facts.”

a 1946 column titled In Front of Your Nose:
“Closely allied to [schizophrenia] is the power of ignoring facts which are obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later.” “In Front of Your Nose,” p. 123.

film machine statically:
“Charles Dickens,” pp. 82-83.

If contained no happy surprises:
“Charles Dickens,” p. 99.

a man who lacked imagination:
Wigan Pier,
p. 190.

Doublethink

all others seem to us the most horrible:
“Politics vs Literature: An Examination of
Gulliver's Travels”
(1946),
Essays,
III, p. 391.

like a Sherlock Holmes story:
Shelden, p. 219; “Inside the Whale” (1940), Essays, I, p. 212.

art of Salvador Dali:
“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” (1944),
Essays,
IV p. 25.

to use logic against logic:
1984,
p. 36.

likes his friends no better than his enemies:
Quoted by Bernard Crick in Introduction to
Lion,
p. 28. The reviewer was VS. Pritchett, writing in the
New Stateman and Nation,
March 1, 1941.

bank officials with prehensile bottoms:
Lion,
p. 103.

and yet remain the same:
Lion,
p. 70.

tee-totaling missionary:
I am not being unfairly selective in what follows. An electronic search for “America” through all of Orwell's major books and essays comes up with cracks like these on almost every single hit. We encounter “cheap American dentists”
(Coming Up for Air,
p. 21); American embezzlers
(Down and Out,
p. 26); and “that little American doctor who dismembered his wife (and made a very neat job of it by taking all the bones out and chucking the head into the sea, if I remember rightly)”
(Coming Up for Air,
p. 54). We meet “an ass of an American missionary, a teetotal cock-virgin from the Middle West” (Wigan
Pier,
p. 146). Americans staying in fancy Paris hotels are “easy to swindle”; Americans “know nothing whatever about good food.” They “stuff themselves with disgusting American ‘cereals,' and eat marmalade at tea, and drink vermouth after dinner, and order a poulet á la reine at a hundred francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce. . . . Perhaps, it hardly matters whether such people are swindled or not”
(Down and Out,
p. 82). The American apple is “a lump of highly-coloured cotton wool” with a “shiny, standardised, machine-made look,” whereas the English apple has “superior taste”
(Wigan Pier,
p. 204).
Even American tramps are a lesser breed: they reflect “deliberate, cynical parasitism,” not like English tramps, who are imbued with “a strong sense of the sinfulness of poverty”
(Down and Out,
p. 202). “American soul-mate slop” is the American euphemism for adultery
(Aspidistra,
p. 104). The typical American paper is “mainly adverts with a few stories lurking apologetically among them”—a “panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease”
(Aspidistra,
p. 234). “The Americans always go one better on any kind of beastliness, whether it is ice-cream soda, racketeering or theosophy”
(Aspidistra,
p. 235). And on his very favorite subject Orwell writes gloomily: “When I think of what the book trade is like morally, I wonder why we don't go the whole hog and organise it into a proper racket on American lines” (Shelden, p. 294).