Orwell's Revenge (6 page)

They never would. The Party consisted of people like Wilkes, the obedient drudges, the stupid and the uninquisitive. Scientific and
technical progress had ceased; the empirical habit of thought could not survive in a
strictly regimented society. As private communication
had eroded, scientists had lost their ability to check up on each other, to record their findings and compare results. In any event, science had been abolished. The Party made the laws of nature by decree; its control over the physical world was absolute. What was commonly called “reality” was an illusion, a fraud: outside man, outside the human skull there was nothing at all. At the will of the Party a man could float off the floor like a soap bubble, ice could be heavier than water, two plus two could make five. Being omnipotent, the Party had
no need for science.

And yet . . . and yet, somehow they watched, somehow they knew. In a world with no memory, the Party remembered all; in a society with no records, the Ministry of Truth churned out records in endless supply; in a city with
no directories, where it was impossible even to discover where anyone lived except by personal inquiry, Big Brother always knew exactly where you were. Big Brother was able to inspire only abstract, undirected emotion, love or hatred, anger or jealousy, which could be switched almost randomly from one object to another like a
plumber's blow-flame; but when the Thought Police came after you they found you, found you alone, and destroyed you with quick, perfectly directed efficiency. In a city of no real human contact, no links, no loyalties, no reliable connections of any kind, the Party maintained perfect connections with everyone, everywhere, all the time. It was as if the laws of physics and engineering had succumbed to
doublethink,
the Party's vast system of mental cheating.

The hot sweat had broken out all over Blair's body. His face remained completely inscrutable. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and—one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency—bent over and tucked the first joint of her
fingers under her toes.

“There, comrades! That's how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again. I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look.” She bent over again. “You see my knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,” she said as she straightened herself up. “That's better, comrade, that's much better,” she added encouragingly as Blair, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent,
for the first time in several years.

For all its remarkable powers, the telescreen is really impressive at only one point in all of
1984.
While Winston Smith is doing his morning exercises, his mind begins to wander. It doesn't get very far:

“Smith!” screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. “6079 Smith W! Yes, you! Bend lower, please. You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please!
That's better, comrade.”

This is indeed unsettling. Smith, among tens of thousands of Londoners aged thirty-something, is apparently being watched personally by Jane Fonda.

She is watching from the Ministry. The Ministry of Truth is responsible for all books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, soundtracks, cartoons,
photographs, telescreen broadcasts, and so on. The other telescreen Ministry—“the
really frightening one”—is the Ministry of Love, headquarters of the Thought Police.

Miniluv, as it is called, towers over central London, “vast and white above the grimy landscape, . . . [an] enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace,
three hundred meters into the air.” It contains “three thousand rooms above ground level and
corresponding ramifications below.” The Ministry of Truth occupies an identical building next door. Every broadcast, every news report, film,
and documentary, emanates from one government building, and every return signal, from every telescreen in every lavatory, living room, and public square, returns to another. The terror of the telescreen isn't the message or the newfangled two-way medium; the real terror is the Ministry. The word
itself—“Ministry”—gets 75 mentions in
1984.

Orwell has been anticipating the arrival of such monoliths of centralization all his life. Take the problem of dirty crockery, for example— the problem of “cleaning out
a frying-pan which has had fish in it.” Orwell's little 1945 essay on the subject is lighthearted, but the self-parody is nevertheless quite unconscious: “Every time I wash up a batch of crockery I marvel at the unimaginativeness of human beings who can travel under the sea and fly through the clouds, and yet have not known how to eliminate this sordid time-wasting drudgery from their daily lives.” What is to be done? The thought of private, automatic dishwashing machines never even surfaces. Orwell considers paper plates but rejects the idea in favor of something better. We must “devote as much intelligence to rationalising the interiors of our houses as we have devoted to transport and communications.” Dishwashing is like communications? Anyone who has read
1984
suddenly knows what's coming next: “I see no solution except to do [the washing up] communally, like a laundry.” Orwell isn't joking. He really means it: “Every morning the municipal van will stop at your door and carry off a box of dirty crocks, handing you a box of clean ones (marked with your initial, of course) in return.” The problem of dirty dishes, in short, is going to be solved by . . . Yes! A Ministry of Crockery.

What holds for crockery holds even more for mass communications; Orwell has been predicting centralization here for years. The English press in 1938
is appallingly concentrated. Monopolists lurk behind such politically vital things
as two-penny postcards and Boys'
Weeklies.
The film industry is “virtually a monopoly”; so are the daily papers,
“and most of all,” the radio. Even gramophone needles have been cornered
by a conniving monopolist.

For Orwell, the centralization of powerful machines is inescapable economic destiny in the industrial age. “The processes involved in making, say, an aeroplane are so complex as to be only possible in a planned, centralised society, with all the repressive apparatus that that implies,”
Orwell declares in a 1945 book review. The book he is reviewing maintains that advanced machines can be reconciled with efficiency and individual freedom. Orwell doesn't believe it. For Orwell, the road to industrial efficiency leads straight to the Ministry. Immutable economic laws dictate that industrialism “must lead to
some form of collectivism.” Only governments can raise the “enormous sums” needed to modernize
vital industries like coal mining.

For Orwell, modern weapons raise the same basic issues, albeit with more unpleasant implications, as coal mining or the greasy frying pan. As he reasons in “You and the Atom Bomb,” “tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons.” Expensive, complex weapons make the strong stronger; simple ones “
give claws to the weak.” Regrettably, civilization is moving steadily away from private weapons
toward collective ones. Nothing is more complex, more expensive, and therefore more centralizing than a nuclear bomb. Such weapons inevitably imply some monstrous, all-consuming Ministry of Peace behind.

Which leads in turn to collectivist nations, collectivist maps, a collectivist planet. The atom bomb fits perfectly with a vision of “two or three monstrous super-states . . .
dividing the world between them.” Little nations are to be absorbed into big ones, just as the grocer and the milkman are to be swallowed by trusts. Orwell has been saying this for years too, and when he revisits the issue in 1945, neither Hitler's recent immolation nor Stalin's imminent mummification has changed his views at all. The likeliest development is an armed peace, with power concentrated
in fewer hands than ever before. The world is “heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as
the slave empires of antiquity.” “[T]he general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of
recent years has accelerated it.”

The acceleration is not about to end. As Orwell knows, after radio, gramophones, and film there will come . . .

The telescreen in Blair's office had been behaving erratically for days. Three times already, to his intense irritation, Blair had lost a full morning of meticulously rewritten history. And all because the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department had happened to walk by his cubicle one morning during the Two Minutes Hate. Blythe's leering face had filled the screen, his voice had been bleating out some new piece of treason. The girl had flushed, her chest had swelled, her arm had quivered, and then, unable to contain herself, she had begun crying out “Swine! Swine! Swine!” Before he knew it, she had picked up a Newspeak dictionary and
flung it at the screen. The unit had been acting up ever since.

With a deep, unconscious sigh, Blair pulled the
decrepit chair up to his desk. Every day, he thought to himself, he became more and more
like a sucked orange.

He worked in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. The largest section of the Department consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were
due for destruction. Blair had a far more delicate job, of creating new histories to replace old ones. It was never called forgery.
All errors due for correction were blamed on prior telescreen malfunction.

Blair glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other side a small, precise-looking,
sharp-faced man
named Connolly was working steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee. He kept his mouth as close to the screen as possible, and spoke in a low voice as though trying to keep what he was saying a secret. He looked up, and his spectacles darted a
hostile flash in Blair's direction.

“Display mail,” Blair said to his own screen, in a carefully measured tone.

Four messages materialized on the screen, neatly arrayed by time and date, with a ten-digit source code at the top. Each was only one or two lines long. Miniplenty projections of chocolate production for this month were to be corrected, certain unpersons were to be replaced in last month's
Times
 . . . routine matters, though the first would require some tedious wading through lists of figures. Blair was good at these things.

The Records Department had become much more efficient in recent years, just as Orwell had planned. A curious figure, Orwell. Blair was probably one of the few left who even remembered him any more. Some years before, Blair had worked for many months expunging Orwell's name from official Party histories, and the man was now almost completely forgotten. But Blair remembered. The act of erasing every memory of Orwell had imprinted Orwell's story indelibly on Blair's own mind. The telescreen, the network, the Ministries of Truth and Love: Orwell's brilliant mind had created them all.

For years, Orwell had been a member of the Outer Party, though often suspected of being ambivalent in his love for Big Brother. Long after his disappearance, the Party hacks had continued to build the network exactly as Orwell had planned. The speak-writes-—dictation machines that converted spoken words into written text—had been manufactured precisely according to Orwell's original design, then incorporated in the telescreens themselves. Now, everything moved through the telescreens. Orwell himself had been vaporized, of course.

In the cubicle across the way Comrade Connolly was still growling hoarsely into his screen. It was quite possible that Connolly was working on the same job as Blair. Some master brain in the Inner Party would eventually select among several independent rewrites; other drafts would be consigned to the memory holes. Orwell had invented those too. There was a hole beside every desk, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. The memory holes still existed in tens of thousands throughout the Ministry, not only in every room but
at short intervals in every corridor. It was said they led down to giant furnaces in the basement.

“Back numbers,” said Blair to his telescreen.
“Times.
One-four dash two dash nine-four.
Times.
Three dash twelve dash eight-three.” After a moment's delay, the front page of the corresponding issues appeared in a window on his screen.

Blair set to work. When he had finished compiling each set of corrections, the revised document would be dispatched by telescreen to higher authority. His work would be reviewed and probably approved, the back issues of the
Times
would be systematically destroyed, and corrected copies placed on file instead. Similar processes of continuous alteration were applied to every conceivable kind of record. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. After a while, it was not even forgery any more, just the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Garbage in, garbage out, Blair thought to himself. Somewhere or other, far away and quite anonymous, members of the Inner Party coordinated the whole effort, decreed that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the next rubbed out of existence. Every time records were revised they were also brought into line with the latest edition of the Newspeak dictionary. This meant the records got a little shorter each year, as the vocabulary shrank. The deliberate denuding of the language had been going on for years.

A puzzling thing, Blair reflected, was that Newspeak had at one time been growing richer. He was quite sure of it. There had been a day when Newspeak had been even smaller than it was now, when the wonder of it all was how quickly the language was expanding. Intelligent people had taken pride in mastering its latest subtleties, and
had shown off the breadth of their Newspeak vocabulary. Newspeak hadn't been quite the rich, mellifluous Oldspeak that the proles still used, but it hadn't had the vapid emptiness of modern Newspeak either. The language had been clipped, precise, but also powerfully expressive. Now, Newspeak was just a foolish affectation, simple to the point of being dysfunctional. Like everything else controlled by the Party, Newspeak had been overtaken by decay.