Orwell's Revenge
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Orwell's Revenge

The 1984 Palimpsest

Peter Huber

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eBook - ePub

Orwell's Revenge

The 1984 Palimpsest

Peter Huber

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About This Book

Mark Zuckerberg's 'A Year of Books' Selection George Orwell's bleak visions of the future, one in which citizens are monitored through telescreens by an insidious Big Brother, has haunted our imagination long after the publication of 1984. Orwell's dystopian image of the telescreen as a repressive instrument of state power has profoundly affected our view of technology, posing a stark confrontational question: Who will be master, human or machine? Experience has shown, however, that Orwell's vision of the future was profoundly and significantly wrong: The conjunction of the new communications technologies has not produced a master-slave relation between person and computer, but rather exciting possibilities for partnership.In an extraordinary demonstration of the emerging supermedium's potential to engender new forms of creativity, Huber's book boldly reimagines 1984 from the computer's point of view. After first scanning all of Orwell's writings into his personal computer, Huber used the machine to rewrite the book completely, for the most part using Orwell's own language. Alternating fiction and non-fiction chapters, Huber advances Orwell's plot to a surprising new conclusion while seamlessly interpolating his own explanations and arguments. The result is a fascinating utopian work which envisions a world at our fingertips of ever-increasing information, equal opportunity, and freedom of choice.

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Publisher
Free Press
Year
2015
ISBN
9781501127731
PART I: THE MACHINE

CHAPTER I

The telescreen was still there. It had always been there, as long as Big Brother himself. Big Brother’s black-haired, black-mustachio’d visage still gazed outward from the screen, full of power and mysterious calm. Every minute of every day and night you always knew: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
It was a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind. The wind whipped through the leafless trees and flapped the torn posters against the gray walls of the buildings. As Blair pushed his way through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, scraps of paper in the street seemed to scuttle along the walls of the alleys, like rats. The stairs loomed before him, their threadbare carpet a dull green in the light that filtered through the dirty window The lift wasn’t working. The electric power was always shut off for a month during the Nega-watt austerity program that led up to Love Week.
Blair climbed the eight stories to his dingy apartment. The paint on the walls was blistered and peeling from the damp. He stopped on the landing to cough, and doubled up in an agonizing spasm. When he could breathe again, he fumbled in his tattered raincoat for the key, then stepped into the chill, stagnant air of his home. He saw his reflection in the mirror that faced the door. Eric Blair— E. A. Blair—Party Number 503-330-090. He was a pathetic figure: shabby and insubstantial, looking older than his thirty-five years. His otherwise gray skin was red and rough from too frequent applications of a razor blade that had lost its cutting edge weeks ago.
The voice on the telescreen was babbling in his living room about the production of pig iron. It was always pig iron, or the five-year plan, or the latest triumph in the never-ending war against Eastasia. The voice issued from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror, which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. The telescreen could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely The device received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Blair made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.
Blair turned toward the window, his back to the telescreen. More paint had flaked off the metal frame onto the sill. He looked out over London, chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous province of Oceania. All around spread endless grimy miles of decayed brick buildings, with gaps like missing teeth, filled with rubble, and patches of waste land where weeds sprouted and rubbish accumulated. Had London always been like this? The building opposite seemed to have once had some kind of dome on it—whatever covered it had been stripped off, leaving a scarred brick infrastructure. The iron railings on the balconies of the buildings had struts missing and misshapen.
A kilometer away the Ministry of Love towered vast and white above the grimy landscape, an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete. From where Blair stood it was just possible to read, picked out in elegant lettering on the white face of the Ministry, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Blair set his face into the expression of quiet optimism it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen, then turned from the window. He crossed to the kitchen, poured a teacupful of Victory Gin, and gulped it down. It burned his throat, and brought tears to his eyes, but it also loosened the knot of fear in his stomach. Then, as casually as he could, he walked over to the shallow alcove to one side of the telescreen. For some reason the telescreen in the living room was in an unusual position, so that the alcove, once occupied by bookshelves, was just out of its line of sight. In the alcove stood a small battered table, left there by some former occupant of the flat.
But for the alcove, Blair knew he would never have dared accept the package. Razor blades would have been bad enough. Nobody could get razor blades except from the proles, and trading was officially forbidden. Yet somehow his search for blades had produced this package instead, and Blair knew it contained something infinitely more compromising. The package contained a book—the book, the book without a title, the compendium of all heresies against the Party, against Oceania, against Big Brother himself. It was the diary of the archtraitor Winston Smith. Smith had been hanged, of course—the execution had taken place years ago, in Victory Square. But somehow his diary had survived.
Blair slid the slim volume out of the brown paper wrapping. It was amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The handwritten text inside had evidently been copied by some photographic means. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart easily, as though the book had passed through many hands. Where was the original? Who had found it? A tremor passed through Blair’s bowels. To begin reading was the decisive act. He opened the book.
At the top of the first page was a date: April 4, 1984. There followed a rambling passage describing a routine piece of newsfilm— something to do with fighting at the eastern front. But at the bottom of the page, printed in bold letters, were the words:
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
Blair flipped forward in the book. Then he read:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings!
He sat back, weak with indecision. A sense of complete helplessness descended upon him. Was this the future that Smith had in mind? Men certainly did not live alone now In the age of Big Brother no one lived alone. But this was a matter of doublethink. Men lived with Big Brother every second of their lives, and they lived alone too—utterly alone, with no empathy, no links of understanding, no connections of any kind, except to the Ministry, which was connected to everyone.
For some time Blair sat gazing stupidly at the page. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music, and he breathed in time with the tinny racket until he felt calmer. It was curious, he thought, how his ability to read Oldspeak had atrophied. The words on the page seemed jumbled and hard to pronounce, though distantly familiar, as if his understanding had been scattered and confounded. He was conscious of nothing except the blaring of the music and a slight booziness caused by the gin. The seconds were ticking by
He put his hand to his face, and grimaced as he felt the tender surface of his cheek. To be done in by razor blades! It was sublimely ridiculous. For an instant Blair felt an overwhelming desire to laugh. Then his stomach tightened again as he thought of the morning.
It had happened just before eight hundred, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen. The scraping of the six-week-old blade on his raw face had finally been too much. Staring with a wretched frustration at the points of blood appearing on his neck behind the plow of the blade, he had thrown the razor down, wiped his half-shaved face with a towel, and ventured out to the market.
Officially, the market didn’t exist. Officially, the parasites and profiteers had been banished, the speculators cleared out, to protect goodthinking people from ruthless exploitation. Unofficially, the proles’ market flourished in the very heart of London. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the little stalls and shops inside the four-mile radius of the inner city.
For a long time the market had been confined to one or two narrow streets away from any main thoroughfare. Blair remembered having visited it once years before, in a derelict alley in the east of London. Two miserable stalls were set up, small folding tables that could be quickly removed at any sign of trouble. On one of them were wilted cabbages. But that had been years ago.
This morning, Blair had made his way down Bond Street and the length of Waterloo Road. He passed through Victory Square. There were always a number of prostitutes there—the unsuccessful ones, who couldn’t earn enough for a night’s bed. One woman who had been lying on the ground overnight was crying bitterly, because a man had gone off without paying her fifty-cent fee. Toward morning some of the girls did not even get that, but only a cup of tea or a cigarette.
By a small bake shop an old, very ugly woman was violently abusing two of the other women because they could afford a better dinner than she could. As each dish was brought out to them she would point at it and shout accusingly, “There goes the price of another fuck! We don’t get hash for dinner, do we girls? ’Ow do you think she paid for them kippers? That’s that there toff that ’as ’er for a tanner.”
Blair headed down toward the river, through one of the most desolate parts of the city. The buildings here were broad and solid, and might once have been imposing, but their window frames were rotting apart, and the broken windows gaped dark and menacing. Rubbish blew along the deserted street, and a small, dark form slid into a hole in the wall as his steps approached. In the middle of a dreary square was an oval building with rectangular apertures where the windows had been torn out. It had a small tower in front. The pavement around it was broken and uneven, and weeds sprouted up through the cracks. He wondered what its purpose had been. A vague tune came into his head, a singsong melody about oranges and lemons. Clouds covered the watery sun and the day darkened.
The wind was stronger now, and blew dust into his face. The river gave off a thick, sweetish, unhealthy smell, and green slime clung to the pillars that supported the bridges. There was no railing to protect the walker from the turbid brown water, though discolored pits on the parapet suggested there once had been. Eventually the road turned away from the river, and the large dilapidated buildings and wide thoroughfares gave way to rows of brick houses, huddled shoulder to shoulder, leaning on each other as if for support.
The streets became narrow alleys, and people appeared again. A great fat woman with hair sprouting on her lip and chin was pegging washing to a sagging line, shouting in a husky voice to an unseen neighbor. A couple of thin children offered cabbage leaves to a mangy cat, which they held on a string. The cat crouched beside them sullenly, and turned its face away from their offering with pointed dislike. In another alley the smell of an overflowing drain made Blair’s stomach turn. He met some men going the other way with some tools and pipes, and wondered if they could possibly be doing repairs. Were the proles capable of that? The Ministries were barely able to keep the plumbing in Party flats in working order.
Blair walked under high brick arches that carried rail lines, his nose wrinkling at the stench of urine and rotting garbage. He trailed back southward, knowing he would sooner or later hit Whitechapel Road. The gray apartments gave way to slums of terraced brown two-story houses.
The scene changed abruptly as he entered the area of the market. Suddenly the sidewalk stalls were so numerous they almost spilled over on to each other. His nose was assailed by smells of sweat and coffee. He glimpsed the stall he wanted between two great solid females, who beamed at each other and parted. He caught his breath in amazement. There at the top of the stall, lined up against a wooden plank, was chocolate. Real chocolate, eight solid bars, not the Party’s dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a rubbish fire.
Blair diffidently made his way forward, and was pressed by the crowd against the trestle table that supported the goods.
’Ullo, mate,” the heavy, red-faced stallkeeper said amiably. “Can I ’elp you?”
Blair cleared his throat. His voice, when it came, sounded to him stilted and pedantic. “Well yes,” he replied. “The thing is, you see, I need some razor blades. . . . I, ah, have these light bulbs here . . .” Feeling foolish, he pulled a light bulb out of the big pocket of his raincoat.
“Sorry, sir, I just parted with me last ones,” the stallkeeper said politely.
The frustration was almost too much to bear. The anticipation of a comfortable shave had become solidly fixed in Blair’s mind. The stall owner seemed to understand, even as Blair began to turn away in disgust.
“I can ’ave some for you tomorrow if you like. I’ll put ’em aside,” he added.
What nonsense! By tomorrow the man would have forgotten all about that promise. Tomorrow, always tomorrow, there would be full employment, exemplary public health, universal education, and free entertainment—Big Brother promised, the Ministry of Plenty solemnly promised. No one ever delivered. No one remembered anything any more. And even if by chance the stallkeeper remembered his promise, why on earth should he bother to keep it? Promises were worth as much as dollars these days, and dollars were worth nothing at all.
As these thoughts flashed through his mind, Blair felt a surge of hate—the kind of blind, gripping hate you felt when the face of Kenneth Blythe leered at you from the telescreen during the Two Minutes Hate. Not hate for this particular stallkeeper, fool though he was, but hate for the Party, hate for the Ministry of Plenty, hate for Love Week, hate for everything that combined to make Blair shave his sore face with a blade that was six weeks old.
And then he had said it. A lunatic impulse had taken hold of him, and the words had shot out of his mouth, faster than he could even think, an ejaculation of bitterness bursting like pus from a boil.
“Like the Jam!” Blair had shouted. “Just like the Jam! We get jam every other day, don’t we! Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow But never any jam today, because today isn’t any other day, now, is it?” Then, in a spasm of sheer insanity he had added: “I suppose Big Brother’11 have blades for me tomorrow, too!” A sharp burst of laughter had followed the words out of his mouth, before the horror of what he had said gripped his throat back into silence.
It was exactly at this moment that the significant thing had happened. Blair had caught the stallkeeper’s eye. For a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen, Blair knew—yes, he knew—that the stallkeeper was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other. “I am with you,” the stallkeeper seemed to be saying to him. “I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust— and about the soreness of your face. But don’t worry, I am on your side.” A second later the flash of intelligence was gone, and the stallkeeper’s face was as inscrutable as everybody else’s.
“Don’t worry, ...

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