Orwell's Revenge (27 page)

It occurred to him that there would always be Thought Police. So long as there were thugs of any kind, there would be thugs of the mind. And the most ruthless would always end up in the ministries. If there was hope, it lay with the proles, with their families, their private loyalties and their market. There was a strength there, far deeper than the Party's, immeasurably more powerful than Big Brother's.
Sooner or later it will happen,
Smith had written.
The proles' strength will change into consciousness. In the end
their awakening will come.
As the memory of Smith's words drifted through his mind, Blair imagined he heard Big Brother again, the deep voice full of power and mysterious calm, speaking words of wisdom, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but
restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.

It was five o'clock. Blair moved to the ladder and began to climb. There was a metal trapdoor at the top. He pushed it up and lifted himself into the room above. It was enormous and brightly lit with fluorescent fixtures built into the low ceiling. From one end to the other, the room was filled with rack after rack of gray-painted metal boxes. There was a quiet hum of fans and electric transformers. The cable tray ran the length of the wall. Every few yards, one of the orange cables rose from the tray and snaked up the side of the wall, along the ceiling, and then down into one of the metal racks.

Thousands of hair-thin glass strands branched out from each rack and on to a great vertical metal frame, like the warp of a huge loom. They gleamed and glistened, the colored lights iridescent, slicing through the air like hair-thin icicles, indescribably rich in
red and blue colors. The room was a giant pink, convoluted rose, a sea anemone of cut glass, an enormous piece of fluorescent
coral plucked from the Indian Ocean, alive with strands of light.

At the far side of the room there was a door, and from behind it came the low sound of a single voice, a voice full of calm, and confidence, and quiet authority. It was Big Brother. Trust me, the phreak had said. And now Blair understood.

He walked across the room and opened the door. He saw the telescreen. He saw on the screen the face of Big Brother, as he had known he would, and heard his resonant voice fill the room with a sort of languorous calm. Three uniformed guards sat on decrepit wooden chairs in front of the screen. They seemed anesthetized, as if their brains had somehow been disconnected from their limbs. They looked at Blair when he entered, but made no move to stop him.

“Await further instructions, comrades,” said the face on the telescreen. “Follow instructions. Assist our agents as they move through the Ministry. Follow instructions, stand by the Party, and all will be well. Follow instructions. Cooperate with my agents. Follow instructions . . .”

“Good morning comrades,” said Blair.

One of the officers reluctantly pulled his gaze away from the telescreen and stared at him with an air of passive expectation.

“I shall need your help, Wilkes,” said Blair. “Please come with me.”

Wilkes rose obediently from his chair. His amphibian face was composed and had even taken on a slightly sanctimonious expression. The other two guards sat unmoving. Blair and Wilkes moved across the room and stepped through the door.

“I'm looking for a prisoner. A young woman.”

They walked along a featureless corridor of gray cement and up a flight of stairs. A similar corridor lay above the first. Concealed lamps flooded the halls with cold light. They moved down another long corridor, then through another room. On the right was yet another room where more guards sat, staring at a telescreen with the same expression of unthinking absorption. “Follow instructions, comrades,” Big Brother was saying. “Assist my agents . . .”

He saw her first through the spy hole in the bolted steel door. The cell had a bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sit on, that ran round the wall, broken only by the door. She sat alone, hunched down, her dress in shreds. Her face was bruised and expressionless. The steel door clanged open as he walked in.

At first she seemed not to recognize him. Then a look of desperate sadness filled her face, and two tears formed at the edges of her eyes and slid down her dirty cheeks.

“I betrayed you,”
she said baldly.

Blair thought of the youthful, rapacious face, with blackened eyebrows, and of
the tunnel, and the rat.

“I betrayed you too,” he said.

She still sat frozen on the bench.

“Sometimes,” she said, “they threaten you with something— something you can't stand up to.”

“Yes,” he said. “Sometimes you're afraid.”

“And then you're defeated. They break you up.”

“Yes.”

“After that,
you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer,” she said.

He walked over to her and with a single finger touched the side of her cheek. “But I still do,” he said.

She stared at him, unbelieving.

“I'm not a prisoner,” he said. He reached down with both hands, and touched her shoulders, and gently made as if to lift her from the bench. She rose under her own strength. She looked up at him an instant longer, and then buried her face in his breast as suddenly as though ducking from a blow. She wept,
clinging to him like a child. And as he led her gently toward the door, he felt her waist, still sweet,
still soft, still warm.

They walked out of the cell, and made their way down the corridor and past the guard posts.

“Assist my agents . . .” droned the confident, smooth voice from the telescreen.

“Lead us out, Wilkes,” Blair said. They climbed three more sets of stairs and emerged in the great white foyer of the Ministry of Love.

At the iron doors were two more guards, hulking gorillas hung with weapons, grimacing outward toward the courtyard. They fell back as Blair and Kate passed.

Wilkes followed them to the main gates. They walked by the last of the guard posts. Big Brother was still on the telescreen. The guards were still watching, passive, silent, and immobile. “Await further instructions,” said the calm voice. “Do not interfere with my agents . . .”

Blair remembered the phreak again. Trust me, the phreak had said. We own the network now. It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. And for the first time in his life, Blair
knew that he loved Big Brother.

•  •  •

And now, in the age of doublethink, in the age of the telescreen, there is choice. It is so simple. One keystroke: DEFINE. A second keystroke: DELETE. One page is gone, the other remains. Which shall it be? After J984, all history is a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed
exactly as often as is necessary. History is yours to erase. But not yours alone. And whatever your choice may be, mine may be different. What you may erase, I may save. So the ending is yours to choose. And mine. And theirs . . .

They stepped out of the Ministry together into the dawn. There was a mist in the air; the light was still dim. And for a moment he thought it was the end of the day rather than the beginning. He shut his eyes and saw their children clustered around him, and heard their voices distant and choked with pain, their faces blurred and wet. He saw himself smile when he heard them. He heard himself trying to say something to comfort them, while his gaze stayed locked on hers. He saw that her face was old, her eyes tired, her flesh wrinkled, and her teeth gone, and he saw that she was more beautiful now than ever before. And he knew that without Kate's face close to his the separation from all else would be too
painful to bear. He knew that only with Kate beside him would he ever see the face of God.

He opened his eyes, and saw her face again, not in his imagination now but alive and young, and no longer grieving. The fog was rising and the sun was just beginning to creep down the glistening wet streets of London. The first narrow streaks of gold, like swords slitting the darkness, were cutting through the mists. The light was growing, and behind, seas of carmine cloud
stretched away into inconceivable distances.

He took her hand, and saw the light of the city and the beauty of her face. He remembered, or thought he remembered, what the first man in the world had learned, after searching all of creation for a friendship deep enough to pierce the ineffable loneliness of dying. And he knew now that even the network could never reach everywhere, that man alone was too small to reassemble the dispersed sparks of creation, that only God is infinite, that only God transcends all, not through power but through love. And he knew that where Eve is,
there too will always be Eden.

“That should do it,” said O'Brien. He flicked off the novel-writing machine and pulled the pages from the tray. “Send it on down to the printer.”

And as he heaved his bulk from the room, he reflected that this would surely be the end of all the trouble Smith's diary had caused. It had been remarkably simple. O'Brien had supplied the new template, the new plot; the machine had done the rest. It was just a matter of rearranging a paragraph here and a sentence there, changing a name, and substituting some suitable antonym from the thesaurus. He knew it was a rubbishy book put together with scissors and paste, but
it would do the job.

“Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock,” Orwell had written. “
Nitwits wanting only to be doped.” Orwell was right of course. The proles would feel better about it all now, the few who still bothered to read. Most just sat stupefied in front of their screens.
In any event, the traitor's book now had a happy ending, one suitable for the telescreen itself. Just the sort of thing the mob always demanded.

And with the book rewritten, nothing else would have to change. This was the essence of doublethink. No need to change the world or even to see it clearly, no need to worry about the future, no need to atone for the past. Rewriting history would always be enough.

So it's Christmas 1931, and Orwell has decided to get himself sent to prison. He wants to write about the experience, you see. While other old Etonians sip brandy at their country homes, Orwell gets roaring drunk and (with some difficulty) achieves his goal. The prison cell he is locked up in reappears in
1984,
but Orwell's original description is in his 1932 essay “Clink.”

“One remark made by these men [fellow cellmates] struck me,” Orwell reports. “I heard it from almost every prisoner who was up for a serious offence. ‘It's not the prison I mind, it's losing my job.' This is, I believe, symptomatic of the dwindling power of the law
compared with that of the capitalist.”

It's a typical Orwellian aside, so casual, so neatly fitted to the context of his story, that you read another paragraph or two before it hits you. The force of law is giving way to the power of the capitalist! What a disgrace. And then you read on.

Or perhaps you think about it some more. Pushed to the limit, the force of law is . . . the Ministry of Love. And the power of the capitalist? Push that to the limit and of course you end up in . . . well, it depends who's doing the pushing. Orwell is quite sure that the capitalist becomes a monopolist and in due course ends up running the Ministry of Plenty. But in 1943, while Orwell is imagining
1984,
another
Londoner is finishing up an equally challenging book that proposes a different answer. The man is Friedrich Hayek; his new book is titled
The Road to Serfdom.
What Hayek argues, roughly speaking, is this: in a free society the market
should
be more important than the prison.

Central economic planning, Hayek reasons, requires coercive government. The Ministry of Plenty (or whatever else it may end up being called) must treat people as means, to be directed for the achievement of a plan, rather than as ends, to be treated equally under law. The Ministry is typically occupied at first by moderate and well-meaning socialists—men much like Orwell perhaps. But ministries attract men who love power of every kind—men like O'Brien. Well-intentioned plans for progress and social equality thus lead straight down the road to totalitarianism. In Orwell's political vision, decent socialism triggers a neofascist reaction, which leads to Big Brother. Hayek paints a simpler picture: decent socialism decays into a Big Brotherhood directly.

Is economic anarchy the only alternative, then, to economic planning through a Ministry of Plenty? Hayek sets out the answer a few years after
1984
is published, in
The Constitution of Liberty.
The essentially Orwellian choice between central planning, in which the Ministry controls everything, and anarchy, in which the strong prey on the weak without restraint, is false. There is a middle ground between the polar alternatives of planned and wholly unplanned economies. The alternative is the free market.

Market mechanisms are rational and efficient: the market is orderly, bounded by rules, and well adapted to private, individual purposes. Yet the order of the market is spontaneous too, not centrally planned, a product of human action, not human design. Commonly accepted rules evolve over time and embody far more wisdom than any central planner can incorporate in a decree. Free markets and free speech can supply coordination of any scope and complexity. A planned society, by contrast, is inherently limited by what the minds of the planners can grasp. Small bands of hunter-gatherers could perhaps be led efficiently by a single headman. But advanced industrial society is possible only if humans are guided by rules rather than commands. Those rules—the rules of free societies and free markets—were not invented consciously, or ever even fully articulated. They exist by common consent,
like the rules of grammar.

Rules of grammar? Funny that Hayek should point to language as another example of the kind of spontaneous order that can develop without central planning. Orwell looks at the English language and sees dilapidation and decay—clear signs (he might have said) of a nation
sliding down the road to serfdom. Hayek looks at language and rejoices in its spontaneous, consensual order—clear evidence (he might have said) of the possibility of civilization without Big Brother. Prophecy aside, however, Hayek and Orwell would have agreed about language: there is a middle ground between the meaningless babble of infants— “unplanned” language, perhaps—and Newspeak—a language so “planned” that it culminates in
duckspeak.
The middle ground is the English language itself—Oldspeak, that is—subtle, expressive, delicate, and alive, created and maintained by consent and common usage rather than
by coercion and central planning. Though Orwell believes that Ministries operate better coal mines and more efficient railroads, he understands clearly that central planners would wreck the tool of his own trade,
the English language. Hayek understands that coal mines and the English language are really much the same.