Orwell's Revenge (44 page)

railways, public utilities, and banks:
“London Letter to
Partisan Review”
(1945),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 396.

class privilege under English capitalism:
“Preface to Ukrainian Edition of
Animal Farm”
(1947),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, pp. 404-405.

the British Labour Party (of which lama supporter):
“Letter to Francis A. Henson,” p. 502.

hence of freedom of thought:
“The Prevention of Literature” (1946),
Essays,
III, p. 339.

like Britain's Ministry of Information:
“The Prevention of Literature,” p. 335.

are killing the arts too:
“As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, pp. 229230.

not worth saving anyway:
“As I Please” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 230.

must necessarily disappear with it:
“As I Please,” p. 229: “[I]f one thinks of the artist as an Ishmael, an autonomous individual who owes nothing to society,” he writes in the same column, “then the golden age of the artist was the age of capitalism. He had then escaped from the patron and not yet been captured by the bureaucrat” (p. 229).

who cares for literature can cling:
“Literature and Totalitarianism,” p. 137. See also “Letter to H. J. Willmett,” p. 148: “I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book
The Lion and the Unicorn,
in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so.”

frantic struggle to sell things:
Coming Up for Air,
p. 149.

contrive to keep their decency:
Aspidistra,
p. 239.

too expensive:
1984,
p. 96.

bred out in a couple of generations:
“As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, pp. 189-190.

filled with a wildness of spirit:
“Review,
Herman Melville,
by Lewis Mumford” (1930),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, p. 21.

there will be room for everybody:
“Riding Down from Bangor” (1946),
Essays,
III, pp. 406-407.

strength [will] change into consciousness:
1984,
p. 221.

blow the Party to pieces:
1984,
p. 70.

collectivist logic of the Party:
1984,
p. 267: “[I]f a man can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.”

Chapter 11

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER:
1984,
p. 19.

nothing to set beside it:
“England, Your England” (1941),
Essays,
I, p. 252.

emotional unity:
“England, Your England,” p. 266.

found himself in a new section:
1984,
pp. 185-186.

fired them at ourselves:
Compare
1984,
p. 154.

to destroy the products of human labor:
1984,
p. 191.

we preserve the Party's control:
1984,
p. 192.

the natural, unavoidable condition of survival:
1984,
p. 192.

in ways that impair military efficiency:
“Looking back on the Spanish War” (1943),
Essays,
I, p. 200.

they have to make four:
See
1984,
p. 198.

kilometers away in space:
See
1984,
p. 195. Here, as elsewhere/, Orwell proves prescient about where technology may head./Forty years after he first metioned the “lens” weapon, “Star Wars*' technology was very much in vogue.

not in fact advancing at all:
See
1984,
pp. 196, 199.

like three sheaves of corn:
1984,
p. 198. “[W]e [in England] believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run,” Orwell writes. “What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modem industrialised state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?” “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943),
Essays,
I, p. 200. O'Brien puts exactly the same question to Winston at the end of
1984
(p. 273).

cause comparatively few casualties:
1984,
p. 187.

maintain our cultural integrity:
See
1984,
p. 197.

which direction is up and which is down:
1984,
p. 199.

There would be a bloody struggle:
See
Homage to Catalonia,
pp. xxi (introduction by Lionel Trilling); pp. 121-22.

grinding them down in exploitation:
See
Broadcast,
p. 62 (quoting Churchill).

differs enormously from country to country:
“England, Your England” (1941),
Essays,
I, pp. 252-253.

ceases to be an enemy of any account:
CI Wigan Pier,
p. 219: “A country like England . . . could be reduced to chaos by a few thousand well-placed placed bombs.”

mostly highly trained specialists:
See
1984,
p. 187.

in which people rule themselves:
Cf. “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” p. 210: “No bursting bomb can ever shatter the crystal spirit of democracy.”

firmness in the truth:
“Reflections on Gandhi” (1949),
Essays,
I, p. 177.

Chapter 12

all had to be organized:
See
1984,
p. 149.

suddenly appeared all over London:
1984,
p. 150.

unworthy of their attention:
“As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 98.

like monstrous horizontal ears:
Aspidistra,
p. 128.

in the corner of her room:
The
1984
lovers find a hiding place in a dilapidated room above a junk shop. The room awakens in Winston “a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an armchair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.” 1984, p. 96. This echoes a very similar passage in
Wigan Pier
(pp. 117-118). At another point, Winston and Julia meet in the belfry of a mined church.
1984,
pp. 129, 131. The church is borrowed from
Homage to Catalonia,
p. 213.

in her arms:
1984,
p. 121.

rosy in the early morning light:
Aspidistra,
p. 97.

cracking their whips and cursing:
Coming Up for Air,
p. 47.

they are loyal to one another:
1984,
p. 166.

evolved spontaneously from their loyalties:
See
Aspidistra,
p. 105. A similarly upbeat market scene, equally rich in color and detail, appears in
Burmese Days,
pp. 126-127.

It was a political act:
1984,
p. 128.

glass and water are not the same thing:
“As I Please” (1947),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 267.

fawn jacket, and a mac:
Shelden, p. 223.

his emaciated torso:
Shelden, p. 322.

a mischievous, amused look:
Shelden, p. 273.

She adored cats:
See Shelden, p. 197.

can carry on where we leave off:
1984,
p. 156. Again, one wonders how Orwell managed to ignore the relationship between musings like this one and telescreen technology. As 1984 makes abundantly clear, these “small groups . . . banding together” don't stand a chance against the Ministry, the large group linked by telescreen. But why not? Orwell has to assume, at every turn, that only the Ministry knows how to use telescreens, not the dissidents.

rebel from the waist downward:
1984,
p. 157.

conscious beings must one day come:
1984,
p. 222.

laying its coralline beak upon them:
Burmese Days,
p. 57. There is, of course, a very similar scene in
1984,
p. 125.

a torrent of song:
1984,
p. 125.

she had been asleep:
In
1984,
Julia is a synthesis of other Orwellian women. In
Aspidistra,
“Julia” is the hero's sister.
1984
's Julia lives in an unpleasant women's hostel, just like the heroine in
Aspidistra.
“Whenever there was nothing particular to do,”
Aspidistra's
Hermione “always fell asleep as promptly as an animal” (p. 96).
1984's
Julia is “one of those people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position.”

By contrast, Winston's estranged wife, Katharine, was “[t]he human sound track.”
1984,
p. 67. Orwell's favorite insult for orthodox Party hacks in other books is the “gangster gramophone.” See
Homage to Catalonia,
p. 198 (“the gangster-gramophone of continental politics”); and
Wigan Pier,
p. 216 (Bolshevik commissars are “half gangster, half gramophone.”).

the bells of Shoreditch:
1984,
pp. 97-100, 147, 179. A bell is a telegadget too, of course. Indeed, a church bell is the original “telephone,” or “far speaker” in Greek.

a crimson silence:
Shelden, p. 67.

Chapter 13

nothing to set beside it:
“England, Your England” (1941),
Essays,
I, p. 252.

in moments of supreme crisis:
“England, Your England,” p. 266.

an invisible chain:
“England, Your England,” p. 266.

it must close its ranks:
“England, Your England,” p. 267. See also “Notes on the Way” (1940),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 17: “If whole armies had to be coerced, no war could ever be fought. Men die in battle—not gladly, of course, but at any rate voluntarily—because of abstractions called ‘honour,' ‘duty' ‘patriotism' and so forth.”

in perfect unison:
“England, Your England,” p. 264. See also
Homage to Catalonia,
pp. 28, 59. Cf. “Review:
The Totalitarian Enemy,
by F. Borkenau” (1940),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 25: “[A] country . . . which is waging or preparing for ‘total' war must be in some sense socialistic.”
Lion,
p. 22: “War creates a consciousness of fraternity Above all, war brings home to the individual that he is not altogether an individual.” “Notes on the Way,” p. 17: “People sacrifice themselves for the sake of fragmentary communities—nation, race, creed, class—and only become aware that they are
not
individuals in the very moment when they are facing bullets.”

the spirit of the church:
Cf. “Review:
The Spirit of Catholicism
by Karl Adam” (1932),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, p. 79.

Industrialism requires coordinated control:
Wigan Pier,
p. 188.

constant stimulation from other people:
“As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 133: “If Defoe had really lived on a desert island he could not have written Robinson Crusoe, nor would he have wanted to. Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”

by communities rather than by individuals:
“The Prevention of Literature” (1946),
Essays,
III, p. 334.

an index to majority opinion:
“Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (1947),
Essays,
III, p. 421: a poem “defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible.”

a creation of common experience:
“New Words” (1940?),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 9.

meaningless until it is shared:
Burmese Days,
p. 57: “Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.”

truth is indeed statistical:
1984,
pp. 219, 280.

then a lunatic:
1984,
p. 80.

need not greatly trouble him:
1984,
p. 80.

the belief might also be wrong:
1984,
p. 80.

must be written in solitude:
“The Prevention of Literature,” pp. 342343: “Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or, on the other hand, very artificial verse forms, can be composed cooperatively by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and Scottish ballads were originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is disputed, but at any rate they are non-individual in the sense that they constantly change in passing from mouth to mouth. . . . In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible.”

eternal guardians of the weak:
1984,
p. 265.

cutthroat equality:
See
Homage to Catalonia,
p. 61.