Orwell's Revenge (45 page)

Gadarene swine in times of peace:
“England, Your England” (1941),
Essays,
I, p. 265.

so that he might then run to friends for help:
When the Spanish police were pursuing Orwell, they arrested his wife Eileen “as a decoy to help them apprehend . . . her husband.” Shelden, p. 270.

was a beehive:
Wigan Pier,
p. 216.

a handful of stoats:
Wigan Pier,
p. 216.

as a sort of keystone:
“London Letter to
Partisan
Review” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 81.

really a waxwork:
“London Letter to
Partisan
Review,” p. 81.

the price of civilization:
1984,
p. 205.

hierarchy and regimentation:
1984,
p. 205.

quickly merged into large ones:
See “England, Your England,” p. 269.

hosts of petty traders:
“England, Your England,” p. 273.

steel and concrete nests:
“Review, Angel
Pavement,
by J. B. Priestley” (1930), CEJL, Vol. 1, p.25.

Obliteration of the Self:
See
1984,
p. 198.

actually not possible to keep them:
“Such, Such Were the Joys” (1947),
Essays,
I, p. 5.

unrelated and unintelligible facts:
“Such, Such Were the Joys,” p. 9.

only true feeling was hatred:
“Such, Such Were the Joys,” p. 26.

did not teach science in any form:
“Such, Such Were the Joys,” pp. 8, 18.

principles of Ingsoc:
1984,
p. 194.

a dual system of astronomy:
1984,
p. 269.

no weeds, no poverty, no pain:
Wigan Pier,
p. 189. See also Orwell's own summary of Oscar Wilde's utopianism in “The Soul of Man under Socialism by Oscar Wilde” (1948),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, pp. 426-428.

an efficient world:
Wigan Pier,
p. 190.

more organization, more telescreens:
Wigan Pier,
p. 193.

uniformity of opinion on all subjects:
1984,
p. 207.

had ever forged unity before:
Orwell believed this completely. He had said it many times before. The new totalitarianism was different because it was backed by more powerful technology. “[W]e are different from the persecutors of the past,” O'Brien boasts. In
Coming Up for Air,
George Bowling saw that too. “Old Hitler's something different. So's Joe Stalin. They aren't like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off and so forth, just for the fun of it. . . . They're after something quite new—something that's never been heard of before.”
Coming Up for Air,
p. 185. What they're after, of course, is man's mind. They are the Thought Police.

Cf. “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1946),
Essays,
III, p. 341: “The despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility”

that machines made history:
Orwell himself embraces this view in the Blythe essay in the middle of
1984.
He has presented this argument before. The steady advance of “the machine” was creating
wealth for all, which might readily have been shared all around.
Wigan Pier,
p. 171; “Looking back on the Spanish War” (1943),
Essays,
I, p. 203; “As I Please” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 249.

and yet still not live alone:
1984,
p. 29.

self-contained space:
A. Koestler,
Darkness at Noon
(New York: Bantam, 1989), p. 211.

start out on his backbone:
Coming Up for Air,
p. 271;
1984,
p. 62.

a ruling group can fall from power:
See
1984,
p. 208.

fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants:
See
1984,
p. 187.

the great nebula in Orion:
Cf.
Broadcast,
p. 80.

discontent can now become articulate:
1984,
p. 208.

journalists, and professional politicians:
See
1984,
p. 206.

the linking together of opposites:
See
1984,
p. 217.

this principle that will defeat us:
1984,
p. 273.

touching to see such love:
See
1984,
p. 259.

the suspicions he had long possessed:
1984,
p. 218.

I have almost ignored:
1984,
p. 218.

definitely pleasant thrill:
“Such, Such Were the Joys,” p. 27.

Chapter 14

on the sixth day:
1984,
p. 180.

Big Brother had been overthrown:
Compare 1984, p. 180.

admission that any change had taken place:
1984,
p. 181.

slipped into the speaker's hand:
See
1984,
pp. 181-182.

understanding rippled through the crowd:
1984,
p. 182.

thrown into the melting pot:
See “Politics and the English Language” (1946),
Essays,
I, p. 164.

governed by love and reason:
“Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's
Travels”
(1946),
Essays,
III, p. 385. Also, “[t]hey had reached, in fact, the highest stage of totalitarian organisation, the stage when conformity has become so general that there is no need for a police force” (p. 385).

without even breaking the syntax:
1984,
p. 182.

shooting out slogans:
In
1984,
Winston attends a huge rally. It's both a mesmerizing scene and a wonderfully clever parody of Party propaganda. It is also lifted pretty much word for word from
Com
ing Up for Air,
p. 175, written ten years earlier.
Wigan Pier,
pp. 175-176, contains another much shorter account of what may be the same episode.

Orwell, who stood six feet two, did not particularly care for short people. See, for example,
Coming Up for Air,
p. 14: “The floor-manager was an ugly little devil, undersized, with very square shoulders and a spiky gray moustache. . . . Do you notice how often they have undersized men for these bullying jobs?”

her dreams were slogans:
Coming up for Air,
p. 172.

stick inside a swill-bucket:
Aspidistra,
p. 50.

the same old invective:
“Politics and the English Language,” p. 161.

dump of worn-out metaphors:
“Politics and the English Language,” p. 159.

a prefabricated hen house:
“Politics and the English Language,” p. 159.

lackey-flunkey-mad-dog-jackal-hyena-headed:
“As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 109.

all the factories, and all the money:
1984,
p. 73.

blood-bath:
“As I Please,” pp. 108-109.

the lifeline of the network:
1984,
p. 90.

Fascism . . . Democracy . . .:
Coming Up for Air,
p. 153.

malfunctioning old gramophone:
Cf.
Homage to Catalonia,
p. 198 (the “good party man,” the “gangster-gramophone of continental politics”);
Wigan Pier,
p. 216 (“Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone)”).

hammering down on your brain:
Coming Up for Air,
p. 156.

in the tone of her voice:
Coming Up for Air,
p. 156.

won't smash our poor ones:
See also “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (1947),
Essays,
III, p. 420.

principles of Blytheism—that, etc. etc.:
1984,
p. 54.

The stinking corpse:
“As I Please,” p. 109.

offal from a rentier class:
“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” (1944),
Essays,
IV p. 31.

poisoned the imagination—on life itself:
“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali,” p. 24.

filthy stew of words:
“As I Please,” pp. 109-110. See also “Politics
and the English Language,” p. 166: “[B]estial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder.”

through a viscous sea:
Burmese Days,
p. 252.

menacingly above her head:
1984,
p. 181.

Chapter 15

with unmerciful clarity:
“The Spike” (1931),
CEJL,
Vol. I, p. 39.

Winston Smith of course lands in a cell in
1984.
We've read about that cell before. Orwell himself in fact occupied it, in London's Bethnal Green police station. There are several descriptions of the same cell in
Down and Out
(p. 146), in Orwell's essay “Clink” (1932),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, p. 87, and in
Aspidistra.
The walls are “glittering white porcelain,” and the prisoners while away time by counting the bricks. They sit on a plank “shelf” rather than a bench or a bed. There's a spy-hole in the steel door. There's a single open toilet in the cell, which prisoners use abundantly; they “can't help it.” The toilet doesn't flush properly. The cell then stinks “abominably.” It's all exactly the same in each of Orwell's three accounts. See
1984,
pp. 223, 225, 229, 233, 237; compare
Aspidistra,
pp. 179, 183, 187; “Clink,” pp. 87, 89, 90. See also
Homage To Catalonia,
p. 31 (“The position stank abominably, and outside the little enclosure of the barricade there was excrement everywhere”);
Burmese Days,
p. 75 (“It was very dark, stifling hot, and quite unfurnished, except for an earth latrine that stank to heaven”);
Burmese Days,
p. 217 (“It [the badly cured leopard skin] also stank abominably”);
Down and Out,
p. 199 (a tramps' hostel has a “common chamber-pot” that “stank abominably”). Compare
1984,
p. 237 (“Parsons used the lavatory, loudly and abundantly. It then turned out that the plug was defective, and the cell stank abominably for hours afterwards”).

Even one of the other inmates—a man dying of starvation—is a repeat. He's “a commonplace, mean-looking man who might have been an engineer or technician of some kind.”
1984,
p. 238: “But what was startling was the emaciation of his face, . . . The man was dying of starvation.” Here he is in Down
and Out,
p. 156: “I
had time to see his face, and it looked agonised. Quite suddenly I realised, from the expression of his face, that he was starving.”

eyes looked disproportionately large:
1984,
p. 238; compare
Down and Out,
p. 97.

said the voice:
1984,
p. 239.

solitude, and persistent questions:
See
1984,
pp. 102, 167.

I have almost ignored:
1984,
p. 218.

that makes freedom inevitable:
1984,
p. 218.

reach the central secret:
1984,
p. 218.

churned up within him:
Down and Out,
p. 131.

a cough that almost tore him open:
Coming Up for Air,
p. 30.

blood-streaked mucus on his hand:
“How the Poor Die” (1946),
Essays,
II, p. 89.

chosen for you from above:
“England, Your England” (1941),
Essays,
I, p. 256.

conscious of anything outside their daily lives:
1984,
pp. 202-203.

films oozing with sex:
1984,
p. 44.

peddled furtively to their youths:
1984,
p. 132.

horse shaking off flies:
1984,
p. 70. p. 172
without any impulse to rebel: 1984,
p. 211.

the range of their vision:
1984,
p. 92.

mixed with repulsion and bewilderment:
See
1984,
p. 265; “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (1947),
Essays,
III, p. 407.

the depths of his bones:
Burmese Days,
p. 35.

almost no friction:
Cf.
Broadcast,
p. 79.

no longer requires collectivism:
Cf.
Wigan Pier,
p. 188.

a high level of technical development:
“Review,
A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays,
by Herbert Read” (1945),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 48.