1985 by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Anthony Burgess
substance from himself. He fought against his inability to love them by desperate acts of dispossession â making himself down and out in Paris and London, spending the season in hell which produced the Wigan Pier book. He pitied the workers, or animals. He also feared them. There was a strong element of nostalgia in him â for the working-class life he couldnât have. Nostalgia has come to mean frustrated home-sickness. This got itself mixed up with another nostalgia.
You mean for the past. A vague and irrecoverable English past. Dickensian. That vitiated his Socialism. Socialism ought to reject the past as evil. Its eyes ought to be wholly on the future
.
Youâre right. Orwell imagines a kind of impossibly cosy past â the past as a sort of farmhouse kitchen with hams hanging from the rafters, a smell of old dog. As a Socialist he should have been wary of the past. Once you start to yearn for kindly policemen, clean air, noisy free speech in pubs, families sticking together, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, the fug of the old music hall you end up by touching your forelock to the squire. You oppose to that past a present full of political dogma, policemen with guns, adulterated beer, fear of being overheard, fish sausages. You remember the hero of
Coming Up for Air
. He bites into one of these horrors and says itâs like biting into the modern world. Thereâs a part of Orwell which fears the future. Even when itâs Socialist, progressive, just, egalitarian. He wants to oppose the past to it, as though the past were a real world of solid objects.
Itâs the future thatâs supposed to be subversive. Yet Winston Smith has his subversiveness all in the past
.
Well, the past
is
subversive in the sense that it opposes pragmatic values to doctrinaire ones. The human and not the abstract. Take even the least considerable and most neutral-seeming areas â like, for instance, weights and measures.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is genuinely prophetic in presenting a Britain thatâs yielded to the metric system. At the end of the war there hadnât as yet been any official proposal to replace the traditional units with the Cartesian abstractions of France, but everybody felt sure the change was on its way. Inches and feet and yards were top much based on thumbs and limbs to be acceptable in a truly rational world. A prole beer-drinker whom Winston Smith encounters complains of having to drink in litres or half-litres: he wants the traditional pint. But despite the protests of traditionalists, Britain had to be given a decimal coinage. Orwell knew this was going to happen: he puts dollars and cents into Winstonâs pocket. As the British know, the reality is the heavy dollar still called the pound, with a hundred new pence or
p
in it â shameful liquidation â but the dehumanization remains. Americans have a monetary system that carries an aura of revolutionary necessity, and theyâll never understand how the loss of the old shillings and half-crowns and guineas wounded British hearts. For the whole point of the traditional system was that it sprang out of empirical common sense, not abstract rationality. You could divide by any number â 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. If you try to divide by 3 now you get a recurring decimal.
7
and 9?
Yes. You added a shilling to a pound and that gave you a guinea. A seventh of a guinea was three shillings. A ninth of a guinea was two shillings and fourpence, or a Malayan dollar. So long as there were seven days in a week, four weeks in a month, twelve months in a year, and an hour divisible by 3 and its multiples, the old system made sense. But it had to go: it was too reasonable, too human. It also committed the grave error of keeping ancient folk traditions alive. âOranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clementâs. You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St Martinâs.â This old song is a mysterious link between Big
You mean for the past. A vague and irrecoverable English past. Dickensian. That vitiated his Socialism. Socialism ought to reject the past as evil. Its eyes ought to be wholly on the future
.
Youâre right. Orwell imagines a kind of impossibly cosy past â the past as a sort of farmhouse kitchen with hams hanging from the rafters, a smell of old dog. As a Socialist he should have been wary of the past. Once you start to yearn for kindly policemen, clean air, noisy free speech in pubs, families sticking together, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, the fug of the old music hall you end up by touching your forelock to the squire. You oppose to that past a present full of political dogma, policemen with guns, adulterated beer, fear of being overheard, fish sausages. You remember the hero of
Coming Up for Air
. He bites into one of these horrors and says itâs like biting into the modern world. Thereâs a part of Orwell which fears the future. Even when itâs Socialist, progressive, just, egalitarian. He wants to oppose the past to it, as though the past were a real world of solid objects.
Itâs the future thatâs supposed to be subversive. Yet Winston Smith has his subversiveness all in the past
.
Well, the past
is
subversive in the sense that it opposes pragmatic values to doctrinaire ones. The human and not the abstract. Take even the least considerable and most neutral-seeming areas â like, for instance, weights and measures.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is genuinely prophetic in presenting a Britain thatâs yielded to the metric system. At the end of the war there hadnât as yet been any official proposal to replace the traditional units with the Cartesian abstractions of France, but everybody felt sure the change was on its way. Inches and feet and yards were top much based on thumbs and limbs to be acceptable in a truly rational world. A prole beer-drinker whom Winston Smith encounters complains of having to drink in litres or half-litres: he wants the traditional pint. But despite the protests of traditionalists, Britain had to be given a decimal coinage. Orwell knew this was going to happen: he puts dollars and cents into Winstonâs pocket. As the British know, the reality is the heavy dollar still called the pound, with a hundred new pence or
p
in it â shameful liquidation â but the dehumanization remains. Americans have a monetary system that carries an aura of revolutionary necessity, and theyâll never understand how the loss of the old shillings and half-crowns and guineas wounded British hearts. For the whole point of the traditional system was that it sprang out of empirical common sense, not abstract rationality. You could divide by any number â 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. If you try to divide by 3 now you get a recurring decimal.
7
and 9?
Yes. You added a shilling to a pound and that gave you a guinea. A seventh of a guinea was three shillings. A ninth of a guinea was two shillings and fourpence, or a Malayan dollar. So long as there were seven days in a week, four weeks in a month, twelve months in a year, and an hour divisible by 3 and its multiples, the old system made sense. But it had to go: it was too reasonable, too human. It also committed the grave error of keeping ancient folk traditions alive. âOranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clementâs. You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St Martinâs.â This old song is a mysterious link between Big