1985 by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online Page B

Brother’s London and the ancient buried one of churches and chimes and liberty of conscience. But in 1984 nobody knows what a farthing is. Everybody began to cease to know in 1960. ‘Sing a song of sixpence’ – it means nothing. Nor doesFalstaff’s reckoning at the Boar’s Head – a capon, 2s 2d; sauce, 4d; sack, two gallons, 5s 8d; anchovies and sack after supper, 2s 6d; bread ½d.
    Why does Orwell make Winston Smith wake up with the name Shakespeare on his lips?
    Shakespeare, though still not proscribed by the Party, is subversive. God knows what the Newspeak version of him is like, but the Oldspeak Shakespeare is full of private lives and individual decisions. Shakespeare means the past. But note that Winston Smith evokes the past in a far more dangerous way. He buys, for 2 dollars 50, a beautiful book full of blank paper of a creamy smoothness unknown to his modern world – or, for that matter, to present-day Soviet Russia. He also buys an archaic writing instrument – a pen with a real nib. He is going to keep a diary. He feels able to do this with a modicum of safety because his writingtable is in a small alcove out of range of the telescreen. He first writes at random, and then lets his thoughts wander. He looks down at the page and finds that he’s written over and over again, in total automatism, the words DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER . Mrs Parsons, the woman with the blocked-up drain, knocks on the door but, for all Winston knows, it may already be the Thought Police. Going to the door he sees that he’s left the book open. ‘It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.’ The subversive act and the materials with which it’s been performed – these have become one thing. The past is an enemy of the Party. Hence the past is real. After dealing with Mrs Parsons’s problem, he comes back and writes:
    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!
    We can talk to the past as we can talk to the future – the time that is dead and the time that has not yet been born. Both acts are absurd, but the absurdity is necessary to freedom.
    Conversely, freedom itself is thus proved to be absurd
.
    Yes yes. Freedom was certainly an archaic absurdity to some of Orwell’s contemporaries. Britain and her allies had been fighting fascism,which was dedicated to the liquidation of personal liberty, but one of those allies was herself as repressive of freedom as the enemy. When Soviet Russia became a friend of the democracies –
    A brief friend
.
    Yes. That was when those of tender conscience believed the war had lost its meaning. That was when it was in order for Englishmen to love Stalin and praise the Soviet system. There were certain British intellectuals, especially those associated with the left-wing magazine the
New Statesman
, who even preached totalitarianism on the Stalinist model. Kingsley Martin, its editor, for instance. Orwell summed up Martin’s view of the Soviet leader something like this: Stalin has done ghastly things, but on balance they’ve served the cause of progress, and a few million liquidations must not be allowed to obscure that fact. Means justify the end. That’s very much the modern view. It was Orwell’s belief that most British intellectuals were given to totalitarianism.
    He went too far
.
    Well, consider – it’s in the nature of an intellectual to be progressive, meaning that he’ll tend to support a political system that will bring rapid changes about in the commonalty, meaning a disdain for the