The ultimate future city: 1984, Part 1, the poverty of slums
Continuing our occasional series on the
The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov, 11/07
The Naked Sun, by Isaac Asimov, 11/07
The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg, 12/07
Diaspar, The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke, 3/08
Cities in Flight, Part 1 and Part 2: 8/08
Perhaps the most famous year in fiction begins in the most tactile not-present:
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
In previous posts, I’ve profiled visions of ultimate future cities. Some of these visions are nightmares – and yet, nightmares that can see around us if we know where to look, in the slums inside.
Victory mansions? Soviet flats
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features.
George Orwell’s writing has the clarity and simplicity of genius: with never an inflation, nary an exclamation point, nothing but the impressions of everyday, he created the world’s catchword for dystopia, and all out of his own experience. Poverty, disease, war, humiliation, bombing, death, and political cant – he experienced them all, and in 1948 he wrote the work that, in reversing two digits, made itself into a symbol.
George Orwell in 1948 …
Winston Smith in 1984 …
Tyranny, says Orwell, is enforced poverty, and what makes 1984 remarkable is Orwell’s understanding of how denying people even the most trivial and mundane of personal accessories can reduce them to groping about for a rusty razor-blade, or an unbroken shoelace.
Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston who was thirty-nine, and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. Page 5.
In ancient
Until, that is, the elevators break.
Exterior hallway in
Some months back I was in
A broken elevator testifies that a landlord does not care – and that is the message being sent by the Party, rulers of
Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked wherever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy.
Even solid construction dies without maintenance, and without money
In fact, worse than the landlord who does not care is the landlord who wants to prevent improvement:
Repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window pane for two years. Page 21.
George Orwell, seeing a future
For Orwell, tyranny meant poverty, and poverty meant housing poverty – a slum.
The Parsons’ flat was bigger than Winston’s, and dingy in a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the place had just been visited by some large violent animal. Games impediments – hockey sticks, boxing gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out – lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise books. There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which – one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how – was the sweat of some person not present at the moment. In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing from the telescreen. Page 21.
Decaying high-rise public housing,
Re-reading 1984 twenty or so years after my last reading, I am struck by how consistently Orwell paints his dystopia in the practical terms of living and working – especially living – and how the simplest comforts denied are the instruments of repression. Everything is decaying:
The reality was dingy, decaying cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of
He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-story houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat holes. There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alleyways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers – girls in full bloom, with crudely lip-sticked mouths, and youths who chased girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years’ time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and the scattered at angry tells from their mothers. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. 70.
For Orwell, as for my developer friend, a slum can be a low-cost prison. Victory Mansions’ rooms are little different from prisons – in fact, his descriptions of being in prison are roughly the same as Victory Mansions, where you are the prisoner and ‘they’ are the jailers:
Big Brother is watching you
A prison is a place of no privacy – as O’Brien puts it, we shall meet in the place where there are no shadows.
Winston kept his back to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste – this was
In a prison, your schedule is not your own. You rise on their schedule, you work on their schedule, you eat and sleep on their schedule, you do what they want:
The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes [… ] Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym shoes, had already appeared. “Arms bending and stretching!” she yapped out. […]
“Smith!” screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. “6079 Smith W! Yes, you! Bend lower, please. You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.” Page 34.
If they are the jailers, ‘we’ are the prisoners, and if we are in prison, we are already guilty, so anything more we do is no more than confirming our guilt:
Life as she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a good time: ‘they,’ meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it;’ you broke the rules as best you could. She seemed to think it just as natural that ‘they’ should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught. 109.
Julia: “Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe.”
We read 1984 and it grips us because we all fear it. We fear falling from the ladder of success, falling out of the nest of material possession, falling into begging.
“You see now,” said O’Brien, “that it is at any rate possible.”
“Yes,” said Winston. Page 213
“They do not exist. You do not exist.”
Poverty, in 1984, is a slum, and all its characters live and work there every day.
All but one.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2].
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