"1984" and "Gravity's Rainbow"

[Campbel Morgan]

Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in
the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the
sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a
Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about
her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as
babies" diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she
was singing in a powerful contralto:

It was only an 'opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of
countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-
section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed
without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a
versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful
rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. 137

She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice
floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a
sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been
perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply
of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years,
pegging out diapers and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious
fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and
spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a
dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only
when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had
anything to sing about. 142

The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate
Song, it was called) had already been composed and was being endlessly
plugged on the telescreens. It had a savage, barking rhythm which
could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a
drum. Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet,
it was terrifying. The proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the
midnight streets it competed with the still-popular "It was only a
hopeless fancy.”
The Parsons children played it at all hours of the night and day,
unbearably, on a comb and a piece of toilet paper. Winston's evenings
were fuller than ever. Squads of volunteers, organized by Parsons,
were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitching banners, painting
posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and perilously slinging
wires across the street for the reception of streamers. Parsons
boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred metres
of bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark. The
heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting to
shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once,
pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone
along with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of
his body what seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.

A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption,
and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier,
three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless
Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his
hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the
gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at
you. The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall,
even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally
apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their
periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the
general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of
people than usual. One fell on a crowded film theatre in Stepney,
burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The whole population
of the neighbourhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral which
went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting …148

paperback Signet Classic






On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 7:42 PM, Robin
Landseadel<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> "A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.”
>
> Sir Thomas Beecham
>
>
> On Jul 29, 2009, at 4:35 PM, Campbel Morgan wrote:
>
>> the young Hamlet giving acting lessons to
>> professional actors, for example.
>
>
>