The Unmentioned

The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried onto the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. ... The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.

...

Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone... He settled deeper into the armchair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity.(Orwell 181, 184-185)

There's obviously a strong conflict between orality and literacy in Orwell's fictional world. What I find even more interesting, however, is the contrast in the story between orality's highly social and ephemeral nature and literacy's ability to give people enduring privacy. If all the theories and studies we've been reading about so far this semester were delivered as fiction rather than nonfiction, I'm sure the result would be something like this.

[Trackback]