Conclusion
When Self reads 1984, he is attracted to the world it
depicts: "A no-frills setup, run without sentiment, snobbery, or cultural [100]
favouritism, Airstrip One seemed like my kind of town. (I saw myself as an idealistic
young corporal in the Thought Police)" (207). The reader familiar with Orwell's
savage satire will note that Self already lives in a version of Airstrip One. The
totalitarian state of Oceania is dedicated to reducing human freedom and choice by
steadily narrowing the range of thought.
In the mass-mediated commodity culture Self has temporarily thrived
in, advertising and film have engendered a similar effect. Like Winston Smith, the doomed
hero of 1984, Self spends most of his narrative discovering that he is
trapped--not by a totalitarian state, but in the prison of a debased private culture.
"I sometimes think I am controlled by someone," Self says late in his narrative.
"But he's not from out there. He's from in here" (305). Near the end of 1984,
Winston Smith is led away to "Room 101," where he is threatened with torture and
loses his last shreds of freedom and dignity. It is no accident that Self's expensive New
York hotel room, arranged for him by Fielding, has the same number. 22
Among other things, Money represents a narrative
representation of the "shock experience" that the Marxist writer Walter Benjamin
saw typifying modern urban life. Writing in the 1920s, Benjamin foresaw the destruction of
what he called the space of contemplation by the forces of modernity, in particular the
aggressive, inescapable influence of advertising and its technological ally, film.
"The most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It
abolishes the space where contemplation moved and all but hits us between the eyes with
things as a car, growing to gigantic proportions, careens at us out of a film
screen."23
John Self, who made himself through advertising, who has a
"screening-room inside my head" (304), is the embodiment [101]
of modernity as Benjamin conceives it. He careens at us from the pages of his narrative,
recording the spectacle of his life careening out of control. "At sickening speed I
have roared and clattered, I have rocketed through my time, breaking all the limits, time
limits, speed limits, city limits, jumping lights and cutting corners, guzzling gas and
burning rubber, staring through the foul screen with my fist on the horn" (288). The
word "screen" here has a double significance, referring not just to a windshield
but to the debased cinema of pornography and money that takes up so much room in Self's
imagination. Like modernity, it threatens to crowd out contemplation itself.
