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Published in 1948 and set thirty-six years in the fu- ture, 1984 is George Orwell’s dark vision of the fu- ture. Written while Orwell was dying and based on the work of the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin, it is a chilling depiction of how the power of the state could come to dominate the lives of individ- uals through cultural conditioning. Perhaps the most powerful science fiction novel of the twenti- eth century, this apocalyptic satire shows with grim conviction how Winston Smith’s individual per- sonality is wiped out and how he is recreated in the Party’s image until he does not just obey but even loves Big Brother. Some critics have related Win- ston Smith’s sufferings to those Orwell underwent at preparatory school, experiences he wrote about just before 1984. Orwell maintained that the book was written with the explicit intention “to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society they should strive after.”
Author Biography
George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal, India, in 1903, into a middle-class family. The son of a British civil servant, Orwell was brought to England as a toddler. The boy became aware of class distinctions while attending St. Cyprian’s preparatory school in Sussex, where he received a fine education but felt out of place. He was teased and looked down upon because he was
George Orwell
1949
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not from a wealthy family. This experience made him sensitive to the cruelty of social snobbery. As a partial-scholarship student whose parents could not afford to pay his entire tuition, Orwell was also regularly reminded of his lowly economic status by school administrators. Conditions im- proved at Eton, where he studied next, but instead of continuing with university classes, in 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police. Stationed in Burma, his class-consciousness intensified as he served as one of the hated policemen enforcing British control of the native population. Sickened by his role as imperialist, he returned to England in 1927 and resigned his position. He planned to become a writer, a profession in which he had not before shown much interest. In 1928, perhaps to erase guilt from his colo- nial experiences, he chose to live amongst the poor of London, and later, Paris. In Paris, he published articles in local newspapers, but his fiction was re- jected. His own life finally provided the material for his first book, published in 1933. Down and Out in Paris and London, which combined fictional nar- rative based on his time spent in those two cities with social criticism, was his first work published as George Orwell. The pseudonym was used so his parents would not be shocked by the brutal living
conditions described in the book. The next year, Orwell published Burmese Days, a novel based on his stay in Burma. Subsequent novels contain au- tobiographical references and served as vehicles for Orwell to explore his growing political convictions.
In 1936, Orwell traveled to Barcelona, Spain, to write about the Spanish Civil War and ended up joining the battle, fighting against Spanish leader Francisco Franco on the side of the Republicans. Wounded, he returned to England. Two nonfiction books, The Road to Wigan Pier, a report on de- plorable conditions in the mining communities of northern England, and Homage to Catalonia, the story of his participation in the Spanish Civil War, allowed Orwell to explicitly defend his political ideas. Dozens of pointed essays also revealed his political viewpoint.
By that time, Orwell clearly saw himself as a political performer whose tool was writing. He wrote in a 1946 essay, “Why I Write,” that “every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against to- talitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I un- derstand it.”
Orwell’s next book, Animal Farm, a fable about the events during and following the Russian Revolution, was well liked by critics and the pub- lic. He had had trouble finding a publisher during World War II because the work was a disguised criticism of Russia, England’s ally at the time. When it was finally published, just after the war, however, it was a smashing success.
The money Orwell made from Animal Farm allowed him, in 1947, to rent a house on Jura, an island off the coast of Scotland, where he began to work on 1984. His work was interrupted by treat- ment for tuberculosis, which he had contracted in the 1930s, and upon his release from the hospital in 1948 Orwell returned to Jura to complete the book. Under doctor’s orders to work no more than one hour a day, but unable to find a typist to travel to his home, he typed the manuscript himself and collapsed upon completion of the book. For the next two years he was bedridden. Many critics claim that Orwell’s failing health may have influ- enced the tone and outcome of the novel, and Or- well admitted that they were probably right.
Orwell did plan to write other books, accord- ing to his friends, and married while in the hospi- tal, but three months later in 1950 he finally died of tuberculosis.
George Orwell
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crew of stormtroopers who beat Winston and Ju- lia, then hurry them separately away.
Part Three
Winston is tortured in jail—known as the Min- istry of Love—for an interminable length of time. O’Brien is in charge of the torture. Winston con- fesses to various crimes, including his years of con- spiracy with the ruler of Eastasia—one of the three superpowers that are often at war with Oceania. O’Brien explains to Winston that, among other things, Goldstein’s book was in fact a Party cre- ation.
It becomes clear, however, that the purpose of Miniluv is not to produce forced confessions and then kill its victims, but to “cure” the confessors, to enable them to see the truth of their confessions and the correctness of the Party’s doublethink, in which “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” The Party is not content with negative obedience, but must have the com- plete and true belief of all members. No one is ex- ecuted before coming to love Big Brother.
Winston is at length able to persuade himself that the Party is right about everything—that two and two, in fact, make five—but he has not be- trayed Julia, whom he still loves. At last the time comes for that step, and O’Brien sends Winston to Room 101, where each individual’s darkest fear is catalogued. In Winston’s case it is rats. When they threaten him with rats, he betrays Julia.
One last hurdle remains: Winston must come to love Big Brother, for the Party wanted no mar- tyrs, no opposition at all. Winston is released a shell of a man, his hair and teeth gone, his body destroyed. He is given a small job on a committee that requires no real work. He spends most of his time in a bar, drinking oily victory gin. He sees and even speaks to Julia one day, who admits mat- ter-of-factly that she betrayed him just as he be- trayed her. They have nothing more to say to one another.
At last, it is announced over the telescreen in the bar that Oceania has won an important victory in the war. Suddenly Winston feels himself purged, no longer running with the crowd in the street but instead walking to his execution in the Ministry of Love. He can be shot now, for he at last believes. He loves Big Brother.
Characters
Big Brother
Big Brother, the mysterious all-seeing, all- knowing leader of the totalitarian society is a god- like icon to the citizens he rules. He is never seen in person, just staring out of posters and telescreens, looking stern as the caption beneath his image warns “Big Brother Is Watching You.” Big Brother demands obedience and devotion of Oceania’s cit- izens; in fact, he insists that they love him more than they love anyone else, even their own fami- lies. At the same time, he inspires fear and para- noia. His loyal followers are quick to betray any- one who seems to be disloyal to him. Through technology, Big Brother is even able to monitor the activities of people who are alone in their homes or offices. Of course, Big Brother doesn’t really exist, as is clear from the way O’Brien dodges Winston’s questions about him. His image is just used by the people in power to intimidate the citizens of Ocea- nia. Orwell meant for Big Brother to be represen- tative of dictators everywhere, and the character was undoubtedly inspired by Adolf Hitler, Fran- cisco Franco, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung, all of whom were fanatically worshipped by many of their followers.
Mr. Charrington
Mr. Charrington is an acquaintance of Win- ston’s who runs a small antique/junk shop and rents Winston a small room above it. Winston and Julia do not realize he is actually a cold, devious man and a member of the Thought Police. Charrington is responsible for Winston and Julia’s eventual ar- rest.
Emmanuel Goldstein
Emmanuel Goldstein is the great enemy of Big Brother. An older Jewish man with white hair and a goatee, Goldstein is a former Party leader but now the head of an underground conspiracy to over- throw the Party. When his face is flashed on tele- screens, people react to him as if he were the devil himself, frightening and evil. He personifies the en- emy. Winston fears him yet is fascinated by him as well. He thinks Goldstein’s speeches, which are broadcast as a warning against anti-Party thoughts, are transparent and shakes his head at the thought of people less intelligent and more easily led than him being taken in by such revolutionary talk. Yet Winston changes his mind later, and as he reads Goldstein’s revolutionary tract, “The Theory and
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Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” he is more impressed than ever by Goldstein’s ideas.
Goldstein is reminiscent of Leon Trotsky, the great enemy of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin who led an unsuccessful revolt and was later brutally mur- dered by Stalin’s men. It is no accident that he is a Jewish intellectual because dictators Stalin and Adolf Hitler deeply feared and hated the Jewish in- telligentsia.
Julia
At first Winston doesn’t like Julia because she seems like a zealous pro-Party advocate. Moreover, she is also a member of the Anti-Sex League, and deep down Winston resents that he will never be able to have sex with her. However, when he takes her up on her request that they meet privately, Win- ston discovers that Julia is smart and funny and loves sex, and she doesn’t care at all about Big Brother. As for her membership in the Anti-Sex League, she is simply doing what is expected of her in society. A pretty woman with dark hair and freckles, she is basically a simple woman who doesn’t worry about the revolutionary implications of her actions; she does what she does because it feels good and right. She cares little about revolu- tion and even falls asleep when Winston is reading
from Emmanuel Goldstein’s revolutionary tract. Julia is practical as well. For instance, she is dis- creet in arranging her meetings with Winston and warns him that they will eventually get caught. When they are caught, it is Julia who insists that her love for Winston cannot be destroyed, but she betrays Winston more quickly than he betrays her (at least, according to O’Brien), and when they finally meet again she is indifferent to him.
Katharine
Winston’s wife. She was a tall, fair-haired girl, and, according to Winston, remarkably vulgar and stupid. Technically, he is still married to her, though they’ve lost track of each other. They parted ways about ten or eleven years before, after only fifteen months of marriage, when they realized that she could not get pregnant by him. The Party has declared that the only reason for marriage is pro- creation, and in fact it is illegal to have sex simply for pleasure. Therefore, there was no reason for Winston and Katharine to stay together. The Party does not believe in divorce, just separation, so Win- ston and Katharine just sort of drifted apart. Readers only see Katharine through Winston’s memory of her, and her main purpose in the novel
John Hurt and Richard Burton in the film Nineteen Eighty-Four, released, appropriately enough, in
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him. In a way, he seems happy to be confronting him at last.
Syme
Syme, who works in the Research Department of the Ministry of Truth, is a small man with dark hair and large eyes. He is helping prepare a new dictionary of Newspeak which will eliminate even more words from the language. He is so smart and straightforward that Winston knows Syme is des- tined to be purged. Syme’s lack of savvy and self- protectiveness irritates Winston because he knows he is loyal to Big Brother.
Winston’s Mother
Dead for thirty years, Winston’s mother ap- pears only in his dreams of the past. He recalls her as a fair-haired and self-possessed woman. He’s not certain what happened to her, but he thinks she was probably murdered in the purges of the 1950s (rem- iniscent of Joseph Stalin’s infamous purges in Rus- sia, in which large numbers of people simply dis- appeared overnight and were murdered). Winston misses his mother greatly and feels guilty that he survived and she did not. In fact, he has the feel- ing that somehow she gave her life for his.
Themes
Freedom and Enslavement/Free Will
Orwell’s 1984 is set in Oceania, a totalitarian state ruled by a god-like leader named Big Brother who completely controls the citizens down to their very thoughts. Anyone who thinks subversive thoughts can be turned in by spies or by Big Brother, who monitors them through highly sensi- tive telescreens. If someone does not have the proper facial expression, they are considered guilty of Facecrime, so all emotions must be extremely carefully guarded. It is even possible to commit Thoughtcrime by being overheard talking in one’s sleep, which Winston Smith fears will happen to him; it actually happens to his neighbor Tom Par- son. Freedom exists only in the proletarian ghetto, where crime and hunger are commonplace. Win- ston feels he could not live in this ghetto, even though his life is almost as grim as that of the ghetto dwellers.
The punishment for even minor crimes is se- vere, yet people occasionally choose to break the law. The Party knows that people instinctively want to have sex, form loving bonds, and think for them-
selves instead of accepting unquestioningly what- ever the totalitarian government tells them. As long as people choose to exercise free will, the Party must be ever-vigilant against crime and make their punishments severe in order to remain in control.
Appearances and Reality
In totalitarian Oceania, it seems as if everyone is slavishly devoted to Big Brother and believes everything the government tells them. However, as we can understand from Winston’s thoughts, all is not as it seems. Some people secretly feel and be- lieve differently from how they behave; of course, they are extremely careful not to betray themselves. Moreover, the Party is in control of all information and revises history, even yesterday’s history, to re- flect their current version of events. Winston is very much aware of this, because it is his job in the in- accurately named Ministry of Truth to change the records of history. He cannot ignore what he re- members: Oceania was at war with Eurasia and al- lied with Eastasia yesterday, and not vice versa. If anyone else remembers differently, they certainly won’t say so. Only the old man, a powerless prole who lives on the street, speaks about what really happened in the past, but in short and irrelevant snippets about his personal experiences. It is Winston’s need to reconcile what he knows with the Party’s version of reality that leads to his downfall. The Party can- not allow people to have a perception of reality that is different from theirs. As Winston writes in his diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
Loyalty and Betrayal
In order to remain all-powerful, the Party de- stroys loyalty between people: co-workers, friends, even family members. Children are encouraged to betray their parents to the state if they suspect them of Thoughtcrimes (thinking something that goes against the Party line). The Party has outlawed sex for pleasure and reduced marriage to an arrangement between a man and woman that exists only for procreation. Sexual urges must be repressed for fear they will lead to love, human connection, and personal loyalty, all of which threaten the Party. Winston believes that love like the love he and Julia share will eventu- ally destroy the Party, but he underestimates the Party’s ability to destroy that love and loyalty. Win- ston and Julia both give in to torture and betray each other. When they are released, their love and loyalty to each other has been destroyed.
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Because the Party can easily detect Thought- crimes, people always act as if they are completely loyal to the Party. No one trusts anyone else com- pletely. Winston makes fatal mistakes when he trusts O’Brien and Charrington, both of whom be- tray him. His misjudgment is almost understand- able, given the subtle cues both give him to indi- cate that they are fellow subversives. But as it turns out, they are deliberately setting a trap for him and Julia. In the end, no one can be trusted.
Utopia and Anti-Utopia
1984 is clearly an anti-utopian book. As O’Brien tells Winston, the world he and his com- rades have created is “the exact opposite of the stu- pid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imag- ined.” Instead of being a society that is a triumph of human spirit and creativity, the society the Party has created is full of fear, torment, and treachery that will worsen over time. O’Brien gives Winston an image of the future: a boot stomping on a hu- man face, forever and ever. Such a pessimistic vision of the future serves a purpose, as Orwell knew. He wrote 1984 as a warning in order to make people aware that this type of society could exist if trends such as jingo- ism, oppression of the working class, and the ero- sion of language that expresses the vastness of hu- man experience continued. Readers are supposed to see that this is only one possible future, one they must work to avoid. Orwell’s anti-utopian vision captured the horrors of World War II and the fears
of the cold war in the same way that earlier utopian novels, from British author Thomas More’s Utopia to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, captured the hope and self-confidence after the end of the medieval era.
Patriotism
The blind patriotism that fueled the dictator- ships of German leader Adolf Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s in- spired Orwell to write of Oceania and its leader, Big Brother. Just as the Germans fanatically cheered and revered Hitler, treating him as a beloved father, the citizens of Oceania look up to Big Brother as their protector, who will watch over them just as a real brother would. The huge pic- tures of Big Brother that can be found everywhere in Oceania are reminiscent of those of Communist leader Mao Tse-tung displayed by the Chinese. As in real totalitarian regimes, the children of Oceania play a large part in maintaining the loy- alty and patriotism of the citizens. Just as German children joined the scout-like and militaristic Hitler Youth organization, the children of Oceania enjoy wearing their Junior Spies costumes, marching around, and singing patriotic songs. Orwell depicts how sinister it is for a government to use children to promote their policies when he portrays the Par- sons’ children as holy terrors, threatening to de- nounce their parents to the authorities if they don’t give in to their childish demands. In the 1960s, the Chinese under Mao would indoctrinate an entire generation of children to be loyal to the state by taking them away from their parents for long peri- ods in order to insure that the government’s mes- sage could not be contradicted by the children’s parents.
Style
Point of View
Orwell’s 1984 is told in the third person, but the point of view is clearly Winston Smith’s. Through his eyes, readers are able to see how the totalitarian society functions, in particular how an individual deals with having illegal thoughts that can be detected easily by spies and telescreens that monitor one’s every movement. Because readers are in Winston’s head, they make the mistakes he makes in judging people. At one point he looks around a room at work and tells himself he knows just who will be vaporized within the next few years and who will be allowed to live. His percep-
Topics for
Further
Study
- Explain how history is distorted and hidden from the citizens of Oceania. What is the result?
- Discuss how Newspeak works to alter the ex- pression of thoughts in 1984. Give examples from today’s society of institutions and leaders that have used language to distort reality.
- Explain Winston’s feelings about the proletariat, its past, present, and future.
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nately for Winston, this respect does not translate into O’Brien freeing him. O’Brien successfully brainwashes Winston into loving Big Brother. The book ends with an appendix on the de- velopment and structure of the language called “Newspeak.” The appendix is written as if it were a scholarly article, and while it serves to clarify the use of Newspeak in the novel it is interesting to note that the publisher originally wanted to cut it, thinking it unnecessary.
Historical Context
Totalitarianism
In 1948, when Orwell’s 1984 was published, World War II had just ended. One of England’s al- lies had been Russia, which was ruled by a despotic dictator named Joseph Stalin. Stalin ruled with an iron fist, and was famous for his midnight purges: he would round up hundreds of citizens at a time and murder them in deserted areas, much as Ocea- nia citizens are “vaporized.” Stalin’s victims were his imagined enemies, such as political dissidents, artists, or Jews. Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler, in Ger- many, had slaughtered his enemies as well, in the end killing six million Jews plus nine million Slavs, gypsies, political dissidents, homosexuals, and mentally challenged people. Mao Tse-tung in China was fighting for communism against Chi- nese nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek. Mao would finally defeat the nationalists in 1949 and begin a long, oppressive totalitarian regime. Other dictators of the time included Francisco Franco in Spain and Benito Mussolini in Italy. These oppressive rulers controlled citizens through propaganda and violence. This state of affairs prompted Orwell to create Big Brother, the ulti- mate totalitarian leader who dominates all politi- cal, social, and economic activities.
Socialism and Communism
Orwell fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s, supporting the social- ist left. He was not a communist, but a dedicated Democratic socialist who believed that the gov- ernment, not private enterprise, should control the production and distribution of goods, and as such he was greatly concerned about the lives of the poor and working class. All over the world, throughout the twentieth century, working class people had been fighting for better lives. In America, workers fought a long and
hard battle for labor reforms that would eventually include such benefits as job security, safety regu- lation, overtime and hazardous duty pay, vacation and sick days, health insurance, pensions, disabil- ity, and child labor laws, which modern workers sometimes take for granted. Some U.S. and British workers turned to socialism and communism, thinking that perhaps these alternate forms of eco- nomic and social structure would solve their prob- lems. In the late nineteenth century, Karl Marx of Germany proposed that to resolve the gross in- equality between the workers and the bosses, the working class, or proletariat, would have to revolt and establish a new communist regime in which one authoritarian party would control the political and economic systems. He believed workers ought to own their farms and factories and distribute the profits evenly among workers. Here in America, the capitalist factory and mine owners eventually conceded to labor’s de- mands and the socialists and communists were mar- ginalized. This act deferred American workers from revolting against their government. Commu- nist revolutions did occur in Russia and in China, but eventually those countries modified their eco- nomic systems. America’s response to communism was ex- treme during the Cold War era of the 1950s; in fact, many people believed the U.S. government was acting just as oppressively as communist govern- ments were. Under the leadership of Senator Joe McCarthy, the House (of Representatives) Com- mittee on Un-American Activities aggressively at- tacked public figures who were suspected commu- nists, demanding that they name other communists or be blackballed in their industries. Hollywood writers and filmmakers were especially hard hit by the mania and many careers were destroyed before President Truman and public opinion turned against McCarthy and the witch hunt ended. The paranoia that characterized the McCarthy era was similar to the paranoia in 1984, as people were pressured to betray their friends, co-workers, and even parents in order to save themselves. Today, communism still has some followers in the United States and England, as does Democratic socialism, which Or- well embraced wholeheartedly.
Television
Aside from being concerned about labor and government, Orwell was very aware of an impor- tant invention that was just becoming popular after World War II and would eventually be a dominant force in Western culture: the television. The first
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BBC broadcast in Britain occurred in 1937, and TV was first demonstrated to the American public in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair. Television’s popularity grew enormously throughout the 1950s, and today 98% of American households own at least one color television set. Orwell recognized the enor- mous potential of this communication tool, which would soon be in every home. He imagined that the television could one day not only broadcast propa- ganda nonstop but that it could transmit back im-
ages of action in front of the screen, allowing the broadcaster to spy on its viewers.
Critical Overview
When 1984 was published, critics were im- pressed by the sheer power of George Orwell’s grim and horrifying vision of the future. They
Compare
&
Contrast
- 1948: West Berlin, Germany, is blockaded by the Soviets. The Americans begin an airlift to help the stranded Berliners. 1984: The Berlin wall, built in 1961 to keep East Germans from defecting to the West, remains in place. Today: East and West Germany are reunified, after the Berlin wall was taken down in 1990. - 1948/49: Mao Tse-tung battles Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist forces, finally defeating them in 1949 and establishing a totalitarian commu- nist regime. 1984: China has survived the severe cultural purging of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revo- lution in the 1960s. Opened to the West in the 1970s because of President Nixon’s visit in 1972, China is now trading with the West and incorporating some small democratic and eco- nomic reforms. Today: In 1989, students demanding greater economic and civil rights reforms protested in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and were gunned down by Chinese troops. China continues to trade with the West, but its democratic move- ment has been slowed considerably. - 1948/49: In September, 1949, President Truman announces that Russia, too, has the atom bomb, having developed the technology on its own. 1984: In 1991 the Cold War continues as the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States escalates.
Today: On December 8, 1987, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sign an agreement to dismantle all 1,752 U.S. and 859 Soviet nuclear missiles within a 300 to 3,400-mile range. In 1991 the former Soviet Re- public breaks up. American investors are help- ing the Soviets establish new businesses as the Soviets concentrate their attention on revamp- ing their economy.
- 1949: There are one million television sets in the United States and two dozen TV stations. There will be ten million TV sets by 1951, fifty million by 1959.
1984: Eighty-five million U.S. households own a television set. Cable television reaches almost half of those households. Computers start to be- come a household product in the United States with approximately 13% or 516,750 computers owned by consumers.
Today: Ninety-eight percent of U.S. households (95 million homes) own a color television set, 28 percent own three or more televisions, 65 per- cent have cable access. New TV technology on the horizon includes high-definition television. In 1995, over three million people owned a per- sonal computer. Use of a vast computer network, called the Internet, which originated in the 1960s and connects users from over 160 countries to each other via electronic mail, exploded during the 1990s with an estimated count of 20 to 30 million users in mid-1995.
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be a cruel and violent dictator, critics of the time believed that the novel was about the events in the Soviet Union. Some mistakenly believed that by setting the story in England, Orwell meant to crit- icize British socialism, particularly since he names the Inner Party Ingsoc (“ENGlish SOCialism”). Or- well strongly denied this. Then again, some critics saw the novel as a satire of the contemporary so- cial and political scene. Certainly, many of Or- well’s details bear a resemblance to life in London post-World War II. However, over time critics came to realize that Orwell meant the story to be a universal warning about the dangers of any totali- tarian dictatorship.
Criticism
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
In the following essay, Fitzpatrick, an author and doctoral candidate at New York University, maintains that although Orwell’s dystopian vision has not been borne out by Soviet-style communism, the author’s fears about the ability of the state to control people is still a danger in modern society.
George Orwell’s dystopian (a fictional place where people lead dehumanized and fearful lives) vision of the year 1984, as depicted in what many consider to be his greatest novel, has entered the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world more completely than perhaps any other po- litical text, whether fiction or nonfiction. No mat- ter how far our contemporary world may seem from 1984 ’s Oceania, any suggestion of government sur- veillance of its citizens—from the threatened “clip- per chip,” which would have allowed government officials to monitor all computer activity, to New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s decision to place se- curity cameras in Central Park—produces cries of “Big Brother is watching.” Big Brother, the all- seeing manifestation in 1984 of the Party’s drive for power for its own sake, has come to stand as a warning of the insidious nature of government- centralized power, and the way that personal free- doms, once encroached upon, are easily destroyed altogether.
Critics generally agree that the hero of the novel, Winston Smith, may be recognized by his name as related to both the great British statesman and World War II leader Winston Churchill and a non-descript Everyman. However, the point is not
that Winston is a great man, or even that he is one man among many; rather, O’Brien, while torturing Winston, says that if Winston is “a man,” as he claims to think of himself, then he is the last man. In fact this echo of the novel’s original title, The Last Man in Europe, reveals Winston as symbolic of what critic Ian Watt has described as Orwell’s conception of a dying humanism. Whether Winston Smith is truly a humanist, in the classical sense of the term, is of no matter; in comparison to the to- talitarian regime which destroys him, Winston is, in fact, the last embodiment of the human. In con- verting Winston to the love of Big Brother, the last man in Europe is destroyed. Winston maintains, throughout the novel, two avenues of hope for a life outside the confines of the Party and the watchful eyes of Big Brother, a life which may undermine or even overthrow the Party’s hold on Oceania. One of these possibilities is conscious, spoken: the proles. Just as Marx fore- saw, in the nineteenth century, that the Revolution would come from a spontaneous uprising of the proletariat as they shook off the chains of their op- pressors, so Winston writes in his diary that if there is hope, it lies in this 85 percent of Oceania’s pop- ulation that exists outside the confines of the Party. And yet, the impossibility of a proletarian uprising presents itself to him at every turn. Echoing Marx, Winston writes: “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” And, unfortu- nately, he is right; as O’Brien admonishes Winston in the Ministry of Love, “The proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot.” Thus this small bit of hope is crushed. The second possibility remains mostly unspo- ken and unconscious: desire. It is this possibility, the momentary destruction of the Party through in- timate union with another person, which solidifies Winston’s relationship with Julia. Though they are drawn together at first by what seem to be basic animal urges, it is precisely the baseness and the animality of those urges that gives them their lib- eratory potential. As Winston relates earlier, in con- templating the sterility of his relationship with his wife: “The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.” Desire is thoughtcrime in Oceania because it elevates the hu- man, the individual, above the powers of the state to control him. In fact, as Winston and Julia begin to make love for the first time, this piece of re- pressed knowledge becomes conscious; “the ani- mal instinct,” he thinks, “the simple undifferenti-
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ated desire: that was the force that could tear the Party to pieces.” The threat to the Party of the thoughtcrime that desire represents is sufficiently serious that the state must exert formidable control over any such hu- man, instinctual reactions. In his essay “1984: Enigmas of Power,” Irving Howe writes, “There can be no ‘free space’ in the lives of the Outer Party faithful, nothing that remains beyond the command
of the state. Sexual energy is to be transformed into political violence and personal hysteria.” It is this recognition by the Party that there may be no ele- ment of “human nature” which can remain the province of the individual without endangering the Party’s hold on its members that represents the great “advance” of Ingsoc (English Socialism, in Oldspeak) over previous totalitarian regimes. There was always room, notes Howe, in these previous
What
Do I Read
Next?
- Animal Farm (1945) was George Orwell’s 1945 fable about the inevitable course of all revolu- tions. In it, a group of animals revolt against the farmer who is their master and set up their own form of government. The most intelligent ani- mals, the pigs, are in charge, and hopes are high when the animals write their own bill of animal rights. However, over time, these rights are eroded as the pigs begin changing the rules.
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1931) in- fluenced Orwell’s own futuristic novel, 1984. Huxley’s totalitarian state, which exists in Lon- don six hundred years in the future, is less grim than Orwell’s, but its inhabitants are as power- less and oppressed as the citizens of Oceania. Huxley’s characterization and prose is less so- phisticated than Orwell’s, but his novel is funny and fascinating. The inhabitants of his society are controlled from before birth by a handful of elite rulers with sophisticated technology. When a primitive person, the Savage, from outside the society is introduced, he confronts the shallow values of the citizens.
- This Perfect Day by Ira Levin (1970) is another futuristic novel about a totalitarian society with very different values from that of contemporary society. As in Brave New World, citizens dull their pain and fears through drugs and are ge- netically very similar. Those who have genetic differences have a greater tendency to be dis- satisfied with the pacified society, which is con- trolled by a huge computer that dispenses the mood-altering drugs. - The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985) is the story of a woman named Offred, who lives in the Republic of Gilead, an oppres- sive society of the future in which women’s roles are severely limited. - Harrison Bergeron, a satirical story by Kurt Vonnegut, was inspired by Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. Harrison lives in a totalitarian state in the future. He is very intel- ligent—not an advantage in this society—so to “correct” this “defect” and allow Harrison to be as mediocre and middle-of-the-road as his fel- low citizens, doctors plan to perform brain surgery. However, Harrison is whisked away by an elite group that secretly controls all of soci- ety and given a choice: join the rulers and dis- appear from society for good or be lobotomized. - We by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924) influenced George Orwell’s 1984. It, too, is a dystopian novel set in the future, in this case the twenty-sixth century, and features a totalitarian state. This society, called OneState, is ruled by a Big Brother-type dictator called simply Bene- factor, who has scheduled the day of every cit- izen down to the very minute. The narrator, D-503 (all the citizens have numbers, not names), is the designer and builder of a space probe called INTEGRAL and is waiting for the day when he finally has the Great Operation: the lobotomy the government performs to erase the last vestige of each individual’s humanity: the imagination.
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the Prague Spring to the rise of Solidarity in Poland, to the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall, demonstrate that the proletariat, and even party intellectuals, were not completely crushed by Party ideology, and that, in Esslin’s words, “the totalitarian manipula- tion of popular feelings and ideas by the mass me- dia is far less effective than Orwell had imagined.” Nonetheless, by the novel’s end, Big Brother is ultimately victorious, having won over the last man in Europe. In today’s world, Big Brother is still a force, especially to those who worry about the continued possibility of the rise of totalitarian- ism today. However, there is another face to Big Brother, which is precisely that “manipulation of popular feelings and ideas by the mass media” about which Orwell warned. If people find in gov- ernment endless new reasons to be vigilant about the incursions into personal liberties which 1984 depicts, they would do well to remember, as Neil Postman claims in the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, that there is a very different version of the dystopian universe presented in Al- dous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which “no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their au- tonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” Big Brother may not be watching; he might be broadcasting. Source: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, in an essay for Novels for Stu- dents, Gale, 1999.
James E. Davis
In the following essay, Davis argues that, in addition to its literary merits, 1984 should be kept in the high school curriculum for its look at total- itarianism.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four has been challenged on such grounds as profanity, im- morality, and obscenity. It has been charged with being Communistic, containing sex references, and being depressing. Some of these charges are ab- surd, and though some have a grain of truth when items are taken out of context, on the whole the book stands up well and though frequently chal- lenged has a history of rarely being removed from classrooms and libraries. Critics, as well as readers in general, have recognized the book as significant and valuable since its appearance at the end of the 1940s. Some examples: On the dust jacket of the first American edition of Nineteen Eighty-four Bertrand Russell and Alfred Kazin are quoted. Rus- sell states, “ Nineteen Eighty-four depicts the hor-
rors of a well-established totalitarian regime of whatever type with great power and skill and force of imagination.” He adds that it is important that we should be aware of these dangers. Alfred Kazin characterizes the book as “an extraordinary expe- rience … overwhelming in its keenness and prophetic power.” He further comments: “I hardly know which to praise more—Orwell’s insight into the fate of man under totalitarianism, or his com- passion for him.” Reasons for reading and teach- ing Nineteen Eighty-four continue today to be much the same as these critics gave four decades ago. The book does express a mood of near but not complete despair. The mood is despair only if read- ers do not heed the warning of what will happen if we continue on some of our present courses. But we do not have to become soulless automatons. It is not foreordained. The scenario of Nineteen Eighty-four is that atomic wars had started in the 1940s, accelerated ten years later in Russia, West- ern Europe, and North America. This atomic war led the governments (Eurasia, Oceania, and Easta- sia) to conclude that unless atomic wars stopped, organized society would be doomed. Of course, this would also mean the end of governmental power. Thus atomic war stopped, but bombs continued to be stockpiled awaiting the right time to kill a large segment of the world’s population without warn- ing in a few seconds. Orwell portrays this contin- ued military preparedness as essential also for the continuation of the economic system and shows the consequences of a society in a constant state of war readiness, always afraid of being attacked. As Erich Fromm says in the Afterword to the 1961 New American Library paperback, “Orwell’s picture is so pertinent because it offers a telling ar- gument against the popular idea that we can save freedom and democracy by continuing the arms race and finding a ‘stable’ deterrent.” With techni- cal progress geometrically progressing, the caves will never be deep enough to protect us. The novel begins on a bright cold day in April, “and the clocks were striking thirteen.” From there on a world is presented that is permeated by fear and hate with such slogans as HATE WEEK, WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNO- RANCE IS STRENGTH. The society has nothing like our first amendment. Everything is censored by the MINISTRY OF TRUTH. It is even a crime to keep a diary and Winston Smith’s life is endan- gered by doing so. Ironically Winston is employed by the MINISTRY OF TRUTH, and his job is to constantly rewrite history. Government predictions
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which do not come true (and they never do) are made to disappear. And, of course, people have to be made to disappear too (to become nonpersons) if they commit THOUGHT CRIME, which the THOUGHT POLICE are to control. BIG BROTHER affirms that: “Who controls the past controls the future: Who controls the present con- trols the past.” The following extended quotation from the book demonstrates in some detail how this control of the past was accomplished:
As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the cor- rected copy placed in the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, pho- tographs—to every kind of literature or documenta- tion which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been cor- rect; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the mo- ment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed ex- actly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest sec- tion of the Records Department, far larger than the one in which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for de- struction.
A few cubicles away from Winston is Ample- forth, who juggles rhymes and meters, producing garbled versions of poems which have become ide- ologically offensive but for one reason or another are to be retained in anthologies. There is also a whole army of reference clerks who spend all of their time preparing lists of books and magazines to be recalled. There are also huge warehouses where corrected documents are stored and furnaces where original copies are burned.
By controlling all information BIG BROTHER controls responses of citizens, primarily through the giant two-way TV screens in every living space. These permit THOUGHT POLICE to observe all citizens to see that they are responding in a desir- able manner—hating enemies and loving BIG BROTHER. Reality control, DOUBLETHINK in NEWSPEAK, means an “unending series of victo- ries over our memory.”
In Nineteen Eighty-four orthodoxy means not thinking or even needing to think. It is uncon- sciousness. Orthodoxy is to close the book. One of the U.S. Supreme Court justices in the Island Trees case talks about censorship resulting in a “pall of orthodoxy.” One of the functions of literature in a free society is to help protect us from this “pall of orthodoxy.” This book is one of the best examples of a work of considerable literary merit worth read- ing and studying in the classroom as part of a pro- tection program against the orthodoxy pall. It is also a very interesting study of the effects of an or- thodoxy that finally convinces Winston Smith, a party member who opposes the system, that four is five. It takes brain-washing and torture by the MIN- ISTRY OF LOVE to accomplish this convincing. Winston’s final orthodoxy is: “Whatever the Party holds to be true is truth. It is impossible to see re- ality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.” In answer to the question of why this particu- lar novel to study the relationship between totali- tarianism, technology, psychology, and language instead of a social studies, science, or language text, Roy Orgren, writing in the Fall 1983 Connecticut English Journal, says: Simply because, set forth in a work of fiction, the ideas are more accessible, more interrelated, and more engaging; the sheer horror of totalitarianism is more real. We flinch when the truncheon-wielding guards in the MINISTRY OF LOVE crack Winston’s fingers and shatter his elbow; we writhe in our arm- chairs as O’Brien virtually disembodies Winston with electric shocks; we shudder as moist pads are applied to Winston’s temples; and we, like Winston, are dazed by the “devastating explosion,” “the blinding flash of light” which so numbs his mind that he con- sents to seeing—no, actually sees—five fingers when only four are held to him. We are jolted out of our complacency so that it is likely that we will never slacken our vigil against oppression and human rights violations. Orwell, with his presiding interest in language, shows how BIG BROTHER manipulates society and controls reality by corrupting language. NEWSPEAK is calculated to get rid of individual- ity by limiting the range of thought through cutting the choice of words to a minimum. As Syme, the NEWSPEAK expert, says, “You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edi- tion won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.”
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amount of free interchange of ideas, even between master and disciple. Rather, in this new style of di- alogue, one party has the ability to inflict pain on the other party in any degree desired, even while the two proceed to discuss the most abstruse polit- ical questions. Dialogue implies the ability to have one’s mind changed, but in the condition of “con- trolled insanity” which is 1984, communication consists in the imposition of an insane view of re- ality by the strong few upon the weak many, through overwhelming force. O’Brien must “save” Winston, but this is religious salvation turned back- ward, and its purpose is to prevent even one “just man” from existing anywhere in the world, by con- vincing that man that he is insane. “Is it possible that a whole society can be insane?” asked Orwell in one of his essays, speaking of Hitler’s Germany.
Orwell’s 1984 is about religion reversed, law and government reversed, and above all, language reversed: not simply corrupted, but reversed. In the world of 1984, the mad world which Orwell sought by his writing to lead men to avoid —for he was a political activist not interested in simple predic- tion—in this world, which I call Orwell’s “anti- universe,” because of his conversion of all the pos- itives of Western civilization into their negatives, all of the channels of communication are system- atically being closed down, restricted to just the minimums necessary for the technical functioning of society. For Orwell, as for his master, Swift, lan- guage and politics are equivalents, and political corruption is always preceded by linguistic cor- ruption, of which the phrases “two plus two equals five” and “black is white” are only the ultimate log- ical (and mad) projections. Communication will become, if the political tendencies which Orwell saw in the forties continue, not the transmission of meaning, but the attempt to avoid meaning in fur- therance of a political end which we feel must be mad but are unable to prove, even as Winston Smith cannot prove to his tormentor the madness of the Party’s doctrines.
Instead of the Electric Age resulting in a quantum jump in communication, as Professor McLuhan asserts in Understanding Media: The Ex- tensions of Man, when he says that “as electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village,” what McLuhan calls both “cool” and “hot” media have been, in the Orwellian view, dampened down as between individual and individual, and distorted terribly as between the individual and the State. I mention McLuhan not only because his book is cur- rent but also for what I think is his place in the di- rect line of descent from Orwell on the general sub-
ject of communication, and Orwell would have un- derstood what McLuhan was driving at while not agreeing with most of his doctrine. At any rate, the deliberate, managed breakdown in communica- tion—not extension but breakdown—at the lin- guistic level and indeed in all media is one of Or- well’s master themes, as it is such a theme in the Theater of the Absurd, the Beat Generation, the use of the lunatic in literature to convey truth, as in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or the recent hit play, Marat-Sade, and, it may be, in the lan- guage of current underground cultures, such as that of drug addiction or crime. If meaningful communication has less and less chance of conveying impressions in the usual com- munications media, how does Orwell envision communication as taking place in his nightmare world? He does so primarily at the level of the in- fliction of pain. Torture is communication. Worse, to be tortured is not the worst thing in the world, if only the victim is understood by his torturer, as Winston feels he is understood by O’Brien. In the mad world of 1984, all human relation- ships are based on pain, either its infliction or its avoidance. “We are the dead,” says Winston of himself and his mistress, Julia, but just as the Pla- tonic dialogue form has been adapted in 1984 in the torture scenes for satiric purposes, so Orwell has modified the Cartesian cogito to “‘I suffer pain, therefore I am.’” No communication, nor self- definition, nor relation can occur in the Orwellian anti-universe without pain, and in this Orwell fol- lows an important trend in modern literature. If one suffers pain, he is at least certain of being alive. One is reminded, in the relationship between O’Brien and Winston which is the only human re- lationship in 1984 —the Winston-Julia relationship being hollow and merely physical by comparison— of relationships between pairs of characters such as Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov, and while we think of Crime and Punishment , one of the prime pro- genitors of this theme, also Raskolnikov and Por- firy Petrovitch. “Suffering, Rodion Romanovitch, is a great thing,” observes Porfiry, as he invites him to confess. There is the climactic, though brief, re- lationship between Joe Christmas and Percy Grimm—their entire lives having been preparation for this confrontation—in Light in August, when the only way in which Grimm can become a man communicating with another is via an automatic pistol, emptying its magazine through a tabletop into his victim and then castrating him and defin- ing him as the hated Other. There is the relation-
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ship between the former agent provocateur, Rubashov, and the commissar Gletkin in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon which, written a decade before 1984, shows some of the same but is on a cruder level, especially in terms of the dynamics of the power-pain relationship between O’Brien and Win- ston Smith. And in Brecht’s haunting 1927 play, Im Dickicht der Städte, occurs the very sophisti- cated perception of the ambivalent relationship be- tween Shlink, the Malay lumber dealer residing in the Chicago of 1912, and George Garga. “You ob- serve the inexplicable boxing match between two men …,” says Brecht, and he explains it in sexual terms. Shlink explicitly dies the death of Socrates, by poison, sitting upright, even as Winston Smith dies the death of Socrates reversed: spiritually, not physically, by the mastering of his will by that of the Party incarnated in O’Brien. Orwell explains the relationship in ostensibly non-sexual, political dynamics. Brecht uses such communication through pain in many of his plays, especially, I should say, in that between P. Mauler and Joan in St. Joan of the Stockyards, and in the enforced metamorphosis of Galy Gay in A Man’s a Man. This kind of communication only between politi- cal or sexual aggressors and victims is that which Orwell was to dwell on. The Brechtian distinction between sexuality and politics is blurred by Orwell, because he saw the two drives as convertible, each an aspect of the other, in that sexual frustration or hysteria was one of the primary causes of political fanaticism. That human beings can communicate only by inflicting pain on each other, or at any rate that this will be the state of things soon, is a desperate the- sis. Orwell’s life was a consistent development to- ward this frightening perception. But Orwell was, as has been said of Browning, “an ardent and head- strong conventionalist,” who was defining a norm by its opposite, a moral universe by an antiuniverse. Orwell saw human life under the primary philosophical category of relation, and this may be why he was never able to create a “round” charac- ter, even those characters which in the terms of what we know about Orwell’s experience were clearly his own personae, aspects of himself at dif- ferent stages of his life. He is the “I” as a school- boy and the “I” as a Paris plongeur and English tramp in “ Such, Such were the Joys … ” and Down and Out In Paris and London, respectively. Inci- dentally, neither of these purportedly autobio- graphical documents is really the objective truth, as those who knew Orwell have testified; he took his artist’s liberty of arranging the time sequence
in Down and Out in the same way as Thoreau did in Walden, compressing two years of clock time into a single seasonal year, for increased concen- tration of effect. There is the civil servant, Flory, in Burmese Days: Orwell, or rather his portrait of the artist as a young imperialist. Flory shoots him- self, as one imagines Orwell about to do in Burma before he resigned from the Indian Imperial Police. There is Winston Smith as middle middle-class man of the future, whom I have called a member of the Auxiliaries, the Outer Party, in the inverted Platonic Republic which is 1984. There is S. Bowl- ing, the very important member of the English lower-middle class who has sharp perceptions about his society as the result of native wit and his educating himself beyond his class because of ab- surd circumstances in World War I. There is Gor- don Comstock, the literary intellectual of the Eng- lish lower-middle class, who refuses to climb out of his impoverished and unsatisfactory life at first when he has the opportunity; he leads the life of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, re- fusing the shackles of his society, until he is brought to bay by that most fundamental drive: the procreation of the race. Least believable of his char- acters is the antiheroine of A Clergyman’s Daugh- ter —a novel in which we again have the impover- ished middle class, seen through the eyes of a neurotic and repressed woman, and in this portrait we see more than a hint of Orwellian antifeminism. For while Orwell deplored what he saw as the mod- ern denigration of love in favor of sheer power, he recognized power as the greater reality. In each of these characters, essentially the same story—the conflict of an individual with an unsatisfactory, if not mad, society—is told from a somewhat different perspective. But all of them are two-dimensional, and the central focus is not even on society, but on power, the central question of which, as Orwell himself said, was “how to pre- vent it from being abused.” Orwell’s basic moti- vation was to communicate with other social classes, especially with the working class which is as near to a true hero, albeit a collective hero, as he ever developed. And he emphasized the diffi- culties of such communication: for him, bred to an extreme class-consciousness despite himself, the simple step of walking into a working-class pub, incognito, was as hazardous as visiting a tribe of isolated Australian aborigines, and his equivalent of obtaining First Class Honours in P.P.E. at Ox- ford, which he never attended, was his being ac- cepted by English coal miners and Spanish revo- lutionaries in The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage
