The dominant emphasis throughout Orwell's work is on loneliness and exclusion, on the fearful individual in an oppressed world, on the people, in Trotsky's phrase, “swept into the dust bin of history.” Winston Smith, the final embodiment of defeated man, has predecessors in all of Orwell's books: in his impoverished and exploited persona in Paris, London, Wigan and Spain; in Flory, Dorothy Hare, Gordon Comstock, George Bowling and Boxer. Each character attempts, in Chekhov's description of himself as a young man, “to squeeze the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and wake one beautiful morning to feel that he has no longer a slave's blood in his veins but a real man's.”30 And each character struggles against the bondage of their threatening world toward individual freedom and responsibility.
Like the novels of Malraux, Sartre and Camus, Nineteen Eighty-Four expresses our archetypal fears of isolation and disintegration, bestiality, cruelty and dehumanization. Orwell's response to the horrors of contemporary history emphasizes his close relationship to these authors and firmly places him in the tradition described by Victor Brombert: “Europe's dark hours are thus responsible for the emergence of a generation that feels ‘situeé’ and responsible in the face of history—a generation whipped on by the urge to transmute its anguish into action…. Sartre has shown how the awareness of death, the threatened subjection to torture and the systematic will to degrade brought writers to the extreme frontiers of the human condition and inspired them with a … concern for moral issues.”31
Orwell's repetition of obsessive ideas is an apocalyptic lamentation for the fate of man in the age of anxiety. His expression of the political experience of an entire generation gives Nineteen Eighty-Four a veritably mythic power and makes it one of the most influential books of the modern period, even for those who have never read it. As Harold Rosenberg states, “The tone of the postwar imagination was set by Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: since the appearance of that work, [the theme of] the ‘dehumanized collective’ haunts our thoughts.”32 Orwell's particular and distinct contribution to modern English literature is a passionate commitment, a radical sincerity and an ethic of responsibility that ultimately transcends his defeated heroes.
FOURTEEN
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
A Novel of the 1930s
This essay was first read at a conference on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four at the Library of Congress in Washington in 1984. It was then published in a book that also included heavy hitters like Alfred Kazin and Denis Donoghue. I wrote that Orwell's statements about the future were not prophecies, but descriptions of the past. Though he failed to predict many events, he was impressively accurate about the emergence of three hostile superstates engaged in permanent but inconclusive warfare. The novel is at once a warning about the future, a satire on the present, and an ironic parody of the literary and political themes of the 1930s.
The Anschluss, Guernica—all the names
At which those poets thrilled or were afraid
For me meant schools and schoolmasters and games;
And in the process someone is betrayed.
Donald Davie, “Remembering the Thirties”
I
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a projection of the future that is based on a concrete and naturalistic portrayal of the present and the past. Its originality is rooted in a realistic synthesis and arrangement of familiar materials rather than in prophetic and imaginary speculations. The numerical title is thought to be a reversal of the last two digits of the year in which the book was completed (1948), but it was probably influenced by Yeats’ poem “1919” and certainly inspired Alberto Moravia's 1934, Anthony Burgess's 1985 and Arthur Clarke's 2001. If the novel had been completed a year later and the title transposed to 1994, we would have had to wait another ten years for the momentous revaluation of Orwell's work. It is notoriously difficult to predict the future accurately in a world that is rapidly transformed by technology. Who could have imagined 1949 in 1914? How precisely can we imagine 2019 in 1984?
Most of Orwell's statements about the future were not prophecies but descriptions of events that had already taken place. He looked backward in time as much as he looked forward. The portrayal of Airstrip One reflects the defeated and hopeless air of postwar London. Britain had won the war but suffered a loss of colonies and an economic decline that made the country seem worse off than its defeated enemies. The ruined, squalid and depressing postwar city was vividly portrayed by Wyndham Lewis in Rotting Hill (1951). When Lewis returned to London in 1945, after six years of exile in North America, he found himself in “the capital of a dying empire—not crashing down in flames and smoke but expiring in a peculiar muffled way.”1 In 1948, the year Orwell completed his novel, Russia—recently an admired ally—had taken over all of Eastern Europe and was actively threatening the West. In that year Gandhi was assassinated, Jan Masaryk was killed (or killed himself), Yugoslavia was expelled from the Comintern, the Berlin airlift began, Count Bernadotte was murdered in Palestine and civil war raged in China. “It was the coup in Czechoslovakia” in 1948, writes Irving Howe, “that persuaded many people that there could be no lasting truce with the Communist world.”2
Orwell failed to predict urban guerrillas, ecological problems, oil shortages, genetic engineering, organ transplants, computers, sophisticated spy equipment, spaceships, satellites, nuclear submarines, intercontinental missiles and the hydrogen bomb, as well as the dissolution of empire and the postcolonial era that followed the Second World War. England and America today bear no significant resemblance to Oceania. Yet his very act of prophecy tended to induce its own fulfillment, for readers have adopted his terms and sought his portents. In the year 2000, as surely as we are now watching for Orwellian omens, masses of new believers will be standing on mountain tops waiting for the apocalypse at the end of the second millennium.
But Orwell did predict, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, three hostile superstates (America, Russia and China; or NATO, the Warsaw Pact and the nonaligned countries) engaged in permanent but limited and indecisive warfare. He said that they would use conventional weapons, that the war would be confined to peripheral territories (Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia) and that there would be no invasion of the homeland of the principal powers.3 The Vietnam War was a classic example of America and Russia supporting foreign armies in an alien battleground. The ruthless suppression of personal freedom, the rigid indoctrination and the widespread elimination of hostile elements during the cultural revolution in China, the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and the Khomeini autocracy in Iran have made Nineteen Eighty-Four a reality in our own time. But the horror of the Gulag Archipelago, which in 1948 had existed for nearly two decades, is far worse than anything portrayed by Orwell. Russia, like Eurasia in 1948, still is a totalitarian power opposed to the West.
II
Nineteen Eighty-Four is composed of five poorly integrated elements. Orwell would have artistically refined and perfected them if he had not been desperate to finish the book before his death. He was terminally ill when he wrote the novel, had great difficulty completing it and tried to make his task easier by repeating what he had written in his previous books. Orwell usually wrote clear drafts of his work, but more than half of the typescript of Nineteen Eighty-Four was crossed out and completely rewritten.4
The five elements are (1) a conventional Orwellian novel of poverty, frustrated love and flight to the countryside for solitude and sex; (2) a satire on conditions in postwar England; (3) an anti-Utopian projection of an imaginary political future; (4) an almost detachable didactic argument in Goldstein's testament and the appendix on Newspeak; and (5) (the least successful and most horrible part) a portrayal of the torture and pain that are used to suppress political freedom—clearly based on his knowledge of Nazi extermination camps and his personal experience in sanatoria during 1947–48. The novel is artistically flawed because each element has a different novelistic and political purpose. How, then, do we account for the great strength of the novel, for the
source of its overwhelming impact?
I have argued elsewhere that Nineteen Eighty-Four was influenced by Swift, Dostoyevsky, Zamyatin and Trotsky; was a culmination of all the characteristic beliefs and ideas expressed in Orwell's works from the Depression to the Cold War; was a paradigm of the history of Europe for the previous twenty years; and expressed the political experience of an entire generation. I would now like to show that if we read Nineteen Eighty-Four in its cultural context—the literature of the 1930s—we can see how Orwell's various elements are connected by a unified theme. His novel is a collective text that abstracts and synthesizes all the regular and recurring elements of Thirties literature. It explains the world of 1948—and by extension of 1984—by describing the conditions and ideologies that led to the Second World War.5 In Nineteen Eighty-Four the 1930s were the prerevolutionary past, the final phase of capitalism that led to atomic warfare, revolution, purges and the absolutism of Big Brother. Nineteen Eighty-Four is about the past as well as about the future and the present.
The past is one of the dominant themes of the novel. The Party confidently believes: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The Party can not only change the past but can also destroy it and authoritatively state: “it never happened.”6 By creating a new as well as destroying the old past, the Party can also arrange to predict events that have already taken place. Winston spends a great deal of time conversing with the proles, trying to recall and reestablish the personal and historical past that has been officially abolished, for he believes that the past may still exist in human memory. When Winston plots with O’Brien, they drink “To the past.” O’Brien gravely agrees that the past is more important than the future because under a system of organized lying only a remembrance of the past can prevent the disappearance of objective truth.
Orwell's ideas about the capacity of language to express complex thoughts and feelings, to describe the dimensions of experience with accuracy and honesty, are central to Nineteen Eighty-Four. These ideas originate in Winston's desire to rediscover his own past—in his dreams and his diary—and are contrasted to Ampleforth's enthusiastic creation of Newspeak. In pursuing these thoughts about language, Orwell joined the literary debate about modern prose.
The Newspeak tendency to reduce the language, to limit the meaning and to reject abstract words was originally a positive aspect of modern prose that developed just after the Great War. Hemingway, who began his career as a journalist, was fascinated by the language of telegraphic cables that resembles the messages sent to Winston's desk at the Ministry of Truth: “speech malreported africa rectify.” Hemingway told his colleague Lincoln Steffens: “Stef, look at this cable: no fat, no adjectives, no adverbs—nothing but blood and bones and muscle. It's great. It's a new language.”7 Influenced by Ezra Pound, Hemingway came to believe: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”8
Like Robert Graves, John Dos Passos, Erich Remarque and other writers who had served in the Great War, Hemingway learned to distrust patriotic rhetoric. In A Farewell to Arms he wrote: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain…. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”9 The abstractions were lies. Only the concrete places where men had fought and died had any dignity and meaning. The bitter disillusionment of the Great War is connected to the betrayal of principles in Nineteen Eighty-Four by Winston's prophecy of doom: “We are the dead,” which is repeated by Julia and reaffirmed by the telescreen when they are arrested. For Winston's grim phrase is an ironic echo of an accusatory line, spoken by a corpse, from John Macrae's popular poem of the First World War, “In Flanders Fields”:
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.10
In the Thirties, this need to reject meaningless abstractions was combined with the desire to find a basic vocabulary and create a proletarian literature. Though Hemingway's short words, limited vocabulary and declarative sentences, his bare, clear and forceful style, had a salutary effect on modern prose, he was criticized by Wyndham Lewis in “The Dumb Ox” for choking off the possibilities of thought: “Hemingway invariably invokes a dull-witted, bovine, monosyllabic simpleton … a super-innocent, queerly-sensitive, village-idiot of a few words and fewer ideas.”11 Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrates how the modern tendency to reduce language to its essential meaning can, when carried to the extremes of Newspeak, make the expression of unorthodox opinions almost impossible.
Orwell's essay “Politics and the English Language” demonstrates the connection between inaccurate expression and dishonest thought. It debunks political pomposity, criticizes fuzzy thinking and shows the corruption that comes from the use of clichés, hackneyed diction and dead language. Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, criticizes the opposite tendency to oversimplify language so that it limits the range of human expression. While expounding the principles of Newspeak and creating the brilliant neologisms that have taken a permanent place in our speech (Big Brother, Thought Police, Doublethink, Facecrime, Vaporized, Unperson), Orwell also predicted the radical deterioration of language and the perversion of meaning. In our time, the influence of technology, bureaucracy, television and journalism has debased the language. Dangerous euphemisms have diminished the reality of all unpleasant concepts: prison, torture, war, disease, old age and death. Vague but condemnatory words—Communist, Fascist, racist, sexist—have been indiscriminately attached to anything that anyone dislikes. Orwell would have deplored the primacy of visual over verbal media in our culture—television and video over books and magazines—and the corruption of language by computer jargon. All these tendencies have produced words that seem to be written on a typewriter by a typewriter.
III
Many of the characteristic literary themes of the Thirties appear in Nineteen Eighty-Four: schools, cinema, advertising and propaganda, public issues, self-deception, Marx and Freud, violence and war. And aspects of Orwell's reportage—his anatomy of Burma, France and England in the 1930s in “A Hanging,” “How the Poor Die,” and The Road to Wigan Pier—are incorporated in Nineteen Eighty-Four to provide the documentary basis of the future world.
The writers of the 1930s had intense feelings about the conventions and codes of schools and schoolboys, which were often based on their personal experiences as both teachers and pupils. The headmaster became the embodiment of social and political power, and the austerity and sadism of the school were contrasted to the civility and kindness of the home. Auden expressed this theme when he wrote: “The best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I lived in a Fascist state.”12 Anthony West, who described his own horrible schooldays in the autobiographical novel Heritage, was the first to notice that “most of these [terrors], in Nineteen Eighty-Four, are of an infantile character, and they clearly derive from the experience described in Such, Such Were the Joys. … What he did in Nineteen Eighty-Four was to send everybody in England to an enormous Crossgates to be as miserable as he had been.”13
Nineteen Eighty-Four explores the complex mixture of nostalgia, fear and self-hatred that Orwell felt when writing about his school days. By drawing on these intense early experiences, he convincingly portrays the psychological effects of totalitarian oppression: isolation, enforced group activities, physical discomfort, desire to suck up to those in power, lack of identity and feelings of guilt. The physical exercises, sexual propaganda, songs, processions, banners and drills all derive from school. Parsons, who resembles a large boy, is an athletic Hearty. Winston dislikes Julia at first “because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her.” Even Winston's compulsive re
petition of “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his diary recalls the lines written out as punishment at school.
Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects the 1930s ritual of cinema-going and the cult of film stars, the interest in advertising and the use of propaganda. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock hates the movies and seldom goes there. But a recurring image in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the bombing of Jewish refugees in the Mediterranean which Winston sees at the cinema on April 3, 1984. Several hundred victims are killed when a rocket bomb falls on a crowded film theater in Stepney, East London. The obligatory Two Minutes Hate, with Goldstein as the star performer, is projected on a gigantic telescreen before a hysterical anti-Semitic audience.
Winston dimly recalls an advertisement for wine in which “a vast bottle composed of electric lights seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass.” Virtually all the Outer Party members are swallowers of slogans: “War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Strength.” (Should not it logically be “Ignorance is Wisdom”?) As in a modern political campaign, the head of Big Brother (whose image is an amalgam of Stalin and Kitchener) appears “on coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet—everywhere.”
The writers of the Thirties dealt with public themes. It was a decade of economic depression throughout the world; massive unemployment and poverty; the misery of democracies and the rise of Fascism; wars in Manchuria, Ethiopia and Spain; the Nazi seizure of territory in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Russia experienced the forced collectivization of the Kulaks (1929–33), the Ukraine famine (1933), the exile and the murder of Trotsky (1940) and the Great Purge Trials (1936–38). Writers fared badly under totalitarianism; Mayakovsky, Babel and Mandelshtam were killed during Stalin's regime. The decade of hatred between the Nazis and the Communists culminated in profound disillusionment with the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact (August 1939), which was repudiated by Germany's invasion of Russia (June 1941). This abrupt alteration of political alliances was portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four when “it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy…. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.”
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