Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  As in 1930s literature, intellectuals in Nineteen Eighty-Four lie to support their cause and protect their own position, and agree to accept and practice immoral acts. Orwell once condemned Auden for his phrase “the necessary murder.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four O’Brien asks Winston: “If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face—are you prepared to do that?” and he unhesitatingly answers: “Yes.” In both the 1930s and in Nineteen Eighty-Four the ruling class betrays the principles of the revolution; and the deceivers are themselves deceived.

  The committed writers of the 1930s developed a new moral awareness and literary strategy to deal with the dreadful conditions of the time. They became socially and politically conscious and abandoned private art for public communication. They adopted a new tone and rhetoric in which to express their new convictions and often embraced Left-wing or Communist ideology. The two main intellectual influences of the Thirties, Marx and Freud, are faithfully reflected in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Marxist dialectic, expressed in Trotsky's style, appears in the forbidden tract, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Winston embraces the Marxist belief: “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles.” His hope is not based on their real or theoretical virtue, but on the fact that they comprise eighty-five percent of the population and are the only force that seems strong enough to overthrow the Party. But the proles lack a Marxist political awareness and a desire to revolt against oppression.

  Orwell suggests a Freudian interpretation of Winston's dreams to depict his inner life. They concern Winston's guilt about the sacrificial death of his mother, which foreshadows his betrayal of Julia. Winston realizes that the political hysteria stirred up by the Two Minutes Hate is an emotional outlet for “sex gone sour.” And the last line of the children's poem, which he has been vainly trying to remember, is supplied by the voice on the telescreen when he and Julia are arrested in their secret bedroom. The line suggests the threat of castration after sexual pleasure: “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”

  In the Thirties violence was used to achieve political ends. The strong dictator replaced God as the omnipotent figure and ruled with absolute and intimidating power. There were constant threats of bombing civilians and of global war. Gordon Comstock eagerly awaits this destruction in Keep the Aspidistra Flying; George Bowling dreads it in Coming Up for Air. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the rocket bombs are fired on the people by their own government in order to arouse continuous hatred of the enemy. The confrontation of Communism and Fascism in Spain was, for most intellectuals, their first real experience in politics and warfare. Auden and Spender attended propaganda conferences in Spain; Hemingway and Koestler went as journalists; Francis Cornford and Julian Bell were killed. But of all the major writers involved in the war, only Orwell fought as a common soldier, was seriously wounded and survived to record his experiences. He came from the generation which had failed The Test by being too young to participate in the Great War, but he brilliantly passed The Test in Spain. Orwell (and his wife) knew from personal experience what it felt like to be hunted by the secret police. His honesty and integrity shine through Nineteen Eighty-Four as they did in the literary personae of the more openly autobiographical works of the Thirties. All his books project what Malcolm Muggeridge has called “his proletarian fancy dress, punctilious rolling of his cigarettes, his rusty laugh and woebegone expression and kindly disposition.”14

  IV

  Orwell not only evokes the past era of the Thirties to explain the evolution of 1948 into Nineteen Eighty-Four, but also ironically reverses the dominant political themes of the period: homosexuality, frontiers, spies, technology, Mass Observation, change of consciousness, collective action, justification of Communism and intellectual polarities. Winston affirms Orwell's own commendable heresies of the 1930s: his refusal to adopt the orthodoxy of the Left about the socialist intelligentsia in England (criticized in The Road to Wigan Pier) and about the Communist Party in Spain (condemned in Homage to Catalonia). Nineteen Eighty-Four contains two opposing strains: Orwell's truthful revelations about the horrors of both Fascism and Communism, and his despair about the destruction of the hopes and ideals of the Thirties.

  The homosexual theme—founded on adolescent love affairs in school, portrayed as a protest against the oppressive educational system and idealized in poems like Auden's “Lay your sleeping head”—becomes perversely twisted in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston's intense attachment to O’Brien takes on homosexual overtones and verges on sexcrime. (When tortured, Winston freely but falsely admits he is a sexual pervert.) When he first comes to his hero's flat, “A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston towards O’Brien.” When O’Brien tortures him to the point of lunacy and death, “It made no difference. In some sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates.” And just before he faces his final degradation in Room 101, “The peculiar reverence for O’Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy, flooded Winston's heart again.” Like the young favorite of the Head Boy at school, Winston vacillates between craven submission and a lust for vicarious power.

  O’Brien's Irish name may have been inspired by the surname of Orwell's first wife, Eileen O'shaughnessy, by her brother Dr. Eric Lawrence O'shaughnessy (who had the same Christian name as Orwell) and by Eric's wife, Dr. Gwen O'shaughnessy. The name may have expressed Orwell's fears about the power, domination and sexual demands of women, which the passive Winston is scarcely able to deal with. Eileen, as closely attached to her brother as to her husband, was deeply grieved by Eric's death at Dunkirk in 1941. Both Eric and Gwen O'shaughnessy treated Orwell for tuberculosis in the 1930s. Orwell may have transferred his antagonism from the doctors—who seemed to be torturing him while trying to cure him during the unsuccessful treatment with streptomycin in 1948—to the authoritarian figure of O’Brien. While curing Winston of Thoughtcrime, O’Brien destroys his body exactly as the doctors had done.

  The map, the frontier and the geographical context were recurrent metaphors in the poetry of Auden and his followers. The marked increase of this imagery coincided with the obsolescence of the frontier, which was easily overrun by tanks, planes and modern armies. (Goldstein declares: “The main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.”) Orwell sets his novel in a global context by describing two vast land masses that are alternately opposed to and aligned with Oceania. A Flying Fortress lies between Iceland and the Faroes in the north; victories are announced on the Malabar front in the south; and the permanent land wars take place in the rough quadrilateral covered by Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong. Julia gives Winston precise directions to their secret meeting place “as though she had a map inside her head.” Orwell is also concerned, more profoundly than the Thirties writers, with the inner psychic frontier at which man can be broken and made to betray.

  In the literature of the 1930s spies secretly cross the frontier and operate independently against the alien population. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Goldstein is said to control spies and saboteurs; but the real Spies (the name of a youth group) work in the home against their own parents. Parsons, the most enthusiastic Party hack, is proud of the fact that his daughter has betrayed him for uttering “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep (another example of the Freudian unconscious at work). All the principal characters in the novel are either arrested (Winston, Julia, Parsons, Syme, Ampleforth) or work for the Thought Police (O’Brien, Charrington, Parsons’ daughter).

  The Thirties writers, following the Italian futurists, were fascinated by modernism, airplanes and technological advance. Auden liked industrial landscapes and advocated “New styles of architecture, a change of heart.” Orwell, who “loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future,”15 opposed modern change and longed for the familiar cosiness of the decent past. In Nineteen Eighty-Four a dehumanized London is called Airstrip One and hovering helicopters snoop into people's windo
ws. Technology either breaks down and causes chaos or operates efficiently and leads to repression.

  The characteristic mode of social inquiry in the 1930s was Tom Harrisson's Mass Observation, which “tried to understand social behavior by accumulating disparate [factual] observations about what given groups of people were doing.”16 This is also ironically reversed in Nineteen Eighty-Four where Mass Observation is a mode of surveillance carried on by the Thought Police to identify and vaporize potential opponents of the regime.

  The writers of the 1930s advocated a change of heart and new awareness that would lead to revolutionary commitment. In Nineteen Eighty-Four there is also an alteration of consciousness and a commitment to the revolution—but of an entirely different kind. In the last part of the novel, O’Brien tortures Winston—using a process that resembles electroconvulsive therapy—in order to humiliate him and destroy his powers of reasoning. He makes Winston believe that 2 + 2 = 5, forces him to betray Julia, crushes him until he loves Big Brother.

  The idea of collective action was a major preoccupation of the Thirties. Writers were concerned with relating the public and private dimensions of their lives, with creating a Popular Front, with establishing a secure defense against Fascism by immersing themselves in the collective security of the Soviet Union. In the 1930s there “was an attempt to deny utterly the validity of individual knowledge and observation.”17 Unlike most writers of the 1930s, Orwell (who had served as part of a unit in the Burma Police) rejected the idea of collective action and almost always stood alone. The only group he ever joined—the Anarchists in Spain—were an underdog minority, destined for destruction. Like all left writers of the Thirties, Orwell hoped for a new social order; but he did not believe that Communism would help mankind progress toward that goal. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the Party embodies the collective mind and all members are forced to participate in communal activities. Winston, locked in loneliness, becomes a lunatic, a minority of one, the only man still capable of independent thought. He is “The Last Man in Europe” (the original title of the book) precisely because he adheres to the importance of the individual mind. Orwell shows that totalitarianism paradoxically intensifies solitude by forcing all the isolated beings into one overpowering system.

  Thirties writers idealized and justified the Soviet Union—even after the transcripts of the Purge Trials had been published and the pact with Hitler signed. They argued that any criticism of Russia was objectively pro-Fascist. This belief was carried to a typically ludicrous extreme in a line of Day Lewis’ “The Road These Times Must Take”: “Yes, why do we all, seeing a communist, feel small?” Winston feels small when he sees O’Brien, not only because he admires and loves him, but because he craves O’Brien's power (“The object of power is power”) and is reduced by his torture to a rotten, suppurating cadaver who resembles “a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston's physical disease symbolizes his intellectual “illness”: his heretical hatred of the prevailing ideology.

  Finally, the political conditions of the 1930s led to an intellectual polarity between catastrophe and rebirth, a contrast between economic and industrial collapse and revolutionary hope for the future, a belief in the destruction of the old social order for the sake of a new Communist world. Nineteen Eighty-Four combines and transforms these polarities. The revolution is followed by betrayal and repression, catastrophe leads only to catastrophe, the new order is far worse than the old. In Orwell's novel, the “endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties” are attributed to Eurasia (or Eastasia), but they actually take place in Oceania.

  After the Second World War, the destruction of much of England, the reaffirmation of the class system and his own long illness, Orwell realized that the totalitarian states he had written about in his essay on James Burnham had come into permanent existence. The ideas of the 1930s had led to the chaos of postwar Europe and his hopes had been destroyed. Orwell's disillusionment and disease help to account for the political ideas and the artistic flaws of the novel. Nineteen Eighty-Four 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 Thirties. The past, as a theoretical concept and a historical reality, is crucial to the meaning of the novel. “The best books, [Winston] perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.”

  FIFTEEN

  MISERIES AND SPLENDORS OF SCHOLARSHIP

  Bernard Crick and Peter Davison were both at the Library of Congress conference, and their personalities accurately reflected their work. My third essay on Nineteen Eighty-Four contrasted Crick's poorly annotated and factually inaccurate edition of the novel with Davison's masterful facsimile edition (both 1984). Crick was completely out of his depth as a literary critic and there was nothing original in his overlong introduction, written in his typically turgid style. Davison's work revealed Orwell's working methods and enabled readers to see the genesis of the novel.

  Wyndham Lewis's prescient political study, The Art of Being Ruled (1926), which would have been a brilliant title for Orwell's novel, begins with similar premises but arrives at quite different conclusions. Written a few years after the Russian Revolution and the Fascist coup in Italy, Lewis's book, like Orwell's, combines satire, political theory and prophecy. Lewis (who lived in Canada during World War II, taught at Assumption College and wrote his greatest novel, Self Condemned, about Toronto) sees the postwar world divided between the democratic and dictatorial forms of government: “The principal conflict to-day, then, is between the democratic and liberal principle on the one side … and on the other the principle of dictatorship of which Lenin was the protagonist and first great theorist.” Because the masses are manipulated by the media—“The contemporary Public [is] corrupted and degraded into semi-imbecility by the operation of this terrible canon of press and publicity technique”—Lewis rejects force as a passing and precarious thing and cynically insists that thought control, getting “inside a person's mind and changing his very personality, is the effective way of reducing him and making him yours.”

  In contrast to Orwell, Lewis, the intellectual elitist, asks: “Instead of the vast organization to exploit the weaknesses of the Many, should we not possess one for the exploitation of the intelligence of the Few?” Lewis maintains that the strong ruler is justified in outraging the most elementary principles of freedom because the masses (Orwell's proles) are happier when they are dependent rather than independent. Since Lewis concludes, like Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor and Orwell's O’Brien, that men are essentially weak and crave authority, not freedom, he inevitably recommends a totalitarian form of government: “We should naturally seek the most powerful and stable authority that can be devised…. All the humbug of a democratic suffrage, all the imbecility that is so wastefully manufactured, will henceforth be spared…. The disciplined fascist party in Italy can be taken as representing the new and healthy type of ‘freedom.’ … For anglo-saxon countries as they are constituted to-day some modified form of fascism would probably be the best.”

  The heart of Bernard Crick's introduction, the “Seven Satiric Thrusts” of Nineteen Eighty-Four, includes three of the themes mentioned by Lewis: the division of the world, the mass media as agents of prolerization, and power hunger and totalitarianism; and adds four others: betrayal by the intellectuals, the degradation of language, the destruction of truth and the theses of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution (1941). The first, third, fourth and sixth of these points were mentioned in Orwell's letter to H. J. Willmett of May 18, 1944 (printed as Appendix B) and repeated in Orwell's unused introduction to Animal Farm, “Freedom of the Press,” first published in 1972. So there is nothing at all original in Crick's argument, which fails to distinguish between the true objects of Orwell's satire (points 2–6) and the ideas he borrows from Burnham (points 1 and 7). Crick's statement
that the novel is “best read as Swiftian satire” repeats an idea stated by V. S. Pritchett, Herbert Read and Czeslaw Milosz when the book first appeared; his assertion that it is “deeply rooted … in contemporary conditions” echoes the argument in my Reader's Guide to George Orwell (1975).

  It is an excellent idea to bring out a scholarly edition of a modern novel (as Cambridge University Press is doing with the work of D. H. Lawrence) when it is relatively easy to recreate the context and elucidate the contemporary references. Crick is good on relating Orwell's essays and reviews of the 1940s to the ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and revealing the conscious parody of catechism and communion when Winston visits O’Brien's flat. But his edition, directed at students and teachers (if any can afford the steep price of this volume) is more likely to confuse than to edify.

  Crick, a political scientist, is completely out of his depth as a literary critic. He states, for example, that “Lear's eyes were ground out by the boot of his daughter's husband.” But it is Gloucester—not Lear—who is blinded by Cornwall. There is no clear logic or structure in his 136-page introduction. He discusses Orwell's intentions, which should have come first, after the contemporary reception, which should have come last. The “contemporary reception” covers exactly the same ground as my George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975); Crick mentions eleven of the fifteen writers that I discuss on pages 24–27 of my book, but he does not cite this work except to quote one essay that I translated from German. Long-winded and unbearably repetitious, Crick tediously reiterates dozens of points. His turgid and sometimes senseless style—in contrast to Orwell's clarity, precision, vigor and wit—makes the reader feel as if he were crawling through a swamp. Crick is fond of clichés like “red herring” and “there is many a slip between the cup and the lip”; and he writes that Orwell “was making notes, on what proved to be his death bed (a fact which was, indeed, a possibility to him at the time, but far from a certainty).”