1984: Minitruths and Maxiluv
2003 marked the centenary of George Orwell's birth, an anniversary
preluded by Christopher Hitchens' welcome eulogy, Why Orwell Matters
(2002), and consolidated by two new biographies from Gordon Bowker and
D.J. Taylor. Back in 1999, fifty years after the publication of 1984,
the Waterstone's poll for the (pseudo-)millenial novel put it in third
place in tandem with The Lighthouse, behind the winner Ulysses and
runners-up Proust and The Great Gatsby. As is still too often forgotten
- his 1991 biographer Michael Sheldon well calls it his most
misunderstood work - the novel is satire, not prediction. As political
satire, it ranks second only to his own Animal Farm. The "profound and
terrifying" (Lionel Trilling's New Yorker verdict) impression left on
the reader will not be dimmed by nit-picking. Still, to work fully,
satire (like farce) depends upon coherent detail and inner logic.
Writers on Orwell, even admiring ones, tend to disparage his novels, an
attitude encouraged by Orwell himself who, while composing 1984, wrote
(10 May 1948) to Julian Symons, "I am not a real novelist anyway." All
this, plus a re-viewing of Michael Radford's generally excellent film
version with Richard Burton in his last role as O'Brien - the 1954 BBC
effort with Peter Cushing, Yvonne Mitchell, and Andre Morell, which I
remember seeing, now seems forgotten, while Michael Anderson's 1956
abomination, despite the presence of Michael Redgrave, ending with a
defiant Winston Smith (Edmond O'Brien) shouting "Down With Big
Brother", deserves to be - led me back to the book itself and some
consequent ponderings, now (2009) cued in by the 50th anniversary of
1984's publication.
Is there anything new to say? The Sunday Telegraph (18 May 2003)
recently came up with a pseudo-novelty, the 'revelation' that Orwell
thought he had killed a fellow pupil at Eton through voodoo. The source
given is a letter by his school friend, the great Byzantine historian
Sir Steven Runicman. In fact, a version of this story was given by
Shelden (pp.65-6), who takes it from the 1956 Orwell biography by
Christopher Hollis.
How Orwell would have laughed at this! But Runciman, with whom Orwell
kept in post-school touch, might have a more real relevance to 1984.
Namely, its opening sentence with the clocks famously striking
thirteen. It may not be easy to visualise a 24-hour clock dial, much
less the one later mentioned on Winston's wrist-watch. Yet Jacopo
Dondi's pioneering 1344 Padua clock had such a one; cf. Jean Gimpel,
The Medieval Machine (Penguin, 1976, pp.160-1). Orwell might have known
of this via Runciman. At all events, he would have been horrified by
the philistine remark of Labour Education Minister Charles Clarke
(quoted in the Spectator, 17 May 2003) that mediaeval historians are
mere "ornaments", undeserving of state support (Mini-Ed, indeed!).
Orwell would have preferred Oxford don K.B.McFarlane's (Alan Bennett's
tutor) contention that mediaeval studies are "just a branch of the
entertainment industry."
At school, Orwell was a prize-winning classicist. There are some
visible elements of this that go generally unremarked in 1984. The old
codger in the pub who tells Winston that one advantage of age is "no
truck with women, and that's a great thing" is actually repeating a
well known observation by Sophocles. O'Brien's Party-approved astronomy
has a lot in common with both the relativist Protagoras' "Man is the
Measure of All Things" and the beliefs of both the pre-Socratic
Anaxagoras and the Greek atomists (a major influence on Karl Marx whose
doctoral dissertation was devoted to them) that the sun and stars were
just bits of fiery stone, no nearer or further away than they seemed to
be and no bigger than the human hand which could blot out their sight
by covering the eyes. For good measure, O'Brien adds the doctrine of
Aristotle and others that the sun revolves around the earth, an item
uncannily anticipated in Winston's thoughts much earlier in the book: "At one time, it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth
goes round the sun."
We all know, or thought we did, that the title 1984 simply reverses
the digits of 1948, the year of its completion. However, Sally Coniam
in the Times Literary Supplement (31 December, p.14), exhumed a poem
entitled 'End of the Century 1984' published in 1934 in her school
magazine by Orwell's first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, and concluded
that "surely nothing before has so directly suggested the influence of
his clever first wife as this poem." Shelden was attracted to this
notion, Bernard Crick (one of Orwell's other most distinguished
biographers) and Peter Davison (editor of the 20-volume complete
Orwell) less so. At least, the idea of an uxorious Orwell does
something to dispell the nonsense still pedalled (e,g, in Philip
Hensher's Spectator review of Bowker and Taylor) about his supposed
misogyny: "women are repeatedly humiliated in small ways throughout his
work, and from time to time he gives full rein to a fantasy of ugly
violence," a striking example of the 'biographical fallacy'. The "ugly
fantasy" is illustrated by Winston's early thoughts about Julia when he
suspects she is a Thought Police agent: "He would tie her naked to a
stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian." The only
thing worth a word here is actually Winston's surprising remembrance of
the Sebastian story itself. The fantasy suits Smith, not his creator:
"Winston disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty
ones."
Despite Coniam and media-manufactured images of 'the dreaded year',
1984 remains a simple reversed 1948, with no other significance. When
his American publishers, Harcourt Brace, jibbed, an unconcerned Orwell
said they might call it whatever they liked. H ehimself had been talked
out of his own original title by his British publisher, Fredric
Warburg. When he began drafting the novel in 1946, it was to be called
The Last Man in Europe. There is a remnant of this in the Ministry of
Love torture scenes where O'Brien sarcastically says to Winston "You
are the last man."
But how could Winston Smith be the last man in Europe? He lives on
Airstrip One (Britain), third most populous province in Oceania.
According to 'The Book', The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivism, supposedly written by the arch-traitort Emmanuel
Goldstein but actually the work of O'Brien and the Inner Party, Oceania
comprises the Americas, the Atllantic Islands including the British
Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. The whole of
continental Europe is subsumed into Eurasia.
London is still London (and Colchester, the only other island city
mentioned, is still Colchester), but Britain is now Airstrip One. Why?
Apart from France and Germany, whose new designations are not given,
all other countries and cities have kept their old names Probably the
reason was to help the subsequent joke of Nelson's Column being
replaced by a statue of Big Brother commemorating his vanquishing of
Eurasian aeroplanes in the Battle of Airstrip One. The parody of World
War II iconography is obvious, the logic less so, since the War is
Peace chapter of Goldstein's book states categorically that "no
invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken." And was the statuary
changed every time Oceania switched alliances between Eastasia and
Eurasia? Julia may have been right to suspect that the rocket bombs
falling daily upon London were actually fired by the govenrment "just
to keep people frightened" - nowadays, that would be an Internet
conspiracy theory. Here, she is brighter than Winston, to whom this
idea "had literally never occurred." Was The Last Couple in Europe
ever contemplated as a title? Probably not. It is remarkable that Julia
should never have heard of The Brotherhood, since we have earlier been
told that everybody else has, while her notion that the war was not
really happening leaves unexplained the parading and executions of
captives since "foreigners, whether from Eurasia or Eastasia, were a
kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the
guise of prisoners." Perhaps they were fakes, a trick allegedly pulled
throughout history from Caligula and Domitian to Idi Amin. Something
else left unexplained is how the atom bombs dropped on Colchester and
an unspecified rural spot in1953, also the hundreds that fell all over
Europe and North America, had apparently no radio-active effect at all.
Outside Goldstein's book, America is virtually never mentioned, apart
from the tell-tale Times photograph of the former leaders Jones,
Aaronson, and Rutherford attending "some Party function in New York."
Canadians, by contrast, might be flattered that this treacherous trio
flew on their perfidious mission to Eurasia from a secret airfield in
their country, less so by the Party's version of capitalist times in
Britain when recalcitrant workers might be "shipped off to Canada, like
cattle." The rest of Oceania is completely marginal.
According to Goldstein's book, the basis for Oceania was laid by the
British Empire's absorption into the United States. As Orwell
frequently mentions in his journalism, his notion of the three
superstates was inspired by the post-1945 carve-up of the world.
America is evidently the biggest country in Oceania. As Shelden puts
it, "this does not necessarily mean that Big Brother himself is
American - simply that his empire is dominated by his largest
possession, and its standards have been imposed on smaller places. But
Big Brother is neither a capitalist nor a communist."
Well, Big Brother could be Uncle Sam rather than Uncle Joe, though his
heavy black moustache points more to Stalin. Clement Attlee is not a
contender. Orwell insisted "My novel is NOT intende as an attack on
Socialism or on the British Labour Party of which I am a supporter," an
affidavit wasted on Hensher for whom the book "can only posibly be read
as a vicious satire on the depivations of Attlee's England." Airstrip
One's currency is now the dollar, not the rouble, but it also has the
metric system, which to this day America refuses to adopt. Are the
Americans the unspecified "buggers" who dropped the atom bomb on
Colchester (why this small provincial town?)?. If so, why is Oceania
governed by the principles of Ingsoc rather than Yanksoc? Whatever its
national origin, the imposition of this ideology with its attendant
textbook emphasis on the evils of capitalism surely puts Big Brother
firmly into what used to be called the socialist camp.
Big Brother's empire has no capital, yet when Julia talks of the
"government of Oceania," Winston does not correct her. How does this
vast state extending from Britain to New Zealand work? Especially when
it is said that the Party's faking of big lottery winners is
facilitated "by the absence of any real inter-comunication between one
part of Oceania and another." Not that this prevents "spontaneous
demonstrations all over Oceania this morning when workers marched out
of factories..." - how would London know this, and have time zones been
abolished?
We are told in the opening pages that "Nothing was illegal, since there
were no longer any laws." This comes straight after the information
that the Ministry of Love maintains Law and Order, and before the
remark "There was no law, not even an unwritten one, against visiting
the Chestnut Tree Cafe." Later on, Party-produced pornography is
purveyed to proletarian youths "under the impression that they were
buying something illegal." In general practice, there is nothing to
distinguish between laws and the frequently mentioned "rules", e.g. the
one against consorting with prostitutes which carries a penalty of five
years in a labour camp.
Talking of sex, we all know the old line which claims it is good for
the complexion. This seems to have worked for Winston, whose running
leg sore cleared up after he began sleeping with Julia.
According to 'The Book', nothing is efficient in Oceania save the
Thought Police, a cue for the famous telescreens, remarkable devices in
a society otherwise so tehcnically primitive, in whose Newspeak there
is no word for Science. These transmitting-receiving communicators are
a giant advance on Dick Tracy's two-way wrist-radio with which Orwell,
well versed in American comics, will have been familiar. Winston says
they are "Quite delicate enough" to detect any irregular heartbeat.
Supposedly, they watch people all the time: the Physical Education
instructress on them can pick Winston out by name and number from the
entire thirty-to-forty segment of the population, as can the screen
watcher in a crowded cell in the Ministry of Love. Overall, in Oceania,
the Inner Party has six million members, about 2% of the total
population; 85% are proles; the rest belong to the Outer Party, to
which Winston probably should not have been admitted, since both his
parents had been purged back in the 1950s. An impressive feat of
24-hour electronic invigilation. Perhaps this is why the "great
majority" of proles do not have telescreens in their homes, even though
the Thought Police had agents "moving always among them." Winston is
surprised by the absence of a telescreen from Mr Charrington's antique
shop in the prole district, but blithely accepts the explanation "I
never had one of those things. Too expensive," even though this implied
notion of choice is utterly alien to an Outer Party member. And how did
the proles pick up and take a fancy to the new Hate Week song,
disseminated by "endless plugging" on the telescreens most of them
hadn't got?
Regarding Mr Charrington, later revealed to be a Thought Police spy,
was Orwell having a bit of quiet inner semantic fun here? Some years
ago, a newspaper item revealed that 84 Charing Cross was used for
wartime security work. As our earlier classical allusions showed, the
novel is rich and varied in its linguistic and literary nuances. Many
previous writers have connected the Ministry of Truth with Orwell's
wartime experiences of BBC bureaucracy and censorship. One further
matter has escaped attention, namely the 1948 (of all years!) BBC
Variety Programmes Policy Guide for Writers & Producers, with its
absolute ban on: jokes about lavatories, effeminacy in men, immorality
of any kind; also on suggestive references to honeymoon couples,
chambermaids, fig leaves, prostitutes, ladies' underwear (e.g. "winter
drawers on"), animal habits (e.g. "rabbits"), commercial travellers.
This makes an ironic counterpoint to the Ministry's Porno Section where
Julia works.
At a higher level, after the marathon rewriting of history in Hate
Week, to cover up the latest sudden switch of alliance from Eastasia to
Eurasia, "A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the
Department. A mighty deed, which never could be mentioned, had been
achieved." Phraseology and sentiment are strikingly similar to those of
Himmler's speech of 4 October 1943 (in volume 4 of the Nuremberg
documents on Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression) apropos The Final
Solution: "This is a page of glory in our history which has never been
written and is never to be written."
Winston realises that renting Mr Charrington's spare room to pursue his
affair with Julia was a fatal folly. Not to mention leaving his
incriminating diary with the words DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER open for all
to see - "An incredibly stupid thing." All too typical, though. He
knows that the Newspeak lexiographer Syme is ill-advised to frequent
the Chestnut Tree Cafe, disreputable haunt of the old discredited Party
leaders. So, why had he been sitting there in mid-afternoon back in
1966, in the midst of its telescreens, at the next table to the
arch-traitors Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford? Little wonder that,
after his arrest, he learns from O'Brien that the Thought Police had
had him under surveillance for seven years, although no key incident
for 1977 appears in the novel - Winston dwells only on 1973, when he
saw the Times photograph that proved the trio's confessions were
false. Dates, though, are not Winston's strong point: at one moment he
reflects that Big Brother was unheard of till the middle Sixties, the
period of the great purges when "the story really began;" yet his own
parents had been "swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the
Fifties." Given such imprecisions, it is no great shock that, having
twice reflected that the Thought Police always came for you in the
middle of the night, he and Julia are actually arrested by them at
20.30 of a summer evening while it is still light.
If Syme was vaporised for being "too clever", how has O'Brien himself
survived so long? Everything Syme predicts to Winston about language
and thought is repeated at greater length by O'Brien in the
interrogation scenes. Mind you, O'Brien is a difficult character to
weigh up. He is introduced as "a member of the Inner Party and holder
of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea
of its nature" - Winston had seen him "perhaps a dozen times in as many
years." Not formally named as a Party Leader, O'brien leads a
versatilely busy life: he helped to write the fake Goldstein book, he
was an interrogator not only of Winston and Julia but of victims
ranging from the Jones-Aaranson-Rutherford trio to Syme, as well as
these annual visits as agent provocateur to the Ministry of Truth.
In the Ministry of Love, Winston does not understand the first
reference to Room 101; neither does a co-prisoner, his fellow-worker,
the poet Ampleforth. Yet when she is ordered there, a female cellmate
"seemed to shrivel and turn a different colour," while its mention
drives another prisoner hysterical with terror. According to O'Brien,
"Everyone knows what is in Room 101:" how anyone could, before being in
it, is not explained.
Winston is not the last man in Europe or wherever. Julia was "in some
ways far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party
propaganda" - as she says, "One knows the truth is all lies anyway."
Moreover, "She took it for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone,
secretly hate the Party and would break the rules if he thought it safe
to do so." This certainly applied to her many previous lovers, while
(as seen) everyone in the Party knew the lottery prizes were faked.
It is not clear why the Thought Police release some and not others.
This conundrum is acknowledged ("Sometimes people were released and
allowed to remain at liberty for a much as a year or two years") but
not explained. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford are tried, convicted,
set free, re-arrested, re-tried, and shot. Most, like Syme and Withers,
are simply vaporised and become 'unpersons'. Julia is quite literally
(to use a favourite Orwell adverb) a burnt-out case in terms of her
rebelliousness and sexuality: how many other such - neither persons nor
unpersons - were walking the streets of Oceania? As Winston wonders,
how could Goldstein continue to attract so many followers? Even if all
were innocent, the phenomenon implies a mass ability to disbelieve.
Winston himself is not only released but given a sinecure
sub-sub-committee position with four others "all very similar to
himself" at the Ministry of Truth relating to the Eleventh edition of
the Newspeak Dictionary - what happened to the Tenth, still months away
from publication just before his arrest? - dealing with the question of
putting commas inside or outside brackets.
The famous finale is also problematic. At face value, the 'cured'
Winston loves Big Brother: "Forty years it had taken him to learn what
kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache," albeit earlier he
could not recall hearing of Big Brother before sometime in the Sixties,
not to mention the fact that he is himself only thirty-nine. But, a
couple of pages before, in his last, chance meeting with Julia, both
understand very well what has been done to them: their love has been
destroyed by consciousness of mutual betrayal, not diverted to Big
Brother.
Various other things jar. Is it really credible, at any level of
satire, that Julia, while aware of oranges, does not know what a lemon
was? Or that neither she nor Winston had ever seen or tasted wine?
O'Brien remarks "Very little of it gets to the Outer Party;" the
constituent states of Oceania are full of wine-producing countries.
There are also slack repetitions, e.g. we hear twice at some length in
almost identical language about the interdict on proles drinking gin
and the kaleidoscopes and versificators that mechanically produce their
songs and pornography. I dare say some of this is attributable to the
conditions of the novel's final production. As described by Shelden, as
late as November 1948 the manuscript was still too disorganised to send
to the printers, so the desperately ill Orwell re-typed the whole thing
himself in three weeks. On the other hand, he was subsequently
unwilling to accept any alterations to the text of the American
edition; and one wonders (we are not told) if none of this was noticed
or queried by the sub-editors and proof-readers at Secker & Warburg?
These are all amiable puzzlements. I should like to think that Orwell,
for whom my admiration is almost boundless, would welcome them for
debate. Perhaps I am simply insufficient at Doublethink. There is no
need to redo Shelden's excellent account of Orwell's sources,
especially Cyril Connolly's little-remembered short story Year Nine. On
the documentary side, it may be noted that when O'Brien threatens
Winston with the caged rats, he observes that it was a common torture
in imperial China, whereas we now know (E. Nolte, Der Europaische
Burgerkrieg 1917-45, Berlin 1987, pp. 115,564n24) that it was a method
practised by the Cheka. The demented confessions extracted by the
Thought Police find a black farcical antecedent in the one produced at
the Moscow Trials of 1937 admitting to "placing broken glass in
workers' butter" - V.Z.Rogovin, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror, London
1988). When he has Winston reflect on how Party histories of the
Revolution were pushing Big Brother's role ever further back into the
past, Orwell anticipates North Korea where Kim Il Sung's supposed
leading of anti-Japanese guerillas has been officially dated to 1926 -
when he was just 14.
It seems wryly appropriate that at least one famous Orwellian scene
should be plagiarised in a recent novel, The Concert (English tr.
1994) by the wildly-overpraised Albanian writer and fake dissident
Ismael Kadare, whose native land was for half a century under the
surrealist, quasi-1984 regime of Enver Hoxha - the Ministry of
Plenty's favourite slogan "Our New and Happy Life" was actually
ubiquitous in communist Albania. Kadare describes a Chinese committee
engaged in the invention of Lei Feng, that famous (in real life)
paradigm of all virtues of the communist 'New Man'. This copies
Winston's fabrication of the cynosure of Party virtues, Comrade Ogilvy
- is the name a tribute to his fellow St Cyprian's pupil, advertising
mogul David Ogilvy? When his job is done, Winston reflects that "It is
curious that you could create dead men but not living ones," loudly
echoed by Kadare's punchline "They'd just given birth to a dead man."
On the big issue, Winston was right: "If there is hope, it lies in the
proles." How Orwell would have enjoyed watching the Berlin Wall come
down and the general collapse of what passed as communism. Albania,
again, can be invoked. I have seen two editions of Hoxha's book
Conversations with Stalin. The first (1979) contains a sentence
lavishly praising his senior colleague and fellow wartime resistance
leader, Mehmet Shehu. The second, rushed out after Shehu's mysterious
death and denouncement for simultaneously spying for at least six
countries (how did he keep all these treasons straight?), omits the
sentence - he is now an unperson. Despite holding all the military,
police, and secret police (Sigurimi) aces in 1990, the Party and all it
works were (in Winston's hopeful words) blown to pieces by a few
peaceful demonstrations of workers and students. Quite simply, the
Party had lost its voodoo - Doubleplusgood!
Canadian novelist-critic Margaret Atwood, in her collection Moving
Targets (Toronto 2004, pps. 331-337, reproducing her talk 'Orwell and
Me', given June 13, 2003, on BBC Radio 3 and published in 'The
Guardian' (June 16), writes: "The essay on Newspeak is written in
standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can
only mean that the regime has fallen and that language and
individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on
Newspeak, the world of 1984 is over. Thus, it's my view that Orwell
has much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he's
usually been given credit for."
Atwood's point had (apparently unknown to her) been anticipated by
David Smith & Michael Mosher, Orwell for Beginners (London 1984), p.
178: " The Party tries hard to seem invincible and permanent. However,
in the Newspeak Appendix Orwell indicates that this appearance is
unjustified - Newspeak, the Appendix says, was the bizarre product of a
failed dictatorship, which gave rise to a better society afterwards."
This unusual interpretation is well worth discussing. How else might we
take the Newspeak Appendix? What do other Orwellians think?