Cecily's Reviews > 1984

The colour of this book is grey, relentless grey: of skin, sky, food, floor, walls, mind, life itself. Added piquancy comes from general decay, drudgery, exploitation, chronic sickness, and malaise.


Ten Shades of Grey?

There is also sex and (non-sexual) bondage, domination, and torture.

I don’t expect a dystopian book to be happy reading, but this reread was far grimmer than I remembered it, partly because I read it immediately after the lyrical beauty of another dystopia, Fahrenheit 451, reviewed HERE, and partly because I’ve probably watched Terry Gilliam’s magical film, Brazil so many times (though he claimed he had not read the book before making the film).

Nevertheless, more than 50 years after it was written, 1984 is still powerful, important, and relevant - a feat EL James’ “Fifty Shades” books are unlikely to achieve. On the other hand, I gather Fifty Shades lacks page after page of heavy-handed political theory, so on that criterion, it might be ahead of 1984.

“If there is hope, it lies in the proles” - they are not any shade of grey.

The novel that inspired this

Orwell admitted to being heavily inspired by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s WE. The plot is very similar, but WE is a more complex combination of utopia and dystopia, and Natasha Randall's translation has a lyrical beauty very different from Orwell's much greyer, darker mood. See my review HERE.

Have We Reached 1984? (written in 2015)

In some ways, this book is very dated.

• The underlying misogyny is unchallenged (Winston “disliked nearly all women, and especially the young pretty ones… who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party” and he quickly goes from wanting to rape and murder a woman (he even tells her!) to lusting after “her youthful body desperate for him” and feeling “he had a right to” her). On the other hand, Winston is uncritical - enthusiastic even - about her promiscuity.

• Related to that - and to Fahrenheit 451 - Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote in a group discussion: "there's a distinct echo in both books of the Garden of Eden story, with Eve tempting Adam to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And in each case, it's a denial of the dogma that this is the original sin."

• A contemporary writer would probably avoid the lengthy passages of exposition and theory found here (especially ~20 pages of closely typed text from Goldstein’s snappily titled “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism”).

• The post-war Cold War fears are ancient history, and the rise of supposedly Islamic groups like Daesh/ISIS/ISIL pose a different sort of threat.

BUT, where this is still pertinent, it’s not quite in the ways that Orwell might have expected.

• We’re blasé about ubiquitous CCTV cameras, and we voluntarily, enthusiastically, surrender details of our interests, activities, location, and friends via our smartphone apps, and Google (see Vox article about how Google Trends reveals the truths that people don't tell researchers, here).

• We think we’re too smart to fall for lies like those of the Party, but a quick trawl of trending stories on social media demonstrates the untruth of that: people are gullible. The patent nonsense that people believe and share, without ever engaging the weakest of critical faculties is staggering. Most of those are trivial compared with the lies of Big Brother, but they show how easy it is to believe what everyone else believes, regardless of ample evidence to the contrary.

• We may not have Two Minutes’ Hate or Hate Week, but we certainly have hate figures, and again, social media exacerbates the crowd mentality: “The horrible thing… was not that one was obliged to act a part, but… that it was impossible to avoid joining in”. I’ve not read Jon Ronson’s So You've Been Publicly Shamed , but I’m familiar with many of the stories in it (if you’re not, look at the many excellent reviews on GR). Scary stuff.

Update, January 2017, “Alternative Facts”

On 20 January 2017, Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the USA. He campaigned in the style of an autocratic, narcissistic demagogue. He had a long track record of flagrantly denying obvious, provable truths, even on trivial matters. The day after numerous photos and other measures showed unimpressive attendance at his inauguration, rather than blame poor weather or practical and financial difficulties of travel, Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary flat-out denied realistic estimates, refused to take questions, and threatened to crack down on the press. The resulting furore led to Kellyanne Conway, a Trump Strategist, defended him, saying he had merely presented "Alternative Facts".

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command… And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: .....Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened – that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? ”

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

UnTruth and UnReality - Three Types

• “The mutability of the past” means history is forever being rewritten corrected for slips, errors, misprints and misquotes, making truth unknowable (Winston is not even sure of his age or year of birth).

• The doublethink slogans of the Party are another deliberate type of unreality.

• The third confusion of reality is subtler, in stark contrast to the gritty realism of the rest of the book, and not one I’d really considered on previous readings. It relates to dreams, premonitions, hallucinations, and (in)sanity. Confusion from deprivation and torture is one thing, but there are possible magical-realist aspects. Early on, Winston dreams of meeting O’Brien “in the place where there is no darkness”; later mentions are ambiguous as to whether this is coincidence or something else. A country landscape is also familiar from a dream, and he has a muddled dream about the coral paperweight, his mother and a Jewish woman. Furthermore, there are times in prison when the interrogator’s knowledge seems too precise and secret to be inferred from spies, screens or microphones: can he read Winston’s mind?!

“Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else. ”

“If there is hope, it lies in the proles”

“The proles were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another… The proles had stayed human. ” As unimportant drones, they have freedom denied to Party members and “were beneath suspicion”.

Conditions in Airstrip One are dire, with food and basic services in very limited supply, but sanity is scarcest of all. “Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain. ”

For some, “By lack of understanding they remained sane”.

Three Parts

• The first part sets the scene of Winston’s Smith’s predictable life as an unimportant Party member in Big Brother’s terrifying regime in Airstrip One, ever at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia.

• The second part concerns actions: freedom, courage, love/lust, betrayal.

• The final part is about the consequences of those actions.

Again and again, brief, apparently trivial things turn out to be significant.

Newspeak

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year”, with the aim of making “thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”.

This is really an extreme form of linguistic determinism (aka Sapir-Whorf hypothesis): the idea that the structure of a language can affect the cognition of those who use it. A very different extrapolation of that is in Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life (filmed for 2016 as Arrival), reviewed HERE.

I thought the linguistic aspect would be something I’d especially enjoy this time, but the key features are familiar and it’s explained in an appendix (which is where most of the lengthy extracts of Goldstein’s book should have gone, imo.) However, it's worth noting that the appendix, written after the main story, is in conventional English. Newspeak is/was no more.

For insight into 21st Century Political Language, see my review of Steven Pool's excellent Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality from 2006, HERE.

Feelings – and Troublesome Questions

This is a grey, cold book. Even the lust and passion it contains is chilling. But it asks timeless and difficult questions about love and loyalty:

• Would you risk everything - absolutely everything - for a few passionate meetings with someone you may not even love?

• To serve your ideology, would you lie, murder, steal… throw acid in a child’s face?

• If you could save your partner by doubling your own pain, would you? Would you really?

• Is failure of love the only betrayal that counts? (If you tell all, but secretly love, are you loyal?)

Quotes

Some are so well-known, it might seem superfluous to type them here, but that’s exactly why I’ve included them.

• “It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
• “Although the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere.”
• “An active man of almost paralysing stupidity.”
• “All history was a palimpsest.”
• “It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”
• “The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details.”
• “A hanging oil lamp which gave off an unclean but friendly smell.”
• “He would buy further scraps of beautiful rubbish.” (In addition to coral in glass.)
• “It was camouflage. If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.”
• A dash of lipstick and “she had become not only much prettier, but… far more feminine.”
• Charrington, the junk shop owner had “vaguely the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman”.
• “The end was contained in the beginning.”
• “Our only true life was in the future.”
• “Winston was gelatinous with fatigue… His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its transparency.”
• “The best books, he [Winston] perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.” No, no, no!
• “The blade would bite into him with a sort of burning coldness.”
• “Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain… Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.” Hmm. What about emotional pain?
• “If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.”
• “The confession was a formality. The torture was real.”
• “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
• “In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic… But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out.” Shades of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, reviewed HERE.

Slogans

• “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
• “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
• “2 + 2 = 5” “Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once.”
• “It is not enough to obey him: you must love him.”
• “We are interested solely in power… Power is not a means, it is an end.”
• “Outside man there is nothing… The earth is the centre of the universe.”
• “Big Brother is watching.”

Image source: http://www.artsparx.com/images/bl_val...

OLD Review from 2008
The year 1984 may be long passed, but this book is more pertinent than ever: big brother is watching us, history is rewritten (though that has always been true) and free speech is constrained (albeit often under the misused guise of political correctness).

It's a shame that the humorous TV programme "Room 101" and reality TV franchise "Big Brother" have distracted people from the seriousness of Orwell's message.