s.penkevich's Reviews > 1984

‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.’

‘History stopped in 1936,’ George Orwell once said to fellow author Arthur Koestler. During his time in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell observed the pervasiveness of propaganda as a pillar upholding authoritarianism, from censored newspapers to lies perpetuated for political convenience and began to fear that ‘the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.’ This fear presented itself across the whole of his works during his short life, culminating in his famous 1984 where he warns ‘who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’ Published in 1949 and written as Orwell was dying from tuberculosis, he didn’t live long to see how 1984 and his dire warnings against authoritarianism would have a lasting effect even to this day, often being used by all sides of the political spectrum as a cultural touchstone. And while this is mostly owing to the broad criticisms showing how any ideology can become oppressive when hungry for power, it also exemplifies his own dread that words will be twisted and quoted as cudgels to fit a desired purpose as truth is washed away. A harrowing story of dystopia, surveillance, manipulation and resistance being crushed underfoot, 1984 still chills today with its themes on collective vs individual identity under totalitarianism and controlling all aspects of reality to eliminate all those who step outside the boundaries of orthodoxy.

‘We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.’

When we read sci-fi, words like “prophetic” and “warning” often get applied. 1984 continues to remain relevant due to its warnings against irresponsible use of rhetoric, which almost makes the references to it amusing or ironic. Such as the Apple computer commercial in 1984 that uses the novel for the sake of marketing (and what is “marketing” but a euphemism for propaganda) a product that would lead to all sorts of concerns over government surveillance for which people would quote 1984 in addressing them. I think the term prophetic often frames a book in a way that causes us to consider how close it came true, which seems beside the point because when we look at the ways it didn’t, that often becomes an excuse for delegitimization or ignoring the warning.

Born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal in 1903 and passing in 1950, Orwell’s short life left a lasting legacy from his works like Animal Farm being classroom staples in the US and terms like “Orwellian” being blithely applied to anything that brushes against government use of technology and surveillance. Hardly a political cycle goes by in the US without 1984 coming up. In the US alone in the past decade we saw it returning to the paperback bestseller list under the Trump administration when the term “alternative facts” was being tossed around, and a few years later it was being referenced by the GOP to claim the government was denying an election victory and inventing the January 6th terrorist attack to arrest people. Though with a president making statements like “What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening,” naturally one is reminded of Orwell writing ‘the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,’ and we are reminded of the power of literature and how we often turn to great works for guidance during uncertain times, though often, as Orwell warned, using it as propaganda shorn of context. Orwell did live long enough to see the novel used improperly, having to put out a statement almost immediately for those who wished to use the novel as an example against the British Labor Party. ‘My recent novel is NOT an on Socialism or on the British Labor Party (of which I am a supporter),’ he wrote, and an introduction to the book states:

‘every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.’

Which becomes a pretty important distinction, as Orwell believed in better form of governing yet also was suspicious of anyone who would seek out power in order to change it as he writes in the novel ‘we know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.’ I feel 1984 is best read with an openness to nuance and in good faith, which is often glossed over for the sake of political identifying which is, ironically or not, the exact thing he was warning against. Which is to say, call out problems even if it’s your own “side” and don’t create further divide by abusing rhetoric for the sake of scoring quick political points.

I think there is a tendency when trying to score quick political points that things need to have some sort of unassailable pure aim to them. 1984 is critical of any regime that seeks to keep power, but narrowing it to a pointed attack against an opponent without seeing how it might apply to your own political "team" (US politics is so much cheering for your "home team" than actually hashing out politics, especially lately, though I also find the whole "both sides" angle to often be used less for establishing nuance than trying to delegitamize any efforts for progress too, but hell who am I to say I'm just as bad as anyone) is more convenient. But even Orwell himself isn’t a “pure” figure, having been an informant for the British government delivering a list of names of people suspected of communism (the list includes John Steinbeck and many have observed that there is a strong presence of gay people on the list which makes many of Orwell’s rather homophobic comments seem all the more menacing). He also, as A. E. Dyson observed in his book on Orwell, that he ‘had a very English dislike of intellectuals, supposing that anyone willing to wear such a label would be diminished or depraved.’ Which is all neither here nor there, but goes to show how one can create a narrative out of anything, and that is what 1984 taps into.

So let’s move on to the novel and head on down to Room 101. As I said earlier, 1984 can be read as a culmination of a lot of his themes and ideas across his short career. Warning of totalitarianism arrives everywhere with Orwell, such as Burmese Days when he describes the town as ‘a stifling, stultifying world…which every word and every thought is censored,’ not unlike 1984 because ‘free speech is unthinkable.’ And one can read in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, with Comstock (a name derived from Common and Stock similarly to how the terms in 1984 are often truncated phrases) bemoaning ‘I’m dead, You’re dead. We’re all dead people in a dead world,’ as a precursor to the pivotal moment when Winston and Jane declare ‘we’re dead’ right before being exposed as having been set up. For Orwell, speech and language is very key. Language itself is fallible and can be morphed to meet many purposes—it’s the medium of poets for a reason—and in 1984 Orwell examines how this can be used to negate truth and establish entirely fictional histories that become generally accepted as a means to upholding power.

‘War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.’

Winston’s job is to rewrite history to fit the purpose of the party. Within his department we find all sorts of nefarious linguistic play designed to control the masses because it is thought that ‘if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.’ We can argue that we see this notion reflected in our modern day, where books exposing history that can be seen as a blemish on the US are banned or dismissed as unpatriotic or trying to rewrite history (the irony in the latter is thick) and many have spoken on the suppression of queer books as an effort to erase the language people need to assess their own identities. What Orwell is looking at is the way language and propaganda is used to control. I enjoy the way he makes creative use of language to compile entire terminologies used by Ingsoc (the party in control that is pretty blatantly a nod to Soviet Russia) to create a propagated history that fits whatever they need, even erasing the history of entire wars to portray other countries as allies and erase the recent memory of them as enemies.

‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’

To step outside the orthodoxy of the Party’s version of history is to become an enemy of the Party and society and find yourself “vaporized” and erased from history. ‘Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think,’ Orwell writes, ‘Orthodoxy is unconsciousness,’ and when the truth we know conflicts with the truth of the Party, it must be edited. ‘Lies,’ writes Rebecca Solnit in her book Orwell's Roses, ‘the assault on language -- were the necessary foundation for all the other assaults.’ Afterall, ‘the first victim of war is truth, goes the old saying, and a perpetual war against truth undergirds all authoritarianisms.’ “Doublespeak” comes into play here, where one can hold conflicting opinions in their mind and just accept them, and the Party finds that fear is a great tool for ensuring willing erasure of truth. ‘Truth is not a statistic,’ Winston argues, claiming that just because the masses agree doesn’t make it true, though over the novel we see how the power to rewrite “truth” can potentially eviscerate anyone who says otherwise until it becomes the only known “truth.” Returning to Rebecca Solnit, she observes:

‘To be forced to live with the lies of the powerful is to be forced to live with your own lack of power over the narrative, which in the end can mean lack of power over anything at all. Authoritarians see truth and fact and history as a rival system they must defeat.’

It is in this way the Party keeps people subservient. ‘A hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance,’ and Winston, upon reading Goldstein’s book (the book serves as an insert into the narrative that provides a LOT of exposition about the world and its structures as well as being a sort of Marxist-esque handbook, though it only offers the how things came to be and never the why, much to Winston’s interest), Winston realizes that the proles (the working class) are the possible solution. However he realized the proles can only revolt if they become conscious of their conditions and only can become conscious of their conditions if they revolt (not a far cry from Orwell’s own statement ‘we cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war.’), and worries this may never happen. There is also the issue that a revolution will only put a new Party in power that will inevitably oppress again, just in different ways.

‘The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.’

So without giving anything away because this book is full of surprises (though one may guess if they have read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which Orwell “borrows” heavily from—as does Huxley’s Brave New World—and still remains my favorite of the three), across this novel we see a spirit of resistance rise and the forces of power come to meet it with a heavy boot and the power of erasure. While much of the novel focuses on the individual versus the collective, the biggest act of betrayal comes at the end in choosing to protect oneself, the individual, and asking for the harm of others in order to enter the “protection” of the collective Party by erasing any part of oneself outside their orthodoxy.

Where once was the belief ‘to die hating them, that was freedom,’ we see ‘in the face of pain there are no heroes’ and fear keeps people in line. Reminding the people of the frailty of being an individual drives them towards compliance. Yet, in another way, we see the collective existing because of the desire of individuals to protect themselves at the expense of everyone else: nobody will revolt out of fear for themselves and in doing so allows the oppression of all to continue. I think this is what Ursula K. Le Guin is getting at when her books look at the need to integrate both the individual and collective by refusing easy binaries and hierarchies. She also, especially in The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia argues that history can never become stagnant and that, like Orwell argues, an revolution will try to uphold power and oppress leading to the necessity of another revolution. While Le Guin sees this as the natural course of history (the double meaning of revolution as a revolt and a constant turning cycling through) Orwell sees this as a constant erosion of truth due to the weaponization of language as propaganda that will inevitably erase reality in place of a false, collective reality where truth is sent to the grave.

‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.’

One might find 1984 to be a rather bleak book, but it is also intended as a warning. There are many minor warnings building up to the larger, main point—such as the paperweight symbolizing a past now inaccessible where art could be beautiful for the sake of beauty, as well as symbolizing the frailty of the individual—and that we must take care to use language responsibly lest we hold the door for open propaganda. We can even do this on an individual level, such as not perpetuating misinformation (funny political memes are easy to share but dilute the severity of problems when we poke fun at, say, the looks or mannerisms of a politician instead of focusing on their policies) and not giving in to easy attacks instead of respecting the nuances. And so that's my rough rant on 1984, a book that lives on for both its relevance and its political convenience and maybe we should all remember that truth is more important than winning an argument or scoring political edgy points. I fail at it too, we all do, but Orwell reminds us to do better.

⅘

'A nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting - three hundred million people all with the same face.'