More than any other dystopia, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four concentrates on its hero’s psychological state and his efforts to reveal the truth of the superstate in which he lives. Orwell’s meticulous attention to the engineering of reality and the digesting of the individual into the political entity makes this the definitive dystopia of post-Stalinist authoritarian power. The novel is divided into three books that cover, respectively, Winston Smith’s rebellion under the grind of daily life in Oceania, his love affair with Julia, and his incarceration, torture and erasure. The story is basically a struggle for truth, love and liberty where these are criminal. Gradually, through reflection, experience, and a “successful love affair,” Winston discovers the nature of his oppressor and briefly steals the freedoms that make life worth living, acknowledging from his first crime against the state, writing in a journal, that he is a “dead man.”
Like the heroes of other dystopian novels, Winston undergoes a three-stage process: enlightenment, rebellion and destruction. As in Zamyatin’s We, the catalyst of the hero’s awareness and insubordination is journalizing, or, specifically, the act of thinking for himself. Unlike We, this book starts off with the hero’s mortal fear and hatred of his oppressor. Straight off, he engages in a subversive struggle for truth, which continues throughout his protracted detainment and torture at the hands of Inner Party agent O’Brien, who both enlightens and destroys him. But Winston’s martyrdom to truth and opposition to power are more complex than those of the biblical martyr. For the Party, having learned from history, disassembles and reassembles its enemies before their execution, forcing them to repent and adopt its version of reality. Thus Winston dies a criminal, penitent and convert in the end, yet remains a martyr in the reader’s view, due to Orwell’s paralleling of two realities: Winston’s actual experience versus the Party’s manufactured account.
Book One starts with Winston coming home at midday to perform the seditious act of writing in his journal, which he does out of the view of the telescreen, a monitor that both broadcasts and surveils Party members. In this first act of individual expression he states his opposition to Big Brother, the figurehead of the Party’s personality cult, repeatedly writing, “Down with Big Brother.” For this “thoughtcrime,” the severest act of treason, he knows that he is doomed. However, his admittedly suicidal quest for understanding augments his will to live: “Now that he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.” The very thing that will kill him—expressing the truth of his individual experience in defiance of authority—leads to the discovery of the importance of his own existence over the Party-arbitrated one. Winston then goes through the latter half of a bad day in Airstrip One, onetime London, repairing a neighbor’s plumbing and finishing a day’s work at the Ministry of Truth, where he revises news articles to reflect the latest Party-dictated facts.
The next morning he takes us through the first half of a bad day in Airstrip One: waking from a dream of his mother, compulsory exercises conducted by telescreen, working at his desk, lunch in the canteen and, with heroic defiance, writing in his diary. Through tangential reflections on historical events, memories of childhood, recounting dreams, interactions with colleagues and descriptions of life in Airstrip One, his existence emerges as a penurious, abject, laborious and paranoid one. Like the government of modern North Korea under Kim-Il Sung and Kim Jong-il, the ruling Party of Oceania extends its political ideology, “English Socialism,” or “Ingsoc,” into both the subjective lives and objective reality of its subjects, arbitrating over truth and fact to the point of rendering these arbitrary and systematically crushing individual liberties on the most granular level, that of language. The Party’s ongoing program to purge the populace of subversive ideas, to erase history and objective fact, and to eradicate pleasures that would compete with its militant hegemony reveal this political enigma as having a singularly inhuman objective: to completely subsume the individual.
As the book unfolds, Winston becomes more intrepid and careless in his quest for truth. We follow him through the slums of the eighty-five-percent balance of Oceania’s poor, the proles, on whom he is certain depends the overthrow of the Party. If Party life satirizes the white-collar drudge, the proles caricature the impoverished masses of Great Britain’s slums, such as those portrayed in Jack London’s The People of the Abyss. An untapped force of too-ignorant-to-be-indoctrinated humanity, Winston writes, “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” After a rocket-bomb attack and kicking a severed hand into the gutter, his truth-finding mission leads to a futile interview with an addled old drunk whom he plies with beer to get the facts. Then he visits the junk shop from which he purchased his journal and discovers the room upstairs that will eventually become his hideout with the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department, Julia, whom he simultaneously loathes, mistrusts and lusts after. Seeing her as he exists the shop and suspecting her of being an agent of the Thought Police, he seriously considers bashing her head in with a brick.
Book Two involves Winston’s love affair with Julia, which starts with a note she delivers in a pretended fall while passing him in the Ministry of Truth: “I love you.” Once Winston disqualifies her as an agent of the Thought Police, his attraction does not assume an infuatuation of person but rather of flesh: “He imagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him!” Despite Winston’s priapic urgency, it is Julia who makes all the advances and negotiates the first rendezvous.
Thirteen years younger than Winston, Julia represents a generation that has no memories of the time before Party control and no hope to overthrow it. Rather, she lives a duality of specious devotion and concealed defiance that extends only to the personal gratifications she can get away with. Her uninhibited sexual appetite contrasts her active participation in the Anti-Sex League, and her ardent participation in the Party’s program of hatred contrasts her actual hatred of the Party itself. She works in the Fiction Department, manufacturing the propaganda that passes as Oceania’s literature, living the lies necessary to her survival as an Outer Party member. What qualifies Julia as a true partner and conspirator for Winston is the purity of her sexual instinct, to which she testifies during their first physical encounter: “‘I adore it.'” Sex in Nineteen Eighty-Four is thus an act of rebellion, not solely for being personally gratifying such that it detracts from the devotion agitated by the Party, but because it opposes the Party’s program of sex solely for procreation. Sex for pleasure is what brings these two into full union: “This was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.” Here, Orwell advances a kind of sexual libertarianism, the primal sexual appetite as rebellious because, personally gratifying, it is at odds with the tyranny of collectivism and the Party’s attempt to annihilate personal freedom.
Once the affair gets going, Winston rents the room above the shop, which he acknowledges is “suicidal folly,” the most detectable of crimes a Party member could commit. The room becomes a sanctuary, a place for him and Julia to think and speak freely and to enjoy their smuggled contraband, those comestibles we in wealthy nations take for granted, such as real coffee, chocolate and sugar. Though he admits that carrying on a love affair in the privacy and liberty of his own place is in itself an insane risk, he soon adds to this a conspiracy to overthrow the Party. Inner Party member O’Brien, who works at the Ministry of Truth, invites Winston to his home to pick up the latest edition of the Newspeak dictionary. At the start of Book One, it was a look from O’Brien suggesting opposition to the Party that compelled Winston to write in his journal. Now O’Brien invites him over on a false pretext, and he accepts, knowing that it will only bring about his inevitable capture and execution: “He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love.”
He arrives at O’Brien’s home with Julia, and O’Brien asks him, after a loyalty test, to join a counter-organization, the Brotherhood. To become an official member, however, O’Brien requires Winston to read a book by the Brotherhood’s leader, Emmanuel Goldstein. Excerpts from this book, which Winston receives and reads some weeks later, reveal Oceania’s political history and infrastructure. In the room upstairs, during an acknowledgement with Julia that their rebellion is not for themselves but for the future and that they, personally, are the dead, a voice speaks back in affirmation. They discover a telescreen behind an old picture, are arrested, and the inevitable comes to light: they have been monitored all along, the old shopkeeper was O’Brien in disguise, and their defiance of the Party was, in fact, incited by the Party.
The final book, Book Three, covers Winston’s, detainment, torture and execution. It begins in the “cold light” and “steady humming” of a cell in the Ministry of Love. First, he’s isolated and starved, while monitored constantly by telescreen. Then he’s moved to a similar cell, though filthy and packed with ten to fifteen people at a time. There he encounters his literary colleague, Ampleforth, and his neighbor, Parsons, both of whom are sent to the dreaded “room 101” for torture and brainwashing. Finally, O’Brien comes in, not to deliver the promised razor blade but as Winston’s case worker in what will be a protracted torture, re-education, and eventual execution.
Through brainwashing and torture, the authoritarian superstate Oceania is revealed to Winston as improved over those of the past. O’Brien, his dungeon master and intimate, indicts the German Nazis and Russian Communists for incompetence and a flawed ideology: “‘They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where humans would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.” This is a civilization based on what might be considered an abstract entity, power, were power not characterized here as the ability to terrify and crush. O’Brien describes power as both deity and intoxicant, an eternal force that feeds on the equally eternal “enemy of society” and becomes more despotic the weaker its opposition. While other aspects of this so-called civilization have not progressed (the sciences and arts, or what we would call the humanities), power has evolved into an all-consming force that can admit of no other interest: “‘There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.'”
From O’Brien and the Goldstein book, which O’Brien admits to having written himself, the geopolitical context of Oceania emerges. It is one of three superstates that have divvied up the world, with holdings that include the Atlantic Isles and the Americas. The two other superstates are Eurasia, which encompasses all of Northern Europe and the Asiatic continent, and Eastasia, which includes China and the Far East. Each superstate exists in a balance of power with the other two, whereby one is an ally or enemy, and none has the military capacity to bring about complete victory over the others. All vie for control of labor and resources of the subtropical regions; all perpetually oscillate between war and alliance; all are founded on a political ideology evolved from communism. The Ingsoc of Oceania, the Neo-Bolshevism of Eurasia and the Death Worship (literally translated “Obliteration of the Self”) of Eastasia bear the stamp of Stalinist despotism in their use of terror and digestion of the individual into the collective. And all have an identical pyramidal class structure: a privileged few at the top who exercise absolute power over a relatively small, functionary middle class, and a vast lower class consigned to poverty and ignorance.
Orwell has in this political dynamic presented a condition of perpetual world domination of authoritarian superpowers, a sort of worst-case projection thirty-five years beyond his own time, which was marked by the Stalinist Purges and the rise of the Soviet superstate. Though history has not yielded such a tripartite balance of communist domination, Oceania’s socioeconomic structure is both familiar and extant: “For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would seep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
The present wealth-power paradigm still depends on poverty to stunt the advancement of the lower and middle classes, and on ignorance to excite militant unity. War is as necessary to Oceania’s maintenance of power as it is to that of the United States. Its waste of surplus prevents the leisure necessary for the lower classes to become educated: “War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”
Though Nineteen Eighty-Four is not an accurate dystopia in terms of what has actually come to pass, it remains an accurate fable. Orwell was able to see in his own time three global superpowers—Oceania (Great Britain, the United States and Canada), Eurasia (Europe), and Eastasia (Russia and China)—emerge after WWII. He did not forecast, however, that a federal republic with the most ostensibly democratic and free civilian government, the United States, and not an authoritarian communist country, would become the ascendant superpower. Orwell based his story on an unlikely extreme rather than a prediction of what would actually happen, and relied on meticulous attention to his protagonist’s experience to lend his fable relevance. And so it is Big Brother, the Thought Police, Victory Gin, Newspeak, Doublespeak, the Two Minutes Hate, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, the Ministries and the telescreen that abide as cultural currency and are Nineteen Eighty-Four‘s legacy to the lexicon of modern experience.
-Jan DiVincenzo ©2012 Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.