Orwell (24 page)

Though Trafalgar is renamed Victory Square and Big Brother takes Nelson's place atop his column, the physical setting of Airstrip One is essentially that of Orwell's “London Letters” to the
Partisan Review
(1941–46), just as the Ministry of Truth is based on his experience at the bureaucratic BBC. There is a continuous war with air raids and underground shelters, rubble in the streets, a sense of disintegration and decay. There is rationing, a black market,
Ersatz
sugar and coffee, and a constant shortage of small but essential articles like razor blades and boot polish.

The weapons and inventions of Oceania, which shows no material progress, are entirely familiar and conventional: truncheons, machineguns, grenades, bombs, rockets; and microphones, dictaphones (“speak-write”), twoway television (“telescreen”). When Orwell tries to be more sophisticated and imaginative about such things, he is unconvincing or even ludicrous, as when Police Patrols snoop into windows with helicopters and concealed microphones in the vast countryside not only pick up but also
recognize
voices. Orwell's statement, “The symbol of military despotism is the tank, the most terrifying weapon the human mind has ever contrived,” suggests his imaginative limitations about weaponry.
⁷

“Orwell fascinates [East Europeans] through his insight into details they know well,” writes Czeslaw Milosz, “they are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.”
⁸
Orwell's acute conception of totalitarianism is most strongly influenced by Trotsky-Bronstein's
The Revolution Betrayed
(1937), a passionate condemnation of the Stalin regime and the model for Goldstein's book. During the Moscow Purge Trials, Trotsky quoted Rakovsky (former Commissar and Ambassador who became an early victim of the purges) as saying: “By means of demoralizing methods, which convert thinking Communists into machines, destroying will, character and human dignity, the ruling circles have succeeded in converting themselves into an unremovable and inviolate oligarchy, which replaces the class and the party.”

Trotsky's account of the secret police was noted by Orwell in his portrayal of child informers and the sudden “vaporization” of those who, like Winston, are suspected of “Thoughtcrime”:
⁹
“The G. P. U. introduces the sickening corruption of treachery and tale-bearing into the so-called ‘socialist schools.' … All who are outstanding and unsubmissive in the ranks of the young are systematically destroyed, suppressed or physically exterminated.”
¹⁰

The illegal photograph of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford that Winston
finds is related to Trotsky and firmly rooted in historical fact. Winston remembers that all three men had confessed that on a certain date they had betrayed important military secrets to the enemy, and the photograph proved “the confessions were lies.” Isaac Deutscher writes of the purge trials: “In those few cases where the defendants did refer to specific circumstances … that could be verified, the falsehood of their confessions was immediately plain. A hotel in Copenhagen where three defendants, Holtzman, David and Berman-Yurin, had allegedly had an appointment with Trotsky, had ceased to exist many years before.”
¹¹

In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
the enormous face on the posters, “with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features” and the caption “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” (3) is based mainly on Stalin, but it also suggests the famous recruiting poster of 1914 with the picture of Field-Marshal Kitchener and the caption “Your Country Needs YOU.” As in contemporary Russia, the people are called Comrade, the three-year plans are exceeded as the staggering figures of production output are announced, and women wear overalls and produce children for the State who are trained as informers and cause the extermination of their parents.

The atmosphere of overpowering fear is reinforced by the well-known characteristics of the Nazi regime: the underground resistance cells, hysterical Nuremberg-like demonstrations, sadistic attacks on Goldstein and other Jews, and “Facecrime,” or having pronounced Semitic features.

History is completely rewritten, often in imitation of Stalin's military and pedantic style and his trick of answering his own rhetorical questions (Orwell also parodies Trotsky's style in Goldstein's book). It is not clear, however,
who
the Party is trying to convince by its enormous historical revisions. Since it controls all books and media, it would seem more effective to destroy the old books and write new ones. Winston's contention that the publication of the suppressed photo would be enough to blow the Party to atoms seems highly unlikely.

The powerful sense of impending and then actual disaster that dominated Orwell's life and mind in the thirties and forties is, quite naturally, expressed in the books he wrote during the last twenty years of his life. As early as
Down and Out
(1933), Orwell foresees “some dismal Marxian Utopia as the [only] alternative” to present conditions,
¹²
and three years later Gordon Comstock imagines a Socialist future as “some kind of Aldous Huxley
Brave New World;
only not so amusing.”
¹³
The following year, in
Wigan Pier
, he states that “for the vision of the totalitarian state there is being substituted the vision of the totalitarian world,” and that “we are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is
almost impossible to be honest and remain alive.”
¹⁴
In
Coming Up for Air
(1939), George Bowling accurately prophesies not only the imminent war but also the world of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
that Orwell writes about ten years later: “The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him. It's all going to happen.”
¹⁵

In essays like “Inside the Whale” (1940), “Literature and Totalitarianism” (1941) and “Raffles and Miss Blandish” (1944), Orwell again discusses the state's absolute power over the individual. There is a clear connection between such essays as “Politics and the English Language” (1946), “The Prevention of Literature” (1946) and “Writers and Leviathan” (1948) and the Appendix on the principles of Newspeak. And there is a direct line of political thought from
Homage to Catalonia
(1938) through
Animal Farm
(1945) to
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949), all three of which could be called “The Revolution Betrayed.” Orwell's last novel had been germinating in his mind for a very long time.

The evolution of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
becomes even clearer when the history of two major motifs is traced. The most famous and frequently quoted motif is O'Brien's picture of the future: “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever” (271). Orwell had read a variation of this phrase in Book Four of
Gulliver's Travels
when Gulliver imagines the Houyhnhnms “battering the Warriors' Faces into Mummy, by terrible Yerks from their hinder Hoofs.”
¹⁶
This motif also appears in another source of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, Jack London's
The Iron Heel
, when the hero, Ernest Everhard, predicts “the Iron Heel will walk upon our faces.”
¹⁷
In
Coming Up for Air
, Bowling varies this motif slightly in his vision “of himself smashing people's faces in with a spanner”;
¹⁸
and in
The Lion and the Unicorn
(1941), Orwell makes the specific connection between totalitarianism and this inhuman cruelty when he writes that the Nazi goose-step “is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face.” In a weary letter of 1943, he calls himself “an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot.” The next year, Orwell says that “Giants stamping on pygmies is the characteristic pattern of our age”;
¹⁹
and in “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” he quotes, with revulsion, James Hadley Chase's description of “stamping on somebody's face, and then having crushed the man's mouth in, grinding his heel round and round in it.” This motif of merciless sadism is one that Orwell could
never exorcise from his mind, for it symbolized the connection between brutality, power worship, nationalism and totalitarianism.

Another horrible and unforgettable motif is rats. Their ugly ferocity causes nightmares, panic and convulsions of nausea in Winston, and they are later used by O'Brien to torture and destroy him. In Book Two of
Gulliver's Travels
, Gulliver is assaulted by two rats who “came up almost to my Face; whereupon I rose in a Fright … These horrible Animals had the Boldness to attack me on both Sides.”
²⁰
Another possible influence is Camus'
The Plague
(1947), an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France, whose theme of political oppression is analogous to
Nineteen Eighty-Four
and whose central metaphor is a disease caused by rats. The rat image appears in almost every one of Orwell's works. In
Down and Out
(1933) a Parisian brothel smells of rats; in
Burmese Days
(1934) the treacherous U Po Kyin fears he will be reincarnated as a rat; and in
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936) Comstock's landlady speaks of young women as if they were “plague-rats.” In
Wigan Pier
, the rat image takes on the disturbing psychological connotations of
Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“going into the dark doorway of that common lodging house seemed to me like going down into some dreadful subterranean place—a sewer full of rats, for instance.”
²¹
In
Homage to Catalonia
, rats run over Orwell in the darkness; and in
Coming Up For Air
he repeats an image from
Homage
when Bowling shelters himself from a bomb and is “flattened out on the pavement like a rat when it squeezes under a door.”
²²
In
Animal Farm
, “while Major was speaking four large rats had crept out of their holes,” and when these rats become troublesome, they are “said to be in league with Snowball.”
²³
In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, the battered slum doorways “were somehow curiously suggestive of rat holes” (82), and they continue to appear as a disturbing leitmotif throughout the novel. Rats invade the secret room where Winston and Julia meet, and are associated in Winston's mind with something dreadful and unendurable on the other side of a “wall of darkness.” This wall of darkness is also related to the secure “place where there is no darkness” and where Winston hopes to meet O'Brien. Ultimately, this place becomes the constantly lighted Ministry of Love where O'Brien uses the rats to break Winston's will and force him to betray Julia.

The most convincing evidence for the evolution from Orwell's earlier works of the characteristic beliefs and ideas of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is the specific passages that are repeated almost exactly in the last book. There are two principal reasons for this: first, as John Wain notes, Orwell “was a man of comparatively few ideas, which he took every opportunity of putting across;”
²⁴
and second, Orwell was so seriously ill that he feared he might die before finishing the novel. He therefore wrote it as quickly and easily
as possible, drawing freely on his previous works when they could serve his purpose. The novel succeeded despite these severe limitations.

The tenements and slums of the proles and the warmth and vitality that flourishes amidst this economic deprivation derives from Orwell's experiences in Paris and Wigan as well as from his portrayal of wartime London. The working-class district of Paris where Orwell lived in 1928–29—“a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse”
²⁵
—is reproduced almost exactly in the opening pages of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
; and the nineteenth-century slums of the industrial Midlands are still standing in Oceania: “the houses are poky and ugly, and insanitary and comfortless, and they are distributed in incredibly filthy slums.”
²⁶
The simple comforts of working-class life—“Your pipe drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air warm and stagnant”—are also praised in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, when Winston enjoys the privacy of the secret room above the antique shop that he associates with “prerevolutionary” times. These somnolent and ignorant proles represent the same revolutionary hope as the exploited beasts of
Animal Farm:
“But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse” (69).

The absolute control of individual thought and action by the State is another theme that dominates Orwell's works. An idea that he frequently repeats and adopts for
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is that “in the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it” (80). This idea appears as early as 1939 in his review of Bertrand Russell's book on power: “It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two and two will make five when the Leader says so. Mr. Russell points out that the huge system of organised lying upon which the dictators depend keeps their followers out of contact with reality.” In Orwell's novel, the regime is so repressive that it is able to destroy totally the personality of those who resist and to make the Winston Smiths believe what they know to be false.