Orwell (25 page)

Winston reaffirms Orwell's belief that “history has stopped” and is being rewritten. This idea first appeared in 1943: “‘History stopped in 1936.' … If the leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened'–well, it never happened…. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.” For Winston, the psychological effect of political oppression is the loss of childhood memories, the abolition of history in microcosm. Orwell asks in 1939, “But is life—life for the ordinary person—any better in Russia than it was before?,” and he repeats this question in his last two books when
the older animals rack their dim memories and try to decide whether things had been worse under Mr. Jones, and when Winston asks the proles about life in the days before the Revolution.

The central concept in the ideology of the Party, that freedom and happiness cannot coexist, comes from Dostoyevsky's
The Brothers Karamazov
by way of Zamyatin's
We
, and is stated both by Orwell in his review of
We
, and by O'Brien, a modern Grand Inquisitor:

He claims it as a great merit for himself and his Church that at last they have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy.
²⁷

The guiding principle of the State [in We] is that happiness and freedom are incompatible…. The Single State has restored happiness by removing this freedom.

… the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better (265).

The terrible irony, of course, is that the people of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
have neither freedom nor happiness. The omnipotence of the Church and State is defended by the Grand Inquisitor (and repeated by O'Brien) who maintains that men are terribly weak and unable to choose between good and evil: “man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! … By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask too much from him…. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.”
²⁸

A description of the evolution of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
reveals the remarkable consistency of Orwell's style and long-considered ideas, and the working of his creative imagination, which drew upon his painful experiences of poverty and totalitarianism, his reading of Swift, Trotsky and Dostoyevsky, and the recurring motifs of his earlier works. The least effective parts of the novel are the purely expository passages where he establishes the future state of the world in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
: the historical events that followed the Atomic War (as revealed in Goldstein's book), Winston's “historical” work at the Ministry of Truth and the Appendix on Newspeak.

The most powerful and effective part of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is Orwell's recreation of the ghastly atmosphere of fear and torture in the extermination camps, which he may have seen and certainly heard about when reporting from Germany in 1945. Bruno Bettelheim, who was a prisoner in Dachau and Buchenwald, writes that one major goal of the Gestapo “was to break the prisoners as individuals, and to change them into a docile mass
from which no individual or group act of resistance could arise…. [The concentration camp] was a final apotheosis of the mass state, composed of few depersonalized managers and millions of dehumanized slaves, all under thrall to one charismatic leader, the only ‘person,' the only one truly alive.”
²⁹
Like these prisoners, Winston must face the problem of individual existence in the literal, not the philosophical, sense. He does not attempt to define existence, but to discover
how
to exist. The paradox of totalitarianism is that it intensifies individual loneliness and at the same time binds all the isolated figures into one overpowering system.

The dominant emphasis throughout Orwell's work is on loneliness and exclusion, on the fearful individual in an oppressed world, on the people, in Trotsky's phrase, “swept into the dust bin of history.” Winston Smith, the final embodiment of defeated man, has predecessors in all of Orwell's books: in his impoverished and exploited persona in Paris, London, Wigan and Spain; in Flory, Dorothy Hare, Gordon Comstock, George Bowling and Boxer. Each character attempts, in Chekhov's description of himself as a young man, “to squeeze the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and wake one beautiful morning to feel that he has no longer a slave's blood in his veins but a real man's.”
³⁰
And each character struggles against the bondage of their threatening world toward individual freedom and responsibility.

Like the novels of Malraux, Sartre and Camus,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
expresses our archetypal fears of isolation and disintegration, bestiality, cruelty and dehumanization. Orwell's response to the horrors of contemporary history emphasizes his close relationship to these authors and firmly places him in the tradition described by Victor Brombert: “Europe's dark hours are thus responsible for the emergence of a generation that feels
‘situeé'
and responsible in the face of history—a generation whipped on by the urge to transmute its anguish into action…. Sartre has shown how the awareness of death, the threatened subjection to torture and the systematic will to degrade brought writers to the extreme frontiers of the human condition and inspired them with a … concern for moral issues.”
³¹

Orwell's repetition of obsessive ideas is an apocalyptic lamentation for the fate of man in the age of anxiety. His expression of the political experience of an entire generation gives
Nineteen Eighty-Four
a veritably mythic power and makes it one of the most influential books of the modern period, even for those who have never read it. As Harold Rosenberg states, “The tone of the postwar imagination was set by Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
: since the appearance of that work, [the theme of] the ‘dehumanized collective' haunts our thoughts.”
³²
Orwell's particular and distinct contribution to modern English literature is a passionate commitment, a radical sincerity and an ethic of responsibility that ultimately transcends his defeated heroes.

 

 

This essay was first read at a conference on Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
at the Library of Congress in Washington in 1984. It was then published in a book that also included heavy hitters like Alfred Kazin and Denis Donoghue. I wrote that Orwell's statements about the future were not prophecies, but descriptions of the past. Though he failed to predict many events, he was impressively accurate about the emergence of three hostile superstates engaged in permanent but inconclusive warfare. The novel is at once a warning about the future, a satire on the present, and an ironic parody of the literary and political themes of the 1930s.

 

The Anschluss, Guernica—all the names

At which those poets thrilled or were afraid

For me meant schools and schoolmasters and games;

And in the process someone is betrayed.

Donald Davie, “Remembering the Thirties”

Nineteen Eighty-Four
is a projection of the future that is based on a concrete and naturalistic portrayal of the present and the past. Its originality is rooted in a realistic synthesis and arrangement of familiar materials rather than in prophetic and imaginary speculations. The numerical title is thought to be a reversal of the last two digits of the year in which the book was completed (1948), but it was probably influenced by Yeats' poem “1919” and certainly inspired Alberto Moravia's
1934
, Anthony Burgess's
1985
and Arthur Clarke's
2001.
If the novel had been completed a year later and the title transposed to 1994, we would have had to wait another ten years for the momentous revaluation of Orwell's work. It is notoriously difficult to predict the future accurately in a world that is rapidly transformed by technology. Who could have imagined 1949 in 1914? How precisely can we imagine 2019 in 1984?

Most of Orwell's statements about the future were not prophecies but descriptions of events that had already taken place. He looked backward in time as much as he looked forward. The portrayal of Airstrip One reflects the defeated and hopeless air of postwar London. Britain had won the war but suffered a loss of colonies and an economic decline that made the country seem worse off than its defeated enemies. The ruined, squalid and depressing postwar city was vividly portrayed by Wyndham Lewis in
Rotting Hill
(1951). When Lewis returned to London in 1945, after six years of exile in North America, he found himself in “the capital of a dying empire—not crashing down in flames and smoke but expiring in a peculiar muffled way.”
¹
In 1948, the year Orwell completed his novel, Russia—recently an admired ally—had taken over all of Eastern Europe and was actively threatening the West. In that year Gandhi was assassinated, Jan Masaryk was killed (or killed himself), Yugoslavia was expelled from the Comintern, the Berlin airlift began, Count Bernadotte was murdered in Palestine and civil war raged in China. “It was the coup in Czechoslovakia” in 1948, writes Irving Howe, “that persuaded many people that there could be no lasting truce with the Communist world.”
²

Orwell failed to predict urban guerrillas, ecological problems, oil shortages, genetic engineering, organ transplants, computers, sophisticated spy equipment, spaceships, satellites, nuclear submarines, intercontinental missiles and the hydrogen bomb, as well as the dissolution of empire and the postcolonial era that followed the Second World War. England and America today bear no significant resemblance to Oceania. Yet his very act of prophecy tended to induce its own fulfillment, for readers have adopted his terms and sought his portents. In the year 2000, as surely as we are now watching for Orwellian omens, masses of new believers will be standing on mountain tops waiting for the apocalypse at the end of the second millennium.

But Orwell did predict, in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, three hostile superstates (America, Russia and China; or NATO, the Warsaw Pact and the nonaligned countries) engaged in permanent but limited and indecisive warfare. He said that they would use conventional weapons, that the war would be confined to peripheral territories (Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia) and that there would be no invasion of the homeland of
the principal powers.
³
The Vietnam War was a classic example of America and Russia supporting foreign armies in an alien battleground. The ruthless suppression of personal freedom, the rigid indoctrination and the widespread elimination of hostile elements during the cultural revolution in China, the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and the Khomeini autocracy in Iran have made
Nineteen Eighty-Four
a reality in our own time. But the horror of the Gulag Archipelago, which in 1948 had existed for nearly two decades, is far worse than anything portrayed by Orwell. Russia, like Eurasia in 1948, still is a totalitarian power opposed to the West.

Nineteen Eighty-Four
is composed of five poorly integrated elements. Orwell would have artistically refined and perfected them if he had not been desperate to finish the book before his death. He was terminally ill when he wrote the novel, had great difficulty completing it and tried to make his task easier by repeating what he had written in his previous books. Orwell usually wrote clear drafts of his work, but more than half of the typescript of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
was crossed out and completely rewritten.
⁴

The five elements are (1) a conventional Orwellian novel of poverty, frustrated love and flight to the countryside for solitude and sex; (2) a satire on conditions in postwar England; (3) an anti-Utopian projection of an imaginary political future; (4) an almost detachable didactic argument in Goldstein's testament and the appendix on Newspeak; and (5) (the least successful and most horrible part) a portrayal of the torture and pain that are used to suppress political freedom—clearly based on his knowledge of Nazi extermination camps and his personal experience in sanatoria during 1947–48. The novel is artistically flawed because each element has a different novelistic and political purpose. How, then, do we account for the great strength of the novel, for the source of its overwhelming impact?

I have argued elsewhere that
Nineteen Eighty-Four
was influenced by Swift, Dostoyevsky, Zamyatin and Trotsky; was a culmination of all the characteristic beliefs and ideas expressed in Orwell's works from the Depression to the Cold War; was a paradigm of the history of Europe for the previous twenty years; and expressed the political experience of an entire generation. I would now like to show that if we read
Nineteen Eighty-Four
in its cultural context—the literature of the 1930s—we can see how Orwell's various elements are connected by a unified theme. His novel is a collective text that abstracts and synthesizes all the regular and recurring elements of Thirties literature. It explains the world of 1948—and by extension of
1984—by describing the conditions and ideologies that led to the Second World War.
⁵
In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
the 1930s were the prerevolutionary past, the final phase of capitalism that led to atomic warfare, revolution, purges and the absolutism of Big Brother.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is about the past as well as about the future and the present.

The past is one of the dominant themes of the novel. The Party confidently believes: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The Party can not only change the past but can also destroy it and authoritatively state: “it never happened.”
⁶
By creating a new as well as destroying the old past, the Party can also arrange to predict events that have already taken place. Winston spends a great deal of time conversing with the proles, trying to recall and reestablish the personal and historical past that has been officially abolished, for he believes that the past may still exist in human memory. When Winston plots with O'Brien, they drink “To the past.” O'Brien gravely agrees that the past is more important than the future because under a system of organized lying only a remembrance of the past can prevent the disappearance of objective truth.