I first read 1984 seven years after
the events in were fictionally supposed to take place. At the time I was twelve
years old and I regularly read novels that were far above my suggested reading
level even then. Indeed, I’d actually read Animal Farm a few months
earlier (at least three years before I would read in high school) so I was
curious about this writer’s other book.
I was able to read the book and would
reread it several more times before I finished high school. However unlike so
many other books I have reread over the years I did not so because I enjoyed
the book (though how much pleasure could you truly get from the novel is an
open question) or even because I was hoping for a greater understanding of it
as I got older. No, I think my impression was much like those of so much
‘great’ literature or films or TV shows I’ve seen over the years: I couldn’t
understand what the fuss was about.
That’s not uncommon for a lot of political
or historical literature: no one’s going to argue Uncle Tom’s Cabin is
at the same level of Moby Dick and The Fountainhead is such a
lugubrious read I find it astonishing Ayn Rand ever managed to get a following
big enough to have her own political movement. And it’s not like one can say 1984’s
ever gone out of style considering how much it is always being pulled out by
academic and literary types over the 21st century starting with the
Bush/Cheney administration and continuing to the present day. That said
whenever this happens I take one of two points of view: 1) the people who are
shouting about how we’re living in an Orwellian world have not actually read 1984
or 2) they have read but have decided to do the kind of selective
interpretation of it that academics – who are frequently left-leaning – choose
to make of it.
Orwell was, of course, a progressive
himself. Born Eric Blair in Colonial India in 1903, he attended boarding school
in England and first came aware of the class prejudice that infiltrated British
society. He signed on with the Burmese Imperial Police after graduating Eton ,
later arguing “In order to hate imperialism, you have got to be a part of it.”
He quit without explanation five years later and decided to become a writer.
Much of his early work dealt with poverty,
transcending social roles and fighting for the rights of workers, In 1937 he
and his wife joined an antifascist militia at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil
War (recounted in his Homage to Catalonia). Much of his writing involved
the very real political and social circumstances of his day.
All of these description make Orwell seem
very much the kind of left-wing follower that was popular in the 1920s up until
the start of World War II – many of whom believed Communism was the only true
form of government and that democracy was a losing struggle. It is striking to
look at Animal Farm, published not long after V-E Day and consider this
in context. Because it has always looked, then and now, very much like an
allegory for the Communist Revolution that started out as a revolt against the
Tsar and ended up as a totalitarian dictatorship.
Orwell died just a year after 1984 was
first published in 1949 and therefore was never around to give a true
interpretation of what either of his most famous novels meant in the mix of the
Cold War. In that absence scholars have gone out of their way to interpret it
as they see fit, and even after the title date passed and the Cold War ended,
the interpretation has increasingly become whatever its reader choose to see it
rather than what it is actually about. Indeed looking at the 75th
anniversary edition from my local library, I see in both the introduction and
two epilogues – one of which was written this very year – writers are still
trying to make their interpretation the correct one.
This is the interpretation that I’ve come
to over the years, again after recently reading it again. It will not be a
popular interpretation but its as good a one as any I’ve heard.
First of all, let’s get this out upfront: 1984
doesn’t read very well. It gets away with this because it’s a short book –
the new edition is less than 270 pages – but compared to Orwell’s other essays
and Animal Farm, it’s clunky, stilted and far more stodgy and academic
then his other writer. It’s as if Orwell has forgotten to make a readable novel
in the conventional sense.
The only character who has any dimension at
all is Winston, and everyone else is seen through his perception. I’m not
saying he’s an unreliable narrator so much as an uninteresting one. This, one
of the afterwards makes clear, is by design: Winston is a symbolic figure who
things happen to rather than a character who moves the action forward. It doesn’t
change the fact that half the novel is essentially the interior thoughts of
Winston. He’s supposed to be the only person in Europe who has not yet been
brainwashed into the Party’s view of Oceania and that makes him a symbolic
character.
The problem is Orwell had done this exact same
thing with Animal Farm and many of the characters came across far more
well drawn: Boxer’s futility, Snowball and Napoleon’s politics, Benjamin’s
pessimism. Dystopian novels can have interesting characters – we’ve certainly
seen that in the future – but Winston seems to be sleepwalking through his
life, even as he makes his pathetic attempt at a rebellion. Even his supposedly
problem with society is muted and unimagined: he seems numb and barely able to
work up interest for anything. He almost seems thrilled when the Thought Police
capture him and Julia; it’s as if he truly thinks this is the most exciting
thing that could possibly to happen and there isn’t even an attempt to resist
having spent eighty pages making an attempt at a rebellion. Considering that he
and Julia swore loyalty to the Brotherhood just thirty pages ago and have been
devoted to each other for all of the second section, it’s as if Winston seem
very much like he’s been a passenger in his own life.
And I’ll be honest, even when he’s been
held prisoner, tortured and finally getting sentenced to his being broken,
there’s really no difference between Winston then or at any point in the novel.
He doesn’t seem to know or even care that much when he’s being held, or
surprised that O’Brien is a member of the Thought Police or even about his
inevitable execution. Winston seems very much like he is a pawn being moved
from square to square rather than a fully drawn character.
Winston is a member of the Outer Party
which is the close to being the upper classes in the IngSoc part of Oceania. Though
the novel is set in a slightly distant future, what was notable about it to me
was how much it looked like the past – or to be clear Orwell’s recent present. It’s
clear English Society is on what is a model of permanent austerity (the war
measures in place during the second World War) but even though Winston is supposedly
higher up, his food and lodgings look very much like they are second rate. The
same is true of the government, which seems very primitive even in its future.
The country is in a state of perpetual war, no one has much of anything and we
are used to consistent bombing. Everything is pretty much ritual. Including, of
course, the two minutes of hate where everybody shouts their venom at Goldstein
(who may or may not exist) and shows their love for Big Brother (who also may
or may not exist).
If we didn’t know that we were essentially
looking at a model of say the Soviet Union, the fact that the lower class is
referred to as the proles is a dead giveaway. According to Winston they make up
85 percent of the population of Oceania and are the only hope of bringing down
the Party.
Now comes my interpretation of the novel,
which I think as much validity as any
other: Orwell is writing a satire of what it is like to be a leftist in a
society that has in a sense become what happens when one reaches the natural
end of leftism. In a sense Winston Smith is the last true believer in the spirit
of Marxism after the Iron Curtain has descended over all of Europe.
Much of the actions of Winston Smith are very
much that of the intellectual that I suspect Orwell/Blair would have encountered
when he was attending boarding school in Britain. He was very much anti-imperialist,
saw the rising side of fascism and like many British during that period might
very well have been drawn to Communism. Indeed many well-educated British who
were part of intelligence ended up defecting to the Soviet Union though Orwell
would be dead long before he would have known the name Kim Philby.
Winston’s ideas of a rebellion are
pathetic. They are writing down random musing in a journal, which are
themselves a crime. It’s worth noting many so called writers and intellectuals
spent a lot of time, then and now, criticizing the state and calling it a
rebellion. Winston looks about the entire society with something close to contempt.
This is shared by a colleague of his Syme, the man who works in the research department
who is very involved with the creation of Newspeak. Syme seems overjoyed in his
work on the dictionary and it lights him up. “I’m on the adjectives. It’s
fascinating.”
It's worth noting that trying to change
language has been something that both ends of the political spectrum have
always done when it suits their purpose, particularly in America. The left’s
version is changing the terms of identity to make them less offensive. In that sense
when Syme says “it’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” you could
just as easily see the left insisting on LatinX and pronouns such as much as
the right co-ops terms such as ‘critical race theory’ and ‘woke’.
Perhaps it is the fact that because Winston
says: “One day Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He speaks too
clearly and too plainly…One day he will disappear” that the left would be drawn
to the meaning of that phrase. That it refers to a man who is rewriting the
English Language is the context that is missed.
What one sees of Winston, particularly in
the first section, is a contempt for all of society – including the proles who
he sees as having the numbers to win but not the will. “Why was it they could
never raise their voices about anything that mattered?” is a complaint that
could be made by the left about so many working class people today. This phrase
which Winston writes is telling:
“Until they become conscious they will
never and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
This is a kind of double-speak as anything
else in the novel but it sums up the view held by the left in Orwell’s time and
today: they yearn for the lower classes to rise up and strike down the oligarchs
but because they are not educated enough or intelligent enough, they will never
be able to realize the prison there in. The left has always viewed most of
society as being in a prison that they alone
can see.
This is made clear in one of the sections
where Winston goes to visit a pub where the proles are drinking. He meets an
eighty year old prole and tries to get an opinion about what life was like
before the Revolution. But when he tries to have a supposedly intellectual
discussion with him, he’s disappointed because while the man remembers back to
that point, he doesn’t seem to get it. Finally he asks him would he prefer to
live before the revolution or now and the man still thinks he’s asking him
about being young again or old.
This is the only encounter Winston has with
a real prole for the rest of the novel; after he meets Julia he never goes near
them again. It’s very hard not to find the humor in this section; Winston doesn’t
say ‘Ok boomer” but you can sense a similar disappointment that he hasn’t
gotten what he wanted to hear.
The strengths of 1984 are about the
way the language has been reinvented. The Ministry of Truth is about
propaganda, the Ministry of Plenty is about organizing economic shortages, the
Ministry of Peace conducts the wards and the Ministry of Love is where the
dissidents or tortured. Winston spends much of the novel trying to remember the
old British nursery rhyme: “Oranges and Lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens.” I can’t help but think the three slogans “War
is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength have been misused by the
left who basically use them describe Western civilization with these three same
statements as given in our society. Near the end of the second half, Orwell
devoted much of the novel towards Winston reading ‘The Book’ Goldstein’s story
of how the party maintains power and he’s fascinated by it because it privately
confirms what he and Julia have believed all along. However it is written in
such elaborate language that Julia falls asleep while he’s reading it to her.
This portion, I should mention, is the only
period when Winston comes alive at all during the novel which he considers
proof at last of what he’s always believed. I can’t help but think of so many
quasi-intellectuals looking at a copy of Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky’s works
with the same awe and considering this the full truth, solely because it
matches the bias of the world they see around them.
And one of the funniest sections comes in
the Ministry of Love when he meets the poet Ampleforth. He doesn’t know why he’s
been captured:
There is only one offense, is there not?
And you have committed it?
Apparently I have.
He then recollects one instance that he
thinks has to have been critical
“We were producing the definitive edition
of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word ‘God’ to remain at the end of the
line. I could not help it!” he added almost indignantly…”It was impossible to
change the line. The rhyme was ‘rod’ . There are only 12 rhymes to rod in the
English language. For days I racked my brains.”
The expression on his face changed. The
annoyance passed out of it, and he looked almost pleased. A sort of intellectual
warmth , the joy of the pedant who has found some useless fact, shone through
the dirt and scrubby hair.”
Winston actually seems annoyed by this fact
through his dismay.
How much of 1984 was about Orwell’s
concern about the world after the war and the way so many of his fellow
leftists seemed more concerned about semantics when it came to what it came to
Stalin? Orwell knew of Churchill’s raising the spectre of ‘The Iron Curtain’,
saw what was happening in Poland and Eastern Europe and saw the battle lines
being drawn. He must also have been aware of so much of the leftwing movement
in America, particularly among intellectuals towards Henry Wallace’s Progressive
Party and how they thought the world should go easier on Communism, not harder.
Would he have read Mencken’s diatribes of Wallace double-speak? Would he have known
of all the so called intellectuals and artists who embraced him?
I can’t say one way or the other, and its
not as though there is sufficient material from Orwell, who died at 46, to
answer the question. What I do know is that the further away we get from the
era Orwell wrote 1984, it is easier for the context to disappear and
only the words to remain. And as Orwell was aware you can rewrite history the
further away you get from it.
This is proved in what of the deepest
ironies listed by the authors of one of the afterwards. Sandra Newman in 2023
authored Julia ‘a feminist retelling of 1984.’That she has chosen to
reinterpret a work of the past so that it suits her vision is something that clearly she didn’t have a
problem with; that by doing so she demonstrates the same lack of awareness that
Syme does when it comes to rewriting the dictionary is also not surprising.
We see a similar lack of awareness in the
first Forward by Dolan Perkins Valdez, an author herself. But she’s still upset
that Winston Smith is ‘a problematic character’. She actually seems offended
that in a novel about a totalitarian society the lead character is anti-Semitic,
that the major female character doesn’t meet the model of a modern day
feminist, and there’s no discussion of race or ethnicity at all. To be clear,
she’s upset that a totalitarian society has characters with prejudicial views.
Orwell would be proud of the twisted logic, I suppose.
Indeed part of me wonders given how so many
academics and leftist think that they might agree with the Party slogan that
Winston recites to O’Brian: “Who controls the past controls the future; who
controls the present controls the past” Considering that there is now a movement to
teach a different form of history – that argues it must stand over the one we’ve
been told to believe – could be spoken in different tomes about the work of
Chomsky and Zinn as it could D’Souza or Victor Davis Hanson. The left would no doubt agree with that slogan
when it comes to so much of their recent forms of historical teaching even if
they knew the source material – which is why I suspect they don’t.
Much like those fundamentalists who
believed that either the millennium or 2012 would bring about the apocalypse
and then kept pushing the date back rather than admit error, the left has done
much the same even four decades after 1984. They bring it out when its accurate
– much of the War on Terror and the fundamentalist movement bares similarly –
and just as frequently when they feel their own rights in being impacted. It is
rare to watch a broadcast of MSNBC or hear certain comedians and not here the
term Orwellian.
But what does that mean to them? There’s
technology that monitors us in every home but the average person agreed for it
come there for convenience sake and I doubt seriously they would give it up
willingly. I don’t deny the flaws in American society even now, but I defy
someone to tell me that we live in a totalitarian state with absolutely no
freedoms at all. (If that were the case, all of the would be Winston’s who yell
at the current administration would have ended up in the Justice department
years ago by the dictionary definition.) Hell, there’s a reality show on TV
called Big Brother and that may be a sign of the downfall of our society
but not in the way the left wants to argue it is.
Perhaps so many of these people think of
themselves as Winston’s wandering through society, thinking something is wrong
with the world but not sure why. The difference is, of course, we don’t live in
a society where bombs drop on our heads in a regular basis, where everybody is brainwashing into accepting
the same point of view on a daily basis, where you can’t say the wrong thing in
public and your neighbor will report you to the thought police. (They can do
that for other reasons but not for that.) America is far from perfect, but it
is not a future ‘of a boot stamping on a face – forever’ It may be true of some of our politics but it
is not true of every single aspect of it, no matter how much the left wants to
make this argument – and they made this argument for decades before MAGA showed
up.
Because Orwell has been dead seventy-five
years we could never ask what 1984 represented to him. And now that
enough time has gone by so that the memory of what the world was like when he first
wrote the novel the context for it, like almost everything else that the
academic left argue makes it problematic today, has been erased as well.
So like so much else it will be reshaped to
mean whatever scholars, academics and politicians think it means. They will
engage in their own doublespeak, they will try to prove two and two make five
if it suits their ends, they will say Big Brother is watching even though in
many cases they invited him in to their homes in their first place. And they
will no doubt hold tight to books like 1984 as having the answers to
their society, open few of them, and fall asleep while reading them. I don’t
judge them. As Orwell himself said: “Sanity is not statistical.”
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