Orwell (27 page)

O'Brien's Irish name may have been inspired by the surname of Orwell's first wife, Eileen O'shaughnessy, by her brother Dr. Eric Lawrence O'shaughnessy (who had the same Christian name as Orwell) and by Eric's wife, Dr. Gwen O'shaughnessy. The name may have expressed Orwell's fears about the power, domination and sexual demands of women, which the passive Winston is scarcely able to deal with. Eileen, as closely attached to her brother as to her husband, was deeply grieved by Eric's death at Dunkirk in 1941. Both Eric and Gwen O'shaughnessy treated Orwell for tuberculosis in the 1930s. Orwell may have transferred his antagonism from the doctors—who seemed to be torturing him while trying to cure him during the unsuccessful treatment with streptomycin in 1948—to the authoritarian figure of O'Brien. While curing Winston of Thoughtcrime, O'Brien destroys his body exactly as the doctors had done.

The map, the frontier and the geographical context were recurrent metaphors in the poetry of Auden and his followers. The marked increase of this imagery coincided with the obsolescence of the frontier, which was easily overrun by tanks, planes and modern armies. (Goldstein declares: “The main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.”) Orwell sets his novel in a global context by describing two vast land masses that are alternately opposed to and aligned with Oceania. A Flying Fortress lies between Iceland and the Faroes in the north; victories are announced on the Malabar front in the south; and the permanent land wars take place in the rough quadrilateral covered by Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong. Julia gives Winston precise directions to their secret meeting place “as though she had a map inside her head.” Orwell is also concerned, more profoundly than the Thirties writers, with the inner psychic frontier at which man can be broken and made to betray.

In the literature of the 1930s spies secretly cross the frontier and operate independently against the alien population. In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Goldstein is said to control spies and saboteurs; but the real Spies (the name of a youth group) work in the home against their own parents. Parsons, the most enthusiastic Party hack, is proud of the fact that his daughter has betrayed him for uttering “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep (another example of the Freudian unconscious at work). All the principal characters in the novel are either arrested (Winston, Julia, Parsons, Syme, Ampleforth) or work for the Thought Police (O'Brien, Charrington, Parsons' daughter).

The Thirties writers, following the Italian futurists, were fascinated by modernism, airplanes and technological advance. Auden liked industrial landscapes and advocated “New styles of architecture, a change of heart.” Orwell, who “loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future,”
¹⁵
opposed modern change and longed for the familiar cosiness of the decent past. In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
a dehumanized London is called Airstrip One and hovering helicopters snoop into people's windows. Technology either breaks down and causes chaos or operates efficiently and leads to repression.

The characteristic mode of social inquiry in the 1930s was Tom Harrisson's Mass Observation, which “tried to understand social behavior by accumulating disparate [factual] observations about what given groups of people were doing.”
¹⁶
This is also ironically reversed in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
where Mass Observation is a mode of surveillance carried on by the Thought Police to identify and vaporize potential opponents of the regime.

The writers of the 1930s advocated a change of heart and new awareness that would lead to revolutionary commitment. In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
there is also an alteration of consciousness and a commitment to the
revolution—but of an entirely different kind. In the last part of the novel, O'Brien tortures Winston—using a process that resembles electroconvulsive therapy—in order to humiliate him and destroy his powers of reasoning. He makes Winston believe that 2 + 2 = 5, forces him to betray Julia, crushes him until he loves Big Brother.

The idea of collective action was a major preoccupation of the Thirties. Writers were concerned with relating the public and private dimensions of their lives, with creating a Popular Front, with establishing a secure defense against Fascism by immersing themselves in the collective security of the Soviet Union. In the 1930s there “was an attempt to deny utterly the validity of individual knowledge and observation.”
¹⁷
Unlike most writers of the 1930s, Orwell (who had served as part of a unit in the Burma Police) rejected the idea of collective action and almost always stood alone. The only group he ever joined—the Anarchists in Spain—were an underdog minority, destined for destruction. Like all left writers of the Thirties, Orwell hoped for a new social order; but he did not believe that Communism would help mankind progress toward that goal. In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
the Party embodies the collective mind and all members are forced to participate in communal activities. Winston, locked in loneliness, becomes a lunatic, a minority of one, the only man still capable of independent thought. He is “The Last Man in Europe” (the original title of the book) precisely because he adheres to the importance of the individual mind. Orwell shows that totalitarianism paradoxically intensifies solitude by forcing all the isolated beings into one overpowering system.

Thirties writers idealized and justified the Soviet Union—even after the transcripts of the Purge Trials had been published and the pact with Hitler signed. They argued that any criticism of Russia was objectively pro-Fascist. This belief was carried to a typically ludicrous extreme in a line of Day Lewis' “The Road These Times Must Take”: “Yes, why do we all, seeing a communist, feel small?” Winston feels small when he sees O'Brien, not only because he admires and loves him, but because he craves O'Brien's power (“The object of power is power”) and is reduced by his torture to a rotten, suppurating cadaver who resembles “a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease.” In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Winston's physical disease symbolizes his intellectual “illness”: his heretical hatred of the prevailing ideology.

Finally, the political conditions of the 1930s led to an intellectual polarity between catastrophe and rebirth, a contrast between economic and industrial collapse and revolutionary hope for the future, a belief in the destruction of the old social order for the sake of a new Communist world.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
combines and transforms these polarities. The revolution is
followed by betrayal and repression, catastrophe leads only to catastrophe, the new order is far worse than the old. In Orwell's novel, the “endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties” are attributed to Eurasia (or Eastasia), but they actually take place in Oceania.

After the Second World War, the destruction of much of England, the reaffirmation of the class system and his own long illness, Orwell realized that the totalitarian states he had written about in his essay on James Burnham had come into permanent existence. The ideas of the 1930s had led to the chaos of postwar Europe and his hopes had been destroyed. Orwell's disillusionment and disease help to account for the political ideas and the artistic flaws of the novel.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
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 Thirties. The past, as a theoretical concept and a historical reality, is crucial to the meaning of the novel. “The best books, [Winston] perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.”

 

 

 

Bernard Crick and Peter Davison were both at the Library of Congress conference, and their personalities accurately reflected their work. My third essay on
Nineteen Eighty-Four
contrasted Crick's poorly annotated and factually inaccurate edition of the novel with Davison's masterful facsimile edition (both 1984). Crick was completely out of his depth as a literary critic and there was nothing original in his overlong introduction, written in his typically turgid style. Davison's work revealed Orwell's working methods and enabled readers to see the genesis of the novel.

Wyndham Lewis's prescient political study,
The Art of Being Ruled
(1926), which would have been a brilliant title for Orwell's novel, begins with similar premises but arrives at quite different conclusions. Written a few years after the Russian Revolution and the Fascist coup in Italy, Lewis's book, like Orwell's, combines satire, political theory and prophecy. Lewis (who lived in Canada during World War II, taught at Assumption College and wrote his greatest novel,
Self Condemned
, about Toronto) sees the postwar world divided between the democratic and dictatorial forms of government: “The principal conflict to-day, then, is between the democratic and liberal principle on the one side … and on the other the principle of dictatorship of which Lenin was the protagonist and first great theorist.” Because the masses are manipulated by the media—“The contemporary Public [is] corrupted and degraded into semi-imbecility by the operation of this terrible canon of press and publicity technique”—Lewis rejects force as a passing and precarious thing and cynically insists that thought control, getting “inside a person's mind and changing his very personality, is the effective way of reducing him and making him yours.”

In contrast to Orwell, Lewis, the intellectual elitist, asks: “Instead of the vast organization to exploit the weaknesses of the Many, should we not possess one for the exploitation of the intelligence of the Few?” Lewis maintains that the strong ruler is justified in outraging the most elementary principles of freedom because the masses (Orwell's proles) are happier when they are dependent rather than independent. Since Lewis concludes, like Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor and Orwell's O'Brien, that men are essentially weak and crave authority, not freedom, he inevitably recommends a totalitarian form of government: “We should naturally seek the most powerful and stable authority that can be devised…. All the humbug of a democratic suffrage, all the imbecility that is so wastefully manufactured, will henceforth be spared…. The disciplined
fascist
party in Italy can be taken as representing the new and healthy type of ‘freedom.' … For anglo-saxon countries as they are constituted to-day some modified form of fascism would probably be the best.”

The heart of Bernard Crick's introduction, the “Seven Satiric Thrusts” of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, includes three of the themes mentioned by Lewis: the division of the world, the mass media as agents of prolerization, and power hunger and totalitarianism; and adds four others: betrayal by the intellectuals, the degradation of language, the destruction of truth and the theses of James Burnham's
The Managerial Revolution
(1941). The first, third, fourth and sixth of these points were mentioned in Orwell's letter to H. J. Willmett of May 18, 1944 (printed as Appendix B) and repeated in Orwell's unused introduction to
Animal Farm
, “Freedom of the Press,” first published in 1972. So there is nothing at all original in Crick's argument, which fails to distinguish between the true objects of Orwell's satire (points 2–6) and the ideas he borrows from Burnham (points 1 and 7). Crick's statement that the novel is “best read as Swiftian satire” repeats an idea stated by V. S. Pritchett, Herbert Read and Czeslaw Milosz when the book first appeared; his assertion that it is “deeply rooted … in contemporary conditions” echoes the argument in my
Reader's Guide to George Orwell
(1975).

It is an excellent idea to bring out a scholarly edition of a modern novel (as Cambridge University Press is doing with the work of D. H. Lawrence) when it is relatively easy to recreate the context and elucidate the contemporary references. Crick is good on relating Orwell's essays and reviews of the 1940s to the ideas of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, and revealing the conscious parody of catechism and communion when Winston visits O'Brien's flat. But his edition, directed at students and teachers (if any can afford the steep price of this volume) is more likely to confuse than to edify.

Crick, a political scientist, is completely out of his depth as a literary critic. He states, for example, that “Lear's eyes were ground out by the
boot of his daughter's husband.” But it is Gloucester—not Lear—who is blinded by Cornwall. There is no clear logic or structure in his 136-page introduction. He discusses Orwell's intentions, which should have come first, after the contemporary reception, which should have come last. The “contemporary reception” covers exactly the same ground as my
George Orwell: The Critical Heritage
(1975); Crick mentions eleven of the fifteen writers that I discuss on pages 24–27 of my book, but he does not cite this work except to quote one essay that I translated from German. Long-winded and unbearably repetitious, Crick tediously reiterates dozens of points. His turgid and sometimes senseless style—in contrast to Orwell's clarity, precision, vigor and wit—makes the reader feel as if he were crawling through a swamp. Crick is fond of clichés like “red herring” and “there is many a slip between the cup and the lip”; and he writes that Orwell “was making notes, on what proved to be his death bed (a fact which was, indeed, a possibility to him at the time, but far from a certainty).”

Crick's annotations (which repeat what has already been repeated in the introduction) tend to be obvious, unconvincing, incomplete or incorrect. His observations that thirteen is an unlucky number and that the hero bears the first name of Churchill and the most common surname in English scarcely need to be stated. His remark, “some critics regard this [sense of smell] as morbid on Orwell's part. They must lead sheltered lives,” is completely gratuitous. He relates the mustached face and caption “Big Brother Is Watching You” to Stalin, but not to the famous recruiting poster of 1914 with the picture of Field Marshall Lord Kitchener and the caption “Your Country Needs YOU.” He connects the Floating Fortress to the Flying Fortresses of the U.S. Air Force, but not to the Floating Island in
Gulliver's Travels
that also reduces rebellious subjects to obedience. And he claims that O'Brien, described as “a large, burly man with a thick neck and … humorous face,” “seems distinctly more like Hitler” than Stalin—though he bears absolutely no physical resemblance to the Führer.