Orwell's Revenge

FOR SOPHIE AND MICHAEL

G
EORGE
O
RWELL
: Since your day something has appeared called totalitarianism.

J
ONATHAN
S
WIFT
: A new thing?

O
RWELL
: It isn't strictly new, it's merely been made practicable owing to modern weapons and modern methods of communication.

—“Jonathan Swift: An Imaginary Interview” [radio broadcast, 1942]

April 4, 1984 . . . To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:

From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—Greetings!

George Orwell,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949)

The date was wrong; the words were in fact written on April 4, 1948, or thereabouts. They were composed by a lonely iconoclastic genius of English letters, aged forty-four, who was dying of tuberculosis. His book would be published in June 1949, just six months before his death. He chose as a title the year in which the book had been written, with the
last two digits interchanged. The writer was George Orwell. The book was
1984.

It was an immediate, huge success. By July 1949,
1984
had received sixty reviews in American publications. As the
New York Times
reported, 90 percent were “overwhelmingly admiring, with cries of terror rising above the applause.” In the New
Yorker,
Lionel Trilling described the book as “profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating.”
The
Evening Standard
of London called it “the most important book published since the war.”

Forty years have passed;
1984
is still the most important book published since the war. Orwell's grimly technotic vision still casts a dark shadow over every advance in telegraphy, telemetry, telephony, and television—which is to say, every facet of teletechnology, every yard of the information superhighway, that is transforming our lives today. No one who has actually read Orwell can go a week without remembering him in
one context or another. At any moment, some scene or neologism, which comes from this one short book, is liable to drop into your mind.
Big Brother. The Thought Police. Newspeak. Doublethink. Reality Control.
These were all created by Orwell in
1984.1984
is
not so much a book, it is a world. Even people who affect to disagree with Orwell
quote him unconsciously. Through
1984,
Orwell did what very few other writers ever have done: he added not only phrases but his own
name to the English language. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's
whole attitude to life.
1984
is one of them. Whether you approve of him or not, Orwell is there, like
the Washington Monument.

And the only trouble with
that
is that Orwell was wrong. Not wrong in the details—Orwell was in fact remarkably right about the little things in
1984.
But he was wrong in his fundamental logic, wrong in his grand vision, wrong in his whole chain of reasoning. Wrong not because he lacked conviction, or industry, or moral integrity—Orwell brought more of those talents to his craft than any other person of his own time, or ours. Wrong, nonetheless, because Orwell built the essential struts and columns, the entire support structure of his magnificent edifice, on a gadget that he did not understand. The gargoyles in
1984
are magnificent. But the architecture
beneath is rotten.

Begin, as Orwell does in
1984,
with Victory Gin, the opiate of all Oceania that sinks you into stupor every night and floats your mind
out of bed every morning. Winston Smith, the hero of the book, sops up gin like everyone else. It is gin that keeps him calm during the Two Minutes Hate, gin that lets him relax even under the eye of Big Brother, gin that stops his mind from straying into the lethal minefields of
thought-crime.

Smith is a miserable little cipher who spends his days falsifying history for the Ministry of Truth. He lives in London, a city filled with posters, propaganda, and all the squalid incidents of Stalinesque Big Brotherhood. The streets are not smashed to pieces, just “a little altered, kind of chipped and dirty-looking, the shop-windows almost empty and so dusty that you can't see into them,” marked here and there by an
occasional bomb crater. There are “the posters and the food-queues, and the castor oil and the rubber truncheons and the machine-guns squirting
out of bedroom windows,” slogans and
“enormous faces” on posters, “secret police and the loudspeakers
telling you what to think.”

Life in
1984
is lived without affection, without loyalty, without any shred of real friendship. “Every word and every thought is censored,” “free speech is unthinkable,” and “in the end the secrecy of your revolt poisons you like a secret disease.” “Your whole life is a life of lies, you are a creature of the despotism, tied tighter than a monk or a savage by an
unbreakable system of tabus.” Your every waking moment is filled with the “hateful feeling that someone hitherto your friend might be
denouncing you to the secret police.”

As
1984
opens, Winston Smith is about to make a gesture of rebellion: he is going to begin keeping a private diary. The passage I quoted at the beginning of this Preface is one of the first coherent things Winston records. He continues with an account of how he visited a toothless old prostitute,
who disgusted him horribly

The next day, Winston is back at work at the Ministry. He writes in Newspeak, the stripped-down English that is now the official language of all Oceania. An Appendix to
1984
explains its basic grammar, vocabulary, and syntax. By denuding the language of words and texture, the Party is gradually eliminating all possibility of independent thought and communication. Newspeak, to paraphrase Smith's diary, ensures that all men will be the same in what they say, and therefore in what they think. Newspeak communicates nothing, and so forces men to live alone.

The second transcendent political reality in
1984
is the “
mutability of the past.” There is no such thing as honest history any more; what is done can
always
be undone. Winston's job at the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite old newspaper articles so that every Party prediction is vindicated. “[I]f all others
accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale,” Winston reflects, “then the lie passed into history
and became truth.” The “all” is critical: the Party falsifies not just some records here and there but every record, newspaper, book, and poem everywhere. The past is not merely tampered with; it is rewritten chapter and verse. People thus live in a “shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday's weather can be changed by decree, a nightmare world in which Big Brother controls not only the future but the past as well. If Big Brother says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened'—
well then, it never happened.”

The third key political theme in
1984
is
doublethink.
Doublethink is a “vast system of mental cheating,” the “power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously,
and accepting both of them.” To engage in doublethink is to

tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of
the reality which one denies.

Gin makes all of this possible. Silence and Newspeak, forgetfulness and the mutable past, doublethink and the Thought Police: all of life in
1984
is lubricated, all thought dulled, all pain anesthetized, all rebellion dissipated, by Victory Gin. The other fixture of daily life—the other prop that makes the oppression possible, that sharpens the senses rather than dulling them, that creates records rather than destroying them, that enhances memory rather than suppressing it—is, of course, . . .

But I am getting ahead of myself.

In
1984,
every emotion is transmuted into hate. Winston desires Julia, the dark-haired girl who works just down the hall, but half the time his desire is an evil fantasy of flogging and rape. Then one day, out of the blue, she slips him a note: “I love you,” it says. Winston is first astounded, then deliriously happy The two find a hiding place in a dilapidated
room
above a junk shop. For a few brief weeks they lust and love. Within their hermetic private world, they are free. Their affair has an achingly poignant desperation to it. They know they're bound to be caught by the Thought Police in the end.

There's one tiny glimmer of hope: Winston has a hunch that O'Brien, a high-ranking member of the Inner Party, is really a secret leader of the underground resistance. So Winston and Julia go to O'Brien and confess all. O'Brien listens sympathetically, then describes a shadowy brotherhood that is plotting to
overthrow the Party. He arranges to supply Winston with a copy of
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,
a seditious book written by
the arch-traitor Kenneth Blythe. Some weeks later, the delivery is made.

Blythe's book provides a straight political explanation of the ideology and social structure of Oceania in 1984. Each of the three chapters is titled after one of the three slogans of the Party Winston avidly reads “War Is Peace” and “Ignorance Is Strength.” But he never does get to read the third chapter, “Freedom Is Slavery.” Still, the two he gets through make up quite a long tract in the
middle of
1984.

Years ago, Blythe explains, socialism promised men an
egalitarian, classless society. The steady advance of technology created abundant new wealth, which could easily have been
shared all around. But sharing the wealth threatened power-hungry elites in every nation, and these reactionaries blocked society's natural progress toward humane socialism. Capitalist societies became fascist; socialist ones became communist. On both sides, small states coalesced into large ones. The drift toward superstate totalitarianism occurred everywhere at the same time. Geopolitical stability was thus maintained even while scientific competence and
military strength decayed. Blythe's book is the least satirical part of
1984;
it closely tracks
Orwell's earlier political essays. This book within a book straightforwardly summarizes Orwell's own views about where
the world is headed, and why

By 1984, the world is dominated by three equally balanced superstates, all with much the same political structure. England is part of Oceania, where English Socialism (“Ingsoc”) is the triumphant totalitarian ideology. The other two superstates are Eurasia (which practices “Neo-Bolshevism”) and Eastasia (where the political ideology is called “Obliteration of the Self”). With similar systems established by all, the three
superstates are in perfect equipoise, and none faces any real threat of outside conquest. The only remaining threats to the power of the Inner Party in each superstate are internal.

There is, first, the problem of the untutored masses—the “proles.” An all-around increase in wealth would quickly lead to literacy, which would spark a revolution, so the rulers maintain poverty. They can't simply shut down the machines of industrial production; even the proles would see what was happening and revolt. They can't wage real war either; atom bombs
make that unthinkable. So the rulers engage their nations in ceaseless but essentially fake war in the third world, impoverishing society in a psychologically palatable way Poverty maintains ignorance, which maintains the strength of the ruling oligarchy Thus, we understand the first two of the Party's three slogans: WAR IS PEACE and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

The one other threat to the ruling elite is rebellion by people like Winston and Julia: members of the Outer Party
the educated, restless middle class. As Blythe explains, “The only genuine dangers [to the ruling elite] are the splitting-off of a new group of able, underemployed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and skepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously
molding the consciousness.”