snpmurray's Full Review: George Orwell, Erich Fromm, Thomas Pynchon, Erich ...
According to my diary, aged 14 at the time, I read two books in the first half of the year 1984. The first was Animal Farm. The second was 1984. At the time, my homeland of England was experiencing a monumental miners strike. The governmentally appointed governing body for miners had effectively lost control of the workforce, and a man had emerged from the ranks of the miners own unions to represent their case and concerns.This man had been democratically elected leader of the miners union, a I recall, and it was on the very day that I closed animal farm and opened 1984 that the news revealed that he had proclaimed himself leader of the miners for life, without putting it to the popular vote. It matched well with my reading.
Being fourteen, I was at the time waking up to consciousness. Moving from the gentle rolling satire to the biting cynicism and harsh analysis of the relationship of the individual to the state as expressed in 1984 was part of moving from childhood to adulthood for me. They make a good pair of books to read back to back.
1984 is set in a near future. Winston Smith lives in London, capital of the land known as “Airstrip
One”, which is itself a component of Eurasia, one of the world’s three super states. The three super states have been at war with each other for as long as anyone can remember. As it happens, nobody seems to be able to remember very far back into history at all, as far as Winston can tell. Winston himself clearly remembers the end of World War 2, but in his daily work in the ministry of truth, he is concerned with the daily rewriting of any document which implies that the war with the other two super states has been anything less than never-ending. This process is known as correction. The philosophy on which the rewriting of history is based has become known as “doublethink”.
It is important for the state that these documents are constantly rewritten in this manner because the super states which are at war with each other constantly revolve…no two are described as being at war with each other for very long. War is vastly important to the state…..
Continuous war solidifies the permanency of the current social hierarchy.
War increases consumption
War increases the emotional dependency of the individual on the state.
Why does this all sound terribly familiar….?
Anyway, before I get thinking about why this all sounds terribly familiar, let's get back to the plot…..
So, Winston, against the express mental training of the state, begins to think. He thinks about the daily lies, the obvious misleading of the Proles (the 80% of the population not actively involved in the machinery of the state…also the poorest, and constantly downtrodden…why does this sound familiar again?)
His thinking begins to change and his acceptance of the constant broadcasts by the state on the TV in his dwelling diminishes. It is a TV which cannot be switched off, and behind which lurks a recorder which spies his every activity. We observe the waking up of Winston Smith. It is to be a waking up which leads him to commit the worst crime of all….failure to love big brother, the icon of the state.
This book largely concerned itself with the means and methods of duplicity by the state. One particularly memorable example is that Winston is watching a broadcast celebrating the increase of the chocolate ration. He is simultaneously able to recall recent broadcasts reducing the chocolate ration, and promising that the chocolate ration would not change at all. As it happens, at the time that I read this book in England, a particularly famous chocolate bar which shall remain nameless was in the process of telling everybody how wonderful it was that they had increased the size of their bar by 20%. I found this amusing, as I had noted the previous year that the same bar had in fact silently lost approximately the same degree of its dimensions.
Was it taken away silently so it could be handed back to me in a manner I was to take as a gift?
Why does this sound so terribly familiar?
Winston begins to write a diary, falls in love, and associates with person’s intent on changing the government. All of this is hideous thoughtcrime, lovecrime and sexcrime. Winston learns that the dictionary is gradually shrinking….”Newspeak” is slowly and insidiously replacing the English language. If you can’t put your feelings of negativity towards the state into words, you can’t talk about it with other disaffected individuals, and therefore you can’t possibly organize against the state. Such is the philosophy of Ingsoc, the states political brain. The state is involved in the industry of destroying the individual. For Ingsoc, read "English socialism"
Unfortunately, as you may well have heard, having read this book or not, Big Brother was watching.
Will Winston and his friends overturn the totalitarian state and expose its lies? Will Big Brother catch Winston in the act of lovecrime and banish him to room 101, where each soul’s deepest darkest fear lives?
How do I increase my chocolate ration?
Nearly all of these questions and more are answered in 1984.
Quite a plot, eh?
1984 will chill you. 1984 is one of those novels which manages to portray a completely fictional dystopia, only for one to discover that almost every element of its construction is visible clearly in ones own society. A masterful work of invention, George Orwell manages to create a very detailed and believable world. The trick to excellent science fiction is, in my Epinion, is to create a completely detailed , congruent and believable new world, imagine it in every detail, and then completely forget about describing these details to your readership and merely assume they will figure it out as we go along. Such does George Orwell do in 1984. The streets of London are still the streets of London, but with very slight strokes does the author paint them. As he gradually introduces us to some of the changes in this “altered” London, one discovers that in ones mind ithas darkened, become harder and grayer. Despite the sparse degree of descriptive (or perhaps because of it) 1984 leaves the reader with a totally real world, one which lives on forever in the imagination, and perhaps in the nightmares.
Dark and grey fairly accurately describes where 1984 lives. Winston lives a drab life. He lives in a drab world; the color has been systematically taken out of it by the state. This novel describes how a nation might bleed to death culturally under the wrong kind of leadership. It is cynical, and the ending is none too pleasant. Not here a happily ever after. For Orwell, socialist ideals when combined with the frail inability of men to prevent themselves from becoming utterly corrupt in the presence of power could mean only one thing – the arising of the super state, intent on its own propagation, and if that meant the doing away with of individuality in its populace, so be it.
The main character Winston (named after Churchill, another British hero-type of somewhat more successful biography) is beautifully written. You will never forget the Winston that Orwell creates….a proto-man, only half awake before the state itself awakens to his opening eyes and sees to it that he grows no further without its further guidance. As I mentioned, this is no happy fairy tale, and the ending of the book cannot fail to move. Winston does not die, but Orwell reminds us that there are some things that it is more important to keep than ones life, if we are to continue to be human.
1984 didn’t change me significantly, I think. The power of this book is more as a reminder of how much of the power and intent of a state can be out of the eyes and minds of the citizenry. It is impossible in today’s political environment in the western world not to see that though published in 1959, 1984 is still totally fresh, and no less grim.
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