1984: Help, I’m Alive

1. 1984: Help, I’m Alive Feraco Myth to Science Fiction 25 February 2013

2. Do I dare / Disturb the universe? Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered? (70) And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without specific ideas, they could only focus on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. (71-72)

3. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason…Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, or deep or complex sorrows. (30)

4. We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well-known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy-porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. Neil Postman

5. The first chapter accomplishes a tremendous amount in a very short timespan. Orwell lays out the rules of his nightmare world in broad strokes, pausing to explain some while merely referencing others. (We trust he’ll tell us later; he justifies the trust.) In juxtaposing the familiar (London!) with the patently unfamiliar (what’s Airstrip One? What’s Oceania?), Orwell establishes the tone that he’ll carry throughout the entire first section: jumbled and largely grim, with glimmers of hope at the edges of the picture he’s painting.

6. But beyond establishing his world, tone, and narrative perspective, Orwell uses Chapter One to introduce Winston Smith, a character who’s initially a baffling, contradictory mixture of thoughtfulness, decency, cowardice, and vice. Winston would probably be a deeply unsympathetic figure in virtually any other type of narrative, but in the terrible realm of 1984, we latch onto his fundamental humanity like a drowning man clings to passing driftwood.

7. Before looking more extensively at the specific world, mood, and characters of 1984, an examination of its genre is in order. The book itself belongs to a literary tradition that’s pretty well-trodden at the moment, but which was still fairly fresh at the time of its publication: the novel of negative utopia, or “dystopia.”

8. Up until just before the dawn of the twentieth century, novels tended to present fairly straightforward visions of society. Even speculative fiction (what passed for science fiction at the time) tended to project society in one of two ways: either as a continuation of the recognizable traditions of the present, or as a glorious leap forward from it. It’s this latter type that particularly captured a large set of speculative-fiction writers, and it makes sense: why bother speculating about a future where things are markedly worse?

9. As Erich Fromm points out in his Afterword to 1984, this tradition has its roots in the Old Testament – the idea that mankind is not yet what he can be, but will reach that potential someday. The tradition gained further traction with Thomas More’s publication of Utopia – which literally means “no place” in Greek, but which we’ve since taken to mean “good place.” It carried on all the way through the beginning of the twentieth century, at which point the first World War shattered a generation and introduced a level of anxiety about the future on a global scale.

10. From this anxiety was born a counter-movement of sorts – “dystopian novels,” or books about “bad places.” One of the key elements of a dystopian novel is that the society in question must be a twisted version of an impossible Utopian ideal (since the impossibility, after all, is built into the term). People wouldn’t buy into a picture of pure evil arising from nothingness and conquering the world, but they would follow the concept of a good idea turned bad by its adherents – or by people who co-opted such movements for their own purposes.

11. Before 1984, the most famous dystopian work was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (the book we’ll read following 1984). Huxley taught Orwell when he was a university student, and the professor’s ideas echo throughout both novels. That said, it should be noted that the stories represent two sides of the same coin – that they have the same general idea of society gone wrong, but that they take very different paths to get there.

12. Dystopian societies as portrayed in both novels – in most dystopian novels, actually – share the following characteristics: • Propaganda is used to control the citizens of society • Information, independent thought, and freedom are restricted • A figurehead or concept is worshipped by the citizens of the society • Citizens are perceived to be under constant surveillance • Citizens have a fear of the outside world • Citizens live in a dehumanized state • The natural world is banished and distrusted • Citizens conform to uniform expectations • Individuality and dissent are bad • The society is an illusion of a perfect utopian world

13. But dystopian novels’ main purpose is not simply to invent a society. In many ways, the society at hand cannot simply be a twisted version of the Utopian ideal; it has to be a twisted version of the author’s current society were it to incorrectly pursue that ideal. Some of the authors do this in order to criticize utopian ideals as unrealistic or naïve; others do this to condemn us for falling short of what we should be capable of achieving.

14. After all, the vast majority of people behave decently to each other the vast majority of the time; on an individual level, virtually any of us is capable of living in a way that would give rise to a utopia. The dystopian authors get to examine why this tendency towards the good isn’t always expressed in our governance or societal models – and how those systems, in turn, can feed back until they affect our choices and behaviors, until everything blurs together and it becomes too difficult to tell whether our societies reflect our preferences or shape them. (If you noticed that this is the same old question from the first semester – do my morals dictate my choices, or do my choices give rise to my morals? – congratulations.)

15. In this way, authors like Orwell, Huxley, and Ishiguro (whose Never Let Me Go closes our studies together) can use dystopias not simply as works of speculative fiction, but as a means of criticizing current trends, societal norms, or political systems. Orwell and Huxley both painted worst-case scenarios of the modern Western world’s downfall; both were British, and it’s no surprise that the action in both takes place in transformed versions of England. You’ll see Neil Postman’s adage borne out: that Huxley believed we’d be destroyed by the things we loved, and Orwell feared we were more susceptible to the things we hated. And from the first chapter onwards, Orwell starts trying to make as persuasive a case for his fears as possible.

16. The first chapter establishes Winston as a viable protagonist by thrusting us into his world along with him; as strangers in a strange land, we’re forced to feel just as helpless as he is. What’s really brilliant about that beginning is the way that everything’s close-but-not-quite-right – the “uncanny valley” effect from motion-capture animation expressed on a much, much larger scale – and how that particular setup ties into the book’s larger themes and plot points.

17. Think of it like this: Pretend you’re a bilingual speaker (I know – this isn’t much of a stretch for some of you) who’s listening to a conversation in your second language. You can keep up, but it’s not quite as easy as listening to your mother tongue – your brain sometimes hitches when weird slang pops up, or you get distracted hearing people talk about things with words that aren’t nearly as well-suited to the task as the ones in your other language (think Greek speakers, English speakers, and the words we use for love). Now pretend you’re listening to the conversation in a crowded room – a bar, a stadium, somewhere – which adds a bunch of background noise. You aren’t consciously listening to the other stuff, but you’re trying to tune it out while still listening to something else. Can you still do it? Sure, but it’s a strain, and more likely than not you’re going to miss something you shouldn’t, or distort the meaning of something you would’ve caught without the distractions.

18. And knowing what we do, now that we’ve finished, about Winston, Julia, O’Brien, the Party, and all the rest, you can see that Orwell’s laying everything on the table during the first chapter. We should be deeply, deeply suspicious of O’Brien. He’s an Inner Party member, for God’s sake, not our friend. You don’t assume a shark in the water is friendly just because it doesn’t automatically attack your leg at first sight.

19. But we’re not looking at Oceania through Oceanian eyes yet. We’re perceiving this world through our perspective – the one that automatically searches for nuggets of hope in bad situations, the one that’s read book after book in which the villain ultimately gets redeemed or helps the protagonist in the end. It’s an archetype! We’re not nearly skeptical enough. We’re not familiar enough with Oceania to be in the right mindset yet. Our backgrounds, experiences, and upbringings have left us vulnerable – we miss what we should see, even as we spend the latter half of Part One cursing the Symes and proles of the world for not seeing what they should.

20. Orwell counts on this, the self-inflicted distortion, because he’s proving a point: You see what you’re conditioned to see. It’s not just about information control, but reality control as well. This is how the Inner Party, seriously undermanned and starved of resources, can keep a massive population in check as it enriches itself (relatively speaking): it conditions those who could replace it to depend on it, to fear a future without it. In modern political thought, you can persuade a voter to support a law that runs counter to their principles or interests through two approaches: that of hope and compassion, and that of fear and greed. Orwell says the latter is more persuasive, and I sometimes have a very tough time disagreeing.

21. The problem, of course, is that we don’t like to recognize this quality in ourselves: one of the reasons people can manipulate our fears is that we reflexively recoil from the idea that we could be so basely motivated. All you have to do at that point is play with language: dress up pain as noble sacrifice, prejudice as patriotism, etc. Chapter One toys with that dichotomy between ideology and reality, studying what we’ll ignore or miss outright in the name of maintaining a “normal” everyday routine, and it does so both through linguistic juxtapositions and the split-screened Expectations/Reality trick from last semester’s (500) Days of Summer.

22. First, the language. From the instant the clocks strike thirteen, we know this book is going to be trouble: either the laws of time have been screwed up somehow, or the society we’re about to study has been permanently militarized (since military time dispenses with am/pm designations, operating instead on a twenty-four-hour cycle). We suspect it’s the latter when we realize everything’s branded “Victory This” and “Victory That.” And we come to realize that not only do we lack the specialized terms we need to understand this world – what the heck is doublethink? – but that the words we think we know have somehow been distorted, have come untethered from their conventional meanings.

23. So we’ve been inserted into a world where a negative principle (people will give up everything in the name of safety and selfishness) governs everything. We don’t have the vocabulary, let alone the mindset, to process it all. What’s interesting is that Orwell’s narrative lens (Winston) isn’t someone who has it all figured out, navigating a complicated, challenging world suavely and smoothly. Winston’s frightened, broken, and alone, just as powerless as we are – and he’s our only entry point into the world. What ends up happening, of course, is that we end up trusting him completely – because he’s the only one we can relate to. Never mind that we should know that Winston’s perceptions are unreliable. We come to trust him because we need him.

24. One of the most interesting points Orwell raises is the relationship between trust and need. We tend to think of trust in terms of whether someone deserves it, whether someone earns it. We certainly wouldn’t want to be people who just trust indiscriminately – how naïve! – so people have to earn their place in your life, in your heart. Except, Orwell counters, that’s not what happens. You trust who you need to trust in order to survive. If everyone’s relatively horrible to you, and three people are less so, you’ll trust them more without even realizing what you’re doing. You need them, so you make them necessary. It’s what Winston does with Julia, and with O’Brien: in a society defined by fear, suspicion, hostility, selfishness, and pain, any outlet will do.

25. This is also where Orwell begins showing us the contrast between ideology and reality, as well as teaching us to appreciate beauty in small bursts while moving us into a “hunkered-down” mindset – we read the book afraid of what might happen. And as we go through the chapter, getting our first glimpses of daily life – both the routines (Two Minutes’ Hate) and social conventions – and seeing who thrives (as well as the dangers that threaten survival), we find that even Winston himself can startle us. We’re truly starting out in media res – this is Winston at his tipping point, approaching Captain Sisko’s line from In the Pale Moonlight and crossing over it. And we witness Winston’s first real risk, and the thrill of it blinds us to the other stuff – the stuff that foreshadows a ridiculous amount of the book’s final chapters. Basically, the first chapter is really important, even if it seems like “nothing happens.”

26. The second chapter establishes some more social structure – youth organizations, family systems, and so on – as well as explaining more about thoughtcrime, slogans, etc. It also includes some devastating social commentary – our desire to “re-savage” our young in order to mold them into ideal citizen/soldiers comes back to destroy us, because children can’t be trusted. Similarly, the hatred displayed by the Parsons children crystallizes Orwell’s feelings regarding the demonization of foes: that hatred begets hatred, not safety. Finally, the child’s taunt of Winston, shrugged off here as just some kid messing around, helps underline something Orwell establishes in the first chapter: that Winston, having committed thoughtcrime, is “already dead.”’ When better to start living than now? (This helps explain Part Two, by the way.)

27. The third chapter gives us hints of Winston’s past; the “dream” will eventually reveal a great deal about what Winston won’t acknowledge (which makes perfect sense, considering the horrible nature of his past). It’s our first real hint of pre-Revolution life’s actual nature, and the chapter further examines the Ingsoc dystopia, deconstructing the methods used to keep the populace in check Everything we see here helps reinforce the “dehumanization” motif that’s present in everything the Party does; the less like humans the Party can make us, the more effective its rule.

28. The fourth chapter gives us a more well-rounded picture of Winston’s purpose, and fills in the “sketch” we’ve formed of him through the first three chapters. It’s a particularly helpful section for those trying to understand what the Ministries do, as it at least hints at each one’s true purpose. We also see exactly how history easily can be “written” rather than recorded – one of the things Orwell feared most. Finally, the chapter reveals a great deal about the Party’s “psychological profile” – its pathological need to be flawless, its all-consuming and unceasing hungers, its blatant contradictions and inefficiencies, and its compulsive desire to dominate anything and everything.

29. In the fifth chapter, our cast expands: We meet Syme and Parsons, which gives us a spectrum-wide view of the people the Party controls. We also begin to really understand Newspeak’s nefarious nature: that its elimination of words necessarily limits one’s range of thought, which in turn helps entrench the Party in a position of permanent authority. Winston continues ruminating on the bizarre reality of Oceanian existence – the false faces everyone wears and the false stats everyone swallows We start seeing hints about how life was before the Revolution. And most importantly, the dark-haired girl is back…until she’s gone again!

30. The sixth chapter provides us with some more insight into Winston’s psychological profile, damaged though it might be. We’ve wondered why he seems so obsessed with sex and love; now we understand why he’s deeply lonely, as the “marriage” outlined here sounds profoundly broken and sad. (Also, Katharine’s not dead; she’s just not here, and never will be.) Orwell’s inclusion of the toothless prole paints an explicit picture of the way the Party has twisted human instinct, particularly when it comes to love and sexuality. But we remain confused about why the Party bothers to do all of this…a question that won’t be answered soon.

31. The seventh chapter gives us more information about the proles, who have received cursory mentions previously. It also goes back into life before the Revolution (notice the pattern?). This chapter – along with the next one – is one of the most important in terms of foreshadowing; everything from the song playing in the Chestnut Tree Café to Winston’s quotes – “I understand HOW…” – is incredibly critical, and should not be forgotten or passed over.

32. In the last of our quick-hit looks at Part One’s chapters, the eighth and final section takes us into the Prole village, showing us all of its weird quirks – its exposure to war, its lottery and trivial concerns, its connection to a past that fascinates Winston but seems unimportant to the proles themselves. The chapter essentially allows Winston to try his hand at time-traveling; some attempts are less successful (Old Prole Man) than others (Charrington’s shop). Winston also finds the paperweight, an important symbol of a lost heritage – one last piece of beauty in an ugly world…something finally worth saving.