Fifty years ago this week, George Orwell’s “1984” was published, one of a handful of books to become a catch phrase meaningful even to those who’ve never read it.
Indeed, not just the title but whole phrases from the text have passed into common parlance. There must be myriad folks who never cracked the cover of “1984” yet who have exclaimed, perhaps when confronted by security cameras: “Big Brother Is Watching You.”
Which is not to say that Orwell’s last novel has lacked for readers. Two weeks before it appeared in British book shops, he told his publisher he hoped it might sell a modest 10,000 copies. In fact, it was a best seller, which would have provided Orwell with a comfortable income for life had he not died six months later at age 46. In America, it was a Book of the Month Club selection. It’s still a perennial entry on high school and college reading lists. Eleven editions by various publishers are in print in the U.S.
That’s not bad for a book that didn’t quite get it right. The novel is set in an England under the repressive thumb of a Stalinistic dictatorship. Yet Britain remains a democracy, while the Soviet Union barely made it past the year 1984 before collapsing.
Still, aspects of Orwell’s forecast make him a veritable oracle. He eerily foresaw some of the uglier flaws of contemporary American society.
The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, is a minor functionary in the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to distort reality. Whenever Big Brother’s policies fail and have to be changed, Smith alters the historical records to make it seem that the regime had been proceeding on its new course all along.
“Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was his work,” Orwell wrote. “Included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem–delicate pieces of forgery.”
In contemporary terms, Smith was a spin doctor–that most archetypical of current political operatives. George Stephanopoulos or Dick Morris could be nicely cast as Smith in an update of the 1984 film that starred John Hurt and Richard Burton.
Orwell’s book is usually read as a warning against communism. Big Brother wears Joe Stalin-style droopy mustaches. He rules with the aid of a privileged Party apparatus. His enemies vanish into concentration camps. So, too, does anybody who attracts the attention of the secret police.
Yet Orwell advised an American fan that his book should not to be taken as an attack upon socialism per se or the British Labor Party, which he supported. He simply wanted to alert readers to a crushing social conformity and irrational thinking he saw taking hold everywhere, and most worrisome among intellectuals, who should know better.
“Totalitarianism,” Orwell wrote to an American trade unionist, “if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.”
Orwell issued that warning, quite literally, from his deathbed. Sickly much of his adult life, his lungs were failing due to pneumonia–an ailment he shared with his character Smith, who had a hacking cough. He typed the final manuscript of “1984” lying in bed.
Orwell’s own road to “1984” began when he went to fight in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Like other European and American leftists, he felt obliged to defend the country’s elected government against a group of rebellious generals led by Francisco Franco and backed by Hitler and Mussolini. But once there, he discovered that Stalin, the only world leader to back the Spanish republicans, was also using the opportunity to eliminate political rivals.
When Orwell reported that darker side of the conflict in “Homage To Catalonia,” Victor Gollancz, the publisher who had commissioned the book, rejected the manuscript. Gollancz marketed to left-wing British intellectuals, who saw the Soviet Union as a bulwark against fascism and were in no mood to accept criticism of its leader.
Though Orwell found another publisher for the book, the episode taught him that the ideological battles of modern politics were stripping words of their meaning. If British leftists were convinced Stalin was a “democrat,” no amount of evidence could convince them that the adjective hardly suited a bloody dictator.
A decade later, that lesson showed up in Newspeak, the official language of “1984.”
“Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought,” Orwell wrote. “Words such as honor, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist.”
Their place was taken by euphemisms such as “joycamp” (what used to be called a forced-labor camp in an older English). Jargon and telescoped new constructions abound in Newspeak, such as “Teledep” for Department of Television. “Oldthink” characterizes recalcitrants who refuse to give up outmoded ideas like democracy, honor, etc. One of Winston’s assignments read: “speech malreported africa rectify.”
Anyone who has read a corporate memo lately has got to know that Orwell was really on to something here.
Indeed, minus the dictatorship, his novelistic vision of the future roughly matches the world we live in. Pop culture, Orwell predicted, would come to be characterized by songs with “a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music.” Inhabitants of “1984” are constantly scrutinized by ubiquitous television sets that can see who is watching them–a prediction that has come at least half true: Americans now spend the majority of their leisure time staring at their television screens, and some even allow Internet video links to observe them 24 hours a day.
In “1984,” society’s age-old respect for the wisdom of ones’ elders has vanished. Instead, youth makes the rules. “It was almost normal for people over thirty,” Orwell wrote, “to be frightened of their own children.”
Considering our national soul-searching in the wake of recent school shootings, could Orwell have been more prescient?
The protagonist of Orwell’s novel eventually rebels against the system, enlisting the aid of his lover, Julia, a young co-worker. The two make contact with a third potential insurgent, who unfortunately turns out to be a secret-police spy. Under interrogation, Smith and Julia each betray the other in hopes of escaping torture. A broken man at the book’s end, Smith finally surrenders the last shreds of his individuality. Like his fellow citizens have all along, he now proclaims his love for Big Brother.
That bleak ending to an already bleak narrative has led critics and readers to conclude that Orwell despaired of our future. Similarly, it would be easy to find signs that contemporary America is heading even further down the road to Orwell’s reverse utopia.
We live in an age when some of our most distinguished professors have adopted a philosophy Big Brother could love. Adherents of the literary theory of deconstruction, our academics now proclaim that terms like “truth,” “justice” and “democracy,” are only words, devoid of any ultimate meaning, as earlier generations thought.
Already, the president of the United States seems a pretty good practitioner of Newspeak. Recall how Bill Clinton told a grand jury, “It depends on what the meaning of the word `is’ is.”
Had Winston Smith coined that phrase, he might have thought it a pretty good day’s work.
Yet when the shabbiness of our society seems most irreparable, we might take heart from the example of Orwell himself. Even as he knew his own death was rapidly approaching, he didn’t loose his faith in a better future for others. Though he had seen intellectuals abandon reason, he did not.
Above all else, he remained a true believer in democracy. He was convinced that, even when leaders are morally blind, the average man still has a nose to smell political sham and shame. To Orwell, that meant that men and women always will have one more chance to redeem themselves.
Just when Smith is feeling most isolated in “1984,” he takes a walk among the inhabitants of London’s working-class neighborhoods–the “proles,” British slang for proletarians.
“The proles,” he reflects, “if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely, sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And yet–“
