Yes, the book, Orwell’s 1949 novel. I read it, like, 60 years ago. But one of my book groups recently picked it — for obvious reasons. So I read it again. Unfun.
Set in a then-future London, this is a classic dystopia. Ruled by an oppressive, all-controlling “party,” led by “Big Brother” (probably not an actual person) who, on omnipresent posters, “is watching you.” Through telescreens everywhere. (Would require, like, half the party to do all that watching, but those viewers are never mentioned.)
This was somewhat modeled on Stalin’s USSR, written before its horribleness was much known to the outside world. A pervasive feature is people made “unpersons” — “vaporized.” In vast numbers, mostly for “thoughtcrime” (or any vague hint of it). Yet meantime 85% of the population are “proletarians” (“proles”) living a hardscrabble existence and actually largely ignored by the regime.
From the earliest pages I was struck by just how extreme Orwell’s picture is. No subtlety or notionally redeeming glimmers, but dark in every detail. The food bad tasting; the liquor vile; every utensil “greasy.” Even the air itself nasty in this 1984 London. It all felt overdone. And it only got more and more extreme.
The protagonist, Winston Smith, ironically combines a quintessential Everyman last name with that of a heroic icon. Winston, 39, lacks memory of a pre-“Big Brother” time. To this reader he seemed something of a cipher, a character without character. Like the soulless guy in Camus’s The Stranger.
The book is a meditation on the human condition. The world of party creatures Winston inhabits is thoroughly inhuman. Which he comes to see when he hooks up with lover Julia, a prohibited relationship; realizing that only the wretched proles retain their humanity. The book shows us how alone we all truly are —however much involved with others, ultimately imprisoned within our own skulls. And the one line that stuck with me, from my long-ago reading, was Winston’s, under torture: “Do it to Julia.”
Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, which of course is a ministry of lies. His job involves revising past documents in conformance with the regime’s current story. That is, altering the past, particularly erasing any record of unpersons. (Stalin famously had Trotsky and other fallen people scrubbed from old photos.)
This is a huge undertaking, with Smith a small cog. But I wondered why the effort was even deemed needed. It didn’t seem people in this society would have much access, anyway, to that past documentation, so why bother altering it? Just feed people the crap you want them to swallow now. (There’s war, against Eastasia. Until suddenly it’s against Eurasia. Why would the party see fit to make that change? But never mind; the point is that everyone adjusts their brains to the altered “reality.” Proving the party’s power over it.)
This resonates for today’s America. Most notably our regime’s huge effort to revise the history of what occurred on January 6, 2021. Brazen nineteen-eighty-fourization. Showing that not even here is there any need to, as in Orwell’s dystopia, go back and falsify the original news reports of that day. Or the damning congressional inquiry report.* The regime simply spews out its very different story, and its cultists believe it. Lincoln did say, “you can fool some of the people all of the time.”
Now the Renee Good killing. Video shows an ICE agent’s obviously unjustified shooting. “Self defense” says the regime. That’s “garbage” as the Minneapolis mayor says. Yet all MAGA world buys it. Seeing is believing, but for many people what they believe dictates what they see.
Back to 1984: one could fathom the party’s vaporizing the insufficiently loyal. Yet the extent of this is, again, extreme; swallowing almost everyone eventually. And with such cruel brutality that Orwell’s account here again seems over-the-top. Winston’s interrogation, with torture, goes on for months and pages and pages. What is the point — if all such victims will be shot in the end anyway? But that very question is the point; Winston himself asks it. The answer he gets from his high-placed torturer makes no sense from any rational standpoint. It’s totally insane. While Winston is told the purpose is to cure his notional insanity.
A critique of the novel is the inclusion of many pages from a book Winston obtains, by Goldstein, the anti-party rebel. Analyzing the society and party. I found this tedious and unnecessary; actually detracting from the unnerving mysteriousness of it all. But I did note Goldstein’s characterizing the party man as “a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph . . . the mentality appropriate to a state of war.” A fair description of the MAGA mindset plaguing America.
Doubleplusungood.
* The commemorative plaques honoring the January 6 police heroes have been disappeared from the House of Representatives.
