AUTHOR: GEORGE ORWELL
DATE: 1949
Written in a century scarred by the excesses of totalitarian regimes espousing ideologies across the political spectrum, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian masterpiece warning of the consequences of one-party authoritarianism. It has seeped into international culture, not least because of an array of memorable phrases and ideas that set the terms of discussion about such regimes. For those who had come to consider it a novel of the past, it has also found a disconcerting new relevance in the tumultuous international political landscape of the twenty-first century.
Written in the 1940s, the ‘1984’ depicted in the novel is one of great bleakness. Control of the world has been divided into three totalitarian superstates that are in a state of perpetual conflict. The action takes place in one of these states, Oceania (the others being Eurasia and Eastasia), and specifically in the region formerly known as Great Britain but now renamed Airstrip One. Rule is in the hands of ‘The Party’, which operates under the Ingsoc ideology (an abbreviation for English Socialism). Its enigmatic figurehead is Big Brother, around whom an all-encompassing cult of personality is constructed. The regime ensures conformity by the imposition of mass surveillance and the brutal repression of all dissent. Those who fall foul of the Party become ‘unpersons’ and are disappeared, all record that they ever existed destroyed.
The central protagonist is Winston Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth (essentially, a ministry of propaganda), where he is involved in the editing of historical records in order to keep them in line with current government narratives. He is, however, secretly opposed to the regime and aspires to its overthrow. Estranged from his wife, he embarks on an affair with one of his ministry colleagues, a woman named Julia. Recalling his life before the Party, Winston is drawn towards a resistance movement. But he is being set up and, having been exposed, is thrust into a process of ‘re-education’ in which he is forced to confront his worst fear.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Aldous Huxley published Brave New World in 1932. Like Orwell, he foresaw a nightmarish future but one that relied less on force and more on coercion. He wrote to Orwell in 1949:
I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.
The book introduced an extraordinary number of terms that have since entered into common currency. Among them: Big Brother (the faceless dictator); doublethink (the acceptance of contrary ideas as a result of indoctrination); thoughtcrime (unorthodox thinking that is incompatible with official government lines); the Thought Police (the secret division of law enforcement that polices thoughtcrimes); Newspeak (language designed to conceal truth); and Room 101 (a torture chamber where a prisoner is confronted with their worst fear in a bid to break them). The notion that individuals ought to accept as truth whatever the Party decrees is summed up in the statement that Winston ponders in his diary: ‘2 + 2 = 5’. This sense of unstable truth is reflected in the names of the government ministries too: the Ministry of Truth that spreads lies, the Ministry of Peace that is concerned with war, the Ministry of Love where torture is practised, and the Ministry of Plenty, which contends with starvation. From the book’s opening line (‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’), the sense of fluid reality and internal contradiction is palpable.
Orwell was one of the most politically engaged authors of his time. Born in 1903, he was a committed democratic socialist. His 1937 non-fiction work The Road to Wigan Pier examined the struggle of the British working-classes in light of the Great Depression, while the following year’s Homage to Catalonia is an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, during which he fought for the Republicans. He watched with increasing horror as Europe gave way to tyranny under both fascist and communist regimes. In 1945 he published a masterpiece of a novel, Animal Farm, that satirized the Stalinist USSR in a story about a group of farm animals that rise up against their farmer and set out to create their own model society. With swathes of the planet divided between the post-war superpowers, he then set about writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. It would become his last – and to many, greatest – novel. As he completed it on the Scottish island of Jura, he was dying of tuberculosis, succumbing in early 1950.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is an utterly compelling examination of how autocracies take root and how politics and, crucially, language can be corrupted and exploited. In an essay from 1946, ‘Why I Write’, he confirmed that his work since the mid-1930s had been ‘written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’. As well as having an incisive intellect and a prodigious imagination, Orwell was also a great stylist, which ensured his books won a mass audience. V. S. Pritchett praised Nineteen Eighty-Four in the New Statesman, writing: ‘I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down.’
The novel fits into a lineage of related dystopian works, from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 novel We, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Karin Boye’s Kallocain (both written in 1940) to later works like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and William Gibson’s Virtual Light (1993). Each highly influential in their own right, none has come to surpass the enduring impact of Orwell. Even as the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s seemed to herald the ultimate victory of liberal democracy, Nineteen Eighty-Four has come to find new resonance for readers in the twenty-first century – an audience struggling to navigate a path through increasing surveillance, fake news, ‘alternative facts’, a new generation of ‘strong men’ leaders, and a social media environment in which oppositional groups choose their ‘truth’ and reject those who do not conform to it.
In 1949, Orwell wrote in Ninety Eighty-Four:
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.
He would doubtless have been saddened by the continuing relevance of his words.