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"Seldom
can a year have been blackened before its time as effectively as George
Orwell
did to 1984." Ui chao, Steiner đếch
biết, TTT cũng đã làm y chang, với Bếp
Lửa 1954! Le premier, Bêp lua (Foyer du feu, 1954) décrit l'ambiance de Hanoi avant 1954, où ceux qui partent comme ceux qui restent sont contraints à des choix forcés, la séparation ou la mort. La réaction de la critique des écrivains révolutionnaires fut immédiate. Dans un compte rendu de Van Nghê (Littérature et Art), un critique m'a demandé : « Pendant que le peuple du nord du pays est en train de livrer toutes ses forces pour construire le socialisme, où va le personnage du Foyer de feu ? » J'ai répondu : « II va vers la destruction de l'histoire », chaque écrivain est un survivant. Cuốn đầu, Bếp
Lửa, 1954, miêu tả không khí Hà-nội
trước 1954; đi và ở đều là những chọn lựa miễn cưỡng, chia lìa hoặc cái
chết. Lập
tức có phản ứng của những nhà văn cách mạng. Trong một bài điểm sách
trên Văn Nghệ, một nhà phê bình hỏi tôi:
"Trong khi nhân dân miền Bắc đất nước ra công xây dựng xã hội chủ
nghĩa,
nhân vật trong Bếp Lửa đi đâu?".
Tôi trả lời: "Anh ta đi đến sự huỷ diệt của lịch sử," mỗi nhà văn là
một kẻ sống sót. Thơ giữa Chiến Tranh và Trại Tù (1) KILLING TIME
IF THE NOVEL
published by Seeker & Warburg in London on June 8, 1949, and by
Harcourt,
Brace in New York on June 13th (it was a Book-of-the-Month Club choice
for
July) had been entitled The Last Man in
Europe, a title still under active consideration by author and
publisher as
late as February, 1949, this coming year would be different. It would
be
different so far as journalism, publishing, political commentary,
editorial and
partisan pronouncements, academic colloquia, and the general enterprise
of
letters go. More subtly but incisively, it might be quite different in
political mood and social sensibility, in the ways in which literate
men and
women picture and find shorthand expression for the image they have of
themselves, of their communities, and of their chances of survival on a
planet
ideologically divided and armed to the teeth.
As everyone knows, however, George Orwell
and Fred Warburg, his close friend and publisher, chose another title.
(Both
possible titles are mooted in a letter from Orwell to Warburg dated
October 22,
1948.) Having completed the manuscript in November of that year, Orwell
simply
reversed the last two digits. Because of this more or less adventitious
device-had Orwell finished writing in 1949 we would presumably be
waiting for
1994-next year will be not so much 1984 as "1984."
The attribution of the year to the book
promises to be on a megalithic, soul-wearying scale. The novel-"It
isn't a
book I would gamble on for a big sale," wrote Orwell to his publisher
in
December, 1948-has now appeared in some sixty languages, and total
sales are
thought to be in eight figures. In Britain, radio and television
treatments
began last August. A seventy-minute film, entitled The
Crystal Spirit, will portray Orwell's isolated, literally
moribund existence on the Isle of Jura, in the Inner Hebrides, where
much of Nineteen Eighty-Four was first written.
Two further television programs are to show the relations between the
life of
the novelist and his works. Debate is reportedly raging over the
question of
scheduling. The dates under most active discussion are January 21st,
the
anniversary of Orwell's death, in 1950; June 25th, the anniversary of
his
birth, in 1903; and April 4th, the fictive date on which the antihero
of the novel,
Winston Smith, makes the first entry in his clandestine diary. A
seventeen-volume, deluxe complete works is to be issued by Seeker &
Warburg. The original, four-volume edition of Orwell's Collected
Essays, Journalism
and Letters, issued in 1968, is to be augmented by four further
volumes,
running to more than half a million previously ungathered words.
Penguin is to
launch across the earth a newly designed Nineteen
Eighty-Four. Sir Peter Hall is actively considering a stage
production of
Orwell's Animal Farm, first published
in 1945, at the National Theatre. The summer school on Orwell to be
held under
the aegis of Orwell's "most authorized" biographer, Professor Bernard
Crick (this absurd rubric is needed because Orwell himself expressly
asked that
there be neither memorial service nor biography), is only one, though
doubtless
the most prestigious, among dozens of similar academic literary
seminars,
lectures, roundtables, conferences to be held throughout the length and
breadth
of the land that Orwell renamed Airstrip One.
On June 7th of this year, the Wall
Street Journal declared that the
time had come for all good men to decide whether 1984 would be like Nineteen Eighty-Four. The response in
America looks to be extensive. Television and radio have already
announced
numerous programs presenting or dramatizing Orwell and the novel. The
Institute
for Future Studies and Research at the University of Akron will bid its
guests
reflect on "After 1984, What Futures for Personal Freedom, political
Authority,
and the Civic Culture?" A university of Wisconsin conference has as its
theme "Premonitions and Perspectives from 1984: Has
the Orwellian World Arrived?" The Smithsonian is
commemorating Nineteen Eighty-Four by
examining whether or not the mass media can in fact exercise thought
control.
Scores of universities, educational institutes, adult-education
programs, and
high-school syllabi are following suit. Yet even these projects-and
they can be
matched by similar lists in just about every more or less open society
across
the globe-will be dwarfed if a project variously reported from Tokyo
comes to
be: it is nothing less than a summons to all
living Nobel Prize winners to gather in Japan and propound their views
on the
truth, on the measure of fulfillment, of Orwell's nightmare of
thirty-five
years ago.
No other book has ever been publicized,
packaged, and search-lit in quite this way. By statistical comparison,
Shakespeare centennials have been discreet. But then no other book has
sought
to preempt, has preempted for itself, a calendar year in the history of
man.
This, of course, is the point. Like no other literary artifact,
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is its title. The Last Man in Europe would have
matched far more precisely the underlying politics of the book: its
monitory
plea for a social-democratic Europe resistant to both the totalitarian
system
of Stalinism and the detergent inhumanity of a technocracy and
mass-media
hypnosis of the kind toward which the United States seemed to Orwell to
be
moving. By opting for Nineteen
Eighty-Four, George Orwell achieved an uncanny coup. He put his
signature
and claim on a piece of time. No other writer has ever done this. And
there is,
I think, only one genuine parallel in the records of consciousness.
Kafka knew
(we have his witness to this realization) that he had made his own a
letter in
the Roman alphabet. He knew that "K" would for a long time to come
stand for the doomed mask that he assumed in his fictions, that it
would point
ineluctably to himself. The litany of the letter is spelled out by the
English
poet Rodney Pybus in his "In Memoriam Milena":
K and again K and again K
K for Kafka
K from The Castle
K from The Trial
K the mnemonic of fear:
O Franz I cannot
escape that letter K after K- But although
it is now active in scores of languages (I understand that
"Kafkaesque" has adjectival status even in Japanese), the
identification of "K" with Kafka probably does not extend beyond a
literate minority. On a scale vastly beyond the enormous readership of
the
novel itself, Nineteen Eighty-Four
has been, will be drummed into man's time sense. Shakespeare does not
own
"S"; no twelve months are his monopoly. The Nineteen
Eighty-Four preemption is one that neither literary theory
nor semantics is really equipped to deal with.
In one of the innumerable pre-1984 opinion
surveys that have been crowding the media, Len Murray, the eminently
sane
General Secretary of the British Trades Union Congress, put it this
way:
"Seldom can a year have been blackened before its time as effectively
as
George Orwell did to 1984." The uncertain syntax is an honest
counterpart
to the awesome complication of the theme. What is one to make of a work
of
literature, of a fiction, that "blackens before its time" a year in
the lives of men? There have, to be sure, been other fated, baleful
calendar
years in the numerology of apocalypse. We know of the great panics that
seized
on Western European communities at the approach of the year 1000, and
of the cultists
now burrowing their way to Southern California in the expectation of a
doomsday
2000. The year 1666 was regarded by astrologists and theologians as the
year of
the final coming of divine wrath, as foretold in the Book of
Revelation. But
such hysterical intimations do not arise from the adventitious tactic
of a
modern book title. Len Murray could have been more emphatic: never has
any
single man or stroke of the pen struck a year out of the calendar of
hope.
Should a thermonuclear catastrophe occur in this next year, should
famine erupt
beyond even its present empire, there will be countless men and women
who will
feel, in defiance of reason, that Orwell had somehow foreseen 1984,
that there
was in his Nineteen Eighty-Four some agency not only of clairvoyance
but-and
this is a far more unsettling notion-of self-fulfillment. And again the
case of
Kafka offers a possible parallel. The Trial, "The Metamorphosis,"
and, above all, "In the Penal Colony" express a hallucinatory
prevision of the Nazi order and of the death camps in which Kafka's
Milena and
his three sisters were to perish. Does prophecy coerce? Is there in
clairvoyance of so overwhelmingly exact a kind some seed of fulfillment?
The Nineteen
Eighty-Four phenomenon poses nothing less than the question of the
fundamental rights of the imagination. Debate has ranged since Plato
over the
permissible limits of fiction. Does the aesthetically effective
representation
of sexuality, of sadism, of political fanaticism, of economic obsession
induce
the reader, the spectator, the audience to imitative conduct? In this
perspective, censorship is not an inhibition of the freedom of social
man. It
creates for the average human being those spheres of spontaneity, of
personal
experiment, of therapeutic ignorance or indifference in which the
immense
majority of human beings wish to conduct their everyday lives. Has the
artist,
has the literary or philosophic imaginer of absolutes any right to live
our
inward lives for us? Need we, ought we to, entrust our dreams or
nightmares to
his mastering grip? Orwell himself was nervously, puritanically
concerned with
the effects of pulp fiction and of more or less sadistic crime stories
on
society and the imagination at large. Hence two of his most penetrating
essays:
"Boys' Weeklies" of 1939 and "Raffles and Miss Blandish" of
1944. Looking at the fiction of James Hadley Chase, Orwell finds in it
a streak
of corrupting sadism. Its gestures and values are those of Fascism.
Orwell read
closely. In Chase's He Won't Need It Now
notes Orwell, "the hero ... is described as stamping on somebody's
face,
and then, having crushed the man's mouth in, grinding his heel round
and round
in it." In Nineteen Eighty-Four,
this precise image was, if one can put it this way, to bear appalling
fruit. Yet
what of Orwell's own imaginings? The
injection of ferocity, of vulgarity, of feverish tedium into society by
pulp
literature and the porn industry is an ugly but also a diffuse
phenomenon, and
one whose actual effects on behavior remain arguable. The preemption,
the
blackening in advance, of 1984 by Nineteen
Eighty-Four is a far more specific and compelling feat. Has
literature the
moral license to take from the future tense its conjugation of hope? There is no
evidence that Orwell ever asked himself this question. Neither
metaphysics nor grandiloquence
was his forte. His grainy sensibility was as resistant to elevation as
the
pudding in an English cafe on a November evening. Moreover, as Orwell
wrote
Nineteen Eighty-Four his own time was end-stopped. The tuberculosis
from which
he had suffered on and off for a long time declared its full virulence
in
1947-48. Orwell knew himself to be a dying man. (He died some six
months after
publication of the book.) It may be, indeed, that terminal illness is
the one
constant in the inward history of Nineteen
Eighty-Four. Despite the available letters, ancillary writings, and
contemporary testimony, there is much about the genesis and aims of the
work
which remains unclear. In the letter to Warburg
of October 22; 1948, Orwell states that
he first thought of his novel in 1943. On the twenty-sixth of December,
in
reference to the publisher's blurb, Orwell says that what Nineteen
Eighty-Four is "really meant to do is to discuss the implications
of dividing the world up into 'Zones of influence' (I thought of it in
1944 as
a result of the Teheran Conference), & in addition to indicate by
parodying
them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism." The slight
disparity as to the date of inception-1943 in the one statement, 1944
in the
other-is trivial. What matters is that we have no other witness as to
either
chronology. George Orwell has an enviable reputation for honesty, and
there is
no reason to suppose that he was seeking to deceive either himself or
others.
It is wholly plausible that the idea for some kind of Utopian satire on
an
ideologically divided world, on a planet perilously split between
superpowers,
came to Orwell during the later part of the war in Europe and after one
or
another of the summit meetings between Churchill, Roosevelt, and
Stalin. Nevertheless,
one should note that an early dating was very much in Orwell's
interest. For Nineteen Eighty-Four, as he composed it
and as we now know it, depends crucially and intimately on 'another
book. And
on this cardinal point Orwell's witness is-to choose one's words with
care-guarded.
Orwell's
review of Y. I. Zamyatin's We
appeared in Tribune, a weekly of independent left-wing persuasion, on
January
4, 1946. Orwell had read the Russian text in a French translation. He
termed it
"one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age." Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World, whose own
influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell
acknowledged repeatedly and with unworried ease, "must be partly
derived" from Zamyatin. Despite appearances, despite Zamyatin's
self-exile
from the Soviet Union and the total suppression there of his book, We is, according to Orwell, not aimed at
any particular country or regime. It satirizes, it gives warning of,
"the
implied aims of industrial civilization." Proof of this, says Orwell,
is
the fact that Zamyatin has since coming to the West "written some
blistering satires on English life." True, Zamyatin had found himself
incarcerated in 1922 in the same corridor of the same prison in which
the
czarist police had put him in 1906, but We
should be read as "a study of the Machine, the genie that man has
thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again." The
reviewer finds distinct qualities in Zamyatin's fantasy. Its political
intuitions
and its insight into "Leader worship" do make the Russian novel
"superior to Huxley's." But "so far as I can judge it is not a
book of the first order." Writing to Warburg on the thirtieth of March,
1949, when Nineteen Eighty-Four was
going to press, Orwell supported the eventual issue of an
English-language version
of We. But again his enthusiasm is
distinctly muted. There is no indication that he has changed his mind
as to its
stature. Zamyatin's We, published in
1924, tells of human existence in "The Single State." This state,
ruled by "The Benefactor," enforces total control over every aspect
of mental and bodily life. Surveillance and chastisement are in the
hands of
the political police, or "Guardians." (Zamyatin's satiric pastiche of
Plato's Republic is evident.) The
Benefactor's subjects inhabit glass houses, naked to constant
inspection and
recording. Men and women are identified not by proper names but by
numbers.
Ration coupons give them the right to lower their blinds and enjoy "the
sex hour." The story of We is
that of an attempted rebellion by D-S03, who is, as Zamyatin was
himself, an
able engineer, but is at the same time "a poor conventional creature"
(Orwell's description of him in his review). D-S03 falls in love and is
led
into conspiracy. Caught by the all-seeing police, he betrays his
beloved, I-330,
and his confederates. He watches I-330 being tortured by means of
compressed
air under a glass bell. She does not break and must be eliminated.
D-S03, on the
contrary, is given X-ray treatments so as to cure him of a tumor called
"the imagination." He will live to recognize The Benefactor's
omnipotent
care. I have expressly cited
those elements in Zamyatin's fiction which
Orwell picked out in his book review. "The Single State" becomes the
"Oceania" of "Nineteen Eighty-Four"; The Benefactor is
translated into "Big Brother"; Guardians are the equivalent of Orwell's
"Thought Police"; Winston Smith does retain a name, but he is
officially known and summoned as "6079 Smith W." The issue of authentic
as against programmed sexuality, of an act of love between man and
woman as the
ultimate source of libertarian insurrection, is the crux in both
narratives.
The psychic and physical tortures under the glass bell are closely
mirrored in
Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The
effect of Zamyatin's glass dwellings is precisely that achieved by
Orwell's
telescreens. Like D-503, Winston Smith will be cured of the cancer of
autonomous imagining, of the malignant growth of private remembrance.
So far as
the plot goes, the difference is that Zamyatin's heroine dies
unconquered, whereas
Orwell's Julia joins her sometime beloved in betrayal and self-betrayal. With one exception-and it
is, as we will see, the touch of genius
in Nineteen Eighty-Four-every major
theme and most of the actual narrative situations in Orwell's text
derive from
Zamyatin. Without We, Nineteen Eighty-Four,
in the guise in
which we have it, would simply not exist. We know nothing of what may
or may not
have been the germ of Orwell's project in either 1943 or 1944. We do
know that
the actual plotting and realization of Nineteen
Eighty-Four stemmed from a reading of Zamyatin in the winter of
1945-46. It
was in August of 1946 that Orwell began his own version of the hell to
come.
And one must conclude that it was the absolutely central dependence of Nineteen Eighty-Four on its largely forgotten
predecessor that made Orwell's references to Zamyatin so uneasy, so
casual in
their findings. Other sources of
suggestion are readily invoked. They include
H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes,
Jack London's The Iron Heel (a book
that clearly marked much of Orwell's vision), and, of course, Brave New World. More significant than
any of these, however, seem to have been the writings of James Burnham.
Orwell's "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" appeared in the
periodical Polemic for May, 1946. Burnham's concept of “managerialism,"
going back to 1940, and his view of an apocalyptic leveling of human
societies
under technocracy strike Orwell as profoundly suggestive. He finds
Burnham's portrayal of Stalin in Lenin's
Heir, of 1945, suspect; Burnham's fascination with the great war
leader and
potentate has produced "an act of homage, and even of
self-abasement." But certain motifs in Burnham's description will in
fact
surface with Big Brother. "So long as the common man can get a
hearing," concludes Orwell, all is not lost, and Burnham's prophecies
may yet
be proved erroneous. Again, we note a theme to be developed in Nineteen Eighty-Pour. On March 29, 1947,
when work on his novel was in full progress, Orwell published in The
New
Leader, in New York, a lengthy review of Burnham's The
Struggle for the World. Burnham's strident view that a Soviet
onslaught on the West is imminent seems to Orwell excessive. Its
implicit picture
of the globe as irremediably divided between American capitalism and
Soviet Marxism
is an oversimplification. There is, according to Orwell, a third
way-that of
"democratic Socialism." And it is the historical duty of Europe,
after two homicidal and, basically, internal wars, to show that
"democratic Socialism" can be made to work. A "Socialist United
States of Europe" may be very difficult to bring about, argues Orwell,
but
it is certainly not inconceivable. It may, in fact, hold the fragile,
elusive
key to human survival. Palpably, Orwell's debate with Burnham points to
the
"Eurocentric" pivot in Nineteen
Eighty-Four. It throws into sharp relief the full meaning of the
novel's
discarded title The Last Man in Europe.
Winston Smith's doomed attempt to preserve his individuality, to know
and
remember the historical past represents a quintessentially European
refusal
both of Stalinist totalitarianism and of the anti-historical mass
culture of
American capitalism. With Julia's and Winston Smith's defeat and
abjection,
"the last man in Europe" has been made extinct. Orwell's article on "The
Prevention of Literature"
appeared in Polemic in January, 1946. Here, again, we can observe
Orwell's views,
and elements soon to be used in Nineteen
Eighty-Four, ripening, as it were, with Zamyatin's suggestion.
"'Daring to stand alone' is ideologically criminal as well as
practically
dangerous." No
totalitarian order can allow the anarchic play of
individual feeling or literary invention: A totalitarian society which
succeeded
in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of
thought,
in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in
certain
exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the
historian, and
the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it
scandalous to falsify a scientific text-book, but would see nothing
wrong in
falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and
politics
cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the
intellectual. In this
notion of systematic schizophrenia, state-enforced and controlled, we
see the
origins of "Doublethink." As he worked on his novel, Orwell came to
see in the mere act of writing one of the last possibilities of humane
resistance. He published his reflections on "Writers and Leviathan"
in the summer, 1948, issue of Politics &
Letters. Orwell's pragmatic socialism persuaded him that group
loyalties
are necessary: "And yet they are poisonous to literature, so long as
literature is the product of individuals." It is when Winston Smith,
feeble creature that he is, starts keeping a clandestine diary, starts
putting
his own words on the page, that Big Brother is threatened. True
writing,
observed Orwell, "will always be the product of the saner self that
stands
aside, records the things that are done and admits their necessity, but
refuses
to be deceived as to their true nature." The theme of the relations
between language and politics,
between the condition of human speech and writing, on the one hand, and
that of
the body politic, on the other, had moved to the very center of
Orwell's
concerns. He stated it incisively in the famous essay on "Politics and
the
English Language," of 1946. War propaganda, on both sides, had sickened
Orwell. He sensed what would be the erosion of style brought on by the
packaged
mendacities of the mass media. Politics itself, wrote Orwell, "is a
mass
of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia." And just because
"all issues are political issues" this mass threatens to invade and
extinguish the responsible vitalities of all human discourse. The
decadence of
English might still be curable. Never use a long word where a short one
will
do; use active modes rather than passives wherever you can; no jargon
where
everyday English can serve; "break any of these rules sooner than say
anything outright barbarous." The close of the essay has the eloquence
of
impatience: Political
language ... is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity
to pure
wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least
change one's
own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly
enough,
send some worn-out and useless phrase-some
jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable
inferno,
or other lump of verbal refuse into the dustbin where it
belongs. One notes in
passing that this closing phrase echoes a celebrated "Trotskyism."
Trotsky and his rhetoric had loomed large in Animal Farm;
they would do so again in the affairs of Airstrip One. The perception of organic
reciprocities between language and society
is as old as Plato. It had been reexamined and deepened in the
political theory
and theory of history of Joseph de Maistre, the great voice of reaction
and
cultural pessimism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. The
writings of Bernard Shaw are frequently an avowed exercise in purging
private
and public speech of cant and illusion. Orwell adds to this polemic
tradition a
special interest in the corruption of language in children's books, in
the popular
arts, in mass entertainment and "bad" literature (cf. the 1942 essay
on Kipling, with its analysis of the spellbinding coarseness of
Kipling's idiom).
But between such critiques and the move Orwell makes in Nineteen
Eighty-Four there is still a gap. Orwell's attitude toward
Jonathan Swift was ambiguous.
"In a political and moral sense I am against him, so far as I
understand him.
Yet curiously enough he is one of the writers I admire with least
reserve, and Gulliver's Travels, in particular, is a
book which it seems impossible for me to grow tired of." It is, says
Orwell, one of the six books he would preserve if all others were
destined for destruction.
The portrait of Swift latent in "Politics vs. Literature" (Polemic
for September-October, 1946)
comes close to being a self-portrait: "Swift did not possess ordinary
wisdom, but he did possess a terrible intensity of vision, capable of
picking
out a single hidden truth and then magnifying it and distorting it." In
Part III of Gulliver's Travels Orwell finds an
"extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted 'police-State.'''
Informers, accusers, delators, prosecutors, perjurious witnesses throng
the
Kingdom of Tribnia. Indictment and counter-indictment are the mechanism
of public
affairs. Swift, remarks Orwell, anticipates the macabre automatism of
the
Moscow Purge Trials. Filtered through Zamyatin's We,
these several elements will be put to use in Nineteen
Eighty-Four. But it is, I
think, in another touch in Part III that Orwell came on the crucial
hint. In
the "Grand Academy of Lagado," fiercely satirized by Swift, there are
officious savants busy inventing new, systematically simplified forms
of language.
They are, of course, creating "Newspeak." Orwell's
seizure, development, systematization of Swift's hint affords Nineteen Eighty-Four its claim to
greatness. It is here that Orwell breaks away from and goes beyond the
blueprint furnished by Zamyatin. "Doublethink;' "Big Brother,"
"proles," "Ministry of Love," "Newspeak" itself
have passed into the language. "Unperson" has become grimly
indispensable in current accounts of the bureaucracies of terror, be
they those
of the Soviet Union or of Argentina, of Libya or of Indonesia. At a
deeper
level, and even without regard to the ghostly fun that Orwell is having
with
certain elements of Hegel's dialectic as these appear in Marxist logic,
the
famous reversals in Newspeak-"War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery,"
"Ignorance is Strength"-touch the nerve centers of our politics. The
Appendix on "The Principles of Newspeak" has an unsparing authority
lacking in much of the fiction itself. It was as if Orwell's entire
career as
reporter, political analyst, literary and linguistic critic, novelist
of ideas
had been a prelude to this chill statement: A
person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would
no more know that equal had once been the secondary meaning of
"politically equal," or that free had once meant "intellectually
free," than, for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would
be
aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There
would be
many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit,
simply because
they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be
foreseen that
with-the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak
would become
more and more pronounced-its words growing fewer and fewer, their
meanings more
and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always
diminishing. This axiom
of economy may be the only inaccuracy in Orwell's prevision, based as
it was on
Swift. The Newspeak we in fact practice is one of verbal inflation:
assassination within intelligence services is reportedly labeled
"separation with extreme prejudice;" recent developments in El
Salvador or the Philippines are described as "hopeful perceptions of
human-rights principles." But the method is the same. Clarity of
representation, heresy of thought are to be made impossible by the
elimination
or obfuscation of the language in which they could be conceived and
communicated. One of Orwell's dicta throws an almost intolerable light
on much
of American primary and secondary education. Complex, polysyllabic
words, words
difficult to pronounce, are in Newspeak held to be ipso facto bad
words.
Misheard, ambiguously registered, such words are not only elitist-they
yield
breathing space to nonconformity. There is a sadistic,
self-lacerating virtuosity in the uses
to which Nineteen Eighty-Four puts
this whole invention. Again, one of Orwell's judgments on Swift is
illuminating: "In the queerest way, pleasure and disgust are linked
together." The samples of the translation from Old speak into Newspeak,
the stylistic detergence and stenography of lies practiced by Winston
Smith as
he erases or falsifies all texts out of the past which might in any way
cast
doubt on today's party line, are convincing. Though "good-thinkful,"
"crime-think," "joycamp," and "thinkpol" have not
as yet found entry into Anglo-American English, they work effortlessly
in the
book. And we have only to open our daily papers or watch television to
know just
exactly how useful a term is "duck-speak": "It is one of those
interesting
words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it
is
abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise." Example: in
Poland, martial law is a naked tyranny over basic human rights; in
Turkey, it
is a necessary preparation for the coming, one day, of democratic
institutions.
No less haunting and ingenious are Orwell's counter-examples, the
explorations
he proposes of Newspeak via negative inference. Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton,
and Byron cannot be expressed in the vocabulary of Big Brother. They
will, of
course, be translated; such translation will change them not only into
something different but "into something contradictory of what they used
to
be." In the Newspeak of licensed intercourse and procreation, the very
phrase "I love you" will be an archaic, untranslatable
"sexcrime." (A number of present-day manuals on the joys of sex or
its social psychology are not far from Orwell's fantastication.) Even
"I
dream" will become, by virtue of its aura of private and clandestine
freedom, an untranslatable and soon to be eradicated piece of Old
speak. Had
the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four,
one wonders, come across the boast of Reichsorganisationsleiter Robert
Ley,
bellowed shortly after the Nazi assumption of power in 1933: "Today the
only individual in Germany who still has a private life is one who
sleeps"? The Newspeak theme
exfoliates brilliantly. With a wink at the
Britannica, Orwell tells us that the version in use in 1984 embodied
the Ninth
and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary. But it is "with the
final,
perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition," that the
Appendix
is concerned. There are still prodigious masses of history,
information,
belles-lettres to be purged and translated. But by the year 2050 the
great task
will be accomplished. And at that blessed point language, as we once
knew it,
will not be needed: "In fact there will be no thought, as we understand
it
now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is
unconsciousness." Or illiteracy; or a twenty-four-hour-a-day television
system. Or the designation of a thermonuclear test by the title
Operation
Sunshine. Little else in Nineteen
Eighty-Four is of comparable
strength. The matter of women and of sex elicited in Orwell's writings
a queasy
sentimentality. Julia is no exception. The bluebells bloom thick
underfoot; the
thrush begins "to pour forth a torrent of song;" Julia flings aside
her clothes "with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole
civilization seemed to be annihilated"; her body gleams white in the
sun.
Sex is referred to as "it" -not in Newspeak but in Orwell ("You
like doing this? 1 don't mean simply me; I mean the thing in itself?"
"1 adore it"). Much the same sentimentality, at once
genuine and self-ironizing, colors Winston Smith's mutinous descent
into the
"old London," into the forbidden world of the antique shop. There is
the Victorian paperweight with "a strange, pink, convoluted object that
recalled a rose or a sea anemone" at its dusty heart. "Oranges and
lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say
the
bells of st. Martin's." Here are "girls in full bloom, with crudely
lipsticked mouths," and youths chasing them. The mixture of fascination
and repulsion experienced by Winston Smith, whose sensibility we are
meant to
recognize as humdrum and worn out, is at many points, and
uncomfortably, Orwell's
own. Already, prior to Nineteen
Eighty-Four, accounts of torture in totalitarian police cells, of
the
methodical infliction of pain and humiliation on the human body, were
numerous.
After Auschwitz and the Gulag came the systematic bestialities of the
wars in
Algeria and in Vietnam. One's stomach has supped its fill of graphic
horror and
grown hardened. Nevertheless, the third part of Orwell's "Utopia"
(his own exact designation) continues to be very nearly unbearable.
Overall,
this is as it should be. We are meant to imagine in our marrow, as it
were, the
hideous physical pain visited on Winston Smith. We are meant to retch
at what
is being told us: The
elbow! He had slumped to
his knees, almost paralyzed, clasping the stricken elbow with his other
hand.
Everything had exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable, inconceivable
that
one blow could cause such pain! The light cleared and he could see the
other
two looking down at him. The guard was laughing at his contortions. One
question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth,
could you
wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing:
that it should
stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of
pain
there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed
on the
floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm. This has
stark authority. It bears witness to Orwell's unforgiving sense of the
claims
of the human body, of the perfectly legitimate ways in which these
claims can,
at times, overrule even the loftiest of ideals and obligations. Like
Jonathan
Swift, Orwell was rooted in the truthful stench and tearing of the
flesh. But it is not this
articulation of agony that makes the close
of Nineteen Eighty-Four so hard to
take. We are, I think, up against something more complicated to define:
a
certain macabre prurience, a strain of sadistic kitsch of precisely the
kind
Orwell had tracked down in his studies of pulp fiction. We have
Orwell's own words
for it-he may, to be sure, have been deferring to his
correspondent-that he
found embarrassing the notorious proceedings in Room 101. The torture
of the
caged rats that are to be released so as to tear out Winston Smith's
eyes and
then devour his tongue was not Orwell's invention. One can read about
it in
those louche tomes on
"Chastisement" or "The History of Torture and Mutilation"
still to be found in the interior of secondhand bookshops off Charing
Cross
Road. But its application in Nineteen
Eighty-Four has a kind of onanistic spell. There is "sickness"
here, but in more than one sense. The letter to Warburg of October 22,
1948,
contains an evident clue. The book, says Orwell, "is a good idea but
the
execution would have been better if I had not written it under the
influence of
T.B." That influence strikes one as pervasive. The tortures, the
abjections, the self-betrayals enforced on 6079 Smith W. are, pretty
obviously,
a translation of those undergone by George Orwell in successive and
utterly
useless bouts of hospitalization. "It was hopeless: every part of him,
even his head, was held immovably .... There was a violent convulsion
of nausea
inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone
black. For an
instant he was insane, a screaming animal." It is Orwell speaking, out
of
the pain of his wasted lungs, out of the pit of wasted therapy. How
anodyne
are, by comparison, the elegant, metaphysically observed encroachments
of
tuberculosis in Thomas Mann's Magic
Mountain. Finally, the difficulty
with Nineteen Eighty-Four is its
focus. During much of the composition of the novel, Orwell seems to
have viewed
it as a monitory satire on technocratic managerialism, on mechanization
run
mad. In this light, Nineteen Eighty-Four
would have been a blacker version of Karel Capek's R.U.R.-to which we
owe the
word "robot"-or of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. But
the book is nothing of the sort. It is a thinly
veiled allegory on Stalinism, in which the actual events and
ideological
implications of the Stalin-Trotsky conflict are central. Nineteen
Eighty-Four is at many levels an expansion, a literal
"humanization," of the schematic fable set out in Animal
Farm. Orwell's own statement,
made in answer to an inquiry from Francis A. Henson, of the United
Automobile
Workers, shortly after Nineteen
Eighty-Four appeared in America, is well known: My
recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism
... but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy
is
liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and
Fascism. I
do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will
arrive, but
I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire)
that something
resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have
taken
root in the minds of intellectuals every-where, and I have tried to
draw these
ideas out to their logical consequences. The scene of the book is laid
in
Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not
innately better
than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could
triumph
anywhere. In fact,
however, the specificities of the Stalin-Trotsky theme cut across the
generalities of the satire. And here Orwell's attitude is highly
ambivalent.
"Goldstein" (Trotsky) is portrayed both with admiration and with
distaste. The long extract given from Goldstein's forbidden writings is
an
adroit parody of Trotsky's own prose. When Winston Smith and Julia are
trapped
into joining the secret Brotherhood of Trotskyite dissenters, Orwell
makes
plain that this organization is as homicidal, as oppressive, as
dogmatic as is
the regime of Big Brother. Jewishness made Orwell uncomfortable. This
reflex is
patent in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It
pierces in the bizarre motif of the woman who "might have been a
jewess" being machine-gunned in the war film seen by Smith; it is made
graphic in the person of Goldstein. Above all, it emerges in a
little-noticed but
crucial moment in the masterly Appendix: "What was required in a Party
member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew,
without
knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped
'false gods.'
He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris,
Moloch,
Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the
better for
his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah; he
knew,
therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were
false
gods." Fair comment. But arresting in an advocate, in a descendant of
Bunyan and of Milton. At other key points, there
are comparable ambiguities or confusions.
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and
you
would have to believe it.” Under torture, exactly what Winston Smith will believe. But there is more at work
here than a fairly crass image of irrational abjection. The very right
to
proclaim that two and two make five, in the face of all precedent, of
all
orthodoxy, of all dictates of officious common sense, is that with
which
Dostoyevsky's "Underground Man" identifies human freedom. So long,
teaches Dostoyevsky, as the human imagination can refuse assent to
universal
Euclidean axioms it will remain at liberty. Orwell knew this celebrated
passage, of course. How, then, are we meant to read his use and
reversal of it?
What values, parodistic, nihilistic, or simply muddled, are we to
attach to the
injunction that those sane and brave enough to resist Big Brothers must
be
ready to "throw sulphuric acid in a child's face"? Winston Smith
invents
one "Comrade Ogilvy" for purposes of Party hagiography: It
struck him as curious
that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who
had
never existed in the present, now existed in ~e past, and when once the
act of forgery
was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same
evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
Will Nineteen
Eighty-Four fade from immediacy and mass awareness after 1984? This
is, I
think, a very difficult question. "The actual outlook," reported
Orwell in the Partisan Review for July-August, 1947, "is very dark, and
any serious thought should start out from that fact." Nothing in our
affairs today, domestically or internationally, refutes this
proposition. For
hundreds of millions of men and women on the earth, the all too famous
climax
of Orwell's vision, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a
boot stamping
on a human face-forever," is not so much a prophecy as it is a banal
picture
of the present. If nuclear disaster comes to pass or our political
systems
collapse under the weight of armaments and greed, there may well be
those-many,
perhaps-who will recall Orwell's novel as an act of inspired
annunciation. But
it could also be that its weaknesses as an argument, as a work of art
will
tell. The memorations that will throng this coming year point to a work
of
relevance "in excess" but also to a book peculiarly flawed. Very
probably,
it could not be otherwise. For, as Thoreau asks, can a man kill time
without
doing injury to eternity? December 12,
1983
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