Words&Dirt

George Orwell’s 1984 is one of those books about which it is probably impossible to say anything new or interesting. Much like its protagonist’s tortured mind and body, Orwell’s masterpiece has been prodded, cut open, and drained of its juices by many minds that surpass my own. My intention for this review, then, is just to leave a simple record of yet another reader who, befuddled and dismayed by the world around him, turns to a classic to try to make the puzzle of modernity a little more comprehensible.

My desire to return to the world of 1984, which I’d last read in high school, was prompted by an exceptional debate produced by the British podcast Intelligence Squared. This was my favorite single podcast episode from 2017, a delightful synthesis of comparative literary analysis, politics, and language’s role in shaping human thought and action. If you’ve read 1984 before and haven’t the time or interest in a full re-read, just listen to that debate and you’ll have more than enough to chew on.

Now that I’ve returned to this ghastly, brilliant novel, it is easier than ever to see why it has remained a topical text in contemporary discourse. The lion’s share of ideas that Orwell puts forth in these pages are unassailably smart, with an especially keen focus on language games. Embedded in the totalitarian regime of Oceania, Winston Smith struggles with his desire for individuality in a society that demands absolute conformity––both inside and outside one’s private thoughts. Orwell’s now-commonplace Newspeak terms thoughtcrime and doublethink tease and provoke with fresh force, bringing to mind our plethora of newfangled problems sprung from social media, political correctness, and fake news.

Especially chilling are Orwell’s observations about the tragically malleable nature of human memory and its consequences for the project of history. Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to alter historical records so they accord with whatever present conditions the Party has decided must become permanent (for the moment, of course). Lamenting his inability to stabilize a particular, individualized version of reality, Winston admits:

Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished?…And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it. (158, emphasis his)

Orwell expands theoretically on Winston’s experience in an excerpt from Goldstein’s text:

The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change of doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one’s mind, or even one’s policy, is a confession of weakness. (218)

To state the painfully obvious, American politics is closer now to the brink of this kind of mentality than it has ever been in my lifetime. Though we are still far from an Oceania-style dystopia, we are creeping closer to some of the foundational dynamics of Orwell’s nightmare, and we do so to our detriment. Sadly, modern tools for remaking the past have proven far more powerful than anything Orwell envisioned, so we must be that much more vigilant against violence to history. 

Another feature of 1984 that is critical for the 21st-century reader is its plangent rejection of relativism. This is made plain by Winston’s staunch defense of the idea of truth early in the novel, and reinforced later by O’Brien’s explanation of relativism’s central role in Party ideology:

You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane. (256-7, emphasis his)

Nearly three-quarters of a century after this bit of genius was first inked, we now know the messier truth––something that was not so clear in Orwell’s time. While relativism in its strict sense is both an intellectual fraud and a dangerous idea, it is also just true enough to destabilize people, nations, the entire world. Objective reality exists, to be sure, but we access it only through subjectivity, which contains key elements of relativism from which we cannot escape. This predicament becomes especially worrisome when toxic versions of subjectivity become coupled with and amplified by the technologies of modern communication and warfare. Orwell intuited the dangers of over-favoring the relativist mindset even before the threat of relativism loomed as large as it does today. Historically, it is tragic to reflect that the halcyon days of academic relativism––the latter part of the 20th century––were allowed to pass even with Orwell’s cautionary words close at hand. Even more disquieting is the legitimate possibility that the heyday of cultural relativism is yet to come, and is perhaps even on our doorstep.

Despite its august stature as an intellectual achievement, 1984 is not a perfect novel. Orwell’s furious desire to fictionalize his disillusionment with communism forces him into some ill-advised bits of world-building, with many of Oceania’s features feeling needlessly grim and therefore unbelievable. It is hard for me to take seriously a world where things are both so utterly awful for regular people but also so highly stable and structured; Oceania seems to contain too little chaos given the constant misery of its population. This interpretation may reveal nothing more than my fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of dictatorship, but I ultimately understood Oceania as an often incoherent and occasionally comical vehicle for Orwell’s ideas rather than a portentous depiction of a society that may come into being if we’re not careful. Perhaps I am too naive, but I agree with Winston that “It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure…It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide” (278).

Another problem is the idea that Oceania would devote considerable resources to “rehabilitating” a citizen like Winston rather than just shooting him and being done with it. There is a perverse and clever way in which Winston’s conversion allows the Party to prove its legitimacy to itself, but again, this rings true from an ideological position and not a practical one. Regimes of this nature simply don’t value individual human life enough, and don’t depend on the “enlightenment” of those who would seek to undermine them––only their elimination.

All criticisms aside, it is clear that 1984 not only deserves, but constantly re-earns, its place in our literary pantheon. I’m glad to have taken it up more than ten years after my first reading, and look forward to revisiting Huxley’s Brave New World next.

Rating: 8/10