Orwelians ( 1984 )
by Israel Centeno
In order to understand George Orwell’s novel 1984 we must clearly define the term “dystopia” or “anti-utopia.” If utopia represents the best of all worlds, definitive freedom, the place where the dreams of men come true, then dystopia is the worst of all worlds, the loss of definitive and absolute freedom, and the submission to power with absolute control over human will. Paradoxically, the more definitive and absolute that level of control is, the happier the people living under such circumstances are.
Although the idea of utopia has taken hold of our collective and individual imaginations since Thomas More’s work of the same name (1516), and its true political realization has been sought in the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, the utopian French socialists’ phalanstères of the 19th century, the Fabian socialism of H. G. Wells, and the determinism of Jack London, at any moment, the idea of a utopia could split from political theory and enter the exclusive realm of literary creation. With that in mind it could be said that the idea of a utopia gave rise to the genre known as science fiction. Utopian literature features fantastic journeys to distant lands, where proposed models of supreme happiness are put into practice.
It could be said that Erewhon by Samuel Butler (1872) is one of the fundamental works of utopian literature, whose title is an anagram for “nowhere,” or to put it another way, “utopia.” However, at that time, knowledge of the world was limited, and reality sometimes forcefully imposed itself upon certain modes of thinking. In 1911, following the first successful expedition to the South Pole, there was nowhere in the world that man had not been and, perhaps, to be more precise, there was no reality nor foreign human condition left unexplored. Consequently, from that point onward, the search for utopia was focused on the future, or on other lands and other worlds. The utopian and adventure genres converged and the creative production of science fiction became more prominent: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Call of the Wild. But then the world war years came to pass and changed how the universe was interpreted. Above all, they changed how mankind and its future was perceived.
While the Russian revolution suggested that a utopia was possible, it didn’t take long for serious warnings and differing points of view to arise, particularly through literature, highlighting perhaps how horrifying the future could become if power was amassed, if it was concentrated in the hands of a few or held by just one person, or if the collective dream was usurped by a private leadership. And if all this became reality, the perception man had of the world would end up being manipulated and those who suffered a drastic loss of freedom would proclaim the greatest levels of freedom never lived.
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921), Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), and War with the Newts by Karel Čapek (1936) were the first literary works to demonstrate this.
But it was 1984 that would become the most famous dystopian novel, the culmination of a literary tradition that warned us of the dangers of the concentration of power. Following Orwell’s experiences in the Spanish civil war — where he witnessed the pugnacity of Stalinist repression in its ability to persecute and purge the Trotskyists and anarchists in Spain; where he lived through collectivization and its self-management on the Aragonese front; where he experienced the civil war within the civil war when the Republican Army, armed by the Soviet Union and the Comintern, persecuted, captured, executed, eradicated, and demobilized the Trotskyist and anarchist militias — Orwell suffered a significant blow to his convictions, leading him to declare that orthodox communism was another type of dictatorship, comparable to Nazism. Two sides of the same coin. He then went on to denounce the manipulation of information and propaganda within Stalinism, which made it appear, for example, as if the elimination and execution of the Trotskyists in Barcelona had never even happened.
After the Spanish Civil War — a testing ground for Stalinist totalitarianism and National Socialism — Orwell may have created the story lines for what would be his two dystopian literary works: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Animal Farm, published in 1945, is a fable: A group of animals revolt and evict their farmer in order to manage the farm themselves in a parody of Stalinist communism. We can see, for example, that Old Major, the boar, represents Lenin, who, before he dies, shows the animals the path that must be followed so they can be freed from the yoke of humans. His heirs, Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky) struggle for control of the farm. This story sets the progressive degradation of revolutionary ideals before the reader. At the time, it was difficult to find a publisher for the book, as it was written between 1943 and 1945; years in which the alliance with the Soviet Union was important for the West, given that they played a defining role in the war against Nazi Germany. This led the author to bitterly express: “Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. […] For though you are not allowed to criticize the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticize our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals.”
It was this Orwell, who was deceived, embittered, ostracized, and subjected to paradoxical censorship, who had lost his wife and was increasingly weakened from tuberculosis, who conceived Nineteen Eighty-Four, the most famous dystopian novel of them all.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world is divided into three great superstates: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Oceania comprises the Americas, Australasia, Great Britain, and southern Africa. Eurasia was created through the expansion of the Soviet Union across Europe. Eastasia consists of China, Japan, and Indo-China. The world fights a never-ending war, the three powers battling one another in an ever-changing situation of alliances and hostilities. At the beginning of the novel, Oceania is at war with Eurasia, it has always been at war with Eurasia, and it is allied with Eastasia. By the end of the book, the opposite is true. The novel also recounts the life of Winston Smith, a civil servant in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, the body responsible for falsifying reality and manipulating public opinion. Smith is an insignificant clerk for the all-powerful Outer Party. While separated and kept distant from members of the Inner Party, the true elite, and led by theomnipotent Big Brother, Smith is in a higher social class than “the Proles.”
However, despite his social elevation, at a given moment Winston commits a thoughtcrime: A distant childhood memory of his mother fills him with certainty about the falsification of reality that the Party carries out. At the Ministry of Truth Winston’s job is to alter the press in such a way that any news that inconveniences the Party is replaced with the “official truth.” Through this work he is one of the men responsible for erasing other men from existence right in front of everyone’s eyes, and for converting suspected traitors, who have at some point committed thoughtcrime against the Party, into “unpersons.”
In Oceania, Ingsoc is the ruling ideology. It is the Party, the Party is personified by Big Brother, and it has three slogans: “War is Peace” ; “Freedom is Slavery” ; and “Ignorance is Strength.”
Winston’s first criminal act is to begin writing a diary out of sight of the telescreens that monitor him. To think freely. The second crime, which ends his obedience to the Party, is to cease his sexual abstinence.
Winston falls in love with Julia, a female activist in the Junior Anti-Sex League who also works in the Ministry of Truth, though she works in the Fiction Department, writing pornography that will be distributed amongst the Proles to make them think that they are consuming an illegal product. Winston’s love for Julia is an irrefutable display of his individuality. In their society, sex is execrable; it creates thoughts that lead people to wrongly believe in self-satisfaction, not the satisfaction provided by the Party. Therefore, love is forbidden. The inhabitants of Oceania have no alternative to hate. It is society’s strongest driving force in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Hatred of what, you ask? Anything strange, anything foreign, anything that goes against the Party. This hatred is expressed through ubiquitous propaganda, violent with executions, public ridicule, and processions of prisoners of war. It is also expressed daily in the Two Minutes Hate againstEmmanuel Goldstein, the enemy of Oceania. The Two Minutes Hate is the only time when an escape valve is opened: All instincts express a rational hatred, upon which images of Goldstein, killings, and attacks on distant enemies are superimposed. To hate Goldstein is to love the Party and Big Brother. Doubting the iniquity of Goldstein is the worst thoughtcrime, and it is another crime that Winston commits.
Winston hates the Party, hates Big Brother, and wants to resist, so he joins the Brotherhood, a clandestine organization which may or may not actually exist, supposedly founded by Goldstein himself. But the person who recruits Winston into the Brotherhood, paradoxically, is O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party and agent of the Thought Police, who betrays him and surrenders him to the Ministry of Love, where he is abused and tortured. There Winston is brainwashed and sent to Room 101, a chamber in which those who have had thoughts of individualism are crushed. In Room 101 Winston faces his worst nightmares. He is humiliated and filled with terror until he denies everything and betrays both himself and Julia, his love.
Ultimately, Nineteen Eighty-Four portrays a unique way of perpetuating a totalitarian regime, falsifying the truth, and consolidating lies. In order for the system to work, the Party must put an end to dissent and make thoughtcrime the worst criminal act. The past must also be manipulated and made to disappear. As Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
