-Caveat Lector-
>From the Scotsman, a paper in Scotland
Big Brother may be 50, but he's the life and soul of the parties
Ian Bell on why George Orwell' s often misunderstood 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'
has continued to haunt the world for five decades
IN truth, it is not much of a novel because he was not much of a novelist.
Nor does it succeed as prophecy: the famous dateline came and went without
too much fuss. The world went to hell in a handcart, as always, but
totalitarianism did not finally penetrate the central nervous system of
civil society. In 1984, Margaret Hilda Thatcher did her peculiar best, but
Big Sister she was not.
Fifty years ago to the day, an old Etonian socialist and former Imperial
policeman gave the world what can best be described as a fictionalised essay
on liberty, an extrapolation of tendencies already observable when he was
writing. Nineteen Eighty-Four, still selling 60,000 copies a year today,
stands not as predictive science fiction but as a warning. Eric Arthur Blair
(George Orwell) might have been clever to spot the advent of intrusive CCTV,
social anaesthesia by pornography, or the destruction of truth through the
debasement of language and the mass media, but he was not creating a future,
alternate or otherwise.
The best joke of 1999, perhaps, is that one of Blair's namesakes runs a
country, an Airstrip One, in which the clocks have yet to strike 13. The
real irony of his book's success is that, misunderstood, it turned its own
sober assessment of polluted language into a cliché. "Orwellian", both as a
word and a dimly-understood concept, has become a prime example of
late-century tabloid newspeak.
All agencies of government are these days routinely Orwellian; traffic
wardens are Orwellian; applying for a driving licence is an Orwellian
nightmare; criticism of the Sun is Orwellian; attempts to prohibit fox
hunting are Orwellian; the internet - and what might Blair/Orwell have made
of that? - is the perfection of Orwellian threat. This is prolefeed, and is
not quite what the man behind the nom de plume meant. He would have noticed,
nevertheless, that his name is taken in vain at the fag end of the century
by people of every political persuasion when they want to damn their
opponents as enemies of freedom.
But then, this was the book's problem from the beginning, and it is a
problem that springs from the novel itself. No sooner had Nineteen
Eighty-Four been published in the United States (selling 170,000 in its
first year) than Orwell was noting sourly that "some of the US Republican
papers" had been trying to use it "as propaganda against the Labour Party".
Writers on the left, meanwhile, were accusing him of producing right-wing
Cold War propaganda. Some thought he was warning against fascism, some
against Communism, some against multi-national corporate capitalism.
The confusion - and it persists: Conservatives tend to be keen on the
socialist Orwell - is easy to understand. This, after all, is the writer who
fought for the Spanish Republic and nevertheless dubbed histotalitarian
regime IngSoc (instantly identified as English Socialism) and who, just
after Churchill's war, called his lone hero Winston. This is a novel set in
the aftermath of a nuclear exchange in a society for which perpetual limited
war has become the reason - and excuse - for everything. Did Orwell mean the
Warsaw Pact, NATO, or both? Readers could choose according to their
prejudices.
In attempting to explain himself, the novelist struggled. Nineteen
Eighty-Four, he said, was a parody, merely something that could happen. Yet
the trends it described were equally, even in 1949, "deep in the political,
social and economic foundations of the contemporary world situation.
Specifically the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on
Liberal capitalist communities by the necessity to prepare for total war
with the USSR …"
Equally, he rejected vehemently the fond belief of American critics that he
was attacking the Labour Party, of which he was a supporter. Having seen the
Communists at their worst in Spain during the Civil War, happier persecuting
the Anarchists who were his comrades than fighting fascism, Orwell in
reality, and in his every conviction, was an anti-Stalinist socialist. Even
in 1949 this was a concept beyond the grasp of many critics.
Yet it raises another paradox. Having warned, in effect, of what a perpetual
cold war could do to a society and its values, did Orwell not actually help
to perpetuate the real Cold War? Did 50 years of fictive exhortations
against the evils of an absolutely centralised economy (generally identified
as some version of the USSR) not simply persuade people, Americans in
particular, that their own military-industrial complex must be equally
powerful, equally beyond criticism or control? In describing a world of
armed camps Orwell, we could argue, offered a powerful case for their
existence, at least in the west. Glasnost, in any case, is not in the
dictionary of newspeak.
But then, the difficult fact is that politics is not among Nineteen
Eighty-Four's strengths, despite Orwell's pre-eminence as a political
journalist. The real triumph of the novel, more important by far than
ideology, is its understanding of language and the power of the media, its
grasp of the fact that what can be said and spoken affects how people think,
rather than the reverse. Wittgenstein had been in the same territory, as a
philosopher, but Orwell's fascination with both propaganda and slovenly
English, a theme of his essays, gave Nineteen Eighty Four its real power.
Hence the slogans: War is Peace; Ignorance is Strength; Freedom is Slavery.
Hence doublethink, doubleplusgood, sexcrime, the Ministry of Truth that lies
and the Fiction Department that is the spiritual home of all spin doctors.
In his early notes for the novel, which he first proposed to call The Last
Man in Europe, Orwell reminded himself of the "system of organised lying on
which society is founded". Yet he also found some inspiration in the radio
work he did during the war for the good old BBC, at a time when all news was
censored and propaganda was never far distant.
Besides, "George Orwell" was an invention, himself a kind of lie. At one
point he almost became the scarcely plausible H Lewis Allways; instead he
created a character for himself that he named after a river in Suffolk near
his parents' home. Blair/Orwell knew all about deceit and the destruction of
identity. Down and out, dishwashing, in Paris and London or on the road to
Wigan Pier he made the old Etonian disappear. The socialist polemicist he
became as Orwell was a rejection of the Indian Imperial Police officer Eric
Blair, who once described himself as a "Tory anarchist". He practised, in
effect, a doublespeak all of his own.
In the novel, nevertheless, the continual inversion of reality is both a
simple device and a supremely powerful one. It is to this that proles
everywhere (the socialist Orwell had no great faith in the working class)
tend to respond. In the lunacies of a state built on deliberate lies
everything points to Room 101, where the individual is extinguished finally
in confronting his greatest terror, learning to love Big Brother, learning
to accept that truth is what the powerful say it is.
And that, paradoxically, is Orwell's great truth, the bleak summation of the
central fact of human society, whether in 1948, 1984 or 1999. O'Brien, the
torturer, speaks this truth to Winston, speaks the few honest words of
dialogue in the novel, simply because he can. O'Brien says: "The object of
persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of
power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
Stalin, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic and the rest might. Nineteen Eighty-Four
stands, 50 years on, not because its prose is outstanding - Orwell's drive
for precision and horror of ornamentation tend to tedium; his characters
have one dimension, if they are lucky - nor because there is anything
original about its dystopia. Far from it.
The books debt to Yvgeny Zamyatin's We verges on plagiarism; Huxley's Brave
New World is more subtle; Kafka's Trial makes the fable of Winston Smith
seem simple-minded. Above all, the masterpiece that is Nabokov's Bend
Sinister, published in 1947 and set in a country enslaved by the "Average
Man Party", towers over anything Orwell managed. Aware of inevitable
comparisons, the magisterial Russian acknowledged Kafka as a great German
writer; the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four was merely "the mediocre English
one."
That is both true and unjust. Even Bernard Crick, author of the definitive
biography of Orwell, feels that his subject will be remembered chiefly as an
essayist. Yet he also reminds us, at the beginning of his 1980 study, that
Blair/Orwell's own chief ambition was to "make political writing into an
art". Nineteen Eighty-Four, by becoming part of the political and
intellectual landscape of the last five decades, by shaping that landscape,
fulfilled that ambition more completely than even Animal Farm or the great
essays. Orwell offered no prophecy or political philosophy but so much of
the world of his novel has leaked into ours as to put his political
achievement, through fiction, beyond question.
This is not simply a matter of what "came true" and what did not. Granted,
most of us now live under almost continual television surveillance,
apparently powerless to do anything about it. Granted, anyone in need of a
"two-minute hate" need only buy the Sun. Granted, Britain has been America's
Airstrip One during all the years since Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.
But then, most science-fiction writers can claim a few such successes.
Arthur C Clarke predicted orbital satellites: who cares? His prose and his
plots are lamentable.
Orwell's novel is an anatomy of power, state power in particular. It is,
perversely, almost a blueprint for totalitarianism and yet, despite its Cold
War origins, has nothing really to do with ideology. Transpose his world to
ours and you might find yourself asking just how GM food companies, born of
capitalist democracy, can achieve such a hold over governments. Change the
names and the dates and you might wonder why, in a free society, the state
requires quite so much computerised information about individuals. If you
want doublespeak, peruse Jack Straw's Freedom of Information Bill, with its
long lists of all the varieties of information which on no account must be
made free.
Orwell was writing about power, how it is achieved and held, reminding us,
whatever the politicians may claim, that "the object of power is power". He
was close enough to the mark, to the human truth of things, for his novel to
haunt the world - in our newspeak the "free" world - for decades yet to
come. As Bernard Crick has written, Nineteen Eighty-Four is to the 20th
century what Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan was to the 17th.
Orwell was granted little time to enjoy his triumph. After years of struggle
with tuberculosis, his lung haemorrhaged on the night of 21 January, 1950.
He died, according to the author of the biography he never wanted, instantly
and alone in London. He was 46, and never knew what 1984 might really be
like. But then, he did not have to guess.
Ian Bell is a former winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Journalism.
--
I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right
to say it.
-Voltaire ICQ: 9815080 Operator Taliesin_2 of #SacredNemeton on IRC
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