The crowning jewel of dystopian fiction
Right at the outset I must admit that I started the book with Brave New World in mind which I had read a couple of years ago. Brave New World , set in around 2540 AD, and 1984, set in its titular year, are among the foremost dystopian works of the twentieth century. It is anybody’s guess how a reversed reading order might have affected this review.
1984, at its core, is one of the most radical interpretations of left-wing excesses. In 1984, the world is divided into three super-states – Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. The three are constantly at war with each other, even though it is impossible for any two powers to combine and defeat the third.
Oceania is ruled by “The Party” which is led by Big Brother. It is not clear whether Big Brother is just the collective identity of the Party or an actual person and, for all purposes, the distinction is irrelevant.
The Party extends absolute control over its members, divided into Inner Party and Outer Party. These, combined, represent around fifteen percent of the population. The rest, called Proles, are “like animals that need not concern The Party’s policies”.
Proles represent the common people. They still live the way people used to live before the “revolution” – a period in which the most vocal, progressive, liberal and intellectual people having views contrary to the Party were exterminated. As a result, the proles have been reduced to a group that lacks any vision, any sense of awareness of what is happening in the world, and who still lead their lives lost in a smorgasbord of petty fights, neighbourhood chit-chat, pornography and lottery tickets. They can be easily manipulated into bouts of nationalistic frenzy as and when Big Brother finds it necessary.
However, the control of the Party over members of the Inner and Outer Party is absolute. Not even the slightest deviation from their expected demeanour is tolerated, not just in actions but even in thoughts and their body’s reflex actions – a nervous sweat, increased heart-beat, words uttered in dreams, nothing can be hidden from Big Brother, through the ever-present tele-screens which capture, apart from visuals from every house, all auditory signals “above the slightest whisper”.
There are so many parallel strands going on in 1984, that I am finding it difficult to interpret the book as a whole.
There is the dread associated with the possibility of losing ourselves completely to the control of the state; the horror of what all the state would do if we do the slightest mistake; the paradox of doublethink where the upper party members have devised a way to wilfully erase from their conscious memory all things antagonistic to Big Brother and his ideas, and even erase the very thought that they have erased something; the idea of Newspeak, how it works and how it reduces humans to “duckspeakers”; historical revisionism and how, if needed, a person can be made an “unperson” with all traces of him removed from all books, magazines, newspapers and any material ever published, and the irony of being unable to accept that the party members could be harbouring any real human emotions at all.
Indeed, the ideas of 1984 have so heavily influenced popular culture and public discourse that we have come across most of them even before having read the book. So much so, that the eponym “Orwellian” is used to refer to any overboard attempts by the state towards censorship, surveillance or restrictions of freedoms of speech and expression.
Not to forget, 1984 has given us many terms that have entered common usage like thoughtcrime, doublethink, Room 101 and, the name of the official language, Newspeak. The philosophy of Newspeak is very simple and effective. Gradually remove all those words from the English language that even slightly express ideas antagonistic to the Party and people will be unable to even conceptualise those ideas. How can you express something for which there is no word! So, almost all adjectives and most of the abstract nouns are to be removed. Science and philosophy and the arts are not to have any place.
This is by an appreciable stretch the most horrifying work of fiction I have read. Indeed, horrifying is the word many people use when referring to the work. 1984 conjures up a world where there is no place for freedom, feelings, human relationships, hopes, dreams and aspirations. It is a desolate world where, through careful manipulation since birth, each human’s basic instincts are curbed to the extent they become real puppets in the hands of the Party. They lack volition.
I have no way of knowing why Orwell chose 1984 as the designated year. In reality, the kind of technological advancements needed to have the sort of control the Party enjoys is possible but it is relatively far off into the future. In that sense, the narrative does induce a certain indifference in the reader at times.
The novel shocks us and horrifies us. It pushes us into a corner where, paralysed and petrified, we struggle to separate the flights of fictional fantasy from the foreboding of a frightening, far-away future. But in the end, it makes us introspect. And in that sense, the novel has done what it had set out to do.
Whether such a world could come to exist in the future is not the point. The real question is whether mankind will be able to safeguard the freedom and volition of its individual members, whenever the herd mentality of the collective threatens to steer them all towards destruction.
Will those voices, those dissenters, those iconoclasts be assured of their individual autonomies?
Impressive, very well written 🙂