Announcement: George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

A book recommendation.

Subscribe, and follow me on Twitter @TweetingMan_ more updates.Edit: Since writing this post, I have read a lot more Orwell, and have come no closer to writing an essay on Nineteen Eighty-Four than I was when I started. Perhaps I will post an essay about the novel one day. Perhaps I’ll write a whole book on it. Perhaps nothing will become of this at all. I am still thinking about Orwell, though—just don’t expect anything soon.

WAR IS PEACE.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

These are the three tenets of George Orwell’s famous dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The slogans are plastered upon buildings, thrust into peoples’ consciousness at every possible moment. The words are inescapable, and they are all lies. They are almost as ubiquitous as Big Brother himself, the emblem of the governing power of the “Party,” whose stern mustachioed face looms threateningly over all and whose eyes seem to always follow you no matter which angle they stare at you from. It is a face which is printed everywhere. A person cannot enter a room, walk down the street, or count change in their pocket without being reminded that they are always being watched. The year is 1984, and the setting is London, but a different London than the one we are accustomed to. It is London under the rule of English Socialism, or Ingsoc, as it is called in “Newspeak”: the new language of the era, which aims to destroy words rather than create them, to strip down the means of communication to its most rudimentary form, and in consequence, to strip down thought in the same way.

In this hellish London lives our protagonist, Winston Smith. He is a scared man, and a repressed one. A man who is accustomed to drinking gin to get through his government-sanctioned job, and drinking more gin to unwind when he gets home. A man whose unspoken but defiant thoughts label him a “thought criminal,” an enemy of the Party whose unorthodoxy must be punished by torture, reformation, and ultimately, death. His is a world with no written laws, but where any deviation from the Party’s norm is harshly punished. There are few deviants, but the ones that exist always get caught. Then, they are either publicly denounced as heretics, or, more commonly, declared “unpersons” and wiped from history altogether. Evidence of their existence is wiped from all records, and the people they once knew pretend they never existed. Or, rather, they actually believe that they never existed, because this type of mental gymnastics—forgetting what you once knew on command—is an essential skill of staying alive in this world. The process of unquestioningly conforming your beliefs to that of the Party is a habitual one, as is the related skill of “doublethink,” which involves accepting two mutually contradictory statements of fact simultaneously. This is usually practiced unconsciously, at the detriment to that person's own sanity. But there is no sanity in this world. Sanity is believing what the Party wants you to believe, what everyone around you appears to believe. All else is death.

A society kept in a constant state of fear. A populace manipulated by constant war, surveillance, and enforced isolation. A country in which sanity does not exist. Does any of this sound familiar? It is automatic and comforting to dismiss these concepts as a distant nightmare which never came to fruition, despite the novel being set nearly four decades into our past. However, after reading some of Orwell’s nonfiction, I get the suspicion that the novel wasn’t intended as a prediction at all, but as a satirized reflection Orwell’s own observations of 1940s England.

I will publish an essay in the coming weeks discussing in detail the methods of control outlined in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It will examine surveillance, language, isolation, war, collective insanity, and the implications of these elements and the novel as a whole. The essay will be written with the assumption that readers are familiar with Nineteen Eighty-Four. If you are interested, I suggest that you read the book. It will change your life.

I will also discuss some essays written by Orwell, which were published before Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Politics and the English Language,” which outlines Orwell’s concerns about the state of the English Language as he saw it; “Writers and Leviathan,” which discusses Orwell’s observations of politics’ influence on literary criticism; and “The Prevention of Literature,” which expresses Orwell’s belief that enforced political censorship would effectively destroy all literature. It is not necessary to have read these essays before you read mine, but if you finish Nineteen Eighty-Four and find yourself itching for more Orwell, I recommend that you do.

Let’s start a dialogue. Feel free to comment down below with any thoughts or suggestions regarding this novel and its themes.

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