1984 (Criticism)

Criticism

Kathleen Fitzpatrick

In the following essay, Fitzpatrick, an author and doctoral candidate at New York University, maintains that although Orwell's dystopian vision has not been borne out by Soviet-style communism, the author's fears about the ability of the state to control people is still a danger in modern society.

George Orwell's dystopian (a fictional place where people lead dehumanized and fearful lives) vision of the year 1984, as depicted in what many consider to be his greatest novel, has entered the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world more completely than perhaps any other political text, whether fiction or nonfiction. No matter how far our contemporary world may seem from 1984's Oceania, any suggestion of government surveillance of its citizens — from the threatened "clipper chip," which would have allowed government officials to monitor all computer activity, to New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's decision to place security cameras in Central Park — produces cries of "Big Brother is watching." Big Brother, the all-seeing manifestation in 1984 of the Party's drive for power for its own sake, has come to stand as a warning of the insidious nature of government-centralized power, and the way that personal freedoms, once encroached upon, are easily destroyed altogether.

Critics generally agree that the hero of the novel, Winston Smith, may be recognized by his name as related to both the great British statesman and World War II leader Winston Churchill and a non-descript Everyman. However, the point is not that Winston is a great man, or even that he is one man among many; rather, O'Brien, while torturing Winston, says that if Winston is "a man," as he claims to think of himself, then he is the last man. In fact this echo of the novel's original title, The Last Man in Europe, reveals Winston as symbolic of what critic Ian Watt has described as Orwell's conception of a dying humanism. Whether Winston Smith is truly a humanist, in the classical sense of the term, is of no matter; in comparison to the totalitarian regime which destroys him, Winston is, in fact, the last embodiment of the human. In converting Winston to the love of Big Brother, the last man in Europe is destroyed.

Winston maintains, throughout the novel, two avenues of hope for a life outside the confines of the Party and the watchful eyes of Big Brother, a life which may undermine or even overthrow the Party's hold on Oceania. One of these possibilities is conscious, spoken: the proles. Just as Marx foresaw, in the nineteenth century, that the Revolution would come from a spontaneous uprising of the proletariat as they shook off the chains of their oppressors, so Winston writes in his diary that if there is hope, it lies in this 85 percent of Oceania's population that exists outside the confines of the Party. And yet, the impossibility of a proletarian uprising presents itself to him at every turn. Echoing Marx, Winston writes: "Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." And, unfortunately, he is right; as O'Brien admonishes Winston in the Ministry of Love, "The proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot." Thus this small bit of hope is crushed.

The second possibility remains mostly unspoken and unconscious: desire. It is this possibility, the momentary destruction of the Party through intimate union with another person, which solidifies Winston's relationship with Julia. Though they are drawn together at first by what seem to be basic animal urges, it is precisely the baseness and the animality of those urges that gives them their liberatory potential. As Winston relates earlier, in contemplating the sterility of his relationship with his wife: "The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime." Desire is thought crime in Oceania because it elevates the human, the individual, above the powers of the state to control him. In fact, as Winston and Julia begin to make love for the first time, this piece of repressed knowledge becomes conscious; "the animal instinct," he thinks, "the simple undifferenti-ated desire: that was the force that could tear the Party to pieces."

The threat to the Party of the thoughtcrime that desire represents is sufficiently serious that the state must exert formidable control over any such human, instinctual reactions. In his essay "1984: Enigmas of Power," Irving Howe writes, "There can be no 'free space' in the lives of the Outer Party faithful, nothing that remains beyond the command of the state. Sexual energy is to be transformed into political violence and personal hysteria." It is this recognition by the Party that there may be no element of "human nature" which can remain the province of the individual without endangering the Party's hold on its members that represents the great "advance" of Ingsoc (English Socialism, in Oldspeak) over previous totalitarian regimes. There was always room, notes Howe, in these previous regimes, for "'free space,' that margin of personal autonomy which even in the worst moments of Stalinism and Hitlerism some people wanted to protect."

The "advance" represented by Ingsoc, according to Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchal Collectivism, the book written by a collective of Inner Party members including O'Brien, is the realization by the Party that all previous oppressive regimes were nonetheless "infected" with liberal ideas about the individual:

Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.

With that development, the totalization of surveillance of Party members, not only does private life come to an end, but so does the possibility of sexual desire as truly liberating. Julia and Winston do manage to steal their moments together away from the Party. But the Party's enforcers, the Thought Police, are watching even when the lovers are convinced they are safe, and the revenge they exact for this transgression of Party control is enormous.

It is significant that the instrument of this totalized surveillance is the "telescreen," Orwell's projection of the future of television. As Orwell was writing 1984 in 1948, television was just emerging from the developmental hiatus forced upon the broadcasting industry by World War II. Many people were worried, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, about what this new medium would be, how it would function, how much control over its watchers it would create. Orwell's own concerns about the future development of television are reflected in 1984's telescreens, which on the one hand, broadcast an endless barrage of Party propaganda, and on the other hand, act as transmitters as well, enabling the Party to exercise the total surveillance it required.

Martin Esslin has claimed in his essay "Television and Telescreen," however, that Orwell's fears about television missed the mark on two counts. First, Orwell was evidently more concerned about the potential for televisions to become cameras, a technological development which has not taken place, overlooking the importance of "what they have actually become, the omnipresent, constant providers of highly colorful visual entertainment for the broad masses." Secondly, Orwell's notion of what these telescreens did transmit was the crudest possible sort of propaganda — martial music and endless lists of production figures — which overlooks the utility of entertainment as a form of mass manipulation. In Esslin's words:

There is, after all, not that much difference between a society that floods the masses with cheap, novelettish romance, raucous and sentimental pop music, and pornography to keep them amused and politically inert and one that does the same thing for commercial gain — but with the identical ultimate political result: apathy, ignorance of real issues, and acquiescence in whatever the politicians are doing. And does not commercial television do just that?

Furthermore, both Esslin and Irving Howe point out another weakness in Orwell's depiction of the telescreen when compared to the development that television has actually taken in the latter half of the twentieth century: the proles — fully 85 percent of the population of Oceania — are not required to have telescreens. If the machine-made novels and songs are being put onto the market in order to keep the masses complacent, wouldn't the telescreen prove much more effective? Moreover, the proles, kept free of the telescreen's powers of surveillance, retain the ability to have a private life which Party members have lost. The Party clearly regards the proletariat as not being worth watching, as being unable to develop the "humanity" which must be guarded against in Party members. As it is stated in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchal Collectivism, "What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect."

This division of society into Party members and proles in 1984 was clearly modeled on the division which was coming into focus in the Soviet Union in 1948, in which Party members were closely monitored while proles were less controlled. Both Esslin and Howe, however, point out that Orwell's vision of the powerlessness and inertia of the proles did not bear out, given the evidence of history. In fact, numerous uprisings against the Soviet machine, from the Hungarian Revolution to the student uprisings in France, from the Prague Spring to the rise of Solidarity in Poland, to the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall, demonstrate that the proletariat, and even party intellectuals, were not completely crushed by Party ideology, and that, in Esslin's words, "the totalitarian manipulation of popular feelings and ideas by the mass media is far less effective than Orwell had imagined."

Nonetheless, by the novel's end, Big Brother is ultimately victorious, having won over the last man in Europe. In today's world, Big Brother is still a force, especially to those who worry about the continued possibility of the rise of totalitarianism today. However, there is another face to Big Brother, which is precisely that "manipulation of popular feelings and ideas by the mass media" about which Orwell warned. If people find in government endless new reasons to be vigilant about the incursions into personal liberties which 1984 depicts, they would do well to remember, as Neil Postman claims in the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, that there is a very different version of the dystopian universe presented in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which "no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think." Big Brother may not be watching; he might be broadcasting.

Source: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• Animal Farm (1945) was George Orwell's 1945 fable about the inevitable course of all revolutions. In it, a group of animals revolt against the farmer who is their master and set up their own form of government. The most intelligent animals, the pigs, are in charge, and hopes are high when the animals write their own bill of animal rights. However, over time, these rights are eroded as the pigs begin changing the rules.
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1931) influenced Orwell's own futuristic novel, 1984. Huxley's totalitarian state, which exists in London six hundred years in the future, is less grim than Orwell's, but its inhabitants are as powerless and oppressed as the citizens of Oceania. Huxley's characterization and prose is less sophisticated than Orwell's, but his novel is funny and fascinating. The inhabitants of his society are controlled from before birth by a handful of elite rulers with sophisticated technology. When a primitive person, the Savage, from outside the society is introduced, he confronts the shallow values of the citizens.
• This Perfect Day by Ira Levin (1970) is another futuristic novel about a totalitarian society with very different values from that of contemporary society. As in Brave New World, citizens dull their pain and fears through drugs and are genetically very similar. Those who have genetic differences have a greater tendency to be dissatisfied with the pacified society, which is controlled by a huge computer that dispenses the mood-altering drugs.
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985) is the story of a woman named Offred, who lives in the Republic of Gilead, an oppressive society of the future in which women's roles are severely limited.
• Harrison Bergeron, a satirical story by Kurt Vonnegut, was inspired by Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. Harrison lives in a totalitarian state in the future. He is very intelligent — not an advantage in this society — so to "correct" this "defect" and allow Harrison to be as mediocre and middle-of-the-road as his fellow citizens, doctors plan to perform brain surgery. However, Harrison is whisked away by an elite group that secretly controls all of society and given a choice: join the rulers and disappear from society for good or be lobotomized.
• We by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924) influenced George Orwell's 1984. It, too, is a dystopian novel set in the future, in this case the twenty-sixth century, and features a totalitarian state. This society, called One State, is ruled by a Big Brother-type dictator called simply Benefactor, who has scheduled the day of every citizen down to the very minute. The narrator, D-503 (all the citizens have numbers, not names), is the designer and builder of a space probe called INTEGRAL and is waiting for the day when he finally has the Great Operation: the lobotomy the government performs to erase the last vestige of each individual's humanity: the imagination.