“If there is hope…” An optimistic reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four more

“If there is hope…” An optimistic reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four Tony Keen If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles. — Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part One, Chapter 71 After I’d accepted James Bacon’s invitation to contribute to this issue of Journey Planet, I sought out my copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a 1969 Penguin printing with a striking cover taken from a 1942 painting by the British war artist William Roberts.2 I no doubt acquired this copy in a secondhand bookshop at some point. Or did someone give it to me? I can’t recall now. I’ve certainly had this copy since at least 2003, but it’s not the copy I first read the novel in – that was a later Penguin edition, I think the 1975 one with a man with a megaphone on the cover, that I had either borrowed from a library or, more probably, a flatmate. Anyway, out of this copy dropped a newspaper cutting. This was an excellent discovery. It was “The Road to 1984”, an edited extract from the introduction to the 2003 Penguin Orwell Centenary Edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four that was written by reclusive American novelist Thomas Pynchon, and published in The Guardian’s Review section for 3rd May 2003 (an SF-heavy edition; the feature interview was with William Gibson). I had evidently kept it. This was good news, for what I had said to James was that I would revise something I wrote for the sadly-missed literary APA Acnestis back in my first contribution (for the July 2003 mailing).3 Obviously it would be useful to read Pynchon’s piece again, and though I had some small hope that it might still be on the webpage, this was unrealistic – reprints from copyrighted material like this don’t last up there. So what follows is a heavily revised version of that Acnestis piece, with a number of digressions. One section of Pynchon’s article particularly struck me. Towards the end of the piece (it’s pp. xxiixxiv of the introduction if you can get hold of the relevant edition), Pynchon dwells on the fact that the novel actually ends not at the point of Winston Smith’s final mental and emotional submission to Big Brother, but with an appendix, a scholarly excursus entitled “The Principles of Newspeak”. Newspeak is, of course, the fictional language, contracted from English, which is devised by the Party to eliminate the possibility of thinking deviant thoughts. It’s no doubt discussed elsewhere in these pages. First digression: Personally, I find it interesting that, in the notion underlying Newspeak that concepts can only be held if they can be expressed in language, Orwell anticipates the arguments of Lacan that 1 On p.72 of the 2000 Penguin printing. The Control Room, Civil Defence Headquarters, Salford Museum and Art Gallery. 2 3 Acnestis was run for several years by Maureen Kincaid Speller, until it was wound up in 2005. I found being in the APA an extremely valuable experience, that allowed me time to sharpen the critical skills I now employ in the likes of Vector and Strange Horizons, though I suppose you could argue that it was the start of me moving away from the sort of fannish fanzine writing that I had previously done in the pages of various fanzines. our experience of the world is structured by language, and many of the other notions of postmodernism. Orwell had presumably read Heidegger, whose rejection of the concepts of “subjectivity” and “objectivity” informs the discussions the interrogator O’Brien has with Winston. This is not surprising, given Heidegger’s association with the Nazis, one of the totalitarian regimes that Orwell drew upon for his depiction of the 1980s (the other main one being, of course, the Stalinist Soviet Union). I also think Newspeak is influenced by writings on spelling reform of the English language, a cause to which George Bernard Shaw attached his name. End of first digression. To get back to Pynchon, he draws attention not only to the position of the appendix, but also to the fact that, when asked to remove it for an American Book-of-the-Month Club edition, Orwell flatly refused. He wrote a reply making it clear that he saw the appendix as an integral part of the novel’s structure. This appendix, then, was not as dispensable to Orwell as those in Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien expected those solely interested in the story to overlook, and “very properly,” as he wrote in a letter of 1955.4 Pynchon goes on to highlight the tense in which the appendix is written. From its first sentence, “The Principles of Newspeak” is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post-1984, in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past … perhaps “The Principles of Newspeak” serves as a way to brighten an otherwise bleakly pessimistic ending. As I read this, I realized that Pynchon had possibly identified something that always lay in the back of my mind, unsettling my relationship to the novel, and that this passage enabled me to reconcile myself to Orwell’s work. I had, of course, known of the existence of Nineteen Eighty-Four since an early age. So many terms and concepts – Big Brother, Room 101, the Thought Police, just to start with – have passed into common parlance. I have a vivid memory of the final sequence in Room 101 with the rats, seen in some documentary, but probably originally from the 1954 BBC version (starring Peter Cushing as Winston Smith and scripted by Nigel Kneale), though it may possibly have been from the 1955 film (directed by Michael Anderson). But I don’t think I first read the whole novel until the late 1980s. In fact, I’m pretty sure I saw the movie version made in the year of 1984, starring John Hurt as Winston Smith and Richard Burton as O’Brien (directed by Michael Radford), before reading the book, and even that I didn’t see in the year of its release. But I had a problem with all versions of the story, arising from the fact that I have always been, by nature, an optimist (however much I may sometimes pretend otherwise). I want to believe, however much rationally I know this to be against all historical evidence, that human society can progress, and that things do get better. That’s probably evidence of an excessive adherence to positivism, an adherence I know in my head to be wrong. Nevertheless, it affects me. So, when reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, I wanted to believe that this bleak dystopian dictatorship could not endure. The main text of the novel offers no such hope. There is no external power to overthrow Oceania’s order either through military action or offering a more attractive alternative – Eurasia and Eastasia, inasmuch as any idea of them can be gained, differ politically only in meaningless details. 4 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981, p.210. Internal dissent movements are infiltrated, manipulated, even created by the Party for its own ends. The proletariat, the only place where Winston Smith can see hope of changing the order, have no motivation or collective consciousness of their power, neutered by social control mechanisms that have their origins in the “bread and circuses” that the Roman poet Juvenal mentions in his Tenth Satire. There is, finally, no hope to be found in the indomitable human spirit – as the climactic events in Room 101 show, the human spirit can be crushed. As the reader approaches the final caption of THE END, Winston Smith comes to feel unconditional love for Big Brother, to actually join in the fervour of the masses, not just pretend to do so, and to eagerly anticipate the moment that he will be shot. (My natural optimism had tried to mould this for me, leaving me for a long time with the idea that Winston survives in body, if not in spirit. I failed to spot, until this last rereading, the signs that he remains under sentence of death.) Second digression: An interesting comparison can be drawn here with Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s similarly dystopian V for Vendetta, a work undoubtedly influenced by Orwell in so many different ways, such that V for Vendetta could not possibly exist had Nineteen Eighty-Four not been written first (partly this is because V was conceived in the early 1980s, when the approach of the year 1984 was encouraging an obsession with all things Orwellian). Here I want to look at the prison ordeals undergone by the respective protagonists, Evey and Winston. Both are interrogated and tortured (even if in V it is not actually the authorities doing it, though Evey thinks it is). In Moore’s story, Evey discovers that there is one inch inside her that the totalitarian rulers can never get to, no matter how hard they try. Understanding that, there is nothing left that she can be threatened with, and she is truly free. In contrast, Orwell’s message is that they can always get inside you, that they will always destroy the one thing, in Winston’s case his love for Julia, that you thought they could never reach. End of second digression. Back to the main argument. The fact that I could find no hope in Nineteen Eighty-Four left me feeling ill-at-ease with the novel. But Pynchon’s essay would suggest that the hope was there all the time. “The Principles of Newspeak” talks of how the intentions were to adopt Newspeak by 2050, and to destroy all of pre-Newspeak literature once certain classics – Milton, Shakespeare, etc. – had been “translated”. But all of this is put in a past subjunctive: “the literature of the past would be destroyed”; “Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak … by … 2050.” (My italics.) There are further indications that the writer of “The Principles of Newspeak” does not live in a world dominated by the system depicted in the main text of the novel. The writer certainly does not speak the same language as Newspeak. Phrases are used such as “in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary” and “Relative to our own…” Third digression: Rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four, it struck me how very English it is. The British empire has been absorbed into the United States of America, and Britain renamed Airstrip One. But there’s little sense of Britain as a colonized territory. It is English Socialism (IngSoc), not American Socialism, that rules. America is barely mentioned. No Americans are in London. One doesn’t get the feeling that the Ministry of Truth or any of the other Ministries in London are satellites of ministries in Washington. The heroes of the revolution appear to be English. If anything dates the novel, it is this; one cannot imagine a similar dystopia being written today that did not also involve a greater degree of Americanization. Instead Orwell fills his novel with a picture of a parochial totalitarianism, based partly on his own experiences. The London of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the London of the post-war Austerity years, all bombed-out buildings and ration cards. Into this Orwell imports a vision of what he knows about Stalin’s Soviet Union, together with elements borrowed from Nazi Germany (especially the anti-Semitism inherent in the casting of Emmanuel Goldstein as the chief figure of hate). I’d also guess that Orwell was rather overawed by the possibilities television seemed to offer for social control. He was wrong, at least in detail, but Jae Leslie Adams commented in a later Acnestis mailing that television has a way of imposing a degree of linguistic uniformity. As an example, my grandfather once told me that before television, “Coventry” was pronounced (presumably amongst his acquaintances) as if the first syllable rhymed with “dove”. At the time he told me this story, BBC Received Pronunciation was to rhyme it with “of”, though the “dove” pronunciation does seem to have made something of a comeback. End of third digression. To resume, once again. The writer of the appendix cannot be viewing Oceania from outside, from Eurasia or Eastasia. According to Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the incredibly subversive tome referred to by most characters only as “the book”, the political systems in those nations differ from English socialism only in name. (It does not matter, for the purposes of this argument, that the book is actually a creation of the Party. The descriptions of how the system works, the only bits that Orwell lets us read, are confirmed by O’Brien, one of the authors, to be accurate – though how far anything O’Brien says to Winston is to be relied upon is open to question, of course.) The implication must therefore be that, from the perspective of the writer of the appendix, certain things intended by the Party did not happen; Newspeak did not replace English, the literature of the past was not destroyed. Since the adoption of Newspeak is integral to the perpetuation of Oceania’s political system, it must follow that the whole system, and those of Eastasia and Eurasia, equally bound up with Oceania, collapses. This all puts a different light on one of the key sequences in the book, the debate in the Ministry of Love between Winston and O’Brien (Part Three, Chapter 3), where the latter counters every argument that the Party’s rule cannot endure. Winston tries to cling to a belief that people cannot be micromanaged for ever in the way that the Party believes. He does not know Abraham Lincoln’s saying, “You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.” But this is the basis of Smith’s argument. O’Brien rejects this. The Party does control everything. It controls the past, hence it controls the future (he would have no truck with the notion that you cannot learn from history and avoid repeating its mistakes if you eradicate history). The Party even controls disease, so that a sudden attack of plague, a notion Winston advances, would be no threat. O’Brien gives us one of the novel’s enduring images: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.” Fourth and final digression: I’ve noticed that liberals, wanting a sage quote to illustrate some argument about the dangers of totalitarianism, have a habit of turning to the words of people like Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering or Joseph Goebbels. There is an implicit assumption that because Hitler says “the broad mass of a nation … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one,” that makes it true. What seems to slip through the net in these discussions is that these people were intellectual lightweights who got lucky. They created a system that was seriously self-destructive, and was partially responsible for its own collapse. When I look at the Party structures as depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the sheer self-destructiveness of those depicted is what strikes me. End of fourth digression. Every gambit Winston attempts fails. O’Brien comprehensively wins the argument. Yet if Pynchon’s interpretation of “The Principles of Newspeak” is correct, in the long run it is O’Brien, not Winston, who is deluding himself. Winston will not live to see the end of the Party. His fate has been foreshadowed. O’Brien has told him that eventually he will be shot, and the reader last sees him in The Chestnut Tree café, having his glass refilled with gin as the telescreen plays a tune: Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me The reader has watched this scene before. That time Winston was the observer, and the people being served gin were the disgraced Party heroes Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford. Soon after they were rearrested and executed. This will happen to Winston. He knows it, accepts it, even welcomes and desires it. But O’Brien may survive to see what happens. In the final paragraph of the appendix, it is said that “it was not expected that [the translations of major authors such as Shakespeare and Dickens into Newspeak] would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century.” Note again that “would”. No hint that the project actually reached the early 2000s. So sometime between 1984 and 2000, IngSoc falls. The appendix presents no inkling of how this has come about. In the first version of this piece, I wrote “possibly [Orwell] could not himself see how the system he envisaged might fall, but nevertheless believed that sooner or later it must.” I now think, however, that Orwell shows the beginning of the end in the novel. In that final scene in The Chestnut Tree, Smith is listening to a bulletin about the war. Oceanic forces have smashed a Eurasian army that was in danger of conquering the whole of Africa. It is easy to see this as just the usual war propaganda that has been seen throughout the novel. But it is different. Winston notes to himself that this is the first time in the war that the actual territory of Oceania was threatened. Orwell is therefore signalling that this is something new. Indeed, it is something that should not happen, according to Goldstein’s book. The fighting should only occur in disputed areas around the Equator and at the North Pole. Actually invading the enemy’s core territory would cause a series of problems that would risk the war coming to an end – and since the Party (in each nation) relies on the unending war to maintain its authority, through the continued consumption of resources, an end of war would end the system. So the threat to Southern Africa, core territory of Oceania, may indicate that things have got out of the control of the leaders. The Party is not, after all, omniscient. (Of course, if O’Brien did live to see the fall of the Party, he would survive. His involvement in a secret organization working against Big Brother would cease to be a lie designed to entrap subversives, and become the truth.) The problem is, of course, that the view I’m proposing is not a common reading of Nineteen EightyFour. Most accounts focus on the futility of Winston’s personal struggle, and depict the system as neverending. In the entry for George Orwell in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute says that Nineteen Eighty- Four’s “pessimism was both distressing and salutary.” Perhaps this arises from something that Kingsley Amis (who seems not to have liked the novel much) notes in New Maps of Hell; that Nineteen Eighty-Four resists allowing the sort of ray of hope that a more traditional SF novel might include. Certainly, it lacks the tinge of optimism found in the conclusion of Fahrenheit 451, a nearcontemporary (so much so that it may be a deliberate reaction to Orwell) novel written by Ray Bradbury from within the mainstream SF genre. But I want to go along with Pynchon, and argue that, though occluded, there is optimism in Nineteen Eighty-Four, at least on a societal level, if not personally for Winston. Perhaps, like me, Orwell was trying to reconcile an unsentimental observation of the world about him with an undimmable optimism. Maybe, as well, the reason why the appendix is signalled in a note at the very beginning of the book is to allow the following narrative to be read in the knowledge of the system’s ultimate impermanence. Whatever, I feel that the final message of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that, however terrible and hopeless the fate of Winston Smith, one should not believe that Big Brother, The Party, O’Brien and all their works will last. Systems, however apparently triumphant, are not permanent. Francis Fukuyama in 1989 proclaimed the triumph of liberal capitalism and “the end of history”; Fukuyama was pretty obviously wrong at the time, and the succeeding decades have demonstrated clearly how wrong he was. Orwell was a smarter man than Fukuyama. The boot stamping on the human face may be O’Brien’s vision of the future, but that does not necessarily make it Orwell’s. If my amplification of Pynchon’s comments on Nineteen Eighty-Four is correct (and obviously, I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it, but equally obviously, like many academic theories relating to literary criticism, it is impossible to have an empirical proof), then I find it a fascinating insight into Orwell’s character, highlighting a conflict between sides of his personality that did and did not take a fundamentally optimistic view of the human condition. On the other hand, maybe Orwell is simply making the point that to those in an oppressive situation, it is often difficult to see any hope. How many of the citizens of, for example, South Africa in the 1980s could foresee how swiftly the Apartheid regime would be brought to an end? Yet that did end. I shall conclude with a line from the end of Peter Watkins’ bleak 1965 dystopian film, The War Game: There is hope in any unresolved and unpredictable situation.