Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Deconstructing Dystopia

Abstract

The article discusses the broad range of critical responses to Orwell's 1984 in order to offer a framework of reference for the central themes present in the novel. Seen as socio-political commentary, a warning message and sometimes hinting towards the writing of a radical Swift, the book still remains relevant today.

Headnote

Abstract:

The article discusses the broad range of critical responses to Orwell's 1984 in order to offer a framework of reference for the central themes present in the novel. Seen as socio-political commentary, a warning message and sometimes hinting towards the writing of a radical Swift, the book still remains relevant today.

Keywords: socialism, literary (re)construction of the past, administrative utopia, autobiography, bourgeois society

Perhaps no dystopian writing has been so polarizing (critically) and recognized (culturally) as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Concepts such as Big Brother, doublethink, newspeak, have all found a way into popular culture and are here to stay for as long as they will remain contextually relevant. And there is no sign that they will be ousted in the foreseeable future.

One reason perhaps is the impact made by the novel's unequivocal ending: the totalitarian regime in reign that crushes all, a definitive and incontestable conquest over everyone and everything. The context the novel appeared in bared the sign of newly formed superpowers and new war (albeit a different one). Together, these two reasons prompted an extensive quest towards identifying the auctorial intention: was Orwell predicting or was it a warning message he issued?

Nineteen Eighty-Four stands as many things to many people; critical inquiries into the reasoning, scope and method employed in the novel have prompted extensive research. The conclusions covered a vast range: from a critique towards socialism all the way to a rewritten biography and everything in between; yet Nineteen Eighty-Four still provokes debates. I do not intend to offer (if even possible) an all-encompassing decryption of what Nineteen Eighty-Four stands for, however, in this article, I propose a clarification of one of the novel's main themes by following Orwell's own thoughts. Consequently I will present the auctorial view on socialism as perhaps the most prominent theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

All else aside, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a well-documented novel, or in the words of Bowker (2003: 385) "Orwell's novel was informed by his past reading as much as his political experiences". And indeed, it seems that most central themes in Orwell's novel are influenced by a literary work or another. References to Burnham's The Managerial Revolution are evident in the construction of the three super powers and the relationship between them; from Zamyatin's We it seems that he had borrowed the idea of total surveillance and that of the repressive state. In Orwell's essays on Koestler we find the source for psychological manipulation, Emanuel Goldstein from Nineteen Eighty-Four seems to be derived from Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed and O'Brien's discourse on power bares strong resemblances to Jack London's Iron Heel.

Socialism and world view

No utopian writing escaped political categorization and justly so, since no utopia was constructed without the intent of criticizing or improving upon an actual social and political system. More to the point, they always developed according to the state of the actual society they were criticizing: Plato could not escape slaves in his Republic, More could not exclude magistrates; the solution for tyranny was an enlightened autocracy, the solution for monarchy, communism.

A plausible assertion would be that though all utopias share a certain ideal that is common regardless of the period they were written in, none of them can imagine a perfect future because of the influence exercised by the state of things they build upon. The introduction to The Faber Book of Utopias reads that: "books about utopias tend to stress how they reflect historical developments. The discovery of the New World, the Age of Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the rise of science - all those brought new fashions to utopianism" (Carey, 1999: XX).

Then what is the fashion of Nineteen Eighty-Four? The novel's connection to the politics of its time was recognized explicitly. It was argued that the novel is an "impassioned representation of totalitarianism as the historical destiny of middle-class individualism" (Resch, 1997: 142). The motivation behind writing the novel was seen to lie in the author's need to "oppose the dangerous elements of the fashion of the day. The fashion of his day was socialism" (Sims, 1974: 302) or to be "a warning against communist revolution and any relaxing of Cold-War suspicions" (Sinfield, 1993: 99).

Orwell's own position towards socialism is very well documented and overt. I intend to offer an illustrative depiction of how Orwell came about to create Nineteen Eighty-Four based on the trail of evidence offered by his own letters and articles. The aim here is not to provide a constant parallel between the narrative and the background, but to offer a disambiguation key to the informed reader. I will not present an exhaustive list of articles but will focus on a few that are unequivocally relevant for the topic in discussion.

In 1944, five years before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in a rasping essay on Arthur Koestler's works (and communist past), Orwell discusses the outcome of the Russian Revolution and the instauration of Stalinism. He offers a very critical analysis of Koestler's beliefs on the subject, considering his (resigned) position in front of the revolution's failure to be on the middle ground somewhere between total retreat from an active political life and the belief that, sometime in the distant future, Earth will become some kind of paradise. What transpires in this article, relevant to the subject of my analysis, is the fact that the very failure of the Russian Revolution makes Orwell conclude that "all revolutions are failures, but they are not the same failure" (S. Orwell, 1968: 244).

Two years later, in an essay from 1946, entitled James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution, Orwell discusses two books by Burnham: The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians, making some relevant observations along the way. According to Burnham the present state of political society is at an in-between point where the power vacuum left by the disappearing capitalism and the non-emerging socialism is filled by the so called managerial class that represents neither democratic nor capitalist societies. The Managerial Revolution predicts that these newly emerged societies will control the means of production and will organize themselves in super states, grouped around industrial centres in Europe, America and Asia, taking hold of these and fighting for the possession of the remaining uncontrolled land. The class structure will be composed of an aristocracy of talent at the top and a class of semi-slaves at the bottom.

In The Machiavellians the main focus point is on arguing that democratic societies have never existed and will never exist. Politics is solely a constant struggle for power and the only change brought about is the replacement of one ruling class with another. Both these books argue that the world's tendency is to become a totalitarian system which must not be fought against but that may be guided to a certain extent.

Orwell finds all theories asserted by Burnham to be fundamentally reducible to two main points: "1. Politics is essentially the same in all ages" (S. Orwell, 1984: 210) and "2. Political behaviour is different from other kinds of behaviour" (Ibidem). The first point reflects on the way political power acts (domination of one minority over a majority) and its intrinsic nature (power struggle). The second point establishes the defining characteristic of power, namely immorality. For Burnham, power is conceptualized as a permanent struggle and an unrelentless pursuit of domination over the masses.

The question Orwell asks, one found to be lacking in Burnham's explanations, is "why does the lust for naked power become a major human motive exactly now, when dominion of man over man is ceasing to be necessary" (Ibidem: p. 211). The answer suggested is that Burnham's conceptualization of power is reflective "of the power worship now so prevalent among intellectuals" (Ibidem).

Ultimately Orwell dismisses both the inevitability of the managerial class and the success of the class structure imagined by Burnham. In other words: "the huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or, if established, will not endure" (Ibidem: p. 214). The reason lies in the fallacy of the model Burnham constructed upon, i.e. "because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society" (Ibidem).

One year after the Burnham articles, in his 1947 Toward European Unity, the author attempts to imagine the future by pointing towards the possibility of "two or three super-states, unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion" (Ibidem, p. 424). These newly created states would be divided in a two class society "a semi-divine caste at the top and outright slavery at the bottom" (Ibidem).

All three articles presented discuss a theme central to Orwell's political thoughts, namely socialism and its outcome. The historic destiny of revolutions (in the context of the Russian regime), the rejection of a power concept focused exclusively on domination and its derived class structure and finally the premonition of political and economic super powers are themes that crossed over into the novel. Moreover, it is evident that the very ideas Orwell dismissed or condemned found a way into the setup of Nineteen Eighty-Four in an inverted manner.

Why is it then that Orwell used the themes presented above as exact opposites to what he actually believed about them? A plausible answer might be that Orwell wrote the novel as some kind of a historic account of the future. If this is the case then the outcome is tributary to the juxtapositions between the factual truth, the narrator's intention to exemplify and the nature of the material on which the story in superimposed. In other words "if we approach history as literature we may even write better history, as we deploy an additional range of critical apparatuses to the established rules of contextualized evidence" (Munslow, 1997: 71).

The warning of the past

As I have mentioned at the beginning of the article one of the questions that prompted the most critical attention towards the novel was trying to determine if Orwell offered a premonition or issued a warning regarding the future. In a letter to Roger Senhouse from 26 Dec. 1948, the author writes that the novel was meant "to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into 'Zones of influences'(I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Teheran Conference), & in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism" (S. Orwell, 1984: 520). In another letter, dated 16 June 1949, to Francis Henson, Orwell states two important things: that the book is ultimately a satire and that it relates closely to the fact "that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences" (Ibidem, p. 564). More, in the same letter he explicitly states that "my recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism" (Ibidem).

Perhaps then it is not a coincidence that the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four strongly resembles an administrative utopia, a social model developed by the communist regime in Russia.

This kind of utopia involves the organization of utopian features by those in hold of power, by the ruling class. In this particular case the primary objectives are not focused on securing or developing means that should procure happiness or satisfaction but rationalizing life in three main functional categories: productivity, warfare and confinement. However opposing to the romantic idea of utopia these may seem, these categories contain specific utopian features, for they express "a desired order, an extreme rationalism, an outlet for the constructive imagination of organizers who wish to build environments and move or control people like men on a chessboard" (Stites, 1989: 19).

Finally one cannot omit that "My new book is a Utopia in the form of a novel. I ballsed it up rather, partly owning to being so ill while I was writing it" (S. Orwell, 1984: 536). It is a utopia because like all utopias it elaborates on social structure and class (Segal, 1985) and botched for it is a world where "a peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war" (Orwell, 2001: 208)

However, there is an inherent duality present in interpreting Nineteen Eighty-Four. When considering the auctorial position towards socialism one has two options: to see in Orwell an opponent of socialism if the decision is based on him constructing Ingsoc around English socialism and the "sinister capitalist in a top hat" (Orwell, 1987: 7) or to consider him a critic of the ideology from the inside and thus to identify him with socialism's concepts. Hopefully revisiting the novel in the reference key proposed by this article simplifies things and facilitates a clearer image of what Nineteen Eighty-Four was meant to be.

In the end it very well may be that "Orwell consciously decided to become Jonathan Swift, only a Swift whose vision of horror would energize men rather than enervate them, a radical rather than a reactionary Swift" (Kateb, 1996: 576).

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Bowker, G., George Orwell, London, Little Brown, 2003.

Carey, J., ed., The Faber book of Utopias, London, Faber and Faber, 1999.

Irwine, W., Apes, Angels and Victorians, New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company. Inc., 1955.

Kateb, G., The Road to 1984, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 81, no. 4 (Dec., 1996), p. 564-580.

Morton, A.L., The English utopia, Berlin, Seven Seas Publisher, 1952.

Munslow, A., Deconstructing history, London, Routledge, 1997.

Orwell, G., Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin Books in association with Martin Secker and Warburg ltd., 2001.

Orwell, G., The English People, London, Collins, 1987.

Orwell, S. ed., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. vol. 4. In Front of Your Nose 1945-1950, Penguin Books in association with Martin Secker and Warburg, 1984.

Orwell, S; Ian, Angus eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. vol. 3. As I Please 1943-1945, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968.

Patai, D., The Orwell Mystique. A Study in Male Ideology, Amherst, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.

Resch, R., Utopia, Dystopia, and the Middle Class in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Boundary 2, vol. 24, no.1, (Spring, 1997), p. 137-176.

Segal, H., Technological Utopianism in American Culture, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1985.

Sims, V., A Reconsideration of Orwell's 1984: The Moral Implications of Despair, Ethics, vol. 84, no. 4, (Jul., 1974), p. 292-306.

Sinfield, A., Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1993.

Stites, R., Revolutionary Dreams Utopian Visions and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989.