It all comes down to a remark made by a old friend, by the name of Sam Moreland (for the record), whom I saw again a month or so ago, who had himself just re-read 1984. "I wondered what it would be like to reread a book I first read as a teenager," he said, "Would it be the same?" His conclusion was that it was a really interesting thing to do. He recommended reading the appendix on Newspeak ("which nobody reads") and, on the book in general, concluded: "Actually, it's all about sex."
The first thing I have to do however is to dissent from Sam on a couple of points. First, I did read the appendix first time round. Maybe it was my linguistic tendencies showing through, maybe it was because, just as I was brought up to finish all the food on my plate, for me it was a kind of a moral obligation to read everything between the covers of a book. (Notes aside, I still do this, as well as finishing my food, even - bad idea - when in America.) Second, 1984 is not all about sex. There is a lot more sex in it than I recall, and it is a more important factor in Winston's rebellion than I remember, but, sorry Sam, the book is still what I thought it was about: a nightmare of totalitarianism. That said, I am sure that like most teachers at the time I first read the book in the late seventies, mine rather skated over the sex stuff.
The general impression after reading the book, for which I suppose we should be grateful, is that it reads as something of a period piece. This is true of both theme and form. Orwell was of course not so much trying to predict as to warn, and, with the benefit of historical perspective, his satire (not quite the right word, I know) really nails Stalinism. The behaviour of the system, the arbitrariness, the whipping-up of warlike patriotic frenzy, the surveillance, the self-censorship, and so much more chime with so much of what we know about the Stalinist system and indeed things like the Stasi state in East Germany. While the reality was never so all-encompassing, 1984 is extremely lucid about the logical consequences of where these regimes were going, or would go if they could. However, barring relics such as North Korea, the specific sort of regime that Orwell is warning about now seems consigned to history.
It goes a little deeper than that, of course. For all that Orwell's future London is reduced to being simply the largest city in Airstrip One (Great Britain), an outpost of a superstate comprising the Americas and the former British Empire ("Oceania"), the world he evokes seems so English. The superbly described shabbiness and grubbiness of Winston's world is evocative not only of Soviet Russia, but also, I am sure, of postwar austerity Britain. Winston's workplace also has a kind of civil-service-gone-bad feel to it, with modes of address and interaction between colleagues which would be entirely plausible in the lower echelons of a 1950's Whitehall ministry. Even the moments of escape with Julia are redolent somehow of Famous Five adventures (except for the sex), with Julia occasionally assuming a slightly jolly hockey sticks aura with her what-ho girlish enthusiasm. Why, the term of endearment between Winston and Julia is even "dear", which, used like this, reminds me of nothing so much of my grandparents' rather genteel generation.
One can hardly blame Orwell for this, of course, he is simply employing contemporary vernacular. But it does distance the modern reader from the text somewhat. A modern dystopia, one suspects, would rather have an American accent. Saying which, it does. Some five reviews ago, I described Dave Eggers' The Circle, another bleak vision of where the world could be heading, one which moreover pays explicit and implicit homage to 1984. Thinking about it now, I can see even more why than I did in that review. The two visions, though superficially very different, have a lot in common. Both evoke a world where only certain modes of thought are authorised and both systems enforce this standardised way of thinking via "transparency", or the abolition of privacy, actually achieved in quite similar ways (telescreens in Orwell, ubiquitous online video cameras in Eggers). Even language is affected in similar ways. It is not hard to see a relationship between Orwell's Newspeak and the social media jargon of zings, smiles, frowns and so on in Eggers. In both novels too, sex is a vital component in rebellion and potential rebellion, because it stands for fundamental human instincts, which produce "irrational" behaviour, and which are hard for any regime to suppress. Hence the interest on the part of the system in both books in controlling and directing people's sexual instincts.
There is however a very telling difference between the two visions. In Orwell, the state is all-powerful, the system imposed by state force. In Eggers, the state is a pretty ineffectual bystander while an immensely powerful private corporation persuades entire populations to buy into its system. Perhaps in this way too, Orwell is of his time. For good or ill, the belief in the power of the state to shape people's lives was very much alive when he wrote 1984, much less so now.
There is another crucial aspect of Orwell's work which has no direct equivalent in The Circle, namely the importance the the regime of falsifying the past. Perhaps this difference is an inevitable consequence of the very different worlds in which the two works were written. In 1949 it was still (perhaps) possible to imagine the complete control over all sources of information (archives, books, libraries, broadcast, newspapers) by a central power. Winston's job at the Ministry of Truth seems largely to be to revise articles from the Times - the newspaper of record - to ensure their consistency with official needs. It was perhaps a bit far-fetched, even in 1949, to imagine total control of all sources of information by the state - not even Stalin managed this - but now it is impossible, at least as long as there is any outside world. Even the North Korean regime can no longer totally isolate its citizens as mobile phones spread across the country. Maybe recognising this, Orwell's notion of doublethink is important. This is a quite explicit ability to believe in the truth of mutually contradictory things at the same time, if such is necessary because of a political imperative. Famously, in 1984, Winston has to convince himself - really believe - that 2+2=5, and succeeds in doing so. We don't quite see anything as explicit as this in The Circle, but we do see groupthink (the word itself is an orwellian construction), a blindness to counter-argument and a refusal to contemplate the pernicious consequences of adherence to the demands of the Circle, even as they become unbearable.
All this relativising of 1984 may however be taking us away from the merits of the book itself, which does stand as a seminal work of literature (in a way Eggers has yet to emulate).
Seminal, yes, but is 1984 "great" literature? One curious aspect of rereading this novel was to realise how much of it I remembered quite distinctly and indeed how some of the things that slightly bothered me as a teenager still bothered me. (Points to the book for memorability, points to me for consistency.)
It is undoubtedly a vehicle for ideas more than anything else. The long "extracts" from the Goldstein book, related verbatim in the mid section of the novel and which put Julia to sleep, are indeed rather burdensome and disruptive to the narrative. I recall classmates saying they had "skipped that stuff" and frankly I can understand, though it is clear that Orwell felt the need to include his "theory" in the text, even at the (Julia-acknowledged) expense of making it a bit heavy in the reader.
The other thing which bothered me both times round is the treatment of the "proles", normal people, non party members, who live in an abject state, albeit outside the iron discipline the party imposes on its members. Winston sees the only hope for the future in the proles, but Orwell constantly dashes such hope, with prole behaviour constantly reinforcing the idea that they are mindless slaves of the system, ensnared by grinding poverty, ill-health, blind warlike patriotism, booze and an obsession with the lottery. Is this just too misanthropic to be true, or is it just the same as we see in The Circle, where the social media-using masses collaborate voluntarily in their own undoing? One thing is sure though, Orwell does seem to have a bit of a cloth ear when it comes to the proles' speech patterns, surely, even in 1949, people didn't really speak like that?
But I quibble. This is a novel which really repaid its rereading. So many of its ideas have become mainstream, have entered into the broader culture: Big Brother, Room 101, the oxymoronic slogans of the party, doublethink, the Thought Police and so much more. Orwell touched a nerve with 1984; it is still a nerve worth touching.
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