Friday, August 29, 2008

1984
Author: George Orwell 1949 326 pp
My rating: 3*
Started August 15 2008, Finished August 22 2008.

“a complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism” (57)

I found 1984, as I had found A Tale of Two Cities, to be a big name book that does not hold its own as a novel. And while I read it before I started blogging and did not record my impressions while they were still fresh and detailed, the book 1984 seems most comparable to is Brave New World, a similar thought experiment depicting a dystopic future whose author was unable to enrich his ideas with a fully believable human context. After my recent reading of much of Orwell’s oeuvre, I believe that Orwell’s strengths as a writer stem from his courageous willingness to get his hands dirty by becoming a participant in his subject (cf Down and Out …, … Wigan Pier, and Homage …) and then simply report on what he has seen and experienced, but that his ability to invent three dimensional people and envision their inner lives -- the sine qua non of a novelist -- is at best limited. The totalitarian world that Orwell envisions in 1984, while its control structures and extreme regimentation are a not implausible extrapolation of the some of the most diabolical aspects of Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, overall struck as unbelievably lifeless and its inhabitants as not recognizably human-- the inner and outer party members may as well have been robots, while the distracted, downtrodden “proles” who were intended to much more resemble pre-Big Brother humans were indifferently rendered and come across as two (and even one) dimensional clichés. Plot details don’t ring true either: Julia’s infatuation with Smith seems weakly grounded and Smith and Julia’s arrest with the associated revelation that Charrington is part of the thought police struck me as absurdly melodramatic and allows even the very long arms of the Though Police’s law a bit too much reach.

If I were rating this book on its first two thirds, the section before Smith’s arrest, I might give it one or no stars. However, it is mostly salvaged by its cultural import -- perhaps more than anything else it has brought home to the free world the tone of existence in a totalitarian state -- and its last third in which it which it alternately abandons its novelistic affectations during the long excerpt from Goldstein’s manifesto on “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivsim”, a cogent exegesis on the motivations and intellectual underpinnings of totalitarianism and then, during Smith’s torture/reeducation, narrows its focus so drastically -- to just the bound and blinded Smith and his reactions to Obrien’s tortures -- that Orwell’s inability to depict a believable world are no longer a factor. The interrogation/torture/reeducation section is the strongest in the book, and while it still didn’t fully connect with me as Orwell was unable to impart a visceral sense of what Smith was experiencing , it is nonetheless quite powerful, particularly in its depiction of a world completely beholden to an evil ideology -- Obrien’s utterances during these scenes evoked hazy memories of The Grand Inquisitor and Smith’s gradual capitulation, his renunciation of his essential self, brought to mind (the far subtler and more persuasive) Darkness at Noon.

Shortly after finishing 1984, I read a New Yorker article by George Packer on life in Burma under a military oligarchy whose determination to maintain a hold on power with no consideration for the well being of the people under its control brought to mind the Big Brother and Ingsoc of 1984 with the difference that Packer’s reporting rife with real life detail seemed vastly more convincing than Orwell’s imagined world.




Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them (223)

All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed. (266)

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. (276)

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever. (280)

To die hating them, that was freedom. (294)

No comments: