1984 – George Orwell, 1949 ★★★

Why I Don't Love Big Brother

Here is a book so influential you don’t need to touch it to know its grisly details. So many immediate associations come thick and fast, from the title itself to terms like Big Brother, memory hole, and Thought Police.

As a political treatise, it long ago passed the test of greatness: People still talk about it. But how does 1984 hold up as a novel? Would it make sense if I told you I came away both overwhelmed and underimpressed?

The book is a sweeping indictment of collectivist authoritarianism, its target Marxist but vague enough to encompass other totalitarian philosophies. The term “Ingsoc” is rolled out often, suggesting that what we are seeing at work is not far off from present-day English socialism.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” Orwell writes. “It was their final, most essential command.”

Winston Smith is the main character, a Party member disenchanted with the way things are. He discovers a kindred spirit in a woman named Julia. Together they engage in forbidden sexual encounters, knowing that they will inevitably be discovered and pay a terrible price.

Meanwhile, a leading official named O’Brien seems to have taken an interest in Smith. Could he be a way of contacting a rebel organization and take the first steps towards Big Brother’s overthrow?

A pro-government rally as depicted in the 1956 film version of 1984. The slogans at the base of the plinth are taken from the book. "Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason."
Image from https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/1984-keeping-in-mind-that-ive-never-read-it

Don’t get your hopes up. While I avoid spoilers, this is one of the most depressing books you will ever read. The setting is unremittingly bleak and drab, a world locked in endless warfare between three superpowers: Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania. Winston lives in Oceania, on an island dubbed “Airstrip One” which used to be England, Scotland, and Wales.

Winston lives alone in a squalid flat where he is monitored from a two-way telescreen. It barks orders at him while he does state-mandated calisthenics. Just outside, neighboring children report their parents for what they say in their sleep. Privacy is effectively abolished:

On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Winston starts out the book already lashing out against the order, starting a journal where he records his thoughts. Such record-keeping is thoughtcrime and anathema to the State. Winston knows he will be found out regardless of any precautions he takes. Still, he presses on.

Romanian citizens celebrate Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during a May Day celebration in the 1950s. Romania was one of several Eastern European nations under Russian control when 1984 was first published, stirring fear and unease in the West.
Image from https://www.mediastorehouse.com/uig/universal-images-group/russia-n/citizen-marchers-carrying-posters-joseph-stalin-9635157.html

What prompts Winston’s rebellion? That’s one of several problems I found with the story, such as it is. There is no epiphany or outrage that drives him to do what he does. He has made a good life for himself by the standards of Airstrip One, finding comfort in his work. He knows the futility of resistance, and the finality of “Room 101” where the State’s enemies are taken.

Later on Winston finds a reason in the person of Julia. Perhaps the novel’s most enigmatic character, Julia is much younger than Winston. By modern standards she is likely to raise hackles for that alone. I suppose they can also complain with more justice about her resistance to the State being presented as less noble than Winston’s. “You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,” he tells her.

For Julia, having sex with Party members like Winston is a way to blow off steam. She literally and figuratively leads him down the garden path, knowing their inevitable discovery will destroy them both. Neither cares, perhaps understandable given the hopeless nature of their world.

Is Julia a symbol of liberation, or just manipulative and insane? In the hopeless, joyless world of 1984, she could be both.

Suzanna Hamilton as Julia and John Hurt as Winston in the 1984 adaptation of 1984. Julia wears the red sash of a member of the Anti-Sex League, but delights in the act all the same. "I'm corrupt to the bones," she happily tells Winston.
Image from https://70srichard.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/nineteen-eighty-four-1984/

Happiness was such a weird concept for Orwell anyway. In an essay “Can Socialists be Happy,” published December 24, 1943, writing for the democratic-socialist Tribune, Orwell answered the title question with an emphatic NO: “I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness…The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood.”

In 1984, Winston is told that the real objective of a particular variant of socialism dubbed Ingsoc is not brotherhood, peace, or freedom, either. Words like those are merely fronts:

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

Orwell’s own belief system centered around socialism, yet something about the way he saw it practiced unnerved him enough to make it the villain of his most famous book. It’s not quite right to say, as many do, that he was attacking Soviet-style communism. That was so with his earlier novel, Animal Farm. But the nation of Oceania does not include the old Soviet Union, which we are told is part of Eurasia. Oceania is the former Great Britain and United States.

A representation of the three countries that make up most of the world, Oceania (in black), Eurasia (in red), and Eastasia (in yellow). The world's other land masses, unaccounted for in Orwell's book, are in gray.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_geography_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Four

What we have here is more an attack on a collectivist society where individual rights are shredded in favor of a larger state. So nasty is this state that they prefer to cause war and inflict pain than allow a moment’s grace to their citizens. “If you want a picture of the future,” Winston is told, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

At heart, 1984’s philosophy is radicalism. Both Winston and his enemies espouse extreme measures repeatedly, mostly for their own sake. Winston and Julia embrace the possibility of committing a variety of hideous, outlandish crimes for the sake at lashing out at Big Brother. “To die hating them, that was freedom,” he understands at book’s end.

For many people, radicalism is at the heart of what makes 1984 great, that it dares to speak truth to power in a world full of evasions and lies. It culminates in a dialogue between Winston and his chief prosecutor that is epically dark and brilliant in developing its doom-laded thesis, closing off any belief in love or human spirit to redeem humankind. Winston’s resistance here is heroic but also pitiful.

“You are a difficult case,” Winston is told. “But don’t give up hope. Everything is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.”

A scene from Winston's office in the 1984 film adaptation. While the movie can be a slog to watch (like the book is to read), its set design and art direction are unique and impactful. The film was shot April-June, 1984, to coincide with the dates in the novel.
Image from https://ecduygulu.medium.com/a-sociological-analysis-of-1984-movie-90b0e4c222a3

By the way, that is as close to a laugh as we get in the book. Otherwise 1984 is a draining, repetitive cycle of painful experiences occasionally spaced apart by some of the chilliest sex scenes ever written. The premise is brilliant, the early execution ominous in a lived-in way. But what Orwell wants to deliver here is not a story but a lecture.

This becomes most clear in a long section where Winston reads The Theory And Practice Of Oligarchical Collectivism, written (he is told) by chief enemy of the state Emmanuel Goldstein. Just as Winston and Julia are getting swept up into something menacing and dangerous, and the plot moves into a higher gear, we get this lengthy backstory.

The Goldstein treatise lays out in great detail how Oceania came to be, in the aftermath of a third great war between Russia and the United States:

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

This passage resonates today as it did during the Cold War. War is a tool of material as well as personal oppression. But that fact is utterly by the boards as far as Winston and Julia are concerned and plays no part in their story. It would be as Shakespeare stopped Julius Caesar in the third act to have someone step from the curtain to give us a three-scene lecture about the merits of democracy versus tyranny.

I kept waiting for a rationale for this state, some kind of social compact to explain the lack of unrest or mass suicide. But instead everyone seems satisfied with a few extra pieces of meat, or five more grams of chocolate. It’s not just Orwell: Nobody believes in happiness here.

Eric Blair, better known to history as George Orwell, as he was late in life. The capstone of his career, 1984 was published just a year before his death in 1950 from tuberculosis. The disease left him in pain and often laid up while he worked on the manuscript.
Image from https://mariahaskins.com/2014/02/27/george-orwell-on-writing/

The best parts of the book are in the set-up, where Orwell introduces famous phrases like Two Minutes Hate and Newspeak. The characters Winston come into contact with, at work and at his apartment complex, are not personalities so much as different aspects of oppression with names attached. At least they do open up the narrative a bit.

The Parsons children are on the lookout for traitors, attacking Winston after he helps their mother fix a sink. Syme boasts of his work reducing the number of words in Oceania’s vocabulary, thus cutting down on opportunities for thoughtcrime. Later he boasts of seeing a hanging:

“I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue – a quite bright blue. That’s the detail that appeals to me.”

Smith recognizes Syme as someone who won’t survive long – he is too eager to talk. Meanwhile, he does his best to keep his head down, until Julia pushes his rebel heart to the point of no return.

Would 1984 be so well-regarded if it was less theory, more story? Probably not, as its monumental legacy has next to nothing to do with the fate of Winston himself. Yet I would have been more engaged had Orwell been as invested in characters and their outcomes as in ideas.