Orwell (26 page)

Orwell's ideas about the capacity of language to express complex thoughts and feelings, to describe the dimensions of experience with accuracy and honesty, are central to
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
These ideas originate in Winston's desire to rediscover his own past—in his dreams and his diary—and are contrasted to Ampleforth's enthusiastic creation of Newspeak. In pursuing these thoughts about language, Orwell joined the literary debate about modern prose.

The Newspeak tendency to reduce the language, to limit the meaning and to reject abstract words was originally a positive aspect of modern prose that developed just after the Great War. Hemingway, who began his career as a journalist, was fascinated by the language of telegraphic cables that resembles the messages sent to Winston's desk at the Ministry of Truth: “speech malreported africa rectify.” Hemingway told his colleague Lincoln Steffens: “Stef, look at this cable: no fat, no adjectives, no adverbs—nothing but blood and bones and muscle. It's great. It's a new language.”
⁷
Influenced by Ezra Pound, Hemingway came to believe: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
⁸

Like Robert Graves, John Dos Passos, Erich Remarque and other writers who had served in the Great War, Hemingway learned to distrust patriotic rhetoric. In
A Farewell to Arms
he wrote: “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain…. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers,
the numbers of regiments and the dates.”
⁹
The abstractions were lies. Only the concrete places where men had fought and died had any dignity and meaning. The bitter disillusionment of the Great War is connected to the betrayal of principles in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
by Winston's prophecy of doom: “We are the dead,” which is repeated by Julia and reaffirmed by the telescreen when they are arrested. For Winston's grim phrase is an ironic echo of an accusatory line, spoken by a corpse, from John Macrae's popular poem of the First World War, “In Flanders Fields”:

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.
¹⁰

In the Thirties, this need to reject meaningless abstractions was combined with the desire to find a basic vocabulary and create a proletarian literature. Though Hemingway's short words, limited vocabulary and declarative sentences, his bare, clear and forceful style, had a salutary effect on modern prose, he was criticized by Wyndham Lewis in “The Dumb Ox” for choking off the possibilities of thought: “Hemingway invariably invokes a dull-witted, bovine, monosyllabic simpleton … a super-innocent, queerly-sensitive, village-idiot of a few words and fewer ideas.”
¹¹
Nineteen Eighty-Four
demonstrates how the modern tendency to reduce language to its essential meaning can, when carried to the extremes of Newspeak, make the expression of unorthodox opinions almost impossible.

Orwell's essay “Politics and the English Language” demonstrates the connection between inaccurate expression and dishonest thought. It debunks political pomposity, criticizes fuzzy thinking and shows the corruption that comes from the use of clichés, hackneyed diction and dead language.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, however, criticizes the opposite tendency to oversimplify language so that it limits the range of human expression. While expounding the principles of Newspeak and creating the brilliant neologisms that have taken a permanent place in our speech
(Big Brother, Thought Police, Doublethink, Facecrime, Vaporized, Unperson)
, Orwell also predicted the radical deterioration of language and the perversion of meaning. In our time, the influence of technology, bureaucracy, television and journalism has debased the language. Dangerous euphemisms have diminished the reality of all unpleasant concepts: prison, torture, war, disease, old age and death. Vague but condemnatory words—Communist, Fascist, racist, sexist—have been indiscriminately attached to anything that anyone dislikes. Orwell would have deplored the primacy of visual over verbal media in our
culture—television and video over books and magazines—and the corruption of language by computer jargon. All these tendencies have produced words that seem to be written on a typewriter by a typewriter.

Many of the characteristic literary themes of the Thirties appear in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
: schools, cinema, advertising and propaganda, public issues, self-deception, Marx and Freud, violence and war. And aspects of Orwell's reportage—his anatomy of Burma, France and England in the 1930s in “A Hanging,” “How the Poor Die,” and
The Road to Wigan Pier
—are incorporated in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
to provide the documentary basis of the future world.

The writers of the 1930s had intense feelings about the conventions and codes of schools and schoolboys, which were often based on their personal experiences as both teachers and pupils. The headmaster became the embodiment of social and political power, and the austerity and sadism of the school were contrasted to the civility and kindness of the home. Auden expressed this theme when he wrote: “The best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I lived in a Fascist state.”
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Anthony West, who described his own horrible schooldays in the autobiographical novel
Heritage
, was the first to notice that “most of these [terrors], in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, are of an infantile character, and they clearly derive from the experience described in
Such, Such Were the Joys.
… What he did in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
was to send everybody in England to an enormous Crossgates to be as miserable as he had been.”
¹³

Nineteen Eighty-Four
explores the complex mixture of nostalgia, fear and self-hatred that Orwell felt when writing about his school days. By drawing on these intense early experiences, he convincingly portrays the psychological effects of totalitarian oppression: isolation, enforced group activities, physical discomfort, desire to suck up to those in power, lack of identity and feelings of guilt. The physical exercises, sexual propaganda, songs, processions, banners and drills all derive from school. Parsons, who resembles a large boy, is an athletic Hearty. Winston dislikes Julia at first “because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her.” Even Winston's compulsive repetition of “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his diary recalls the lines written out as punishment at school.

Nineteen Eighty-Four
reflects the 1930s ritual of cinema-going and the cult of film stars, the interest in advertising and the use of propaganda. In
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, Gordon Comstock hates the movies and seldom
goes there. But a recurring image in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is the bombing of Jewish refugees in the Mediterranean which Winston sees at the cinema on April 3, 1984. Several hundred victims are killed when a rocket bomb falls on a crowded film theater in Stepney, East London. The obligatory Two Minutes Hate, with Goldstein as the star performer, is projected on a gigantic telescreen before a hysterical anti-Semitic audience.

Winston dimly recalls an advertisement for wine in which “a vast bottle composed of electric lights seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass.” Virtually all the Outer Party members are swallowers of slogans: “War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Strength.” (Should not it logically be “Ignorance is Wisdom”?) As in a modern political campaign, the head of Big Brother (whose image is an amalgam of Stalin and Kitchener) appears “on coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet—everywhere.”

The writers of the Thirties dealt with public themes. It was a decade of economic depression throughout the world; massive unemployment and poverty; the misery of democracies and the rise of Fascism; wars in Manchuria, Ethiopia and Spain; the Nazi seizure of territory in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Russia experienced the forced collectivization of the Kulaks (1929–33), the Ukraine famine (1933), the exile and the murder of Trotsky (1940) and the Great Purge Trials (1936–38). Writers fared badly under totalitarianism; Mayakovsky, Babel and Mandelshtam were killed during Stalin's regime. The decade of hatred between the Nazis and the Communists culminated in profound disillusionment with the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact (August 1939), which was repudiated by Germany's invasion of Russia (June 1941). This abrupt alteration of political alliances was portrayed in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
when “it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy…. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.”

As in 1930s literature, intellectuals in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
lie to support their cause and protect their own position, and agree to accept and practice immoral acts. Orwell once condemned Auden for his phrase “the necessary murder.” In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
O'Brien asks Winston: “If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face—are you prepared to do that?” and he unhesitatingly answers: “Yes.” In both the 1930s and in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
the ruling class betrays the principles of the revolution; and the deceivers are themselves deceived.

The committed writers of the 1930s developed a new moral awareness and literary strategy to deal with the dreadful conditions of the time. They became socially and politically conscious and abandoned private art for
public communication. They adopted a new tone and rhetoric in which to express their new convictions and often embraced Left-wing or Communist ideology. The two main intellectual influences of the Thirties, Marx and Freud, are faithfully reflected in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Marxist dialectic, expressed in Trotsky's style, appears in the forbidden tract,
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
Winston embraces the Marxist belief: “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles.” His hope is not based on their real or theoretical virtue, but on the fact that they comprise eighty-five percent of the population and are the only force that seems strong enough to overthrow the Party. But the proles lack a Marxist political awareness and a desire to revolt against oppression.

Orwell suggests a Freudian interpretation of Winston's dreams to depict his inner life. They concern Winston's guilt about the sacrificial death of his mother, which foreshadows his betrayal of Julia. Winston realizes that the political hysteria stirred up by the Two Minutes Hate is an emotional outlet for “sex gone sour.” And the last line of the children's poem, which he has been vainly trying to remember, is supplied by the voice on the telescreen when he and Julia are arrested in their secret bedroom. The line suggests the threat of castration after sexual pleasure: “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”

In the Thirties violence was used to achieve political ends. The strong dictator replaced God as the omnipotent figure and ruled with absolute and intimidating power. There were constant threats of bombing civilians and of global war. Gordon Comstock eagerly awaits this destruction in
Keep the Aspidistra Flying;
George Bowling dreads it in
Coming Up for Air.
In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
the rocket bombs are fired on the people by their own government in order to arouse continuous hatred of the enemy. The confrontation of Communism and Fascism in Spain was, for most intellectuals, their first real experience in politics and warfare. Auden and Spender attended propaganda conferences in Spain; Hemingway and Koestler went as journalists; Francis Cornford and Julian Bell were killed. But of all the major writers involved in the war, only Orwell fought as a common soldier, was seriously wounded and survived to record his experiences. He came from the generation which had failed The Test by being too young to participate in the Great War, but he brilliantly passed The Test in Spain. Orwell (and his wife) knew from personal experience what it felt like to be hunted by the secret police. His honesty and integrity shine through
Nineteen Eighty-Four
as they did in the literary personae of the more openly autobiographical works of the Thirties. All his books project what Malcolm Muggeridge has called “his proletarian fancy dress, punctilious rolling of his cigarettes, his rusty laugh and woebegone expression and kindly disposition.”
¹⁴

Orwell not only evokes the past era of the Thirties to explain the evolution of 1948 into
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, but also ironically reverses the dominant political themes of the period: homosexuality, frontiers, spies, technology, Mass Observation, change of consciousness, collective action, justification of Communism and intellectual polarities. Winston affirms Orwell's own commendable heresies of the 1930s: his refusal to adopt the orthodoxy of the Left about the socialist intelligentsia in England (criticized in
The Road to Wigan Pier)
and about the Communist Party in Spain (condemned in
Homage to Catalonia). Nineteen Eighty-Four
contains two opposing strains: Orwell's truthful revelations about the horrors of both Fascism and Communism, and his despair about the destruction of the hopes and ideals of the Thirties.

The homosexual theme—founded on adolescent love affairs in school, portrayed as a protest against the oppressive educational system and idealized in poems like Auden's “Lay your sleeping head”—becomes perversely twisted in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Winston's intense attachment to O'Brien takes on homosexual overtones and verges on sexcrime. (When tortured, Winston freely but falsely admits he is a sexual pervert.) When he first comes to his hero's flat, “A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston towards O'Brien.” When O'Brien tortures him to the point of lunacy and death, “It made no difference. In some sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates.” And just before he faces his final degradation in Room 101, “The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy, flooded Winston's heart again.” Like the young favorite of the Head Boy at school, Winston vacillates between craven submission and a lust for vicarious power.