"O Big Brother, where art thou?"
Dr Jo-Ann Stubbings is director of language consultancy Language Australis.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/education-news/o-big-brother-where-art-thou/2008/02/01/1201801039680.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1Anglo-American Oceania is indeed an insane world. Dominated by an all-seeing Big Brother who does not really exist, the society of Ingsoc (English Socialism) functions like a well-oiled machine. Under the control of the Inner Party and adopting the self-deceptive Doublethink, comrades work diligently in the ministries of Truth, Peace, Love and Plenty under such banners as War is Peace and Ignorance is Strength.
Constant war, regardless of the enemy, is a must as long as one is seen to be victorious: it unites the people and maintains the power base. This is a regime in which friendship is forbidden, marriage is loveless and sex is undertaken only for the good of the party, in order to procreate. Any deviation from the rules is monitored by the ever-present telescreen (yes, even in the toilet), comrade-spies or, better still, children bred to inform on their family. Happily, there is no punishment in Oceania, only vaporisation. One simply disappears. In fact, one never existed.
Orwell has created in his futuristic Oceania the ultimate absurdity of oligarchies, chilling in its parallels with those past and present. No less absurd is the depiction of life under the communists in East Germany revealed in Anna Funder's Stasiland and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, in which a suspect's body smells are bottled and the Stasi monitor the angle of television antenna in case they are pointing west.
It is against this tide of tyranny that Winston, Orwell's representative "individual", must swim.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is replete with opposing concepts worthy of further study: sanity-insanity, intelligence-ignorance, consciousness-unconsciousness, freedom-oppression, love-hate, truth-falsehood, individualism-collectivism.
But perhaps the most striking theme is humanity versus inhumanity. The thrust of the story is the forbidden blossoming of Winston's humanity through his relationship with Julia and their subsequent torture and dehumanisation. In this way, Orwell creates a thriller from simply daring to be human.
It is Winston's very ordinariness that makes him the perfect and yet unlikely hero. Middle-aged, sickly, slightly effeminate, lacking in self-esteem, a pen pusher in the Ministry of Truth, he nevertheless stumbles towards a better way of life. At the risk of discovery by the Thought Police, Winston habitually commits Thoughtcrime, daring to daydream and mentally rebel against the party.
The essential loneliness of man - and here of the individual in his battle against oppression - is underscored in Winston. Orwell succeeds in having the reader identify with the hero but at the same time view him at a distance, a la Big Brother. The limited dialogue and contact with others at the beginning of the story, along with the use of lengthy exposition, emphasise his isolation. So too does the process of zooming in, Hitchcock-like, on small but significant actions: the blink of an eye, a fleeting expression, the touch of a hand.
It is little wonder that Winston, desperate to find a like-minded soul but terrified of initiating a relationship - Inner Party official O'Brien seems the only likely sympathiser - acts immediately on receipt of Julia's love note, the first positive piece of action. Significantly, "love", forbidden in Oceania, initially has a different meaning for both. Winston loves the idea of love; the promiscuous Julia confuses love with lust.
Julia is in many ways the antithesis of Winston and so represents another kind of victim of totalitarianism. Whereas Winston represents the past - he recalls "the Golden Country" before the revolution against capitalism - and is keen to change the future, Julia is a child of the present and is sceptical, even apathetic, about the possibility of change. She is bold, sassy, crude, street-wise and overconfident but has learnt to work the system to her advantage. A volunteer of the Junior Anti-Sex League, she has nevertheless bedded scores of party members, a fact Winston celebrates: "Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope."
This is no regular romance. What does link this futuristic Adam and Eve is pleasure in pleasure and in each other's company, almost cornily reflected in the nature around them. The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming, all is colour in contrast with the grey of the opening pages. What also links the two is their mini-rebellion and the certainty that they will, through their unorthodoxy, eventually be "vaporised". The clocks striking 13.00 in the opening sentence is portentous of more than an odd-ball society.
In an almost stylised piece of theatre, the couple's eventual arrest in their love nest/human world, immediately prefaced by their declaration, "we are dead", echoed by the "off-stage" voice, has them standing back to back, a pointer towards their mutual betrayal.
Fittingly, the glass paperweight, the symbol of a once-beautiful world and the dream of another, is smashed by the oppressor.
In offering Winston understanding and the subversive book of the Brotherhood, O'Brien betrays Winston just as Winston is seen to betray the party. It should be said that Winston's excessively lengthy reading of The Book is the flattest part of the story (even Julia falls asleep!) and an indulgence on the part of keen essayist Orwell.
Through O'Brien and his distorted philosophy, Orwell puts forward the mind-set and motives of those seeking absolute authority.
"The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives . . . The object of power is power."
Winston's torture and ultimate belief in Big Brother, a necessity prior to being shot to avoid martyrdom, leads to his ultimate dehumanisation and an ending apparently without hope. This was always predicted by Winston, however, as was his belief that the future lay not in the young - traditionally a symbol of hope - since they had already been indoctrinated. The future lay with the proles, the 85% of the population considered too stupid to be members of the party and largely ignored by it. In retaining their humanity, the proles have the possibility of outliving their oppressors. Just before his arrest, Winston sows the seed of hope and espouses Orwell's belief in ordinary man: "The proles were immortal. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the party did not share and could not kill."
The appendix appears to confirm Winston's prediction. Again indulging in a pet theme, Orwell expands on the nature of the contrived Newspeak, whose aim is to reduce the vocabulary of Oldspeak (English) and ultimately subversive ideas. Notably, it is the use of the past tense to describe Newspeak, and reference to a return to English, that signals that the society of Oceania has indeed died out.
Home
Help
Search
Login
