Perhaps no other novel in this century has had a greater impact upon the way we think and talk about our world than George Orwell's classic, 1984. "Big Brother," "doublespeak," and "the thought police" have become part of our everyday lexicon, and the term "Orwellian" has become a familiar adjective for any situation-real or imagined-where conformity is compulsory and where someone always seems to be watching.
Orwell's novel also has the distinction of being, along with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and his own Animal Farm, one of the most important works of anti-utopic fiction produced in this century. These novels, which began to flourish after World War I, imagine a nightmarish society where all that is ugly and perverse about human nature has prevailed, and people are powerless to resist an insidious, coercive order.
In 1984, the insidious order is known as "Big Brother," a personification of the regime that both demands and ensures absolute loyalty and obedience from all of its citizens. One of these citizens is a man named Winston Smith, the protagonist of the novel and a worker in the state's Ministry of Truth. Through following Winston, we see the myriad methods Big Brother employs to keep the populace servile and under its heavy thumb. Winston's work at the Ministry is to help rewrite history so that Big Brother's pronouncements, in retrospect, always appear to be infallible. Just as sinister is the propagation of "Newspeak," an abridged version of English whose eventual adoption, the party members hope, will limit anyone's ability to think or talk in a way that opposes Big Brother. Perhaps the most often-discussed component to Big Brother's control is the use of the telescreens, television-like gadgets installed in every home that act as surveillance devices and keep track of who is obeying and who is not. Winston, skeptical of Big Brother, but unsure of who or what to trust, tries to find ways of resisting the state's coercive power, and asserting his individuality. But Big Brother is watching.
Although 1984 is almost universally hailed as a landmark in twentieth century fiction, critics have been divided as to how we are to read it. Some see it, as Orwell himself described it, as a dire warning about the future. Others view it as a polemic criticizing Stalin's regime, the government that Big Brother most resembles and that Orwell saw as a monstrous perversion of Marxist ideals. Still others consider it a satire of contemporary England, a deliberately exaggerated version of the propaganda, conformity and denial of history that can exist even in a liberal, democratic state. These interpretations are by no means mutually exclusive, of course, and it is a testament to Orwell's genius that his work continues to speak in different ways to students of history, politics, philosophy, and literature alike.
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It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteen. Winston Smith, Ms chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to
escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory
Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust
from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a
colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the
wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the
face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and
ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use
trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at
present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was
part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was
seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine, and had a varicose
ulcer above Ms right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the
way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with title
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.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which
had something to do with the production of pig iron. The voice came from
an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the
surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice
sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The
instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there
was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a
smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by
the blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party. His hair was very
fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and
blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down
in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper
into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue,
there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were
plastered everywhere. The black-mustachio'd face gazed down from every
commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately
opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark
eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at street level another
poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately
covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a
helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a
blue-bottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the
Police Patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not
matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling
away about pig iron and the overfulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year
Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound
that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be
picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of
vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as
heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being
watched at any given moment.
About the Author
George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, was, among other things, a novelist, critic, essayist, soldier, shopkeeper and, according to many, the conscience of his generation. Born in 1903 in Bengal, India, he grew up in a solidly middle-class household and attended Eton, the prestigious boys' preparatory school. Although he had a keen mind and a penchant for writing, he decided not to attend college, opting instead for a position in the English civil service in Burma. Although his time in Burma was important, providing him with the raw material for some of his most important essays, he disliked being what he considered an agent of an imperialist power. He left Burma to spend time living with the working class in France and with coal miners in England, forming the basis of his book, Down and Out in Paris and London.
Orwell then traveled to Spain to fight in the Civil War on the side of the republicans and, after suffering a serious wound, fled when the communists took power. This experience formed the basis of his memoir, Homage to Catalonia, but perhaps more importantly, it helped inform his mature thinking and his most important works of fiction. Orwell's ardent hatred of totalitarianism sprang directly from his experiences in Spain as he witnessed first hand the abuses perpetrated by a fascist regime. It is this fear of autocratic power that animates both of his most important works, Animal Farm and 1984. Although the former seems clearly an allegory for Stalin's brutal rise to power, 1984 seems to suggest that any political regime in any state has the potential to abuse power and its own citizens. Although he was himself an ardent socialist, Orwell's propensity to criticize the abuses of the Left drew the ire of some of his fellow socialists. But it also earned him the respect of many and a reputation for being a person of great personal and intellectual honesty. Orwell was a great novelist and also a great human being, one who believed in living a life defined by commitment, sincerity and integrity. George Orwell died in 1950 after a long period of ill health and physical exhaustion.
