1984 by George Orwell - Book Report/Review Example

1984 by George Orwell The novel 1984 was published in 1949 and became one of the most popular literary works in 2oth century. This novel belongs to utopian literary works portraying totalitarian government and problems caused by strict government control and strict regime. Critics admit that Orwell's book is one of the central defining texts of the genre of dystopian fiction, dealing in important ways with almost all of the central motifs associated with the genre (Argyros 109). For example, in the Oceania of Orwell's book certain mechanical applications of technology lend themselves directly to political oppression, even while science itself remains a potentially liberating realm of free thought. 1984 refers directly to the oppressive Stalinist regime then in power in Russia, but it echoes Hitler's German Nazi regime in numerous ways as well. The book stands as an eloquent plea that we remember the past and learn from it, that we in modern England and America not forget (and therefore repeat) the excesses of Hitler and Stalin in our attempts to defend our democratic way of life. Orwell's major point may be that the complacency of the general population is one of the surest roads to the tyranny of those in official power (Argyros 109). Thesis The novel can be seen as a reflection to communist and Nazi’s regimes which limited human freedom and liberty. The novel vividly portrays a role and importance of a political party is the life of every state. The Party which rules the Oceania has no illusions about the nature of its mission. Orwell portrays that it makes no claims to attempt to save humanity or to improve the quality of human life. The Party is consciously seeking to create the ultimate dystopia, a world that "is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined" (Orwell). The Party also furthers loyalty among its members through the use of numerous techniques borrowed from religion (Bloom 78). As with many conventional religions, Party solidarity is furthered by communal rituals, but in a reversal of the Christian emphasis on love the central Party ritual is a phenomenon called the "Two Minutes Hate." In this rite of hatred, Party members gather before a telescreen as programming focusing on the heinous treachery of official Party enemy Emmanuel Goldstein gradually whips the crowd into a frenzy the intensity of which might be envied by any Bible-thumping Southern preacher. The viewers jump up and down, screaming at the screen, and even those who are initially less than enthusiastic find themselves caught up in the mass hysteria: "The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in" (Orwell). At the end, the incendiary focus on Goldstein shifts to a calming focus on Big Brother, and the frenzy of hatred turns to a frenzy of devotion and loyalty whose religious echoes are unmistakable. At the end of one such session, a woman runs toward the screen: "With a tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Savior!' she extended her arms toward the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer" (Orwell). Given the Party's opposition to pleasure, it is not surprising that they take a dim view of unrestrained sexual activity (Wanner 77). The Party is careful to assure that strong emotional attachments between family members do not develop in Oceania. Family members are effectively turned against one another, as children are encouraged to inform on their parents and spouses encouraged to spy on one another (Bloom 76). In Oceania, "[t]he family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police" (Orwell). The Party of Oceania accepts a Freudian energy-based model of sublimation, feeling that "when you make love you're using up energy" that might be employed in the service of the Party. As a result, sexual pleasure is a waste of emotional energy, since "sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship" (Orwell). The Party thus seeks strictly to control and limit the fulfillment of sexual desire. Echoing their predecessors in the Christian tradition, the Party sees sex as existing primarily for the purpose of manufacturing human beings. Their official view is that sexual intercourse should be a vaguely unpleasant activity engaged in only for purposes of procreation (Varricchio 98). The policy of official repression leads to opposition to the Party regime. Enemies of the Party identify sexuality as a powerful locus for transgression against the Party's rule. Smith concludes that "the sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion" (Orwell). Orwell portrays that Smith later enacts his subversive tendencies through an unauthorized sexual relationship with Julia, a young woman who shares his view of intercourse as rebellion (Wanner 77). On the other hand, Smith later becomes concerned about Julia's lack of theoretical awareness, accusing her of being "only a rebel from the waist downwards" (Orwell). Indeed, the sexual rebellion of Smith and Julia turns out to be entirely ineffectual. Both are arrested by the authorities, then tortured and brainwashed and forced to turn against each other. In the book's chilling conclusion, the official appropriation of Smith's passion for Julia becomes complete; he sublimates his desire for the woman in a socially acceptable direction, realizing that his only love is now directed toward "Big Brother," the book's Stalinesque personification of official power. The novel is based on unique symbols which help the author to create a conflict and unveil the limitations of the state power Orwell pays special attention to religion which has been conscripted by the state in the service of its own ideology, sexuality is strictly controlled to prevent strong emotional attachments between partners, and art and culture are used as tools for direct propagation of the official ideology (Varricchio 98). Orwell portrays that in Oceania conventional religious activity is strictly forbidden, at least to Party members, though Orwell suggests that the lowly proles would have been allowed to practice religion had they so desired. But it is clear that the ban on religion comes about not because organized religion is so radically different from the Party, but because the two are all-too-similar and would therefore be competing for similar energies (Bloom 45). The Party actively works to appropriate the energies traditionally associated with religious belief and to use those energies for its own purposes, giving the Party itself a quasi-religious air. In his job as official government propagandist Winston Smith invents the story of "Comrade Ogilvy," an idealized Party leader who is intended to serve as an example for rank-and-file Party members. Smith describes Ogilvy in terms with clear religious undertones, making him a sort of Communist saint: "He was a total abstainer and nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible with a twentyfour-hour-a-day devotion to duty" (Orwell). Technology is a key tool of the Party in the Oceania of 1984, but the politicization of science and technology in this society has in fact had a suffocating effect on science itself. There is a certain amount of advanced technology in Oceania, especially for the electronic surveillance of the behavior of individual citizens, but on the whole this dystopian society is rather backward technologically (Wanner 77). Orwell's Party still conducts some research, but only in support of the development of weaponry, and even that is relatively primitive. The forbidden book of the Party enemy Emmanuel Goldstein notes that "[a]s a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago" (Orwell). Science as we know it has virtually ceased to exist in Oceania, being replaced by a purely instrumental technology. Perhaps the most striking instance of this technology involves the ever-present telescreens through which the Party of Oceania keeps track of its members. The homes of all Party members feature these video screens, as do all public places that Party members might frequent. The two-way screens allow the Party both to keep its members under surveillance and to bombard them with a constant barrage of video propaganda; these screens are on at all times, and can be turned off only in the homes of members of the elite "Inner Party." The ideology of Orwell's Party is much more in line with the conventional religion than with modern science. O'Brien describes himself and his peers as "the priests of power" (Orwell), and many of the Party's objections to science echo those of the medieval Church (Bloom 29). For example, O'Brien denies the theory of evolution and argues that the earth is no older than the human race. And he declares that the Party can, if it so chooses, proclaim that "the earth is the center of the universe. The sun and the stars go around it" (Orwell). The Newspeak project is part of the Party's attempts to manipulate reality by manipulating language. In particular (in an obvious reference to the continual revisions of history under Stalinism, but also in a general reference to the fact that the official history of the past is always written by those who hold power in the present), the key element of the ideology of the Party involves what they call the "mutability of the past." "Who controls the present," runs a related slogan, "controls the past." The Ministry of Truth thus proclaims that history is not recorded in texts, but that it is the texts in which it is recorded (Argyros 109). The Ministry's Records Department (where Smith is employed as the book begins) thus continually "updates" history by editing official records, effacing all indication of the existence of problematic persons or events and creating fictional records of nonexistent persons or events that help to support the Party line. Orwell's Ministry not only controls the content of all newspapers in the present, but also continually modifies the filed back issues of those newspapers according to the latest Party line, leaving no official record of anything that might run counter to current Party policy. O'Brien, thrives on power and exerts a malignant charisma to acquire, maintain, and extend it. O'Brien consistently tells the truth in the service of evil, and Smith believes him, because he mistakes O'Brien's perversion of truth for the goodness he wants to believe exists (Bloom 23). Smith also wants to believe in the rebel Brotherhood that O'Brien has adroitly created through hint and innuendo. When Julia and Smith, seeking the nonexistent Brotherhood, approach O'Brien, he immediately tells them that no help, only the means of suicide, will ever come from the Brotherhood. This is the literal truth, because the Brotherhood does not exist, but O'Brien is also deceiving them by playing on their idealistic readiness for individual sacrifice (Argyros 109). The Party constantly appeals to history to legitimate its claims to authority, but in point of fact this continual editing of the past represents a radical effacement of history. Smith suggests that in Oceania "history has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right" (Orwell). The Party's belief in the social construction of reality is so radical that their project of reconstructing the past is quite literal. In their eyes they are not creating false histories that do not conform to a "true past": they are literally recreating the past, which exists only in "texts" of which they are fully in control. This history threatens to strip the experiences of the real people who live through history of all significance (Bloom 12). With no tangible evidence to the contrary, Party members tend to accept official accounts of the past even when those accounts contradict their own memories (Argyros 109). Big Brother calls its instruments of repression by the following names. The Ministry of Plenty assures that citizens scrape by on a bare subsistence diet of horrid food that recalls Orwell's detested boarding-school diet based on margarine and lard, with anything appetizing, like chocolate, severely rationed. The Ministry of Peace conducts constant meaningless subatomic warfare against Eurasia and Eastasia with fearsome new weapons like rockets, keeping the population in a state of perpetual war fever. The Ministry of Love enforces Big Brother's will by terrorism and brute force, and the Ministry of Truth relentlessly bombards the regimented citizens with patriotic propaganda, constantly spying on them with the latest technological devices--and their own Party-indoctrinated children. In Oceania, language has become the perverted servant of the state. With their electronic gadgetry, the Thought Police observe all sounds, all movements, even heartbeats (Argyros 109). They hunt down and destroy all books printed before the mid-1960s, carrying out what Orwell considered the most reprehensible abuse of all, "Newspeak," a reduction of the supple multifaceted English language into terms so general they become sinister, absurd opposites of their original meanings, like the names of Big Brother's various Ministries. Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth. He slavishly produces trashy literature and revamps Big Brother's speeches to accommodate the regime's self-serving revisions of history. Even though he has only a few sketchy recollections of his childhood, Smith fears he is the last man in Oceania to possess a memory--hence Orwell's working title, "The Last Man in Europe," which implies that removing the memory of the past deprives individuals of their very selves (Bloom 71). Winston Smith, a thirty-nine-year-old member of the Outer Party, suffers from an unhealing varicose ulcer on his leg that, like Flory's birthmark, sets him apart from the rest of Oceania's population. Smith has become uneasy about his work and his life, and he has begun keeping a diary. A diary is strictly forbidden, both because it demonstrates and records individuality and because he is writing it in "Oldspeak," the infinitely flexible English language which Big Brother justifiably fears as a demonstration of individual freedom. Smith covers the first page with the revolutionary forbidden statement, "Down with Big Brother!" (Argyros 109). Smith himself is a bundle of conflicting motivations. His fear of being denounced as a rebel coexists with his frequent subconscious slips, like leaving his diary where it might have been observed by the old woman who wants him to fix her drain. As soon as he begins to defy the system, he experiences revealing dreams, symptoms of self-analysis and the subconscious realization of his need to be acknowledged as an individual. Throughout 1984, Winston Smith tries to use language to maintain the reality of a world outside himself. Keeping his surreptitious diary, a form of speaking out against the regime, is his first forbidden step toward asserting his individuality. Next, after he and Julia become lovers, Smith reaches out to others by trying to piece together the nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons", about the individual bell-voices of London churches (Varricchio 98). The rhyme echoes a humanizing tradition of England's forbidden past, since the Church of England customarily baptized and named each church bell as symbolizing a note in the voice of God. Smith learns another scrap of the rhyme from Julia, one more from Charrington, the owner of the flat where he and Julia make forbidden love, and the end of the rhyme from O'Brien, who initially pretended to be Smith's sympathizer and mentor in the fictitious rebel "Brotherhood." Finally Smith's own words betray him when, threatened by the ultimate torture that lurks in Room 101, he saves himself by hurling his last shred of integrity, his moral obligation to Julia, into the abyss (Bloom 32). Winston Smith's experiences in the depths of the Ministry of Love at first follow the same sequence that every repressive human agency--the Inquisition, the Gestapo, and the KGB are only a few--has used to obliterate its victim's belief in objective truth (Wanner 77). Smith first endures physical deprivation--no food, no sleep, no companionship--then physical torture and drugs which intensify the constant nagging questioning by Party intellectuals, while O'Brien promises to save him and to cure him of the mistaken beliefs which have brought him such torment. Even after shock therapy forces Smith to capitulate during the culmination of the first stage of torture, he retains his grip on truth: he knows the evil system will kill him, but he will die defying it He has not yet betrayed Julia, and he knows "to die hating them--that is freedom" (Orwell). Big Brother's regime is more dehumanizing, Orwell says, than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union because it pursues power for its own sake (Wanner 77). The Party cannot allow Smith the freedom to hate evil or the serene self-respect that comes from witnessing to the truth, as Goldstein's Book does. Smith commits the one betrayal he can never forgive himself for making, relinquishing not just Julia, but his own morality, his belief in truth, for which he had made her name his symbol. Winston Smith's tragedy is not death; it is a bigger salary at the Ministry of Truth, more gin to wallow in with other broken souls, the mutual contempt he and Julia now share--in short, a life of loving Big Brother, the worst form of slavery the human race has yet devised (Varricchio 98). The forbidden "Book" Winston Smith read, supposedly authored by exiled Emanuel Goldstein, a Trotsky-like theorist Big Brother denounced as the chief enemy of the state, is really Orwell's own economic-political theory, and it deliberately shows that Big Brother's Oceania, supposedly the realization of idealistic socialistic goals, was actually a despotic dictatorship. As he had done in several of his other books, Orwell incorporated his theories in a long, demanding passage central to Nineteen Eighty-Four. "The Book" teaches Smith that Oceania is far from being the proletarian Party paradise. The Inner Party, a privileged parasitic minority, maintains itself not only by terror but by constant war. War, fueled by the regime's mind-twisting collective demonstrations of Hate, keeps Oceania's industries working while draining the nation's wealth from its citizens (Varricchio 98). War sustains the Inner Party's exclusive power, provides an emotional basis for the hierarchies of this society, and upholds Party morale by creating a population of paranoid, dependent (Bloom 49). In sum, the novel vividly portrays weaknesses and limitations of the totalitarian regimes and their impact on a common citizen. In 1984, Orwell returned to topics he had treated in other works--imperialism, class, poverty, morality, freedom, and language--in the context of a drab future dystopia, a hopelessly wrong society, where the greatest heresy is the expression of common sense. All of Orwell's major topics coalesce in the great message he had been working toward all his creative life and now achieved in 1984 that one man, even if doomed, must fight with everything he has against unjust collective forces like capitalism and totalitarianism that use the perversion of language to dehumanize and destroy him. Orwell's desire to air the evil purposes of totalitarianism ran counter to the prevailing atmosphere of the late 1940s, which still demanded admiration of Stalin and his regime as respected wartime allies. Works Cited 1. Argyros, A.J. Chaos versus Contingency Theory: Epistemological Issues in Orwell's '1984.' Mosaic (Winnipeg), 26 (1993): 109. 2. Bloom, H. George Orwell's 1984. Chelsea House Publications, 2004. 3. Orwell, G. 1984. 4. Varricchio, M. Power of Images/Images of Power in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Utopian Studies, 10 (1999): 98. 5. Wanner, A. The Underground Man as Big Brother: Dostoevsky's and Orwell's Anti-Utopia. Utopian Studies, 8 (1997): 77. Read More