Reviewed by John LeBaron
It must be 60-plus years since I read George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, for the first time while a callow undergraduate at McGill University. By that time, at the tender age of 20-something, the world had already experienced the chilling ravages of totalitarian rule, but this young reader’s mind was not yet sufficiently focused to take much meaning from the danger articulated for the world’s actual political arrangements.
Today, though somewhat ossified, this same mind possesses a lifetime of experience that serves as backdrop to George Orwell’s narrative. 1984 presents as a novel, but more to the point of the work, it is a treatise on authoritarianism as spoken and perceived through the voices of its main characters: O’Brien (the tyrant-antagonist), Winston (the victim-protagonist) and Julia (the star-crossed lover through whom the fable’s romance with Winston develops).
In the backdrop for these characters perpetually lurks the hidden Party leader, Big Brother, who appears only in massively displayed public posters. He seems cast in the image of the black-mustachioed Joseph Stalin, simultaneously avuncular yet fearfully threatening. But does Big Brother truly exist or is he simply a false artifact created as a graven image for popular idolatry? We never know with total certainty.
Throughout his career, Orwell passionately examined the manipulation of language as a means for asserting autocratic control. In this vein, 1984 posits the creation of “newspeak”, a language built on a foundation of traditional English (not surprisingly labeled “oldspeak”). Newspeak is designed in order to simplify verbal expression by reducing vocabulary and stripping existing language of all nuance, wit, irony, creative thought and alternative interpretation, rendering it incapable of conveying anything more challenging than the dull straitjacket of Party dogma.
In this sense, the oppressive tactic of thought control by linguistic manipulation is reminiscent of the grim strictures of Soviet “socialist realism” or the fascist reduction of linguistic expression to buzzwords and dog whistles harnessed to the universal acceptance of state propaganda.
Through the forceful manipulation of verbal expression, the regime depicted in this novel also arrogated to itself the tools for generating fear, anger and loathing among its hapless subjects. The real-world template for the fictional dictatorship depicted in 1984 appears to be the morbid Stalinist purges of the former Soviet Union—but it could just as easily be Nazi Germany.
The lessons of Orwell’s work are important for today’s political realities, showing the necessity for denizens of a democracy to remain vigilant, to resist the oversimplification of expression, and to oppose measures that would turn them into mental and psychological ciphers at the hands of a ruthless tyrant who holds uncontested power.
An overarching truth articulated in 1984 appears in the following quote attributed to the character O’Brien, a senior guardian of the “Inner Party” that rules the empire, Oceania, in its iron grip. (Oceania is one of three perpetually warring mega-states that, together, span the entire globe.) While Winston is tortured under brutal interrogation, O’Brien intones “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. … Power is not a means; it is an end.” (p. 175 London, Signet Classics © 1949)
In our contemporary lives, we have experienced the purposeful corruption of language, the “disappearing” of inconvenient citizens, the exemplary terror of show trials, the perpetual revision of history, the willful projection of falsehood, the deliberate denial of reality, and the foreclosure of all channels of alternative interpretation. These conditions are nothing new. We have witnessed them all, but Orwell’s fictional manner of depicting them is nonetheless unsettling.
Originally published in 1949 shortly after World War 2, Orwell’s Oceania foretells an imagined future dystopia. Reading it today, 1984 feels more like history than forecast. A few apt literary companions to 1984 include Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and almost any of Hannah Arendt’s works on the attributes of totalitarianism. Closer to our contemporary era, Timothy Snyder’s monograph, On Tyranny, offers a more modern take on this perpetually roiling theme of humankind’s endless lust for authoritarian domination.
A modern classic, 1984 is available at the Lennoxville Library.
John LeBaron grew up in Sherbrooke. His career includes teaching and research in schools and universities in Canada, the US and several other countries. His latest book, It Was Only a Movie: You Can Open Your Eyes Again, published in 2022, is available where books are sold and on Amazon Canada at https://tinyurl.com/LeBaron-IWOAM.
NEWS FROM THE LENNOXVILLE LIBRARY
The Library’s “Family Book Club” for readers 7-14 and their parents and younger or older siblings meets every month from September through May.
Meetings alternate between “open book chats” one month, and more focussed book discussions where participants and family members all read and discuss the same middle grade fiction book the next.
Games and fun are always on the program. All are welcome.
Join us Thursday, April 27th at 6:30 in the Salle Amédée-Beaudoin for a discussion of Show me a Sign by Ann Clare Lezotte. Copies are available at the Library.
GOOD READS : Book Reviews from the Eastern Townships 