Post-War literature: George Orwell

George Orwell

George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Blair, who was born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, in the then British colony of India. His father, Richard, worked there for the Opium Department of the Civil Service at the time. His mother, Ida, brought him to England at the age of one. He did not see his father again until 1907, when Richard visited England for three months before leaving again until 1912. With his characteristic humour, he would later describe his family's background as "lower-upper-middle class."

Orwell lived for several years in poverty, sometimes homeless, sometimes doing itinerant work, as he recalled in the book Down and Out in Paris and London. He eventually found work as a school teacher until ill health forced him to give this up to work part-time as an assistant in a secondhand bookshop in Hampstead, London.

Orwell began supporting himself by writing book reviews for the New English Weekly until 1940. During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and in 1941 began work for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programmes to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain's war efforts. He was well aware that he was shaping propaganda, and wrote that he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot."

During most of his career Orwell was best known for his journalism, both in the British press and in books of reportage such as Homage to Catalonia (describing his experiences during the Spanish Civil War), Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), and The Road to Wigan Pier (which described the living conditions of poor miners in northern England).

Contemporary readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is considered an allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision of the results of totalitarianism. Orwell denied that Animal Farm was a reference to Stalinism. He is also known for his insights about the political implications of the use of language. Orwell's concern over the power of language to shape reality is also reflected in his invention of Newspeak, the official language of the imaginary country of Oceania in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is a variant of English in which vocabulary is strictly limited to be used by the government. The goal is to make it increasingly difficult to express ideas that contradict the official line - with the final aim of making it impossible even to conceive such ideas. A number of words and phrases that Orwell coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered the standard vocabulary, such as "memory hole," "Big Brother," "Room 101," "doublethink," "thought police," and "newspeak."

Orwell was married to Eileen O'Shaughnessy until her death in 1945. According to several reports, the pair had an open marriage. Orwell had a number of affairs during this first marriage. In 1944 the couple adopted a son, Richard Horatio Blair, who was largely raised by Orwell's sister Avril after Eileen's death. Near the end of his life, Orwell proposed to editor Sonia Brownell. He married her in 1950, only a short time before his death.

Orwell’s Style

He draws upon his experiences around the world and in various economic situations. Writing during a World War II bombing in London, he said, "As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." Although his experience shaped him, he felt that there were four motives for writing: egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and finally political purpose. Of these writing impulses, the last of the motives seems the most important.  His style is clear, with a simplicity and directness that is combined with underlying humor to create works of literary art. But, through his words, Orwell created an identity, a face to put to the writing voice — so democratic and aloof. He wanted to create new politics in writing, to bring political writing up to a new level and make it art.

1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel by George Orwell published in 1949. The Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thought crimes. Their tyranny is headed by Big Brother, the quasi-divine Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality, but who may not even exist. Big Brother and the Party justify their rule in the name of a supposed greater good. The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith, is a member of the Outer Party who works for the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue), which is responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism. His job is to re-write past newspaper articles so that the historical record always supports the current party line. Smith is a diligent and skillful worker, but he secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion against Big Brother.

Main themes in 1984

Nationalism: Nineteen Eighty-Four expands upon the subjects summarised in the essay “Notes on Nationalism” which Orwell wrote in 1945 (http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat ) about the lack of vocabulary needed to explain the unrecognised phenomena behind certain political forces. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party's artificial, minimalist language 'Newspeak' addresses the matter.

     Positive nationalism: Oceanians' perpetual love for Big Brother.

     Negative nationalism: Oceanians' perpetual hatred for Emmanuel Goldstein.

     Transferred nationalism: In mid-sentence an orator changes the enemy of Oceania; the crowd instantly transfers their hatred to the new enemy. Transferred nationalism swiftly redirects emotions from one power unit to another. This happened during a Party Rally against the original enemy Eurasia, when the orator suddenly switches enemy in midsentence, the crowd goes wild and destroys the posters that are now against their new friend (Eurasia) and many say that this must be the act of an agent of their new enemy (and former friend) Eastasia, even though many of the crowd must have put up the posters before the rally. The enemy has always been Eastasia.

Futurology: In the book, Inner Party member O'Brien describes the Party's vision of the future:

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Chapter III, Part III)

Censorship: A major theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four is censorship, especially in the Ministry of Truth, where photographs are doctored and public archives rewritten to rid them of "unpersons" (i.e. persons who have been arrested, whom the Party has decided to erase from history). On the telescreens figures for all types of production are grossly exaggerated (or simply invented) to indicate an ever-growing economy, when the reality is the opposite. One small example of the endless censorship is when Winston is charged with the task of eliminating reference to an unperson in a newspaper article. He proceeds to write an article about Comrade Ogilvy, a fictional party member, who displayed great heroism by leaping into the sea from a helicopter so that the dispatches he was carrying would not fall into enemy hands.

Surveillance: The inhabitants of Oceania, particularly the Outer Party members, have no real privacy. Many of them live in apartments equipped with two-way telescreens, so that they may be watched or listened to at any time. Similar telescreens are found at workstations and in public places, along with hidden microphones. Written correspondence is routinely opened and read by the government before it is delivered. The Thought Police employ undercover agents, who behave as normal citizens and report any person with subversive tendencies. Children are encouraged to report suspicious persons to the government, and some even denounce their own parents.

This surveillance allows for effective control of the citizenry. The smallest sign of rebellion, even something so small as a facial expression, can result in immediate arrest and imprisonment. Thus, citizens (and particularly party members) are compelled to absolute obedience at all times.

In Nineteen Eighty-four Orwell used the form of Scientific Romance as it allowed him to express his political messages in the form of a novel. Orwell used the Scientific Romance in a realistic way in order to drive home his political point - that a Dystopia such as the one in his novel is a human possibility. Essentially Orwell is warning us of what may happen should certain dangerous political trends be allowed to carry on.

Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-four to try and show how political systems can suppress individual freedom. The book is a warning for the future that of what society could become should totalitarianism be allowed to achieve dominance. The totalitarian Dystopia is inescapable for those who suffer under it and is constantly changing for the worst. The world in the book is a model of Orwell's idea of a Totalitarian state that has evolved into its ultimate form. However, Orwell is not trying to make a complete and accurate prediction of what the world will be like in the future under a totalitarian government, but instead he presents it as an extreme instance that sheds light on the nature of current societies that already exist. Shortly before his death Orwell spoke of Nineteen Eighty-four, he said: "I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe that something resembling it could arrive".

In 2005 the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. It was awarded a place on both lists of Modern Library 100 Best Novels, reaching number 13 on the editor's list, and 6 on the reader's list. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 8 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.

The book has been made into a film in 1984 and you can watch its trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52wis_sLT1I . The free PDF version of the book can be found at http://www.planetebook.com/ebooks/1984.pdf .