An Analysis of the Origins and Politics in Ninteen Eighty-four

Firstly we will examine the structure of the novel, at first glance there is little unusual about the structure, it is a series of relatively short chapters that make up 3 parts, each of which coincides with a new part of Winston’s life, indeed that is why they are separated and so, it is to allow the author to clearly separate these three stages in the events of the book. This furthers the distinction between Winston’s world before he finds Julia, and after he finds her, and then his life after capture by the thought police. Orwell does this for two reasons, to add to the importance of Julia in the readers mind, and also to add to the dissimilarity between what is already a horrible world before capture, and the hellish environment in the cells of the Ministry of Love, more than that it means that the reader can distinguish a new segment of Winston’s life beginning, contributing to the feeling that this is where his life will be lived out for the rest of his days. This serves Orwell’s political purposes by further demonising the government, and adding to the feeling that they are omnipotent and malevolent.

Aside from this the structure is relatively simple and chronological, aside from a handful of flashbacks to his mother and sister, however these come in the form of dreams and so do not actually affect the chronology of the book. There is one final item of significance in the structure of 1984 and that is that Orwell’s use of essays in his novel. It should be pointed out that Orwell was principally a journalist and an essayist and so he was used to writing his political commentary in the form of an essay, during the course of writing the novel he has evidently found that the fictional medium, with its restrictions of plot, was to simplistic to adequately express the complex political ideas that he wanted to portray in his text. Consequently he manipulates the plot in order to allow him the chance to write an essay on the politics he wishes to discuss without actually diverging from the plot at all; this comes in the form of the essay on “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism”. Orwell uses this to say exactly what he wants to say without disrupting the progress of the plot. The other essay in the novel is of course the appendix on the language structures of Oceania; one thing that is often overlooked about this final essay is that it is in the past tense, example:

“It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak by about the year 2050”

This is a subtle implication that perhaps this world has indeed come to an end, although this is so subtle as to be almost unintentional by the author, and it makes me wonder what Orwell had in mind when he wrote it this way, as it certainly does not fit with the theme that O’Brien proclaims whilst interrogating Winston:

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.”

Now we have considered the effect of Orwell’s use of structure in the work, we must look at his use of setting to portray his political ideas.

It was worrying to Orwell the complacency that he saw surrounding him in all the western cultures, he found that the English and Americans thought that they were immune to the evils of a totalitarianism and so sought to show, by setting his novel in the lands of the United Kingdom, that the Western world was no better than anyone else and that the English empire was just as susceptible to a centralized government as the Russian Monarchy and the German Weimar Republic had been. He says this in the letter to Francis A. Henson shortly after the release of his book.

“The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere else.”

Orwell’s fable is however rather more refined than Zamyatin’s by which he was inspired, so changes to the genre are inevitable. Where Zamyatin sets his work 600 years from the date it was written, Orwell was quick to realise that doing this isolated his reader from the story, it was hard for someone to become involved in a world that bared so little resemblance to our own. Consequently when deciding a time setting for his novel Orwell chose a time around 40 years after the time he finished writing it, this enabled him to make any changes to the world he liked, and still allow his audience to identify with the life of his protagonist.

Another vital part of the setting of the novel is the society in which the plot takes place. In most novels this is important; however in Nineteen Eighty-four it is vital to the successful operation of the book as a political fiction.

The society that Orwell constructs is a clear hierarchical pyramid, beginning with the omnipotent semi-divine leader Big Brother, and ending with the driven slaves of this world: The proles.

Orwell’s ideas on totalitarianism are better portrayed the more segregated he can make the society appear, so he writes of a world that has class separation in the most extreme sense conceivable. He enhances the distinction through contrasts between the living conditions of the Inner Party and the rest of the world, we can see this in everything that Orwell describes about O’Brien’s existence, and he has servants, plush carpet and the right to switch of his telescreen. The distinction can possibly be most clearly seen in the cigarettes, Winston smokes from a “crumpled packet” dried out, poorly packed cigarettes that dispel their contents onto the floor should one be so incautious as to hold them upright, in contrast to O’Brien who smokes tightly packed cigarettes with a silky air about them, taken from a shining silver case.

It should be noted that Orwell when making this gap between classes to further illustrate the unfairness of such a political model, makes almost no distinction between the proles and the outer party, except on matters of education and intelligence. His reason for this is obvious; Orwell could not possibly put the protagonist in a superior class, as it would undermine his efforts to gain sympathy from the reader, and placing the main character in the proletariat sector would not fit with the plot element of having the proles as a great immovable force, that is frustrating in its inability to act.

The proles of Nineteen Eighty-four are in fact as much a character as Winston or Julia. They embody the majority of the people of Oceania, and for Orwell they symbolise the majority of people everywhere. It is consistently mentioned throughout the text that the proles are Winston’s frustration, he hopes always that if they could be incited to rebel it would be the end of the reign of terror, but yet they lie dormant, and it is this idea that Orwell is trying to explore. Throughout various essays on the novel many interpretations of the proles can be found, they are seen as a metaphor for “hope” for “hopelessness” and for “the inevitability of human suffering” but the fact remains that Orwell’s ideas in this are not nearly so complex. They are Orwell’s way of showing the reader the consequences of inaction. The proles sit inactive, concerned only with their daily lives, and the pettiness of living: The lottery, football. He states explicitly “The proles didn’t care about the party”. Orwell is trying to show the reader the consequences of inaction. The proles, thereby the majority of people in Britain (or other European countries, and maybe the most of “Oceania” that includes, The Americas, Australia, etc.) are inactive in politics, they are content to sit back and let the world happen around them, and so they are doomed to live forever under the oppression of a tyrannical authoritarianism. It is exactly this that Orwell’s novel intended to serve as a warning against, when he wrote the book he intended to show people that if they were content to let politics happen around them then the world would change for the worse. In Nineteen Eighty-four the only hope for the world is if the proles choose to stand up for themselves, so in real life the only hope to prevent a centralised government that will punish and rule with terror is for the political vegetables to stand up for themselves.

Orwell does not use the proletariat to illustrate a point; the proletariat are Orwell’s point. I think, that in some way, he acknowledges the truth of the Communist Manifesto’s main message, which is: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a –Communistic- (replace the Communistic which your political view) revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite.”

The characters of Nineteen Eighty-four are many things, but at least partially Orwell uses them as representative of groups within the populous.

In the same way as the proles represent the politically apathic, Winston represents those that care.

Winston is described in a way that would make him akin to a typical British man of any time; indeed most interpretations of Orwell’s novel assume him to be the much-lauded “Everyman”, however this idea is an oversimplification of the truth. Winston Smith is not representative of all mankind, only of the politicly active, those who care about the world and work for something better. Orwell’s point through Winston is that those who care are insufficient on their own, a singly party state of the tyrannical nature of Ingsoc can only be overcome by a combined effort of the people: an uprising of the proles, Winston stands alone and is so crushed beneath the boot of Big Brother. Winston’s shares Orwell’s frustration over the matter of the proletariat, Orwell felt that he could see the world letting its freedom slide into the hands of a select few, he knew that it could be stopped if only people could be convinced that they were losing their liberty. However he also felt that this decent into totalitarian control was inevitable and that the people of the world could never be  persuaded to take a stand, we can see this through the words of O’Brien when he is torturing Winston:

“The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The secret accumulation of knowledge – a gradual spread of enlightenment- ultimately a proletarian rebellion- the overthrow of the Party… It is all nonsense; the proletarians will never revolt, not in thousand years of a million. They cannot…The rule of the party is forever, make that the starting-point for your thoughts.” 

Julia is of a similar caste to Winston, in that she represents the politicly active, however she is representative not of those who are benevolently crusading for justice and freedom, instead she represents those who rebel selfishly. She fights for her own good, for physical pleasure, not intellectual freedom as Winston does. Orwell uses her to illustrate another point: she does not require nearly so much reindoctrinating at the conclusion of the novel; this is because she is not as “true” a political activist in Orwell’s mind. The point he is trying to show the reader through her existence is that those whose dissent is selfish are merely superficially seditious, and their political convictions are irrelevant. Again he shows us that those who stand alone cannot succeed against a totalitarian state.

Through Julia and Winston as a pair Orwell demonises the state by showing that it destroys love. The last thing within Winston that is torn from him is his love of Julia, and it is at this point that he makes the change from Man to Shell.

The last character O’Brien in description seems calm, reasonable, manipulative and easy to talk to, he is glib and quick witted. He is Orwell’s representative of the Party, he is almost Satanic in the way that he converts and perverts those that try to battle wits with him, and he is insidious in spreading the propaganda of the party and converting, then destroying those who rebel. Herald of pain and suffering, he is the penultimate evil and representative of all that Orwell hates. Orwell makes him out to be despicable, obviously he is psychopathic, without feeling or remorse, and his sense of morality is so twisted that it is barely recognisable as human sentiment, but Orwell’s technique goes further than this, he even describes him as physically ugly:

“There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged away from the cheekbones”

The Author’s purpose in creating O’Brien is to primarily to allow him to explore the political message that he wants to write of in more detail. Whilst a generic and simplistic political message such as “Totalitarian systems are bad” is a relatively simple to encode into the plot of a text such as this, it is far more complex if the author wishes to discuss the specifics of politics. As Orwell was primarily an essayist he was not used to showing his beliefs in such a generalised way as a conventional political fiction would allow, so it was necessary to find a way to examine the political doctrine of a centralised economy in detail, but more than that it needed to be accessible to the average reader. It was with these needs in mind that Orwell devised O’Brien’s role in the plot, it is his discussions with Winston over the party politics that Orwell uses to explore these concepts with the reader. When O’Brien explains, it is Orwell who wants to show the reader something. For example Orwell uses O’Brien to present his idea that power is not a means, it is an end.

The descriptions are clipped and precise, and flowery language is not to be found within the pages of the novel. His dry, clipped style adds perfectly to the anguish he describes in his foretelling of the future. The book is primarily dominated by narrative, Orwell is only interested in Winston’s conversations so far as they serve his political purpose, and outside the Ministry of Love, almost all of Winston’s conversations are too censored to show any political belief whatsoever. Therefore Orwell is forced to focus his work on the thoughts of Winston to explore his political ideas.

There are certain themes that Orwell uses to better portray the ideas that he wishes to explore. Primarily there is the theme of the destruction of love, Family love: between Winston’s family, and between the Parsons family who live next door. Sexual love: between Julia and Winston. Platonic love: between friends. All these ideals the Party has destroyed. This is just a fairly simple way for Orwell to engender a hate for the Party in his reader, a hate which would enhance Orwell’s political message on the evils of totalitarianism.

Other more subtle metaphors and literary methods that Orwell uses are: the glass paperweight is used to represent freedom from the Party. It is bought when Winston first begins to deviate from the Party doctrine, and it is finally smashed by the guard when Winston is captured. Here we see that the coral, like his freedom, was actually far smaller than it appeared within the glass. Through the same area of the book the Rhyme of St Clements is used by Orwell to establish a growing tension, and is symbolic of the inevitable end to Julia and Winston’s affair. This happens because as one reads the text the reader doubtless remembers the full poem, knowing the final line “Here comes a chopper to chop off your head”, it is hard to relax as one sees its approach. This increase in tension serves Orwell’s political purpose he wishes to focus the reader on the helplessness before the Party that Winston and Julia are victim to, the feeling that their defeat is inevitable adds to this, and is furthered by Orwell’s use of the Rhyme.

Above all Orwell’s literary methods serve to create a book that has stood as one of the greatest political writings of all time, these techniques have allowed Orwell to write a novel that is impossible to read without being changed forever. Merely skimming through the text for the sake of distraction, which surely was never Orwell’s purpose; it is inevitable that Orwell’s political beliefs will leave their mark on the reader. This novel has spawned a thousand fictions of its type, and many great works such as the novel A Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood or the film Brazil, V for Vendetta owe their lineage to the work of Orwell. More than this the ideas that his idea of language as explored in the book have influenced the English tongue forever, words such as “Doublethink” and “Newspeak” will go down in the dictionary for all time, as will an adjective that I think he would be proud of “Orwellian”. However the scope of influence of Nineteen Eighty-four goes beyond literature even beyond language…, to the very subject on which he was commenting. Nineteen Eighty-four changed politics forever, Orwell’s warning, along with others of the time was indeed heeded, and humanity was diverted from a path that could easily have been as self-destructive as that described in the novel.

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Bibliography

Burnham, J. The Managerial Revolution 1941; John Day & Co.

Crick, Bernard, Oxford University Press critical edition of 1984, 1984

Ranald, R. A. George Orwell’s 1984,1965; Monarch Press.

Greenblatt, S. Three modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley. 1965 Yale University Press.

Rucco, A. A Text Response Guide to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. 1993 Wizard books.

Marx, Karl Communist Manifesto (Last Page), 1848

Orwell, George Letter to F.J. Warburg 31st May 1947

Orwell, George Nineteen Eighty-four; 1949, Secker and Warburg

Orwell, George Politics and the English Language Horizon, April 1946

Orwell, George Letter to Roger Senhouse 26th December 1948

Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We 1972 Penguin (First published in English in the USA 1924)

Distopia URL:  11/06/2007

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