George Orwell

Jeffrey Meyers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415159234
• eBook ISBN: 9781134723768
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This set comprises 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.
This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

1984

1949

77. Fredric Warburg, Publisher’s Report

1948

In All Authors are Equal (London: Hutchinson, 1973), pp. 103–4. Fredric Warburg (b. 1898), founder of Secker & Warburg, served in the Home Guard under Orwell; author of An Occupation for Gentlemen (1959).

This is amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read. The savagery of Swift has passed to a successor who looks upon life and finds it becoming ever more intolerable. Orwell must acknowledge a debt to Jack London’s Iron Heel, but in verisimilitude and horror he surpasses this not inconsiderable author. Orwell has no hope, or at least he allows his reader no tiny flickering candlelight of hope. Here is a study in pessimism unrelieved, except perhaps by the thought that, if a man can conceive 1984, he can also will to avoid it. It is a fact that, so far as I can see, there is only one weak link in Orwell’s construction; he nowhere indicates the way in which man, English man, becomes bereft of his humanity.

1984 is Animal Farm writ large and in purely anthropomorphic terms. One hopes (against hope?) that its successor will supply the other side of the picture. For what is 1984 but a picture of man unmanned, of humanity without a heart, of a people without tolerance or civilization, of a government whose sole object is the maintenance of its absolute totalitarian power by every contrivance of cruelty. Here is the Soviet Union to the nth degree, a Stalin who never dies, a secret police with every device of modern technology.

Part One sets the scene. It puts Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith, on the stage. It gives a detailed and terrifying picture of the community in which he lives. It introduces the handful of characters who serve the plot, including Julia with whom Winston falls in love. Here we are given the telescreen, installed in every living-room, through which the secret police perpetually supervise the words, gestures, expressions and thoughts of all members of the Party; newspeak, the language devised by the Party to prevent thought; the big brother (B.B.) whose face a metre wide is to be seen everywhere on placards, etc.; doublethink, the formula for 100% political hypocrisy; the copiously flowing synthetic gin, which alone lubricates the misery of the inhabitants; the Ministry of Truth, with its three slogans—War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength—and its methods of obliterating past events in the interests of the Party.

The political system which prevails is Ingsoc = English Socialism. This I take to be a deliberate and sadistic attack on socialism and socialist parties generally. It seems to indicate a final breach between Orwell and Socialism, not the socialism of equality and human brotherhood which clearly Orwell no longer expects from socialist parties, but the socialism of marxism and the managerial revolution. 1984 is among other things an attack on Burnham’s managerialism; and it is worth a cool million votes to the conservative party; ^* it is imaginable that it might have a preface by Winston Churchill after whom its hero is named. 1984 should be published as soon as possible, in June 1949.

Part Two contains the plot, a very simple one. Winston falls in love with a black-haired girl, Julia. This in itself is to be considered heretical and illegal. See Part I, sec. 6 for a discussion of sex and love, but in any case ‘the sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime….’ A description of their lovemaking follows, and these few passages alone contain a lyrical sensuous quality utterly lacking elsewhere in the book. These passages have the effect of intensifying the horrors which follow.

Julia and Winston, already rebels, start to plot; contact O’Brien, a fellow rebel as they think; are given ‘the book’ of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Trotsky of this community; and Winston reads it. It is a typical Orwellism that Julia falls asleep while Winston reads part of the book to her. (Women aren’t intelligent, in Orwell’s world.)

Goldstein’s book as we may call it (though it turns out later to have been written by the secret police) is called ‘The Principles of Oligarchical Collectivism’ and we are given many pages of quotations from it. It outlines in a logical and coherent form the world situation as Orwell expects it to develop in the next generation. (Or does it?) It would take a long essay to discuss the implications of the astounding political philosophy embodied in this imagined work, which attempts to show that the class system, which was inevitable until circa 1930, is now in process of being fastened irrevocably on the whole world at the very moment when an approach to equality and liberty is for the first time possible. The book is quoted in Part 2, sec. 9, which can almost be read as an independent work.

Before passing to Part 3, I wish to call attention to the use made by Orwell of the old nursery rhyme, Oranges and Lemons, said the bells of St Clements. This rhyme plays a largish part in the plot and is worth study. It ends, it will be remembered, with the words ‘And here comes the chopper to chop off your head.’ This use of a simple rhyme to achieve in due course an effect of extreme horror is a brilliant and typical Orwellism which places him as a craftsman in the front rank of terror novelists.

1984 by the way might well be described as a horror novel, and would make a horror film which, if licensed, might secure all countries threatened by communism for 1000 years to come.

Part Three contains the torture, breakdown, and re-education of Winston Smith, following immediately upon his arrest in bed with Julia by the secret police. In form it reminds one of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, but is to my mind more brutal, completely English, and overwhelming in its picture of a thorough extermination of all human feeling in a human being. In this part Orwell gives full rein to his sadism and its attendant masochism, rising (or falling) to the limits of expression in the scene where Winston, threatened by hungry rats which will eat into his face, implores his torturer to throw Julia to the rats in his place. This final betrayal of all that is noble in man leaves Winston broken and ready for re-education as a willing adherent of Ingsoc, the necessary prelude in this society to being shot for his ‘thoughtcrime’, for in Ingsoc there are no martyrs but only broken men wishing to die for the good of their country.

‘We shall meet in the place where there’s no darkness.’ This phrase, which recurs through the book, turns out to be in the end the brilliantly lit passage and torture chambers of the Ministry of Love. Light, for Orwell, symbolizes (I think) a horrible logical clarity which leads to death and destruction. Darkness, as in the womb and perhaps beside a woman in the night, stands for the vital processes of sex and physical strength, the virtues of the proles, that 80% of the population of Ingsoc who do the work and do not think, the ‘Boxers’ of Animal Farm, the pawns, the raw material without which the Party could not function.

In Part III Orwell is concerned to obliterate hope; there will be no rebellion, there cannot be any liberation. Man cannot stand against Pain, and the Party commands Pain. It is almost intolerable to read Part III which, more even than the rest of the book, smells of death, decay, dirt, diabolism and despair. Here Orwell goes down to the depths in a way which reminds me of Dostoievsky. O’Brien is his Grand Inquisitor, and he leaves Winston, and the reader, without hope. I cannot but think that this book could have been written only by a man who himself, however temporarily, had lost hope, and for physical reasons which are sufficiently apparent.

These comments, lengthy as they are, give little idea of the giant movement of thought which Orwell has set in motion in 1984. It is a great book, but I pray I may be spared from reading another like it for years to come.

^* This judgment has nothing to do with my political sympathies at that time. By then was almost certainly a floating voter.

78. Julian Symons, Times Literary Supplement

10 June 1949, p. 380

Julian Symons (b. 1912), friend of Orwell, English critic and author of detective novels. Six days after Symons’ review had appeared Orwell wrote to him:

I think it was you who reviewed 1984 in the TLS. I must thank you for such a brilliant as well as generous review. I don’t think you could have brought out the sense of the book better in so short a space. You are of course right about the vulgarity of the ‘Room 101’ business. I was aware of this while writing it, but I didn’t know another way of getting somewhere near the effect I wanted. (IV, p. 502–3.)

It is possible to make a useful distinction between novelists who are interested primarily in the emotional relationships of their characters and novelists for whom characters are interesting chiefly as a means of conveying ideas about life and society. It has been fashionable for nearly half a century to shake a grave head over writers who approach reality by means of external analysis rather than internal symbolism; it has even been suggested that the name of novelist should be altogether denied to them. Yet it is a modern convention that the novel must be rather visceral than cerebral. The novel in which reality is approached through the hard colours of outward appearance (which is also, generally, the novel of ideas) has a respectable lineage, and distinctive and distinguished modern representatives. Among the most notable of them is Mr George Orwell; and a comparison of Nineteen Eighty-Four, his new story of a grim Utopia, with his first novel Burmese Days (published originally fifteen years ago and recently reissued) shows a curious and interesting journey of the mind. It is a queer route that Mr Orwell has taken from Burma to the Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four, by way of Catalonia and Wigan Pier.

Burmese Days tells the story of Flory, a slightly intellectual timber merchant, marooned among a group of typical Anglo-Indians in a small Burmese town. Bored by his surroundings and disgusted by his companions, Flory becomes friendly with an Indian doctor; but he is for a long time too timid to risk offending the opinion of the white men he despises by proposing the doctor as a member of the European Club. This problem in social relationships is one of the narrative’s two poles of interest: the other is Flory’s unhappy, self-deceiving love for Elizabeth, niece of one of the Anglo-Indians. Elizabeth is a thoroughly commonplace girl, perfectly at home in the European Club, but Flory invests her with qualities that exist only in his tormented imagination. When he has been robbed of all illusion about Elizabeth, and thus about his own possible future, Flory shoots himself; Elizabeth marries the Deputy Commissioner of the district; the Indian doctor, robbed of Flory’s support, is the victim of a plot to disgrace him made by U-Po-Kyin, a rascally Burman, who—a last ironical stroke—obtains membership of the European Club.

What is particularly noticeable about Burmese Days is that the two poles of its narrative are very unequal in strength. The passages dealing with conflicts between whites and natives, and with the administrative problems facing the British, are written with subtlety; and Mr Orwell’s attitude is remarkable, both in its avoidance of false idealism about the British and of false sentimentality about the Burmese. The part of the book that explores Flory’s relationship with Elizabeth is in comparison crude and naive; and this is because Mr Orwell is already a novelist interested in ideas, rather than in personal relationships. When he is forced to deal with them, here and in later books, he does so often in terms of a boys’ adventure story. When Flory first meets Elizabeth, for example, she likes him because he drives away some harmless water-buffaloes, of which she is terrified. Friendship ripens when they go out shooting, and he is successful in killing a leopard. Her final rejection of him is symbolized by the fact that he is thrown from a pony when about to show off in front of her, by spearing a tent peg. It is true that other motives influence Elizabeth’s conscious rejection of Flory; but it is obvious that this very simple underlying symbolism is important for Mr Orwell himself. He shows great insight into the political and ethical motives of his characters; he seldom puts a word wrong when he looks at very varied facets of external reality; but his view of man as an emotional animal is often not far away from that of the boys’ weeklies about which he has written with such penetration. It is such a mingling of subtlety and simplicity that makes Animal Farm a perfect book in its kind: in that fairy-story with an unhappy ending there are no human relationships to disturb the fairy-tale pattern and the political allegory that lies behind it.

It is natural that such a writer as Mr Orwell should regard increasingly the subject rather than the form of his fictional work. Burmese Days is cast fairly conventionally in the form of the contemporary novel; this form had almost ceased to interest Mr Orwell in 1939, when, in Coming Up For Air, the form of the novel was quite transparently a device for comparing the England of that time with the world we lived in before the First World War. In Coming Up For Air, also, characterization was reduced to a minimum: now, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it has been as nearly as possible eliminated. We are no longer dealing with characters, but with society.

The picture of society in Nineteen Eighty-Four has an awful plausibility which is not present in other modern projections of our future. In some ways life does not differ very much from the life we live to-day. The pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, the hunk of bread and cube of cheese, the mug of milkless Victory coffee with its accompanying saccharine tablet—that is the kind of meal we very well remember; and the pleasures of recognition are roused, too, by the description of Victory gin (reserved for the privileged—the ‘proles’ drink beer), which has ‘a sickly oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit’ and gives to those who drink it ‘the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club.’ We can generally view projections of the future with detachment because they seem to refer to people altogether unlike ourselves. By creating a world in which the ‘proles’ still have their sentimental songs and their beer, and the privileged consume their Victory gin, Mr Orwell involves us most skilfully and uncomfortably in his story, and obtains more readily our belief in the fantasy of thought-domination that occupies the foreground of his book.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four Britain has become Airstrip One, part of Oceania, which is one of the three great world-States. The other two are Eurasia and Eastasia, and with one or the other of these States Oceania is always at war. When the enemy is changed from Eurasia to Eastasia, the past is wiped out. The enemy, then, has always been Eastasia, and Eurasia has always been an ally. This elimination of the past is practised in the smallest details of administration; and incorrect predictions are simply rectified retrospectively to make them correct. When, for instance, the Ministry of Plenty issues a ‘categorical pledge’ that there will be no reduction of the chocolate ration, and then makes a reduction from thirty grammes to twenty, rectification is simple. ‘All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.’ The appropriate correction is made in The Times, the original copy is destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files. A vast organization tracks down and collects all copies of books, newspapers and documents which have been superseded. ‘Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.’

To achieve complete thought-control, to cancel the past utterly from minds as well as records, is the objective of the State. To this end a telescreen, which receives and transmits simultaneously, is fitted into every room of every member of the Party. The telescreen can be dimmed but not turned off, so that there is no way of telling when the Thought Police have plugged in on any individual wire. To this end also a new language has been invented, called ‘Newspeak,’ which is slowly displacing ‘Oldspeak’—or, as we call it, English. The chief function of Newspeak is to make ‘a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc (English Socialism in Oldspeak)—literally unthinkable.’ The word ‘free,’ for example, is still used in Newspeak, but not in the sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free,’ since such conceptions no longer exist. The object of Newspeak is to restrict, and essentially to order, the range of thought. The end-objective of the members of the Inner Party who control Oceania is expressed in the Newspeak word ‘doublethink,’ which means:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them: to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and, above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.

The central figure of Nineteen Eighty-Four is a member of the Outer Party and worker in the records department of the Ministry of Truth, named Winston Smith. Winston is at heart an enemy of the Party; he has not been able to eliminate the past. When, at the Two Minutes’ Hate sessions the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, classic renegade and backslider, appears on the telescreen mouthing phrases about party dictatorship and crying that the revolution has been betrayed, Winston feels a hatred which is not—as it should be— directed entirely against Goldstein, but spills over into heretical hatred of the Thought Police, of the Party, and of the Party’s allwise and all-protecting figurehead, Big Brother.

Winston’s heresy appears in his purchase of a beautiful keepsake album which he uses as a diary—an activity likely to be punished by twenty-five years’ confinement in a forced labour camp—and in his visits to the ‘proles” areas, where he tries unsuccessfully to discover what life was like in the thirties and forties. He goes to the junk shop where he found the album and buys a glass paperweight; and he is queerly moved by the old proprietor’s quotation of a fragment of a forgotten nursery rhyme: ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.’ Sexual desire has been so far as possible removed from the lives of Party members; and so Winston sins g...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Note on the Text
• Down and Out in Paris and London: 1933
• Burmese Days: 1934
• A Clergyman’s Daughter: 1935
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying: 1936 (1st American edition 1956)
• The Road to Wigan Pier: 1937 (1st American edition 1958)
• Homage to Catalonia: 1938 (1st American edition 1952)
• Coming up for Air: 1939 (1st American edition 1950)
• Inside the Whale: 1940
• The Lion and the Unicorn: 1941
• Animal Farm: 1945
• Critical Essays (US title: Dickens, Dali and Others): 1946
• George Woodcock on George Orwell
• 1984: 1949
• Obituaries
• Shooting an Elephant: 1950
• England Your England (US title: Such, Such were the Joys): 1953
• Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: 1968
• Select Bibliography