It had been some years since Your Humble Blogger had read 1984 (New York: Penguin I-Don’t-Have-It-with-me), and the references to it were coming thick and fast, and there was the book, so there it was.
Many people, particularly on the left of course, have been using references to the book to discuss the current political situation, and I wasn’t sure if the references were terribly mischaracterizing the book, or if I totally misremembered it. As it turns out, I did misremember the book almost totally, and I suspect so do many of the people making references to it.
I’m mome just now, so I won’t go into a terrible amount of detail, but I’ll point out that it is only the Party members who are watched all the time, as the proles hardly are worth watching, and of course most of us are proles. It would be interesting to write a short story sent in Mr. Orwell’s Oceania but taking place entirely among proles, but I’m sure somebody has already done it. Also, the use of utter sameness and conformity (again, amongst Party members) which gives the atmosphere of the book a large part of its kick is, of course, in no danger whatsoever of coming to pass. But then, it wasn’t a predictive book so much as a satire.
Anyway, the most distressing part was the description of the use of unending war to distract the populace from their living conditions. Mr. Orwell goes into tremendous detail about the kind of war that could be used for the purpose: it had to be indefinite, there had to be no danger of ever winning it or losing it, the actual armed forces had to be present in people’s minds but be a tiny fraction of the population, there had to be occasional danger to civilians but very few actual casualties, and the actual fighting (if any) had to be a long way away. Hmm. I’m not saying that Our Only President and his cabal of cronies deliberately set up the War on Terror from Mr. Orwell’s blueprint, but they certainly happened on a pretty good match.
The other thing that I really noticed was the emphasis on permanence; Big Brother’s Party was to be in power forever. Nothing in the book indicates any possibility of Oceania (or even Britain) extricating itself from the Party; the image that we are left with, quite deliberately, is of a boot stepping on a face forever. Now, Big Brother (with his cabal of cronies, about whom we know nothing) comes to power in the mid-sixties, and by the time of the book have had only twenty years on top. Yes, the revolution was earlier, but it’s quite clear that the current group wasn’t part of that; only the elderly (in their sixties) can really remember what it was like before the Revolution, but even middle-aged men in their thirties can remember, or in theory could remember, before things Got This Way. I noticed this emphasis quite early in the book, and it was annoying, since of course the whole thing is preposterously unstable. I don’t think that part was meant as satire, though, despite the claims of Mussolini and Hitler; there is too much discussion of why and how the state stopped changing. Anyway, it bothered me.
Finally, I wanted to ask any Gentle Reader who has read more war-time and just post-war science fiction than YHB: did Mr. Orwell really invent that particular run-down shabby future? Did that whole stream of sf really start there? I can’t remember reading anything earlier which had deteriorating technology, drabness, bad cigarettes and vile gin, rubbish on the streets, and the atmosphere that became a prominent setting for dozens of sf books and movies. Of course, Alan Coren topped off and destroyed that in a brilliant essay about the real Ingsoc (collected in Golfing for Cats I believe) with the poor saps in MiniLuv unable to get hold of rats for love nor money, and how about a stoat, then, we’ve got one of those.
               ,
-Vardibidian.