Nineteen Eighty-Four: George Orwell’s Warning About Truth, Memory and Big Brother
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four; if that is granted, all else follows. That thought, written in Winston Smith’s secret diary, is the heart of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a vision of a dystopian future in which the state controls not only what people do, but what they are able to think.
Author: George Orwell (1903–1950)
Title: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Format: English paperback (Oxford World’s Classics), 304 pages, edited by John Bowen
Scope: Dystopian novel about totalitarianism, surveillance and the destruction of truth
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0198829191 (ASIN 0198829191)
Winston and the Ministry of Truth
The protagonist is Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party who works at the Ministry of Truth. He is an intelligent man whose job, rewriting the past, shows how memory is destroyed and with it the only source of historical coherence. The Party destroys the past, along with all the literature and documents that might exist about it, and republishes it according to the current truth. There is no external, objective source for what happened long ago, and since it cannot be discussed, it survives only in memory, and so it may as well never have happened.
Winston, who suspects all this, cannot share his doubts with anyone, because he is watched all the time by telescreens and microphones. The Party asks its members to practise doublethink: to know and not to know, to hold two contradictory opinions at once and believe both, to use logic against logic.
A Language Designed to Stop Thought
Orwell imagines a single official language, Newspeak, that strips away negative connotations, exaggeration, ambiguity and nuance so that dissent becomes literally unthinkable. The population is controlled through the screens, which also spy on possible traitors to Big Brother. It is a dictatorship in which people follow the Party without questioning its laws, without understanding why and without ever contradicting what has been established.
The most intelligent or astute do not go unnoticed: they are treated as mad or abnormal and are re-educated, even through abuse and torture, until they accept that the world they live in is the only one possible and stop being a threat to stability. Individuality is frowned upon, critical thinking is eradicated and freedom is restricted. The simplest things are explained again and again until they are forgotten, so that even arithmetic is pushed aside to the point of absurdity, with the claim that 2 + 2 = 5.
Written Against Time
Orwell wrote the novel in 1947 and 1948, largely on the remote Scottish island of Jura, while seriously ill with tuberculosis. It was published in June 1949, and he died in January 1950, aged forty-six. The book grew out of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, where he saw how propaganda rewrote events he had witnessed, and out of his work at the BBC during the Second World War. The appendix on "The Principles of Newspeak", written in the past tense, has led many readers to wonder whether Orwell meant to suggest that the Party did not last for ever. John Bowen’s introduction and notes in this Oxford edition explain that background and the novel’s many sources clearly.
Julia, O’Brien and Big Brother
Troubled by his work, Winston writes a diary addressed to O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party, because he suspects O’Brien belongs to a secret rebel organisation known as the Brotherhood. Over the course of the story Winston falls in love with Julia and breaks the rules, and he is arrested. In the end he learns to be loyal to the Party and to love Big Brother, its leader.
Everything is rigid and controlled; even something as normal as love is forbidden, and the Ministries of Truth, Peace and Plenty work to that end, while the Thought Police make sure the rules are obeyed. In this society the human being is destroyed: memory, culture and freedom. More than seventy-five years after it was written, it remains an essential warning.
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