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1984 An Introduction: Structure And Meaning |
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As we first meet Winston Smith, he is at work in the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rewrite (really to falsify) history to conform to Party doctrine, in keeping with the Party slogan, which will be more fully discussed hereafter: "Who controls the Past controls the Future." At the point of our first acquaintance with our hero, Winston has, on April 4, 1984, begun to keep a diary. This is not technically illegal, for nothing in 1984 is illegal since there are no written laws, but it is dangerous nevertheless; it shows that one may harbor private thoughts and by committing them to paper may wish in some way to communicate these thoughts to other persons. And part of the maintenance of the oligarchical totalitarian form of government in 1984 depends not on increasing communication, but on decreasing it to the minimum necessary to carry on the routine of life. Therefore Winston's act is suspect, and he knows it. |
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The novel, it should be said at the outset of this discussion, is not presented by Orwell as an objective prediction of what life in the year 1984 will be like. It would be more accurate to describe it as a projection of certain tendencies, an exaggerated picture as seen in a series of distorted mirrors of what life in the future might be like if what Orwell saw as the logical outcome of these present tendencies were to come to pass. His purpose in writing this great satirical work of political fiction was, we can deduce from the total pattern of his life and his writings, to ensure, as far as it lay in his power, that the kind of society which he envisioned in 1984 would never come about. 1984, then, is a satire whose purpose is not to portray the future, but to warn the present: to place those whom Orwell considered the decent members of his own generation on guard. And his definition of the decent people was qhite simple: it appears in its least complicated form, as we shall see, in a novel of Orwell's much less well known than 1984: Coming Up for Air. In the world, as Orwell saw it developing, fear, hatred, sadism, and insane glorification of brute force are in the ascendancy. As George Bowling, the forty-five year old hero of Coming Up for Air, thinks of the coming European war (1939) which is sure to tear everything to pieces, he says: "Every thinking person nowadays is stiff with fright." In turn, the omnipresent fear leads to violence - "smashing people's faces in with a spanner [wrench]." At a climatic moment in 1984, O'Brien, who is Winston Smith's torturer and Grand Inquisitor in the cellars of the Thought Police, says to him: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever." It is this picture to which all decent people, all those who are not disposed to go around smashing people's faces in with spanners or with anything else, should be opposed. It was what Orwell opposed in his life and his writings, almost literally until his last breath. 1984, then, was written in this spirit: to help recall men once again, in what Orwell saw as a completely secularized age, to a sense of decency and of the dignity of man. |
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Orwell, then, in 1984 was writing political satire of an activist nature because he hoped that his work might have some political effect by alerting its readers to certain dangers which he saw. It is in the tradition of Utopian literature which, taking its name from Sir Thomas More's Utopia (written 1515-16) but extending back at least to Plato's Republic, describes a mythical but ideal society which is intended to cast light on society as it actually is and to change the reality to conform more to the author's view of the ideal. A variant of Utopian literature is the "anti-Utopia," in which the mythical or hypothetical is presented not as an ideal, but as a distortion and exaggeration of the real, often emphasizing the worst and most disagreeable tendencies of real society. Its objective is the same as that of the true Utopia, that is, men are urged to improve the society in which they live, but instead of presenting an ideal society or state of being which men might consider as a model of the more perfect society which the author of Utopian literature would like to see come about, the author of an anti-Utopia presents a satirical criticism of mankind's pride and folly, coupled with a warning that if the tendencies illustrated in the anti-Utopia are not checked, the condition of man will inevitably get worse instead of better. The most famous anti-Utopian satirical fiction in English is Gulliver's Travels (1726). But despite the existence of such other works in this tradition as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Orwell's 1984 is without doubt the most famous and influential anti-Utopian work of the twentieth century. |
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The true structure of the grim society of 1984 is explained in a synthetic political tract which Orwell includes in the book and which Winston Smith reads as he is about to be captured by the Thought Police; this tract is called "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism," by Emmanuel Goldstein, who is the archenemy of Big Brother, the Leader, and of the Party which controls the society of 1984. Oligarchy is that form of government in which a small group exercises control (the word is not used as a compliment, as there is a suggestion in it that such a form is corrupt). Certainly the oligarchical society of 1984 is corrupt; in fact, it exists because the small group which rules it maintains itself by tyrannizing and corrupting the large majority of the people. |
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The society of 1984 in Oceania, one of the three superstates into which the world is divided, has three classes: the Inner Party, the Outer Party, and the Proles. The Inner Party numbers only two per cent of the population; it is the ruling class, maintaining its numbers not by hereditary succession, democratic election, or brute force, but rather by selection of small numbers from time to time either from children of Inner Party members or from the most able members of the Outer Party. It is a selective aristocracy of talent-talent of a kind appropriate to such a society, and including both intelligence and vigorous devotion to the aims of the Party. Big Brother, whose pictures and statues are everywhere in 1984, is the symbol of the Inner Party: the Leader of the State. It is never clear whether he has an objective existence as a person, but most likely he does not: he is simply the imaginary representative of the power elite of the Inner Party, and has been created by the Inner Party out of a perception that men have a psychological necessity for a single all-powerful leader. The only member of the Inner Party whom we ever meet in the book in any detail is O'Brien, the torturer of Winston Smith; significantly, we never learn O'Brien's first name, and indeed only three characters in the depersonalized and dehumanized world of 1984 are ever given their complete names in this novel. |
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Under the complete control of the Inner Party is the Outer Party, composing fifteen per cent of the population of 1984 in Oceania. It does the dirty work: all of the routine administration is handled by the Outer Party, which may be described as a relatively small, powerless, but indispensable middle class. A few of its most ambitious and intelligent members, who might cause trouble if they were held permanently in subservient positions, are made harmless to the State by allowing them to rise into the Inner Party. |
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Winston Smith, the thirty-nine-year-old hero of 1984, is a member of the Outer Party. The plot of the book revolves around Winston's revolt against his strait-jacket society, and the end to which that revolt leads him. Even the complete name of our hero is of symbolic significance: coupled to his last name, Smith, which is the most common name in English-speaking lands and which gives a suggestion that Smith is representative man, or Everyman, is the name, Winston, which is the first name of the great war leader and Prime Minister who is generally recognized as the greatest Englishman of his age, Winston Churchill. Winston Smith, then, in the terms of 1984 is Everyman, and at the same time he is quite unique. For at the beginning of the book, Winston Smith, a minor employee of the Government's Ministry of Truth, sets his will against Big Brother and the Party, even though he realizes that such disobedience can have only one end. All crimes in 1984 are comprehended in one master crime: Thoughtcrime, which consists in having an improper mental or inner attitude with respect to the Party and to Big Brother, and though this crime is not even denounced in any written law, everyone knows what it is and also knows that it is punishable by death with or without a formal legal trial. Winston is a Thoughtcriminal, and the book, in illustrating his decline and fall, takes the reader on a tour of the most representative parts of the entire society so that he many understand its structure as well as its past history. |
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The government in 1984 is monolithic and centralized. In London, capital city of Airstrip One (England), a province of Oceania, the government of which Winston Smith is a minor employee is organized in four gigantic Ministries: the Ministry of Truth, which is involved with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerns itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintains law and order and which administers the secret police; and the Ministry of Plenty, which is responsible for economic affairs. In Newspeak, the official, abbreviated language of 1984, these are called respectively Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty. Winston Smith is an employee of the Ministry of Truth. |
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The three slogans of the Party, upon which the theory of government in 1984 ultimately rests, are: War Is Peace Freedom Is Slavery Ignorance Is Strength Hear - The Party Slogans: War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength. These three slogans are explained to Winston as he reads Emmanuel Goldstein's book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. What they mean will be considered in the analytic portions of the present study, but at this time the first - "War Is Peace" - should be explained briefly. For the state of society in 1984 in all three superstates is the same. Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania are all self-contained economies having little or no need of external support. They have sufficient raw materials within their boundaries so that additional supplies are not essential. At most, war can provide them with a few additional millions of people for hard labor, and a relatively few square miles of minimally useful land. Yet, despite the fact that war is in no way an economic necessity, the rulers of all three superstates see to it that a constant state of war is maintained. Society is organized on a war footing. Except for the highly favored two per cent of the population who are the decision-makers (the Inner Party), the people (the Outer Party and the Proles) live in conditions of overcrowding, chronic shortage of food and all other goods, bad plumbing, shoddy materials and workmanship, and long hours of work at low pay, with added "voluntary" work for Outer Party members (work offered as a gesture of loyalty to the State and to Big Brother, for which no pay is received). |
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But in the past, war had an objective which, according to Goldstein's analysis of past societies, was largely economic. In 1984, on the other hand, the purpose of war is not to win-definitely not to win - but instead to maintain the status quo. War, therefore, is indeed Peace, because the state of perpetual war keeps society in balance. War is Peace for as long as the war exists but does not become too "hot," the three superstates can each keep their populations too busy with the war effort to be capable of thinking of ways of changing the system, even if they had the language available to them to conceive of social or political change. The three states prop each other up, even though they are periodically either mortal enemies, whipping up bitterly fanatical hatred in their populations against the foreigners, or else uneasy allies. War provides a psychologically acceptable means of destroying the surpluses, the margin which makes for comfortable living in society. |
