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The Hell of Nineteen Eighty-Four Did Orwell realise quite what he had done in Nineteen Eighty-Four? His post-publication glosses on its meaning reveal either blankness or bad faith even about its contemporary political implications. He insisted, for example, that his 'recent novel [was] NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter)'.(1) He may well not have intended it but that is what it can reasonably be taken to be. Warburg saw this immediately he had read the manuscript, and predicted that Nineteen Eighty-Four '[was] worth a cool million votes to the Conservative Party';(2) the literary editor of the Evening Standard 'sarcastically prescribed it as "required reading" for Labour Party M.P.s',(3) and, in the US, the Washington branch of the John Birch Society 'adopted "1984" as the last four digits of its telephone number'.(4) Moreover, Churchill had made the 'inseparably interwoven' relation between socialism and totalitarianism a plank in his 1945 election campaign(5) (and was not the protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four called Winston?). If, ten years earlier, an Orwell had written a futuristic fantasy in which Big Brother had had Hitler's features rather than Stalin's, would not the Left, whatever the writer's proclaimed political sympathies, have welcomed it as showing how capitalism, by its very nature, led to totalitarian fascism? With Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is particularly necessary to trust the tale and not the teller, but even this has its pitfalls. Interpretations of the novel already exist which blatantly ignore the intentions of the author by reinterpreting its manifest content without any obvious justification. But all existing interpretations of Nineteen Eighty-Four are unsatisfactory in one regard or another. For many years Nineteen Eighty-Four 'served as a sort of an ideological super-weapon in the Cold War',(6) was used along with Animal Farm as propaganda in the Western occupied zones of Germany, which it was 'feared ... might be invaded by Soviet troops',(7) and was later also made use of by West Germany as 'warning . . . about what a future under Stalin might be like'.(8) There is much in the novel, of course, which allowed it to be interpreted as an attack on Soviet Communism and its allegedly aggressive intentions. Nonetheless, such an interpretation does not quite fit: Ingsoc has been established in Oceania by internal revolution and not by military invasion or external pressure. The model is Trotsky rather than Stalin. With the slackening of the Cold War, there were attempts, notably by Orwell's first biographer, Bernard Crick, to claim that Nineteen Eighty-Four was directed as much at the West as at the East.(9) But whatever minor swipes at the West Nineteen Eighty-Four could be said to be taking (the regime's encouragement of pornography and gambling among the working-class for example), such an interpretation, at any rate on a literal level, is perverse - a perverseness exemplified by Crick's extraordinary claim that in the terrible last paragraph of the novel the 'two gin-scented tears' which trickled down the sides of Winston's nose represents 'comic distancing'.(10) Beside these divergent political interpretations, there were others which sought to interpret Nineteen Eighty-Four non-politically as either a study of the mental illness of the protagonist or a psychological document revealing the obsessions of the author. The mental illness reading logically involves the reinterpretation of what seem to be objective characteristics of a totalitarian society as items in a subjective phantasmagoria. Nobody takes this the whole way, but in arguing in these pages that Winston is 'a text-book schizophrenic', Robert Currie has shown the extreme lengths to which critics of this persuasion are prepared to go.(11) Those who interpret Nineteen Eighty-Four as the product of the author's own neuroses, as in Anthony West's celebrated claim that Oceania was merely Orwell's prep school St. Cyprian's writ large,(12) are on firmer ground in that such a view does not involve standing the novel on its head. Even so, it does not explain why the novel has been so enduringly successful and why 'dissident intellectuals' (in Eastern Europe) were '"amazed" that the writer who never lived in Russia should understand the system so well'.(13) To those who knew nothing of St. Cyprian's and the details of his life, it seemed that Orwell was writing about a real and familiar world, not about himself. The work has received such divergent and apparently contradictory interpretations that something more than a simple determination to trust the tale is required. Any fresh interpretation must not only be able to account in principle for the existence of such divergent readings but offer to transcend them. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell depicts a society which, strictly speaking, can never exist because its rulers have the kind of powers traditionally attributed to demons: the closed immobility of the society depends, that is, on its rulers having access to resources which human beings, however wicked and however ordinarily powerful, cannot command. Some subliminal awareness of this is behind the claims both of those who read it politically and those who read it psychologically. For the first, who do not allow themselves to realise that a line has been crossed, that awareness is precipitated as exaggeration of the possible, and Nineteen Eighty-Four interpreted as a satire.(14) For the second, who sense that impossibilities are involved, it is registered as a need to see the book as really about the delusions and phobias of the unbalanced, whether character or author, for phobias frequently embrace the impossible. Nineteen Eighty-Four has successfully recreated the idea of hell and endowed it with an immediacy and significance which Milton and Dante (whose Divine Comedy Orwell was reading in the last year of his life) can no longer command. Though for us, unlike Dante and Milton, hell and its demons are a fable, Nineteen Eighty-Four, by transcending the limitations of the cultural and political context of its immediate origin, provides an objective correlative of this century's 'return to what our nineteenth-century ancestors would have called the standards of barbarism'.(15) Millions of human beings have been the trapped and helpless victims of the pitiless, relentless and yet frequently insouciant cruelty of their fellows: on the ground or from the air. Fiends could scarcely have had more immediate power or behaved worse. In Nineteen Eighty-Four variations of the same inhuman civilization are represented as global (though their ideological bases are not necessarily the same) and the cruelty manifested by O'Brien has historical precedent. His resemblance to an Inquisitor has been frequently remarked (though his electrical assaults on Winston's brain are those of modern psychiatry) and the torture in Room 101 stretches from Imperial China to the late twentieth century where torture victims can be 'exposed to the gnawing of rats through a tube inserted up the anus or vagina'.(16) That in Nineteen Eighty-Four the regime is in some sense Satanic has, of course, been widely perceived. O'Brien has been compared to Mephistopheles the celebrant in his flat of a kind of Black Mass with wine, wafer and ritual. However, such parallels are clearly regarded as metaphorical. Alone among the interpreters of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the millennial fundamentalists have realised that actual demonic powers are involved.(17) For them Nineteen Eighty-Four is a depiction of the reign of Antichrist foretold in the First and Second Epistle of Peter and in Revelation, 13. I am not claiming that Orwell consciously set out to give the regime demonic powers: indeed, part of the effect of the novel may well depend on neither author nor reader allowing themselves to be explicitly aware of it. Orwell may have been in unconscious collusion with the details of his own fiction as readers of the torture scenes have sometimes uneasily suspected. Anthony West's approach to the novel reminds us how much of Orwell went into it: not only St. Cyprian's, but his sadism, his imperial guilt, his sexual encounters (some of them clearly sordid), his fear of atomic war, his Cold War hysteria,(18) and his experience of Communist tactics in Spain and of censorship at the BBC; his revulsion at rats;(19) his previous support for non-democratic socialist revolution;(20) his war-time suppression of his own previous anti-war position;(21) his support for the bombing of German cities,(22) his terminal illness, his pastoral nostalgia - the list could be extended. And yet, by transformation, transference, and substitution all these disparate experiences not only help to form a coherent whole but give to the novel a complex resonance unique both in Orwell's own fiction and in Utopian or Distopian literature generally. Such complexity of origin, particularly if it involves elements of emotional collusion, does not make for clear awareness of exactly what one is doing. Orwell may have believed the novel's official position, that what the regime knows about Winston and Julia is merely the result of a combination of an extraordinarily effective system of surveillance and matching technology. Since, however, the whole of the action of Nineteen Eighty-Four is focalised through Winston Smith even this lacks final endorsement by an impartial narrator. He knew that . . . the Thought Police had watched him like a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to infer. (p. 289) The use of 'infer' keeps this within the limits of the humanly possible: the regime '"can't get inside you"' (p. 174). But when Julia and Winston made love in the clearing, they had specifically noted that the surrounding ash saplings were not 'big enough to hide a mike in' (p. 125). How then did the regime know what they said and did there? Because the aptly named Thought Police can 'get inside you'. They can know what you are thinking - and dreaming; they have telepathic powers including the power of suggestion, and they can know the future. With such powers at their command no one can stand against them and no one ever does ('Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess', p. 107). Individually, the rulers may die but the regime's immortality is symbolised by the mysterious figure of Big Brother (who provides the frisson of the diabolically numinous). '"Of course not"' (p. 272) is O'Brien's answer to Winston's question as to whether Big Brother would ever die. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a hell without a countervailing heaven: the reign of Antichrist for ever, not as a preliminary to the New Jerusalem. There are no angels, only devils. That the regime is Satanic emerges in O'Brien's revelation of its objectives. They are not what Winston expected: 'He knew in advance what O'Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority', (p. 274). But O'Brien does not say this at all: the explicit aim of the regime is to have power to cause pain and suffering for their own sake. '"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever"' (p. 280). That has the authentic Satanic ring: 'Evil be thou my Good'? Winston's expectations were nevertheless reasonable. All merely human regimes, however ruthless and wicked, always claim that their goal is some collective good. That was as true of Hitler as it was of Stalin. Significantly, the brainwashed Winston during his course of 're-education', writes on his slate: 'GOD IS POWER' (p. 290), the only strictly theological proposition in the novel. Antichrist indeed! There are two crucial pieces of evidence that the regime commands the power to match its aims. The first exhibits its powers of telepathic suggestion. In the torture sequence, O'Brien tells Winston, '"For seven years I have watched over you"' (p. 256). Seven years before(24) Winston 'had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness'. . .. It was O'Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark' (p. 27). When at O'Brien's flat Winston refers to the words of the prophecy, O'Brien behaves 'as though he had recognised the allusion' (p. 185) - the prophecy being a typical example of the way, as Macbeth complains, 'these juggling fiends . . . palter with us in a double sense'. For Winston 'The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in' (p. 107); what O'Brien is really referring to is the perpetually illuminated cells of the Ministry of Love. O'Brien's ultimate power, the power to break Winston, depends on his direct access to levels of Winston's mind which he himself cannot reach. Winston has a recurring nightmare: 'It was always very much the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the other side of it there was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced. . . . He always woke up without discovering what it was;' (p. 151). O'Brien not only knows about Winston's dream, but also knows what Winston is repressing. 'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? . . . There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.' (p. 297) It is this knowledge that he uses to destroy Winston in Room 101. Julia has apparently succumbed in the same way: 'Sometimes', she said, 'they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so" . . .' (p. 305) The regime clearly has ultimate power over everyone because of its direct knowledge of inner weakness.
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