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This is Orwell at his most brilliant. O'Brien's position is thus compatible with the traditional idea of Satan as both supremely intelligent (Winston is in awe of O'Brien's superior intellect and believes that his mind contains his own, p. 268), and completely alienated both from the good and from truth and reality, which, since he can appear as an angel of light, he can nonetheless comprehend. The self-consciously lucid and regressive contradictions of diabolic consciousness are impossible for ordinary human beings to combat, as Winston finds. Nonetheless, the novel makes such a diabolic consciousness credible by relating it to the historically familiar. The Inquisition, evoked in the torture and interrogation scenes, believed in effect that the truth could be defined socially - as being what a human organisation said it was, and so confused received opinion with fact. When this was carried to the point, as with Galileo, that correct fact was treated as false opinion which had to be 'corrected' by adherence to an incorrect fact which was itself merely a false opinion, one is getting reasonably close to O'Brien. Indeed when the latter says, '"The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it"' (p. 278), we are surely meant to be reminded of the trial of Galileo. O'Brien's claim that nothing exists outside the human mind can be related to the extreme idealism characteristic of Berkeley's position, 'that only minds and mental events can exist',(28) while for philosophers like Quine and Rorty who challenge the distinction between synthetic and analytic propositions, two and two is not necessarily four. Perhaps the more telling parallel occurs when O'Brien claims that he '"could float off this floor like a soap bubble if [he] wished to"' (p. 277) - a kind of demonic inversion (going up) of Christ's refusal to cast himself down from the pinnacle of the temple (going down). The inescapable logic of the novel is that it would be impossible for anyone to escape the clutches of the regime with life and integrity intact. For anyone even to preserve himself morally he would have to be perfect. Although in actual societies there are always amazing human beings whose inner integrity nothing seems to be able to break down, in Oceania martyrdom is impossible. Moreover, leaving aside the special powers available to the regime, any would-be rebel is disabled from the start. Formed by an inhuman society, he will already be infected by it because he is serving its purposes. Winston grasps the significance of the systematic falsification of the past by the regime, but he is not only actively engaged in it but actually enjoys it ('Winston's greatest pleasure in life was his work' p. 46). And in his loving creation of the nonexistent Comrade Ogilvy, he not only falsities the past himself but furthers the perverse values of the regime, praising Ogilvy's betrayal of his family ('At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police' p. 49). The would-be rebel has no access to any normative moral ideas and is habituated to callousness by public hangings and by the depiction and celebration of atrocities. Winston regrets not having murdered his wife ('"On the whole I'm sorry I didn't"', p. 141), a regret Julia shares ('"Why didn't you give her a good shove? I would have"' p. 141). He kicks a hand severed at the wrist into the gutter (pp. 87-8). She thinks it was '"a good job"' (p. 137) that her first lover committed suicide. Because Winston reached adolescence before Ingsoc had come to power, he has, through memory, some conception of older values beyond the power of the regime to originate. For Winston 'the enveloping, protecting gesture of [his mother's] arm' is a sign of disinterested love, 'a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones' (p. 171) - though it is characteristic of the darkness of the novel that the possibility that his mother has become the alcoholic wreck who vomits copiously on the floor of the cell in the Ministry of Love is left open (p. 239). He believes these standards are still to be found among the Proles. He has a very early memory of the 'grief . . . genuine and unbearable' of an old gin-sodden man, perhaps for the loss of his granddaughter (p. 35).(29) It was a proletarian woman, too, who had protested in the cinema against the gloating depiction of an atrocity involving a woman and child. His callous comment - 'typical prole reaction' (p. 11) is made before he had been sensitised by recovered memories of his mother. Julia, however, 'had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else' (p. 138) and, as a result, has no interest in truth and value at all. Her dismissive comment on Winston's affecting story of his childhood betrayal of his mother and sister - '"I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days"' (p. 171) - shows an insensitive incomprehension of the human meaning Winston had been trying to convey. She is, as Winston says, '"only a rebel from the waist downwards"' (p. 163), though such a rebellion (which, as I have suggested, is actually permitted by the Party) at least ensures that since her sexuality is not repressed, she is detached from the sexually based hysteria promoted by the Party, and is consequently immune from the hatred that it fuels. Winston's relationship with Julia enabled him to recover buried memories of his mother and to register his own progress ('he remembered . . . how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage stalk' p. 172). However, because his memories are also of betrayal, they serve the purposes of the regime by making future betrayals more likely as they constitute a consciousness of inner weakness. The regime plays on this by ensuring that the little room over Mr. Charrington's shop is associated with the dark bedroom where his mother spent her days, through the association of both with 'the glass paperweight and the steel engraving in a rosewood frame' (p. 186). The regime also mockingly ensures that Winston's only recollection of a happy family occasion should occur after his capitulation, when he identifies it as a 'false memory' (p. 309). The basis of the regime's power in the perverse sublimation of repressed sexuality- 'sexual privation induces hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship', (p. 139) - is a major factor in perverting Winston's rebellion. Since in Winston's case the sublimation is imperfect, the distorted sexuality becomes unstable in its effects. When he inaugurates his rebellion by writing his diary, the deteriorating handwriting and the breakdown in punctuation and capitalisation indicate that what he records is beyond his conscious control: 'while he sat helplessly musing he had been writing as though by automatic action' (p. 20). Through the frigidity of his wife, Winston had already experienced on a personal level the socially induced sexual repression which has led to squalid visits to prostitutes (pp. 70ff) and a proneness to fantasies of sadistic lust (p. 17) as when he first noticed Julia and believed her to be unobtainable. Later he actually thinks of smashing her skull with the paperweight (p. 103) - so much for that sentimentalised symbol. That his feeling for Julia begins in this way means that their relationship, whatever genuine value it may embody, is shadowed by it. Julia is associated with the prostitute through the cheap violet scent which they both wear and, at their first tryst, Winston is thrilled by the idea of Julia's promiscuity. He wants her to have been a veritable Messalina - 'scores of times she had done it; he wished it had been hundreds - thousands' (p. 131). That his emotions never escape from their beginnings is shown by the way in which, after projecting into him a hallucination of romantic identity with Julia, the regime makes sure that his early feelings return: '"Do it to Julia! Not me!"', he shouts in Room 101, '"Tear her face off, . . . strip her to the bones"' (p. 300), a clear reprise of the sadistic erotic fantasy with which the relationship had begun. The instability of Winston's sublimation means that his feelings about Big Brother are unstable too: 'at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen. . . . And yet the very next instant . . . his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration' (p. 17). He transfers the feelings he is supposed to have for Big Brother (and ends up really having) to O'Brien: 'A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston towards O'Brien' (p. 182); 'it was impossible to believe that he could be defeated' (p. 183). This feeling survives the experience of O'Brien as torturer ('He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend' (p. 256). Not only masochism, but repressed homosexuality is involved here. The corrupt elements in Winston's motivation lead him, despite his new-found moral awareness, and unprompted by torture, overt pressure or telepathic suggestion, to put himself in the moral pocket of the regime. The title of the phantom opposition group, the Brotherhood, which he thinks he is joining, significantly echoes Big Brother, and to further its cause he allows himself to be tricked into promising 'to lie, to steal, to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's face' (p. 283). As that last horrible promise shows, the destructive power of the regime is greater than the human creativity he had learned from his mother, and his surrender to it is of his own free will. It is the regime's greatest triumph over him, prefigured perhaps in the locket containing 'a strand of long-dead baby's hair' (p. 158) which Mr. Charrington had thoughtfully provided among the bric-a-brac of his bogus shop. Earlier in the 'Golden Country - almost' he had not needed O'Brien's prompting to utter his own proleptic version of the regime's nihilistic credo: '"I hate purity. I hate goodness. I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones"' (p. 132). He has already sunk to the hellish level of that which he is opposing. NOTES 1 'Letter to Francis A. Henson' [extract]. The Collected Essays; Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, (Harmondsworth, 1970), Vol. 4, p. 564. 2 Quoted in Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, New ed., (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 567. 3 See John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation. The Making and Claiming of 'St. George' Orwell, (Oxford, 1989), p. 26. 4 Ibid., p. 27. 5 See Alan Sked and Chris Cook, Post-War Britain, A Political History, 2nd ed., (Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 20-21. 6 See '"1984" -The Mysticism of Cruelty' in Isaac Deutscher, Heretics and Renegades, and Other Essays, (1955), p. 35. 7 John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation, op. cit., p. 289, 8 Ibid., p. 292. The United States can be seen as the true driving force. See the title of Dean Acheson's State Department memorandum, 'Participation of Books in Department's Fight against Communism', ibid., p. 434. 9 George Orwell, 1984, with a critical introduction and annotations, (Oxford, 1984), passim. W. J. West in The Larger Evils. Nineteen Eighty-Four: the Truth behind the Satire, (Edinburgh, 1992), argues that the novel is a kind of coded expose of Orwell's own experience of wartime Britain (and particularly of the BBC). It is of course true that Orwell did make use of many features of life in Britain during and after the war - flying bombs, war damage, shortages and rationing, for example - but these are not at the core of the novel. 10 Ibid., p. 55. Conor Cruise O'Brien took Crick severely to task in 'When re-reading "1984" has to stop', Observer, 25 March 1984, p. 7. 11 'The "Big Truth" in Nineteen Eighty-Four', Essays in Criticism, XXXIV, 1, (1984), 56-69, p. 57; p. 61. See also Richard I. Smyer, Primal Dream and Primal Crime. Orwell's Development as a Psychological Novelist, (University of Missouri, 1979), p. 143 'the Party itself is part of Winston's own psyche'. 12 See The Politics of Literary Reputation, op. cit., p. 114. 13 Ibid., p. 211. 14 For this they had Orwell's authority (see Crick, George Orwell, op. cit., p. 569). If Nineteen Eighty-Four is a satire, then King Lear is a comedy. 15 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914 1921, (1994), p. 13. The period 1914-1990 is 'the most murderous era so far recorded in history' with 187 million killed. See also Norman Geras, 'Human Nature and Progress', New Left Review, 213, Sept/Oct 1995, 151-160, p. 152, quoting an article by Hobsbawm. 16 Norman Geras, 'Human Nature and Human Progress', NLR, op. cit., p. 152. 17 See The Politics of Literary Reputation, op. cit., pp. 259-260. One of their telling points is the regime's 'capacity to "get inside you" as only Satan and the Thought Police can'. 18 See Crick, George Orwell, op. cit., p. 556, for his McCarthyite list of Communist subversives. See also Warburg's press release, ibid., pp. 565-566, based on Orwell's statements to him, which expressed fears of what can only be described as a Communist takeover of the Labour Party. 19 'If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over me in the darkness', Homage to Catalonia, (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 81. 20 See Homage to Catalonia passim and 'The Lion and the Unicorn', Collected Essays, etc., Vol. 2, 74-134, p. 126. 21 See Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters, Interviews with New Left Review, (1979), p. 392. 22 See 'As I Please', Collected Essays, Vol. 3, 213-214. 23 In his war-time diary Orwell writes as follows: 'War is simply a reversal of civilized life; its motto is "Evil be thou my good"'. Collected Essays, Vol. 2, p. 396. 24 Seven is a significant number in symbolic numerology and is particularly prominent in theological contexts. There are seven deadly sins, seven sacraments, seven penitential psalms, and in Revelations sevens come thick and fast: thus in chapter one alone there are references to the seven churches, the seven spirits, the seven golden candlesticks, the seven stars. 25 Jenni Calder, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, (Open University Press, 1987), p. 60. 26 'The "Big Truth" in Nineteen Eighty-Four', E in C, loc. cit., p. 66. 27 See W. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise, (1964), pp. 43-4. 28 Bertrand Russell, History of Westery Philosophy, (1961), p. 632. 29 This incident - a sign of how closely the novel is worked - resonates with the famous last paragraph. Both Winston and the old man are gin-sodden; both weep. But the old man's tears are a sign of his humanity, Winston's of the loss of his.
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