History, feelings and memory
Diogenes – natural and social truths
I’ve been re-reading Orwell’s ‘1984’ for the first time since, well, oddly enough, 1984. It really is a great novel but there are one or two problematic inconsistencies. For example, the Party and its members are just too distinct and separated from the proles to make the idea of ideological control and totality plausible. In fact ideological totalitarianism is not even mobilised over the proles. Secondly, there is no explanation as to why Julia joins Winston in their first meeting with O’Brien. Given her political senses, which is well articulated by Orwell, and Winston’s own deep fears the idea that they would both go together to meet O’Brien whom they have neither talked to other than a couple of passing words is just implausible.
But there are a couple of things that I wanted to mention here. “The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world.” (p.134) I think it rather of an irony that Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia has become popularised (and transformed) in the form of Big Brother television shows (not that any devotees of such shows need know the origins of the phrase ‘big brother’) in such a way that trivial feelings – the more superficial and superficially expressed the better – are elevated to the highest account, whereas control of our material conditions is rendered absolutely trivial and irrelevant.
Second, Winston reflects on the differences in attitude and approach between himself and Julia, arguing that Julia has a much sounder understanding and appreciation. And he observes that ‘By lack of understanding they [the people in general] remained sane, They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue … (p.128) The trouble is that the third part of the novel – when Winston and Julia are subjected to torture in the Ministry of Love – is entirely premissed on the idea that order in Oceania (one of the world’s three superstates in which Big Brother rules) is maintained and reproduced by (i) people understanding correctly, (ii) that they swallow everything and (iii) that the harm is extensive and permanent. To wit O’Brien, Winston’s interrogator, eulogizes,
“We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. …. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me ?” (pp.211-212)
At this point Winston doesn’t understand so he is tortured again and again.
Understanding is not swallowed. Understanding is secured precisely through harm. And even when he reflects on his betrayal of Julia and comes to love Big Brother, even then he, Winston, is still conscious of the residue.
[This piece was written in January 2009]
Morfoubey 