This month the book I read was
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and it was a really good book. /fourth grade book report
Okay, let's go below the fold for something a tad more, I dunno, erudite. In theory.
I can't remember the last time I read
Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it's been yonks. College, maybe, or high school. What I remembered from my earlier reading were some of the major themes and memes:
Big Brother is Watching You. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. And I remembered Room 101, and how the thing that finally broke Winston Smith was being brutalized into betraying that which he loved most. And the rats. [shudder]
This time I didn't set out to read it as fiction per se, but as social and political commentary. I was specifically interested in the Orwellian view of the future, and how that view fits in to the world we live in today.
My copy of this book is the somewhat-recently-issued "Centennial Edition", with a foreward by Thomas Pynchon. In it, Pynchon says that, when it was first published, this book was marketed in the US as "a sort of an anticommunist tract", having arrived during the McCarthy era, but that was not Orwell's intention. Pynchon writes:
Though 1984 has brought aid and comfort to generations of anticommunist idealogues with Pavlovian-response issues of their own, Orwell's politics were not only Left, but to the Left of Left....[Orwell wrote that] "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I know it."
So, there's a lot in this book that echoes in our world today: the erosion of civil liberties, the erosion of personal privacy, [attempts to] control human sexuality, unending war as a way of exerting control over a society, [attempts to] rewrite history, and on and on ad (almost) nauseam. I'm not going to focus on those today, though; I'll leave them to other readers to tackle, because what really grabbed me as I re-read this book over the past few days was Newspeak.
Newspeak is important enough to the book that Orwell actually wrote an appendix: "The Principles of Newspeak". (Pynchon notes that, in 1948, the American Book-of-the-Month Club demanded that the appendix, along with the chapters that quote Goldstein's book, be cut from 1984 before the Club would accept it -- a factoid that I find absolutely fascinating). They later relented when Orwell refused to make the cuts. Pynchon doesn't speculate as to why the Club made that demand, and I certainly don't know the answer myself, but I do wonder what about those parts of the book bugged the Club so much that they wanted them excised.
Anyway. Newspeak. I think one of the most important, and chilling, passages in the book comes fairly early on, when Winston is listening to Syme expound on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.
"The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition," he said. "We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we're finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone... You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston," he said almost sadly. "Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak... In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?"
Syme then goes on, in what I think is a cornerstone passage of the book:
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow thought? In the end we will make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten... The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect... Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like 'Freedom is Slavery' when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
This is borne out, in a very matter-of-fact way, in "The Principles of Newspeak", in which Orwell gives a number of examples, such as a passage from the Declaration of Independence, which in Newspeak "the nearest one could come to [translating while keeping the sense of the original passage] would be to swallow the whole passage up in the word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government."
I dunno about y'all, but more than anything else in the book, that -- and the appendix -- scared the hell out of me. Not because our world today is going down that path, but because it could, and because someone (Orwell) was prescient enough to recognize that, without language, humans may very well be incapable of independent thought. And that is one scary notion, especially in the context of a society in which the powerful recognize this, and exert themselves to destroy independent thought ("crimethink") by destroying language. Yeah, it's a fictional society, but still. Look at how George W. Bush "communicates". Look at Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity. The level of discourse at the highest levels of our government and in the so-called mainstream media is already being dumbed down to an extent I would have not, a decade ago, thought remotely possible. Newspeak is Ingsoc's "final solution". Instead of killing people, they'll just kill the mind's ability to think for itself.
The other thing that is really interesting about "The Principles of Newspeak" is that it is written in the past tense, and in English, as if written at a much later time, when Newspeak has come and gone, and English has been restored as the language of [what once was?] Oceania. A subtle message from Orwell that he believes that even a seemingly invincible fascist society can't endure? Maybe.
A final thought: I think it's a mistake to get bogged down, as I suspect a lot of readers do, in the minutiae of what Orwell got "right" and what he got "wrong" in his predictions. This book isn't a prediction. What this book is about, in (my) final analysis, is what Pynchon describes as "the will to fascism". The specifics are not important. What's important is that, even with the example of Nazi Germany before us, only a generation ago, we (well, some of us anyway) are still fighting against fascism; it's just fascism wearing a different face and spouting a different kind of Newspeak: the Newspeak of "9-11" and "WMDs" and "the terrorists" and "If we don't fight them over there, we'll be fighting them over here". Same song, different verse.
*
Okay, readers, it's your turn. Don't make me do all the heavy lifting here. I've left lots and lots of stuff open for discussion, and the floor is open.
*
Our next Read-Along selection: We are going to lighten things up a bit with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clark. I'll post my diary on this one on Sunday, July 30th. It's a bit of a tome, so get cracking, kids!