1984 - George Orwell

1984 is essentially a novel about the dangers of an overarching system of government, and the lengths that a political figure will go to retain power once he has acquired it.  The novel follows outer-party member Winston Smith through his secret rebellions against Big Brother and the Ruling Party.  Smith works in the Ministry of Truth where he spends his days updating, rewriting, and destroying all printed records of the past so that history remains consistent with the party's often shifting political positions.  As Orwell allows the reader to see into the inner-workings of the Ministry of Truth, he’s also illuminating the overwhelming political dominance of the Party.

Smith lives in London, the largest city in Airstrip One, which is the third largest province of the new nation-state Oceania. Depending on what is politically more convenient for Big Brother, Oceania is constantly at war with either Eastasia or Eurasia. Oceania is a society in which daily life is infused with fear and paranoia.  Everyone is constantly under surveillance—there are two-way televisions monitoring every household, thought police, children taught to turn on their parents as informants—and one is always in danger of being killed for being a threat to the Party. Even something as minor as keeping a secret diary, as Smith does, is considered an unforgivable act of insurrection.

1984 brings to light several ways that political bodies are able to wield power over their subjects but most notably Orwell examines language and memory—both of which are closely intertwined. The power of language, and the power garnered by the capacity to manipulate it, is on display throughout 1984. Propaganda, written and otherwise, is everywhere in Oceania. Smith and the other citizens of Oceania can't seem to get away from Big Brother's image looming over their daily lives like a dark shadow. Most importantly, however, is the Party’s creation and implementation of New Speak.

New Speak is a new language created in order to eliminate all forms of resistance to Big Brother’s power; if one cannot put into words one's rebelliousness then one cannot even think rebellious thoughts, let alone express them to someone else. In "Principles of New Speak", in 1984's appendix, an anonymous narrator explains that the purpose of New Speak is "to make all other modes of thought impossible" and to ensure that "a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words". By eliminating superfluous vocabulary, stripping words down to concrete and singular meanings, and bastardizing the English grammatical structure the Party is able to limit speech to only the expression of simple ideas, while simultaneously eliminating the possibility of political dissent.  During Smith's conversation with Syme, a comrade that happens to be an authority on New Speak, in the Ministry cafeteria Syme explains to him, "We're destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone" and warns him that he doesn’t “grasp the beauty of the destruction of words".

Hand in hand with the destruction of words goes the destruction of history and personal memory. As Winston Smith sits at his desk touching up photographs, rewriting newspaper articles, and deleting all evidence of  'unpersons'—while also inventing new, politically more desirable persons to replace them—he is participating in the revision of Oceania's history.  His revision enables Big Brother to ensure that neither himself, nor the Party, is ever wrong, and to reshape history in such a way that it supports Big Brother’s authority over Oceania and its citizens. The Party's failures are, in a sense, never failures because they are revised into successes. Early on, in a daydream, Smith contemplates:

The past… had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the Sixties, but it was impossible to be certain.

Since the Party never allows individuals to keep any records of their own, the average citizen of Oceania is willing to accept any information fed to him or her by the Party — even if it’s contradictory to his or her own experience. There are no family photographs or journals, like Smith's, and therefore there is nothing to contradict whatever information the party disseminates.

Surely, being a journalist, Orwell was acutely aware of the malleability of history and its (re)interpretation. With the right authority, one has the capacity to alter history with just a few strokes of the pen, hence the irony of the Ministry of Truth’s name.  The Ministry of Truth did nothing but circulate lies and propaganda while simultaneously destroying any evidence that it was doing so.  Orwell's New Speak and Ministry of Truth are not-so-subtle critiques of totalitarianism and the nature of Western politics.  One can also read 1984 as an indictment that people are implicitly responsible for their own subjugation and domination by political bodies, not quite in the Huxlian sense (that most people are complicit in their own domination), but that there is some implicit responsibility on behalf of the individual for allowing himself to be oppressed.

In the end, Orwell's 1984 is nothing short of a classic and a must read. At times it’s frustrating because of over-simplified, and often unnecessary, clues to the reader.  While the metaphor and allegory in the text are certainly complex, sometimes one wishes Orwell trusted his readers to do a little more thinking for themselves. Nonetheless, Orwell's prose is powerful and brimming over with deeper underlying meaning.  While the story is highly political in nature, and the plot is incredibly intricate, 1984 never stops reading as an entertaining novel.  One can't help but marvel at Orwell writing such a complex political allegory without allowing either his prose or narrative to suffer.

Orwell's 1984 was adapted to be made into a British film by Michael Radford ,starring John Hurt as Winston Smith. The film was released in 1984, was nominated for the BAFTA Film Award, and  won the Best British Film of the Year award at the Evening Standard British Film Awards.