The Hell of 1984

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