“There is a Hitler, a Stalin in every breast,” as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., put it in his liberal manifesto, “The Vital Center,” which was published the same year as “1984.” The O’Brien figure corresponded to a popular understanding of the lure of totalitarianism at the time: that it tapped into some dark corner of the human psyche. O’Brien was the type he wanted to warn people against: the intellectual who becomes sadistically fascinated by power. That’s probably what Orwell had in mind, too. When the book came out, some people assumed that the character they were meant to identify with (with horror) was O’Brien. So Orwell was right about that.)īut who can forget this moment: “ ‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them”? Orwell created a story that had suspense and had characters whom readers identify with. After Stalin’s death, it turned out that those defendants had, in fact, been tortured.
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(Both novelists were attempting to understand how, in the Moscow Trials, Stalin’s purge of the Old Bolsheviks, between 19, the defendants, apparently of their own free will, admitted to the most absurd charges against them, knowing that they would be promptly shot. In “Darkness at Noon,” which also ends with an interrogation, the victim, Rubashov, though he is worn down physically first, is defeated intellectually. This seems a rather primitive form of brainwashing.
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How does O’Brien convince Winston that two plus two equals five? By torturing him. O’Brien’s interrogation of Winston, though meant to be the climax of the book, and though people still invoke it, is not completely satisfactory. Another is Newspeak, a favorite topic of Orwell’s: the abuse of language for political purposes. 1) and the telescreen, an astonishingly prescient conception that Orwell dreamed up when he had probably never seen a television. One is the portrayal of the surveillance state-Big Brother (borrowed from Koestler’s No. There are some parts of the novel whose relevance seems never to fade, though. Orwell, who had little interest in and no fondness for the United States, missed that. They may often have mirrored each other in tactics, but they were different systems defending different ideologies. But they were not twin totalitarian monsters, the Fasolt and Fafner of twentieth-century geopolitics. It’s true that, after 1949, the world did divide into superstates-not three, but two-and their forty-year rivalry did a lot of damage around the world. This was the argument of a book that is now almost forgotten, but which Orwell was fascinated and repelled by, James Burnham’s “ The Managerial Revolution” (1941).
Capitalism and liberal democracy seemed moribund centralized economies and authoritarian regimes looked like the only way modern mass societies could be governed. This was a future that many people had contemplated in the nineteen-thirties, the time of the Great Depression and the rise of Stalinism and Fascism.
This is the idea that the world would divide into three totalitarian superstates that were rigidly hierarchical, in complete control of information and expression, and engaged in perpetual and unwinnable wars for world domination. The fundamental premise of the novel was its most quickly outmoded feature-outmoded almost from the start. There was a bounce in readership in 1983-84-four million copies were sold that year-because, well, it was 1984. In the nineteen-seventies, it was used to comment on Nixon and Watergate. The postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe produced societies right out of Orwell’s pages, but American readers responded to “1984” as a book about loyalty oaths and McCarthyism. It was intended as a warning about tendencies within liberal democracies, and that is how it has been read. Partly it’s owing to the fact that, unlike “Darkness at Noon,” Orwell’s book was not intended as a book about life under Communism. “1984” is obviously a Cold War book, but the Cold War ended thirty years ago. It has outlasted in public awareness other contenders from its era, such as Aldous Huxley’s “ Brave New World” (1932), Ray Bradbury’s “ Fahrenheit 451” (1953), and Anthony Burgess’s “ A Clockwork Orange” (1962), not to mention two once well-known books to which it is indebted, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “ We” (1921) and Arthur Koestler’s “ Darkness at Noon” (1940). George Orwell’s “ 1984,” published seventy years ago today, has had an amazing run as a work of political prophecy.
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