By Don Curren
George Orwell’s 1984 is replete with stark and memorable images.
Among them: Big Brother, the telescreen, the Two Minutes Hate, Room 101, the Junior Anti-Sex League, and the image of the future evoked by O’Brien for Winston Smith: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
That last one likely stays with most readers as their final impression of how long Orwell thinks the Party’s totalitarian regime will last - namely, forever.
While this is likely what the majority of readers take away from the book, I don’t believe it’s the conclusion Orwell intended us to draw.
I’ll get to my reasons for that in a moment. But first I’ll cite an interesting instance of the widespread view Orwell meant for us to think the Party’s tyranny will last a very long time.
I ran into it recently while reading Alisdair MacIntyre’s landmark work of moral philosophy, After Virtue.
In a section on the unpredictability of human beings and the resulting difficulty in creating organizations that can manage them in a successful and predictable way, MacIntyre makes a reference to the dystopian prophecies of Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
“Since organizational success and organizational predictability exclude one another, the project of creating a largely or wholly predictable organization committed to creating a largely or wholly predictable society is doomed and doomed by the facts of social life,” the philosopher MacIntyre writes.
“Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible,” he writes. “What the totalitarian project will always produce is a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat.”
But did Orwell really mean for us to imagine the Party’s regime would last forever?
As a shrewd observer of human behaviour in general and behaviour inside political and bureaucratic structures in particular, it seems probable Orwell would have understood the problems that would likely doom totalitarian regimes to eventual failure.
There’s a substantial chunk of textual evidence in 1984 that suggests he did, and that he believed totalitarianisms were prone to failure over time.
It’s the Appendix subtitled “The Principles of Newspeak” that appears after the main body of the text.
It provides a detailed explanation of the language Oceania was attempting to impose on its citizens.
Called “Newspeak,” that language was based on English, but shorn of all of the complexity, flexibility and expressive power that we associate with it. It was deliberately designed to thwart independent thought in those who used it.
“Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism,” is how the first sentence of the Appendix itself reads.
One of the most interesting things about that sentence is how it uses the past tense.
The entire text of the Appendix, which is written in a neutral, academic tone, is couched in the past tense. It’s presented as an historical document written after the fall of the Party.
So, Orwell clearly intended us to think that Oceania didn’t last forever.
I remembering thinking that was Orwell’s intent when I read the book for the first time.
I remember thinking there must have been some kind of society that came after Oceania, a society where thought and expression weren’t confined to skeletal verbiage of Newspeak.
The Appendix, of course, didn’t make it into the movies or television adaptations of 1984. Nor did it make it into any or the standard collection of images tropes from the novel that became part of our common cultural idiom, part of our basic vocabulary for imagining both past and future totalitarianisms
It was also overshadowed by the power of the poignant ending of the main text of 1984, where its protagonist Winston Smith, after having been threatened with his own worst fear, surrenders to the regime in the depths of his being.
“Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother,” read the desolate last few sentences of Orwell’s book.
It’s no wonder MacIntyre and so many others fell prey to the erroneous view that Orwell saw Oceania standing forever.
Against that backdrop, I found my own understanding of Orwell’s intention gradually receding into the background over the years.
When I thought about 1984 - which I’ve had increasing occasion to do in recent years - I tended to imagine the Party’s ascendancy as irreversible.
But I’ve found one person who argues for a limited lifespan for Big Brother’s regime.
And it’s a person who knows their way around dystopias: Margaret Atwood.
Atwood, who turned 86 on November 18, is, of course, the author of several dystopian novels, including A Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel, The Testaments.
(I wrote about the treatment of Canada in the latter and other dystopian visions of the US here.)
Atwood is firmly of the view the appendix on Newspeak was intended as a hopeful message about the eventual collapse of the Party.
“Even 1984 has a coda, and the coda is a note on Newspeak, which was the language being developed to eliminate thought, making it impossible to actually think,” Atwood told the CBC.
The 2017 CBC article quoting Atwood (link) describes her as “revisiting a theory she's held for some time, but that is still not commonly accepted or known.”
“The note on Newspeak at the end of 1984 is written in standard English in the past tense, which tells us that Newspeak did not persist,” Atwood said. “It did not win.”
She told Canada’s national broadcaster that “the best dystopian novels always incorporate some relative aspect of hope, no matter how small.”
“It's a way of telling people not only how that world came to be, but also that it's over," she says.
Why am I writing about this quirky and relatively unknown aspect of Orwell’s very well known novel?
Two reasons.
Firstly, it’s an instance of a literary device that has always intrigued me: using “objective” documents to help build a fictional universe.
It’s something the Victorians did fairly frequently.
They often used the epistolary form, where the narrative is developed through letters exchanged between fictitious characters.
Some Victorians also used other fictitious documentation to bolster their narratives, such as the section entitled “HENRY JEKYLL’S FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE” in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
I’ve also run into it in science fiction, notably in the “factual” appendices of the first Dune novel by Frank Herbert.
Its use in science fiction intrigued me so much I even took a stab at it myself here.
The second reason?
Surely, in this day and age, there is some encouragement to be derived from the fact that one of our most sagacious students of tyranny believed that at some point the boot would stop stamping on the collective face of humanity, and sanity and intelligence would be restored.
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