The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  Orwell found it impossible to say where London’s political journey would have led if he hadn’t died in 1916, at the age of forty. He could conceivably have turned into a communist, a Trotskyist, an anarchist or a Nazi. “Intellectually he knew . . . that Socialism ought to mean the meek inheriting the earth, but that was not what his temperament demanded.” At least, wrote Orwell, he would not have made the mistake of not taking Hitler seriously. Because of his “streak of brutality” and “understanding of the primitive,” London was “a better prophet than many better-informed and more logical thinkers,” such as Wells. Such insight into violence and power was only possible for a man who retained some connection to the blond-beast. “You might say,” Orwell wrote, “that he could understand Fascism because he had a Fascist strain himself.” Perhaps Orwell could not have imagined the Ministry of Love unless he, too, had a streak of brutality.

  The Iron Heel may have informed Nineteen Eighty-Four’s hierarchy of oligarchs and proles and its defining image of a boot stamping on a human face forever. Orwell first deployed “the vision of a boot crashing down on a face” in The Lion and the Unicorn and uses boots as a synecdoche for state violence almost twenty times in Nineteen Eighty-Four. London’s greatest gift to Orwell, however, may have been structural. Gulliver’s Travels and Looking Backward each have a preface from a fictitious editor, so as to make them read like memoirs rather than novels, but London went further. He framed Avis’s account as “The Everhard Manuscript,” a document introduced and footnoted by Anthony Meredith, a historian who lives in a socialist utopia in the twenty-seventh century and considers the text “a warning to those rash political theorists of to-day who speak with certitude of social progresses.” The novel’s footnotes are largely a device for shoehorning political context into the narrative, but they also explain that the Iron Heel was finally overthrown after three centuries and replaced by the Brotherhood of Man. That knowledge gives the book’s cheerless conclusion a hopeful coda. The end is not really the end.

  This brings us to what I’ll call the Appendix Theory.

  The last words of Nineteen Eighty-Four are not “THE END.” The novel’s actual last word is “2050,” which concludes the appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak.” The appendix has two striking characteristics: it is written in twentieth-century English, known as Oldspeak, and it is written in the past tense. It therefore raises some pressing questions: Who wrote it, when, and for whom?

  There are two possible explanations for this. One is that it’s a glaring blunder by an author who otherwise seemed to be in full command of his material and could have easily added an analysis of Newspeak to Goldstein’s book. Another explanation, the Appendix Theory, is that the story of Winston Smith is a text within the world of the novel, with an unidentified author, hence the solitary footnote, in the first chapter, which directs readers to the appendix.

  Logically, this means that all the facts have been accurately remembered, that the English language was not eliminated by 2050 and, therefore, that Ingsoc did not endure “for ever.” Winston must have been wrong to think that “The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour,” because the author of the appendix knows the whole story. Encoded in the appendix’s dispassionate, essayistic account of Newspeak is a happy ending of sorts—a crack in the monumental despair. Winston can’t foresee change “in our own lifetime” but he can imagine “leaving a few records behind, so that the next generation can carry on where we leave off.” In the introduction to their 2013 stage version, the first adaptation to incorporate the appendix, Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan wrote that it “daringly opens up the novel’s form and reflects its central questions back to the reader. Can you trust evidence? How do you ever know what’s really true? And when and where are you, the reader, right now?”

  The most prominent advocate of the Appendix Theory is Margaret Atwood. “Orwell is much more optimistic than people give him credit for,” she said in 1986. In a later interview, she added that many dystopian novels “have a framing device, like once upon a time all these horrible things happened, but now we’re looking back at them from the future.” Atwood’s “Historical Notes” appendix to The Handmaid’s Tale is the same kind of device, looking back at an intolerable tyranny from the safe harbour of 2195. “Optimism is relative,” Atwood said. “Glimmers are good. Happily ever after we don’t believe anymore, but we can live with glimmers.”

  So that’s the Appendix Theory.

  One of the last things Orwell wrote for the Indian Service was a dramatisation of H. G. Wells’s 1896 short story “A Slip Under the Microscope,” a bleak little number about class prejudice, unforgiving bureaucracy and cruel fate, stemming from the writer’s experiences at the Normal School of Science.

  After the fiery dinner party at Langford Court, William Empson told Inez Holden that he thought Wells was angry because Orwell had been rude; Holden countered that it was because Wells thought Orwell had been wrong. And Orwell was wrong, or at least reductive, when he caricatured the older man as a complacent éminence grise with no idea what democracy was up against. In fact, Wells was a depressed, sporadically suicidal old man. His utopian visions had really been warnings as much as prophecies: humanity could either follow the path of progress (as prescribed by Wells) or slide back into the pit. It appeared to have chosen the pit. “We are, as a people, a collection of unteachable dullards at war with an infectious lunatic & his victims,” Wells wrote to George Bernard Shaw in 1941.

  It’s hardly surprising, then, that Wells exploded whenever he felt that somebody had misrepresented his life’s work. A reputation is a precious, fragile thing and must be defended. His entire career, he believed, represented “the clearest insistence on the insecurity of progress and the possibility of human degeneration and extinction . . . I think the odds are against man but it is still worth fighting against them.” How, he thought, could someone as clever as Orwell have missed that crucial point? By the end of the decade, Orwell would discover for himself how it feels to see your fundamental world view misunderstood.

  Read my early works, you shit.

  By the time “A Slip Under the Microscope” was broadcast in October 1943, Orwell had already tendered his resignation from the BBC. “By some time in 1944 I might be near-human again and able to write something serious,” he wrote to Rayner Heppenstall, an old friend who was now working for another branch of the BBC. “At present I am just an orange that’s been trodden on by a very dirty boot.” Eileen was delighted by his decision to quit. “I should think a municipal dustman’s work more dignified and better for your future as a writer,” she later told him.

  In his resignation letter, Orwell stressed that he had been treated well and allowed a great deal of freedom: “On no occasion have I been compelled to say on the air anything that I would not have said as a private individual.” That was a polite exaggeration—he had recently been reprimanded for slipping a criticism of Stalin into a news broadcast—but his main reason for quitting was the nagging conviction that his work was a waste of both his time and the public’s money. There were only 121,000 radio sets in India, a country with a population of three hundred million, and those who did tune in weren’t in the habit of writing in to give feedback. When the BBC commissioned a listener survey, Orwell’s approval rating was a lowly 16 per cent. Only after the war would he learn that his work had any fans in India at all. He never saw the glowing internal report written by Rushbrook Williams, the director of Indian Services, who lauded his talent, work ethic and integrity: “He is transparently honest, incapable of subterfuge, and in early days he would have been canonised—or burnt at the stake! Either fate he would have sustained with stoical courage.” On the day he left, Orwell’s colleagues threw him a surprise party; had he been forewarned, they suspected, he wouldn’t have showed up.

  Orwell had, at least, witnessed the propaganda machine in action, via his own work and Eileen’s, and it had left him obsessed with the mass production of lies. Just as b
eing an imperialist taught him to hate imperialism, fraternising with tramps and miners gave him a visceral sense of economic injustice, and fighting in Spain solidified his opposition to both fascism and communism, working as a propagandist, even a relatively benign one, gave him the moral authority to critique propaganda in the strongest terms. In a long essay called “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” written in 1942, Orwell understood better what he had seen unfolding in Spain: “for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied by an ordinary lie . . . I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’ ”

  This was new, he thought. In the past, people were guilty of deliberate deceit or unconscious bias, but at least they believed in the existence of facts and the distinction between true and false. Totalitarian regimes, however, lied on such a grand scale that they made Orwell feel that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” What was just an inkling in 1937 had been honed into a conviction that would underpin the Ministry of Truth and the true source of Ingsoc’s power: it “controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.”

  Here, undeniably, are the moral and intellectual foundations of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Totalitarianism’s war on reality was more dangerous than the secret police, the constant surveillance or the boot in the face, because in “that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree” there is no solid ground from which to mount a rebellion—no corner of the mind that has not been infected and warped by the state. It is power that removes the possibility of challenging power. That’s why it is not enough for O’Brien to force Winston to say that two plus two equals five. He has only truly won when Winston believes that two plus two equals five.

  During Orwell’s time at the BBC, the tide of the war had turned. When he turned up for the first day of “Liars’ School” in August 1941, Germany dominated Europe and was advancing on Moscow; Japan was sweeping through Southeast Asia; the USA had not yet entered the war. By November 1943, however, Hitler’s forces had been expelled from North Africa and most of the USSR, Italy had surrendered to the Allies, and Emperor Hirohito was describing Japan’s situation as “truly grave.” Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were days away from meeting in Tehran to discuss post-war “spheres of influence”—a summit that Orwell described as a very early inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was just a matter of time before Germany and Japan folded. Orwell’s mind turned to the future of totalitarianism, now that fascism had been routed but Stalinism was flushed with prestige.

  At some point he sketched out the blueprint for Nineteen Eighty-Four, then called The Last Man in Europe. (A trace of the original title survives in O’Brien’s taunting words: “If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors.”) Orwell’s notebook is undated, and its contents clearly copied from one or more rough drafts, but scholars tend to place the outline towards the end of 1943 or the very start of 1944. Some key components of the novel don’t appear in the outline, but the basic material is there, including Ingsoc, Newspeak and doublethink, and the effect he planned to create: “The nightmare feeling caused by the disappearance of objective truth.” That phrase again. If nothing else, his spell at the BBC had given these consuming ideas time to evolve into sophisticated concepts.

  “Looking Back on the Spanish War” was published in New Road in June 1943, minus the crucial sections about propaganda and the abuse of history. The full version would not be published until 1953, which was a great shame, because these sections didn’t just explain the ideas behind Nineteen Eighty-Four; they mounted a pre-emptive defence of the book against anyone who would accuse it of hysterical melodrama. “Is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future?” Orwell asked. “Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The Heretic

  Orwell and Zamyatin

  I know that I have a highly inconvenient habit of speaking what I consider to be the truth rather than saying what may be expedient at the moment.

  —Yevgeny Zamyatin, letter to Stalin, 1929

  In January 1944, a Russian-born professor of literature named Gleb Struve alerted Orwell to the existence of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s anti-utopian novel We, written in 1920–1921. “I am interested in that kind of book,” Orwell replied, “and even keep making notes for one myself that may get written sooner or later.”

  Orwell located a copy of the 1929 French translation, Nous Autres, that summer, and eventually wrote about it in Tribune in January 1946 under the title “Freedom and Happiness.” Orwell judged that “it is not a book of the first order, but it is certainly an unusual one,” and suggested that Brave New World “must be partly derived from it.” In a subsequent letter to Fredric Warburg, he upgraded that to “partly plagiarised.” This was not an outrageous claim—Kurt Vonnegut later said something similar—but Huxley consistently denied having read it and Zamyatin believed him, saying that the resemblance “proves that these ideas are in the stormy air we breathe.”

  Karma came for Orwell in the form of several critics who accused him of plagiarising We. The first was the historian Isaac Deutscher, who accused the author of borrowing “the idea of 1984, the plot, the chief characters, the symbols, and the whole climate of his story” from We. There are three problems with this claim. One: Deutscher wildly overstated the similarities between the novels. Two: as we have seen, Orwell had already written his outline months before he read We. Three: Orwell made repeated efforts to get Zamyatin’s novel republished in English and encouraged his readers more than once to “look out for this book”—surely not the kind of thing that plagiarists usually do.

  Originality is a vexing concept in genre fiction. We don’t accuse everyone who writes about a brilliant, eccentric detective of ransacking Arthur Conan Doyle. Utopian fiction is a genre, too, with a set of recurring tropes and themes. Edward Bellamy influenced William Morris; both men influenced H. G. Wells; Wells influenced Huxley, Orwell and Zamyatin; and all of these writers introduced some major new idea, technique or tone. As Morris said, each one is “the expression of the temperament of its author.” Nonetheless, it’s impossible to read Zamyatin’s bizarre and visionary novel without being strongly reminded of stories that were written afterwards, Orwell’s included.

  Zamyatin called We “my most jesting and most serious work.” The novel he started writing in Petrograd in 1920, at the age of thirty-six, is set hundreds of years in the future, in the ultra-rational despotism of the One State, a hyperbolic expression of the author’s belief that urban life “robs people of individuality, makes them the same, machinelike.” Zamyatin hones and develops ideas from Wells and Dostoevsky into a sturdy template for numerous tales of individualism versus homogeneity. In the shape of the Benefactor, Zamyatin gives us the mysterious, nameless dictator who poses as a protector. He gives us uniformed “ciphers” with numbers instead of names, and a state which represents “the victory of the many over the one.” He abolishes privacy by installing his ciphers in glass houses, constantly monitored by the secret police (“the Guardians”), except during the state-mandated “sex hour,” which, in a world without love, is organised via a ticketing system. He provides them with synthetic food, a controlled climate and formulaic, machine-made music (Zamyatin’s musicometers anticipate Orwell’s versificators), and lashes them to a daily ritual, the Table of Hours, which spoofs the efficien
cy doctrine of the management consultant Frederick Winslow Taylor. He constructs a rectilinear city of glass, modelled on the geometry of Petrograd, and, beyond the Green Wall, an untamed wilderness to represent humanity’s atavistic impulses. Zamyatin also establishes the archetype of a timid cog in the machine who is prodded into rebellion by a bewitching female heretic.

  For all its importance, We is not more widely read because it is not easily read. Following Zamyatin’s compacted, impressionistic prose feels rather like studying a painting by his contemporaries Malevich and El Lissitzky—all colours and shapes. Flocking birds, for example, are “sharp, black, piercing, falling triangles”; laughter is “festive rockets of red, blue, gold”; anatomy is described as geometry. Zamyatin wanted language fit for an accelerating world. “When you are moving fast,” he wrote in 1923, “the canonised, the customary eludes the eye; hence, the unusual, often startling, symbolism and vocabulary. The image is sharp, synthetic, with a single salient feature—the one feature you will glimpse from a speeding car.” He also wanted to articulate the mindset of his narrator, D-530. Writers such as Bellamy and Wells used a contemporary protagonist as a reader proxy, but Zamyatin, plunging straight into the future, needed a new language to animate his new world. He later compared his writing to cinema: “I never explained; I always showed and suggested.”