1985

by Anthony Burgess

  Despite their obvious points of disagreement, Orwell and Burgess seem closest in their speculative fiction, and in their non-fiction writing about possible futures. The Wanting Seed and A Clockwork Orange, both published in 1962, are written in full awareness of the canon of dystopian writing (e.g. Huxley's Brave New World and Zamyatin's We) identified in Orwell's journalism. In The Wanting Seed, Burgess imagines a futuristic over-populated England where homosexuality has become the stateapproved norm. Instead of the clumsy device of having Winston Smith sit down to read long passages from Emmanuel Goldstein's book in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Burgess makes his protagonist a history teacher, who is capable of understanding his current situation and placing it in a wider context of historical forces. That said, Burgess's theorizing about politics is not as well informed as Orwell's, and all of his dystopias (including his later apocalyptic novel, The End of the World News) have a literary and theological flavour which reflects his preoccupations as a reader. Whereas Orwell is transparently a man of the Left, Burgess's politics are so unpredictable and inconsistent that it would be impossible to identify him with any political party. Although he voted Conservative in 1951, this did not prevent him from supporting the Italian Communists when he lived in Rome in the 1970s.

  Orwell died before the publication of David Karp's novel, One (1953), but it proved influential on Burgess's thinking about the evils of the state. Burgess was much in demand as a futurologist after the publication of A Clockwork Orange. He discussed 'The Future of Anglo-American' in Harper's in February 1968, and speculated about 'The Novel in 2000 AD' in the New York Times on 29 March 1970. Given that both Orwell and Burgess were concerned with linguistic and cultural change, it is unsurprising that both Nineteen Eighty-Four and 1985 end with descriptions of 'Newspeak' and 'Worker's English'. Orwell and Burgess were aware of the Basic English project proposed by I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden, which aimed to reduce English to a vocabulary of no more than 850 words, for the benefit of overseas students who were learning English. The poet William Empson (a friend and BBC colleague of Orwell's) recalled that one of his Chinese students of Basic English had mistranslated 'out of sight, out of mind' as 'invisible, insane'. It was a utopian project, and no less doomed to fail than any other utopia, but Orwell's overwhelming instinct was to resist the impoverishment of language. As he writes in 'Politics and the English Language': 'When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy.' Readers of A Clockwork Orange will not be slow to notice that there are teenage gang-members in 1985 who speak an invented language based on Hindi. This is a kind of self-referential joke, and it never amounts to anything more substantial than a joke, but it is more difficult to know what to make of the underground university, in which young people secretly teach themselves Latin and Ancient Greek. Perhaps it is an example of Burgess revealing himself as a former schoolmaster, indulging in a piece of hopeless utopianism. His pedagogic urge was slow to fade.

  One fixed point in all of Burgess's writing about the future is his conviction that the Soviet Union would continue to be a major force in world politics for at least 200 years. In fairness to Burgess, there were few political commentators in 1978 who were far-sighted enough to see that the Berlin Wall would fall just eleven years later, and many on the Left (including academic Marxists and prominent trade unionists) were looking forward to the adoption, through revolutionary change if necessary, of Soviet-style politics in Britain. But often Burgess's writing about the future simply leaves us feeling that he should have got a more effective crystal ball. It is hard to take him entirely seriously when he says (in his 1984 essay on Orwell) that New Age religious cults represent a more serious threat to the future of British democracy than political terrorism. By 1984 he had already written about the danger of cults in Earthly Powers (1980) and The End of the World News (1982).

  Despite the loudness of some of its thinking and feeling about ideologies, Burgess's book is redeemed by its close reading of Orwell, and by the inventive ways in which Burgess manages to dramatize his critical material, such as when he sets up a dialogue between a (semiautobiographical?) 'Old Man' and his interviewer. 1985 is not a work of which Orwell could have been expected to approve, but it succeeds in its aim of setting out an alternative dystopia by drawing on the political tensions which dominated the time of its writing. It is a document which speaks very eloquently about contemporary fears and anxieties, and its value is bound to increase as time passes.

  2 + 2 = 5

  a notice put up in Moscow during the first Five Year Plan, indicating the possibility of getting the job done in four years, if workers put their backs into it

  Part One

  1984

  Catechism

  When did the twentieth-century nightmare begin?

  In 1945, when, for many people, it seemed to have ended.

  How did it begin?

  With the first use of atomic bombs, developed with urgency to finish speedily a war that had gone on too long. But with the end of the conflict between the fascist States and the free world (which was not all free, because a great part of it was totalitarian), the stage was cleared for the enactment of the basic encounter of the century. The communist powers faced the capitalist powers, and both sides had unlimited nuclear weapons.

  So that -?

  So that what had been used to end one war was now employed to start another.

  What was the outcome of the Great Nuclear War of the 1950s?

  Countless atomic bombs were dropped on the industrial centres of western Europe, the Americas and the Soviet Empire. The devastation was so terrible that the ruling elites of the world came to realize that nuclear warfare, in destroying organized society, destroyed their own capacity for maintaining power.

  So that -?

  By common consent the nuclear age was brought to an end. Wars henceforth would be waged with conventional weapons of the kind developed during the Second World War. That wars should continue to be fought, and on a global scale, was taken for granted.

  What was the disposition of the nations at the end of the Great Nuclear War?

  The end of that war saw the world divided into three large powerunits or superstates. Nations did not exist any more. Oceania was the name given to the empire comprising the United States, Latin America and the former British Commonwealth. The centre of authority was probably, but not certainly, North America, though the ideology that united the territories of the superstate had been developed by British intellectuals and was known as English Socialism or Ingsoc. The old geographical nomenclatures had ceased to have much meaning: indeed, their association with small national loyalties and traditional cultures was regarded as harmful to the new orthodoxy.

  What happened to Great Britain, for instance?

  Britain was renamed Airstrip One - a neutral designation not intended to be contemptuous.

  The other superstates?

  The two other superstates were Eurasia and Eastasia. Eurasia had been formed by the absorption of the whole of continental Europe into the Soviet Union. Eastasia was made up of China, Japan and the south-east Asian mainland, together with portions of Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet that, bordering on the territories of Eurasia, fluctuated in imposed loyalty according to the progress of the war.

  War?

  War between the superstates started in 1959, and it has been going on ever since.

  War with conventional weapons, then?

  True. Limited armament and professional troops. Armies are, by the standards of earlier modern wars, comparatively small. The combatants are unable to destroy each other: if they could, the war would end, and the war must not end.

  Why must it not end?

  War is peace, meaning war is a way of life to the new age as peace was a way of life to the old. A
way of life and an aspect of political philosophy.

  But what is the war about?

  Let me say first what the war is not about. There is no material cause for fighting. There is no ideological incompatibility. Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia all accept the common principle of a single ruling party and a total suppression of individual freedom. The war has nothing to do with opposed world-views or, strictly, with territorial expansion.

  But it has to do with -?

  The ostensible reason for waging war is to gain possession of a rough quadrilateral of territory whose corners are Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong. Here there is a bottomless reserve of cheap coolie labour, with hundreds of millions of men and women inured to hard work and starvation wages. The contest for this prize is conducted in equatorial Africa, the Middle East, southern India, and the Malay archipelago, and it does not move much outside the area of dispute. There is also a measure of fighting around the northern icecap, where valuable mineral deposits are believed to lie.

  Ostensible. The real aim?

  To use up the products of the industrial machine, to keep the wheels turning but the standard of living low. For the well-fed, physically contented citizen, with a wide range of goods for consumption and the money to buy them, is a bad subject for an oligarchical state. A man filled with meat turns his back on the dry bones of political doctrine. Fanatical devotion to the ruling party comes more readily from the materially deprived. Moreover, loyalty and what used to be called patriotism are best sustained when the enemy seems to be at the gates.

  What enemy?

  A good question. I said perpetual war, but it is not, to be strictly accurate, always the same war. Oceania is sometimes in alliance with Eurasia against Eastasia, sometimes with Eastasia against Eurasia. Sometimes she faces an alliance of the other two. The shifts in alignment occur with great rapidity and require correspondingly rapid readjustments of policy. But it is essential that the war be officially presented as always the same war, and it follows that the enemy must always be one and the same. The enemy at any given point in time must be the eternal enemy, the enemy past and future.

  Impossible.

  Impossible? The ruling party has total control of the collective memory and, by the alteration, or strictly rectification, of records, can easily bring the past into line with the present. What is true now must always have been true. Truth is actuality. Actuality is now. There is another reason for requiring an eternal enemy, but consideration of that had best be deferred.

  Until -?

  Until you properly understand the true aim of Ingsoc.

  Describe Oceanian society.

  It is very simply stratified. Eighty-five per cent of the population is proletarian. The proles, as they are officially called, are despicable, being uneducated, apolitical, grumbling but inert. They perform the most menial tasks and are satisfied with the most brutish diversions. The remaining fifteen per cent consists of the Party - Inner and Outer. The Inner Party is an elective aristocracy, dedicated to the implementation of the Ingsoc metaphysic. The Outer Party is made up of functionaries, a kind of lower civil service whose members are employed in the four main departments of government - the Ministries of Love, Plenty, Truth and Peace.

  Peace?

  Really war. But war is peace.

  Who is the head of the Party?

  A personage called Big Brother who, never having been born, can never die. Big Brother is God. He must be obeyed, but he must also be loved.

  Is that possible?

  It is essential.

  But can one be made to love to order?

  There are ways and means. The elimination of marital love, of love between parents and children, the destruction of joy in sex and in begetting help to direct what may be regarded as an emotional need towards its proper object. The existence of the traitor Emmanuel Goldstein, always in league with the enemy, who hates Big Brother and wishes to destroy Oceania, ensures a perpetual diffusion of fear and loathing among the population, with a compensatory devotion to him who alone can protect and save.

  What is the Ingsoc metaphysic?

  Ultimate reality, like the first cause or causes, has no existence outside the mind that observes it. Sense-data and ideas alike are mere subjective phantoms. The mind is not, however, an individual mind but a collective one. Big Brother's mind contains all others. His vision of reality is the true one, and all others are false, heretical, a danger to the State. The individual must learn to accept without question, without even hesitation, the vision of the Party, using a technique known as doublethink to reconcile what appear to be contradictions. Outward conformity of belief is not enough. There must be total and sincere allegiance. If the individual memory of the past conflicts with Party history, the device of instantaneous memory control must be employed. Any contradiction can be resolved, and must be. Doublethink - wholly instinctive, sincere, unqualified - is an essential instrument of orthodoxy.

  What, apart from metaphysical idealism and the perfection of its diffusion through the body of the Party, is the true aim of Ingsoc?

  If you expect demagogic hypocrisy, you will not get it. Rule is not directed towards the welfare of the ruled. Rule is for power. The Party desires total control of everything outside itself, ingesting all of exterior reality into its organism, but it is deliberately reluctant to absorb its enemies. The war with Eastasia or Eurasia or both will never end, the treacherous Goldstein will never die, because Ingsoc needs enemies as a nutcracker needs nuts. Only over an enemy can power be satisfactorily exercised. The future is a boot perpetually crushing the face of a victim. All other pleasures will in time be subordinated to the pleasure of power - food, art, nature and, above all, sex.

  May nobody revolt against this monstrous denial of human freedom?

  Nobody. Except, of course, the occasional madman. It is the loving concern of Big Brother to restore such a deviate to sanity. And then to vaporize him as a flaw in the pattern, to convert him into an unperson. Rebellion belongs to the old way. And what is this human freedom? Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? A man may be free of illness as a dog may be free of fleas, but freedom as an absolute is freedom in a void. The watchwords of old revolutions were always nonsense. Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. The pursuit of happiness. Virtue. Knowledge. Power is different. Power makes sense. God is power. Power is for ever . . .

  Intentions

  There are many who, not knowing Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, nevertheless know such terms as doublethink and Newspeak and Big Brother, and, above all, associate the cipher 1984 with a situation in which the individual has lost all his rights of moral choice (this is what freedom means) and is subject to the arbitrary power of some ruling body - not necessarily the State. That the year 1984 may come and go without the realization of the nightmare - with, indeed, an augmentation of personal freedom and a decay of corporate power - will not necessarily invalidate the horrible identification. Doublethink, which the art of fiction can abet, enables us to reconcile the most blatant disparities. In the film Stanley Kramer made of Nevil Shute's novel On The Beach, the world comes to an end in 1962. Seeing the film in a television old-movie slot, we in the seventies can still shudder at what is going to happen in the sixties. In an idyllic 1984, the 1984 of Orwell's vision will still serve as a symbol of humanity's worst fears.

  1984 is used as a somewhat vague metaphor of social tyranny, and one has to regret the vagueness. American college students have said, 'Like 1984, man,' when asked not to smoke pot in the classroom or advised gently to do a little reading. By extension, the term Orwellian is made to apply to anything from a computer print-out to the functional coldness of a new airport. There are no computers on Airstrip One, and most of the buildings we hear of are decaying Victorian. Present-day Leningrad, with its facades in need of a lick of paint, its carious warehouses, is closer to the look of Big Brother's London than is, say, Dallas International. For Orwellian read Wellsian - specifically the decor of the 1936 film Thing
s to Come. The whole point of the urban scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it doesn't matter what it looks like, since reality is all in the mind. And there is nothing 'Orwellian' about particular deprivations - like a ban on copulation in trams: it is the total and absolute, planned, philosophically consistent subordination of the individual to the collective that Orwell is projecting into a future that, though it is set in 1984, could be any time between now and 1962, when Nevil Shute brings the world to an end.

  We have the following tasks. To understand the waking origins of Orwell's bad dream - in himself and in the phase of history that helped to make him. To see where he went wrong and where he seems likely to have been right. To contrive an alternative picture - using his own fictional technique - of the condition to which the seventies seem to be moving and which may well subsist in a real 1984 - or, to avoid plagiarism, 1985. Orwell's story was set in England, and so will be mine. Americans may reflect, before deploring this author's inverted chauvinism, that Britain has usually, with the absent-mindedness that acquired her an empire, blazed the major trails of social change. Change for the worse, as well as the better.

  The French are cleverer than the British! They are skilful at the intellectual work of getting new constitutions on to paper, but the forms of new order have to emerge in Britain first. Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, which had such an influence on the American Constitution, could not have been written if there had not been an existing social contract in Britain - one that Montesquieu did not thoroughly understand. The British do not well understand their political systems either, but they make no claim to be clever. It was Walter Bagehot who described the British as stupid. They lack the collective intelligence on which the French pride themselves, but they do not noticeably suffer for this deficiency. French intellectuality may have had something to do with the French surrender of 1940; British stupidity counselled resistance to Nazi Germany. Out of stupidity, which may be glossed as intuition, came the seventeenth-century revolution and the settlement of 1688, complete with limitation of the power of the executive and Bill of Rights. Out of the muddle and mess of contemporary Britain the pattern of the future of the West may well be emerging. It is a pattern which many of us must deplore, but only Ingsoc and Big Brother will prove capable of breaking it.