1985

by Anthony Burgess

  Nonsense, like saying that the sun will come out at night. Or, for that matter, that Big Brother is doubleplusungood when, by sheer definition, he cannot be.

  In 1984 we are only in the initial phase of the control of thought through language. The State's three slogans are WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Orwell has informed us that the term freedom can have no absolute, or political, meaning, and yet here it is, with just that meaning, blazoned on the State's coinage. Moreover, the State is using paradox in an untypically witty manner: it is the last kick of wit, we must suppose, before the endless night sets in. We are being told, very pithily, that war is the normal condition of the new age, as peace was of the old, and that it is through fighting the enemy that we best learn to love the tranquillity of our bondage. To be left to choose our own way of life is an intolerable burden; the agony of free choice is the clank of the chains of servitude to one's environment. The more we know the more we are a prey to the contradictions of thought; the less we know the better able are we to act. All this is true, and we bless the State for ridding us of the intolerable tyrannies of democracy. Men and women of the Party are now free to engage in intellectual games.

  Winston Smith's work is an intellectual game, and a highly stimulating one. It consists in expressing doublethink through Newspeak. He has to correct errors in back numbers of The Times - meaning, in uningsoc terms, to perpetrate lies - and to compose his corrections, which often amount to full news items, in a language which, restricting semantic choice, promotes ingenuity. (Incidentally, we may ask why separate copies of The Times are allowed to exist, since the collection of them for destruction must be a great nuisance. Why shouldn't it appear as a wall newspaper?) The fascination is that of composing a long telegram. Indeed, Newspeak is recognizably based on press cablese. Orwell must have relished the exchange between Evelyn Waugh and the Daily Mail, when that great popular organ sent him to cover the conflict in Abyssinia: WHY UNNEWS - UNNEWS GOODNEWS - UNNEWS UNJOB - UPSTICK JOB ASSWISE. Newspeak is, God help us, fun. Doublethink is, God help us again, absorbing mental acrobatics. There may be dangers in living in 1984, but there is no need for dullness.

  Consider the situation for eighty-five per cent of the community - the proles. There is a war going on, but there is no conscription, and the only bombs that fall are dropped by the government, just to remind the population that there is a war going on. If consumer goods are short, that is an inevitable condition of war. There are pubs, with beer sold in litre glasses, there are cinemas, a state lottery, popular journalism and even pornography (produced mechanically by a department of the Ministry of Truth called Pornosec). There is no unemployment, there is enough money, there are no oppressive regulations - indeed, there are no laws at all. The entire population, prole and Party alike, is untroubled by crime and violence on the democratic model. One may walk the streets at night quite unmolested - except, presumably, by police cars on the pattern of Los Angeles. There are no worries about inflation. One of the major issues of our time, racial intolerance, is lacking. As Goldstein tells us, 'Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party.' There are no stupid politicians, timewasting political debates, ridiculous hustings. The government is efficient and stable. There are even measures devised to eliminate from life the old agonies of sex and the oppressions of family loyalty. No wonder the system is universally accepted. Winston Smith, in his ingenuous obsession with the liberty of being able to say that 2 + 2 = 4, and his conviction that the entire army is out of step except himself, is a boil, a pustule, a flaw on the smooth body of the collective. It is a mark of charity on the State's part that he should be cured of his madness, not immediately vaporized as a damned nuisance.

  During the Second World War, Orwell bravely wrote that neither Hitler nor his brand of socialism could be written off as sheer evil or morbidity. He saw the attractive elements in the Fuhrer's personality as well as the appeal of a political system that had restored self-respect and national pride to a whole people. Only a man capable of appreciating the virtues or oligarchy could write a book like Nineteen Eighty-Four. Indeed, any intellectual disappointed with the wretched outcome of centuries of democracy must have a doublethinkful attitude to Big Brother. Given a chance, confronted by the spectacle of hundreds of millions living, joyfully, resignedly, or without overmuch complaint, in a condition of what the West calls servitude, the intellectual may well jump over the wall and find peace in some variety or other of Ingsoc. And the argument against oligarchical collectivism is perhaps not one based on a vague tradition of 'liberty' but one derived from awareness of contradictions in the system itself.

  In the cellars of the Ministry of Love, O'Brien tells Winston of the world the Party is building:

  A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilisations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. . . . Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. . . . There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever. . . .

  Winston's heart freezes at the words, his tongue too: he cannot reply. But our reply might be: man is not like this, the simple pleasure of cruelty is not enough for him; the intellectual - for only intellectuals with, behind them, a long deprivation of power, can articulate a concept like that - demands a multiplicity of pleasures; you talk of the intoxication of power growing subtler, but it seems to me you refer to something growing simpler; this brutal simplification surely entails a diminution of the intellectual subtlety that alone can sustain Ingsoc. Pleasures cannot, in the nature of things, remain static; have you not heard of diminishing returns? It is a very static pleasure you are talking about. You speak of the abolition of the orgasm, but you seem to forget that pleasure in cruelty is a sexual pleasure. If you kill the distinction between the beautiful and the ugly, you will have no gauge for assessing the intensity of the pleasure of cruelty. But to all our objections O'Brien would reply: I speak of a new kind of human entity.

  Exactly. So he does. It has nothing to do with humanity as we have known it for several millennia. The new human entity is a science fiction concept, a kind of Martian. A remarkable quantum leap is required to get from Ingsoc - which is grounded philosophically on a very old-fashioned view of reality and, politically, on familiar state oppression - to Powerman, or whatever the new concept is to be named. Moreover, this proposed 'world of trampling and being trampled upon' has to be reconciled with the continuing processes or government. The complexities of running a State machine are hardly compatible with the vision - not necessarily a demented vision - of exquisitely indulged cruelty. The pleasure of power has much to do with the pleasure of government, in the variety of modes of imposing an individual or collective will on the governed. 'A boot stamping on a human face - for ever' - that is a metaphor of power, but it is a metaphor inside a metaphor. Winston, hearing the eloquence with which the Ingsoc dream is propounded, thinks he hears the voice of madness - the more terrifying because it encloses his own apparent sanity. But madness never encloses sanity; only poetry, which has the surface appearance of madness, can do that. O'Brien is poeticizing. We, the readers,
are chilled and thrilled, but we do not take the poem literally.

  We all know that no politician, statesman or dictator seeks power for its own sake. Power is a position, a point, an eminence, a situation of control which, when total, confers pleasures which are the reward of the power - the pleasure of choosing to be feared or loved, to do harm or good, condemn or reprieve, tyrannize or bestow benefits. We recognize power when we see a capacity for choice unqualified by exterior factors. When authority is expressed solely through doing evil, then we doubt the existence of choice and hence the existence of power. The ultimate power, by definition, is God's, and this power would seem non-existent if it were confined to condemning sinners to hell. A Caligula or a Nero is recognized as a temporary aberration, a disease that cannot hold power for long because it can choose nothing but the destructive. The evil dreams of a Marquis de Sade derive from an incapacity to achieve orgasm by any regular means, and we accept that he has no choice but to lay on the whips or the burning omelettes. He makes more sense than O'Brien's sadism freed from the need for orgasm. O'Brien is talking not of power but of a disease not clearly understood. Disease, of its nature, either kills or is cured. And if this disease is not disease but a new kind of health for a new kind of humanity - well, so be it. But we are the old kind of humanity and not greatly interested. Kill us by all means, but let us not pretend that we are being eliminated by a higher order of reality. We are merely being torn by a tiger or pulverized by a Martian deathray.

  Reality is inside the collective skull of the Party: the exterior world can be ignored or shaped according to the Party's will. If the electrical supplies fail that nourish the machines of torture, what then? Is the juice, in some mystical way, still flowing? And what if the oil supplies give out? Can mind affirm that they are still there? There is no science, since the empirical process of thought has been outlawed. Technological skills are all harnessed to the making of armaments or the elimination of personal freedom. Neurologists are abolishing the orgasm, and we must assume that cognate specializations are devising other modes of killing pleasure or enhancing pain. No preventive medicine, no advances in the curing of diseases, no transplantation of organs, no new drugs. Airstrip One would be powerless to stem a strange epidemic. Of course, the decay and death of individual citizens matters little so long as the collective body flourishes. 'The individual is only a cell,' says O'Brien. 'The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your finger-nails?' Still, this vaunted control of the outside world is bound to seem impaired when incurable disease asks the mind to get out, it has outlived its tenancy of the flesh. Of course, logically bodies may disappear altogether, and Big Brother will find himself in the position of the Church Triumphant, souls or Soul static in the empyrean for ever and ever, but with no flesh to thwack or nerves to get screaming.

  Nature ignored or ill-treated has a way of expressing her resentment, as the margarine commercials used to remind us. Pollution, says the Party, does not exist. Nature will powerfully disagree. Earthquakes cannot be shrugged off with doublethink. Collective solipsism represents a hubris the gods of the natural order would be quick to punish with failed harvests and endemic syphilis. Orwell was writing at a time when the atom bomb was feared more than the destruction of the environment. Ingsoc, though, has its provenance in an even earlier time, the Wellsian one, when nature was inert and malleable and man could do with her whatever he wished.

  Even the processes of linguistic change are an aspect of nature, taking place unconsciously and, it appears, autonomously. There is no guarantee that the State's creation of Newspeak could flourish impervious to gradual semantic distortion, vowel mutation, the influence of the richer Oldspeak of the proles. If doubleplusungood or, with a Macbeth flavouring, doubledoubleplusungood, is applied to an ill-cooked egg, we shall need something stronger to describe a sick headache. Unbigbrotherwise uningsocful doubledoubledoubleplusungood, for instance. Bigbrotherwise, as an intensifier, can be as neutral as bloody. Big Brother, being the only deity, can be invoked when we hit a thumb with a hammer or get caught in the rain. This is bound to diminish him. Pejorative semantic change is a feature of all linguistic history. But - one forgets - one is dealing with a new kind of human being and a new kind of reality. We should not strictly be speculating about something that cannot happen here.

  We must take Nineteen Eighty-Four not only as a Swiftian toy but as an extended metaphor of apprehension. As a projection of a possible future, Orwell's vision has a purely fragmentary validity. Ingsoc cannot come into being: it is the unrealizable ideal of totalitarianism which mere human systems unhandily imitate. It is the metaphorical power that persists: the book continues to be an apocalyptical codex of our worst fears. But why do we have these fears? We are so damnably pessimistic that we almost want Ingsoc to happen. We are scared of the State -always the State. Why?

  Cacotopia

  'Wherever you are, you always have to work. There's never any excuse for idleness. Nor are there any taverns, public houses, brothels. There are no opportunities for seduction, no places for secret meetings. Everyone has his eye on you. You not only have to get on with your work, you have to make proper use of your spare time.' That is a rough translation from Sir Thomas More's Utopia. It does not sound so bad in the original Latin. In colloquial English it has an Ingsoc flavour. The term Utopia, which More invented, has always had a connotation of ease and comfort, Lotus Land, but it merely means any imaginary society, good or bad. The Greek elements which make up the word are ou, meaning no or not, and topos, meaning a place. In many minds the ou has been confused with eu - well, good, pleasant, beneficial. Eupepsia is good digestion, dyspepsia we all know. Dystopia has been opposed to eutopia, but both terms come under the Utopian heading. I prefer to call Orwell's imaginary society a cacotopia - on the lines of cacophony or cacodemon. It sounds worse than dystopia. Needless to say, none of these terms are to be found in Newspeak.

  Most visions of the future are cacotopian. George Orwell was an aficionado of cacotopian fiction, and we may regard his Nineteen Eighty-Four as competing in the Worst of All Imaginary Worlds stakes. It has won by many lengths, with the next worst mare of the night somewhat broken-winded. But without that book Orwell might not have felt inclined to compete.

  The book is We, by E. I. Zamyatin. Orwell reviewed it in Tribune on 4 January, 1946, having at last got his hands on it several years after hearing that it existed. It was always an elusive book, and, if it is easily obtainable now in most languages, that is because Orwell was influenced by it. It is not, apparently, to be found in the original Russian. Zamyatin was a Russian novelist and critic who died in Paris in 1937. Imprisoned by the Czarist government in 1906, he was put into a cell on the same corridor of the same prison by the Bolsheviks in 1922. He disliked most governments and leaned to a kind of primitive anarchism. His title seems to allude to a slogan of Bakunin, the father of anarchism: 'I do not want to be I, I want to be We.' This seems to mean that the antithesis of the powerful centralized State is not the individual but the free anarchic community.

  We was written about 1923. It is not about Russia; indeed, it does not portray, even obliquely, any existing political system, but it was refused publication on the grounds that it was ideologically dangerous. One can see why, despite the wildness of the fantasy and the remoteness of the setting. We are in the twenty-sixth century, and the scene is a Utopia whose citizens have so thoroughly lost their individuality that they are known only by their numbers. They wear uniforms, and are called not human beings but 'unifs'. As the Orwellian telescreen has not yet been invented, they live in glass houses so that the State police, known as the Guardians, can supervise them more easily. They eat synthetic food and, for recreation, march about to the tune of the State anthem, which blares through loudspeakers. There is no marriage, but sex is allowed at stated intervals. For the 'sex hour' curtains are permitted to be drawn in the glass apartments. There is a sex ration-book of pink tickets: one's partner in the
act signs the counterfoil. The Single State, as it is called, is ruled by a personage as remote and vague as Big Brother: he is known as the Benefactor. He is voted to power, but he has no opponents.

  The philosophy of the Single State is simple. It is not possible to be both happy and free. Freedom imposes the agony of choice, and God, in his infinite mercy, tried to shut out that agony by shutting Adam and Eve into a glorious garden where they had all they needed. But they ate the forbidden fruit of choice, were driven out of the garden and have had to pay for free will with unhappiness. It is the duty of all good States to bring back Eden and scotch the snake of freedom.

  The hero-narrator is D-503, an engineer who tries to be a good citizen but, to his horror, finds atavistic impulses breaking in. He falls in love, which is forbidden. Worse, he falls in love with a woman - I-330 - who leads an underground resistance movement given to such vices as tobacco and alcohol and the use of the imagination. D-503, who is no true revolutionary, is given the opportunity to be rid of imagination, which the State declares to be a disease, by X-ray treatment. Cured, he betrays the conspirators to the police and watches unmoved while I-330 is tortured. All the dissidents are at length executed - by means of the Machine of the Benefactor, which reduces them to a puff of smoke and a pool of water: literal liquidation. Orwell comments:

  The execution is, in fact, a human sacrifice, and the scene describing it is given deliberately the colour of the sinister slave civilisations of the ancient world. It is this intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism - human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes - that makes Zamyatin's book superior to Huxley's.