Discuss The Ways In Which Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four Can Be Described As ‘the Worst Of All Possible Worlds’.

When considering the question posed, it is important to remember that the key idea within the opening statement is the word possible . Orwell forms the idea of a world that seems dystopian through employing analogies of his own experiences in life and contemporary issues. Christopher Hitchens notes a passage in Orwell s earlier novel Burmese Days that describes the protagonist s role as a stifling, stultifying world in which every word and every thought is censored... free speech is unthinkable and your whole life is a life of lies. [1]

The parallels between the life described in this brief passage and that of Winston Smith as a civil servant working for a Party he has become disillusioned with are clear to see. Later in Orwell s life, a situation with even closer parallels to Smith s came about as he worked for the BBC. Orwell experienced censorship in this role and Slater goes so far to say that it is only a short step from that position to one that would characterise a totalitarian state like Oceania [2]. The analogies between Orwell s life and times and the events within Nineteen Eighty-Four are clear on personal and wider levels.

Within the book itself, Great Britain has become part of a superstate named Oceania, with the country itself renamed the rather anodyne Airstrip One. The decrease in importance of England in world standing is emphasised where it is described simply as the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. [3] This could well have been triggered by the decline of empire at the time of Orwell writing the novel which had seen India, of which Orwell s birthplace Burma had been a part, leave the British Empire the year before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell s attitude towards the British Empire was ambivalent stating that the British are in Burma to rob the Burmese [4], but this was indicative of his attitude towards colonialism in general and part of this attitude is reflected in the way that Britain is presented as an unimportant province of a far larger power, much like the British colonies he felt were oppressed. Equally the fact that Britain is an anonymous part of a superpower could well allude to the fear that Britain was beginning to become swamped by the United States after World War II, a mere part of the West s ideological battle with the Soviet Union. In terms of familiarity to the reader, Orwell employs the tactic of using buildings and places familiar to contemporary readers. The setting is London, but the descri ption of London is what adds to the familiarity as it can be seen to be a post-war London similar to that which existed at the time of writing the novel. Winston Smith, the protagonist, describes the smell of boiled cabbage and old rag mats, (p.1) and Victory Mansions, the flats in which Winston resides, sound much like the homes in which many British people lived in post-war Britain being old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts. (p.25) The prole areas have an even greater familiarity to readers as cobbled streets of little two storey houses with battered doorways (p.95) are described by Winston. The proles themselves can be seen as an analogy for the working classes by the way in which they are described by Winston in terms of their aforementioned ramshackle homes, which must have sounded familiar to many a post-war working class reader, but also their speech, appearance and interests. Their speech is colloquial and littered with grammatical inaccuracies such as you d of done the same as what I done (p. 96) and you ain t got the same problems as what I got. (p.96) This speech is very different to that employed by the Inner Party members who Winston comes into contact with and fits in very closely with stereotypical working class vernacular. The interests of the proles are similar to those of contemporary working classes too, the lottery is described by Winston as their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant, (p.98) with a discussion on how no number ending in seven had won showing that the proles are intelligent enough to solve maths problems in order to succeed.[5] Part of this evidence for intelligence may well have led to Winston s belief that if there was hope, it lay in the proles , (p.95) especially when it is considered that several revolutions in Orwell s lifetime had been brought about by working class movements such as the Bolshevik movement in Soviet Russia. Anybody else, Winston suggests, is not trustworthy as they had either been wiped out in the great purges of the fifties and sixties or had been terrified into complete intellectual surrender .(p.95) The only people still alive who could give an honest account of Britain before the time of Big Brother were proles, believes Winston. Part of this sympathy towards the proles becomes clear when Winston enters a pub in their area and appears to be made welcome, in spite of his the fact that he is wearing the blue overalls of the party. In this instance, the proles can be seen to be represented sympathetically by Orwell. This in turn can be seen to be representative of Orwell s positive view of the working classes for whom he was using the proles to represent.

In terms of trustworthiness, the honesty and simplicity of the proles is at odds with both the Inner Party and Outer Party members. This can be seen to be analogous of the relationship between the working classes and politicians or the ruling classes. While the language of the proles can be seen to be similar to contemporary working class vernacular, the Newspeak employed by the Outer Party protagonists is very different. Concepts such as excellent and bad are replaced by the far less emotive doubleplusgood and doubleplusungood respectively. The English language as we would recognise it is slowly being undermined deliberately by the ruling party, as is discussed by Winston and Syme. Syme states that you think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We re destroying words scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We re cutting the language down to the bone. (p.59) This discussion is reflective of Orwell s own fear that English as a language was undermined regularly by politicians in his own world to satisfy their own ends, as was discussed in his essay Politics and the English Language. Within, Orwell states his fear that English as a language is collapsing with civilisation and is twisted by politicians in order to relay whichever message they wish. Within the novel itself, this manifests itself in the deliberate motive of the party to change not only the language, but the cognition that language creates. Syme proves this idea when he states that even the literature of the party will change. Even the slogans will change. How can you have a slogan like freedom is slavery when the concept of freedom has been abolished? (p. 61) Ironically, Orwell s fear expressed in Politics and the English Language is of the opposite occurring in political language, over-complication of language leading to the truth behind the lies told by politicians being lost. The chief problems with political speech are listed as foreign expressions, glorified politics, use of archaic phrases and the use of foreign, scientific or jargon words where English would be acceptable. [6] However, the motives are the same. While one method is to render speech so complex that critical thinking of the speech becomes difficult, the other method shown in Nineteen Eighty-Four is to simplify the language itself to such an extent that critical thinking is still impossible, as the language required will simply not exist in time. In the aforementioned essay, Orwell clearly states five rules that he feels a political writer must adhere to, focusing on the clarity of expression he feels is necessary to honest speech. However, the sixth rule states that we should break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous[7]. Here it can be seen that the Newspeak created by The Party in Oceania is indeed the barbarous speech that Orwell warned against, seeing as Winston describes Newspeak as not the man s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. (p. 63) The parallels between contemporary politicians and the Outer Party members are clear, that even their language shows unquestioning adherence to the status quo to the extent that they have become unable to even contemplate an alternative.

The ignorance of the party members regarding alternatives to their lifestyle can be seen to be a parody of Orwell s own experiences while working for the BBC, where he described some of his colleagues as being too politically ignorant [8] to differentiate between fascist and communist newspapers in pre-war Britain. The simple belief was that any opposition to the accepted British way of life had to be negative and therefore censored, just as any opposition to Big Brother was characterised as thoughtcrime. This also becomes clear when it is considered that the population of Oceania are unable to recall that their nation had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago (p. 40) whereas they were now at war with the same nation. When the year of writing this novel is taken into account, it can be seen what situation is being parodied. The novel was written in 1948, after it had become clear that Britain s ally in the Second World War, the Soviet Union, had taken over great swathes of land in Eastern Europe and after Winston Churchill had made his famous Iron Curtain speech in which he declared the nation to be a threat to American and British interests. The Soviet un ion had therefore become an ideological enemy whereas four years previously, it had been an ally in the struggle against Nazism and Fascism. Jenni Calder also points out the similarities between Oceania and wartime Britain. She notes that in both there is a state of perpetual crisis to get people to do what is wanted, to submit to power. [9] She also states that the totalitarianism seen in Oceania is similar to a Britain that had emergency powers and a coalition government with no opposition[10]. In terms of the lifestyles of individual people, the rationing seen in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the unquestioning submission of self-interest to the national interest is simply the fact that in a crisis situation thing can be asked of people which normally they would find intolerable.[11]

All of the above factors increase the familiarisation not only to contemporary readers living in the time, but to modern readers who have the ability to research the many issues surrounding the novel. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a political novel describing the erosion of civil and individual liberties at the behest of a government that claims to protect the national interest and way of life. It is often seen as a parody or condemnation of totalitarian regimes that existed at the time of writing the novel, but it is clear from more exacting research that this simplifies Orwell s motives. There are many elements of Oceania, the Party and Big Brother that show not only the worst of totalitarian regimes but also the worst excesses of any government protecting its own interests at a time of war, often at the expense of the personal freedoms of the population within. The significant point of Oceania is its state of perpetual war, hostile elements and enemies are always used as a means to justify all of the worst infringements of the rights of the people, just as many a supposedly democratic state has done. In this instance, Orwell can be seen to be criticising democratic societies as well as totalitarian ones. The fact that Great Britain and the United States appeared to be at loggerheads with the Soviet un ion they had supported only three years earlier can be seen as evidence that none of these nations had learned their lesson from the destructive conflict that had once brought them together. In this instance, Orwell is showing the worst of all possible worlds by showing what could happen if the situation with the Soviet un ion was allowed to escalate into war. A perpetual and destructive war would follow, leading to the steady degeneration of freedom in the hitherto free world , before it became the Oceania so terrifyingly described within the novel. It can therefore be seen as a cautionary tale warning us against further conflict in the name of freedom, for freedom would ultimately be the main casualty.

[1] Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters, (New York, 2002) p. 17

[2] Ian Slater, Orwell: The Road to Airstrip One, (London, 1985), p. 209

[3]George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, (London, 2000) p. 5

[4] David Wykes, A Preface to Orwell, (New York, 1987) p.63

[5] David Wykes, A Preface to Orwell, (New York, 1987) , p.95

[6] Stephen Greenblatt, The Norton Anthology of English Literature Eight Edition, Volume F: The Twentieth Century and After, (New York, 2006) p.2392

[7] ibid

[8] W.J. West, The Larger Evils Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Truth behind the Satire, (Edinburgh, 1992) p.15

[9] Jenni Calder Huxley Brave New World and Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four, (London, 1976), p. 9

[10] Ibid, p. 10

[11] Ibid