3. Nineteen Eighty-Four: the Novel

By setting his novel nearly forty years ahead of the time he was writing it, Orwell was giving a warning about the future. As he constantly emphasized when writing about Nineteen Eighty-Four , it was not to be taken as a prophecy but as a picture of what could happen if not actively prevented. The sense of unease is established immediately in the first sentence by the clocks striking thirteen; this is later explained by the fact that a twenty-four hour clock is in use, but the sinister associations of thirteen, and the tradition that a clock striking thirteen is a sign that something is wrong, set the atmosphere from the beginning. The following paragraphs establish the harsh dullness of the physical conditions of life, the constant sense of being watched via the telescreen, and the overriding force of Big Brother's image. The physical appearance of Big Brother very strongly suggests Stalin, as do many of the elements of his regime and his methods of keeping power. Goldstein's appearance is modelled on Trotsky, and in his role as the former subordinate whose differences of political theory later made him his former leader's enemy, there are also clear similarities with Trotsky (whose origin, like Goldstein's, was Jewish). Yet the character of Goldstein also draws on elements of the life of Andres Nin, who had been the leader of the POUM in Spain, with whom Orwell had fought. Nin came to believe that Stalin had betrayed the principles of the revolution, and he was killed by Russian agents; as Goldstein was said to have done, he left a document setting out his political beliefs and principles.

Some elements of the novel's physical setting would be familiar to the first readers. Others (those invented by Orwell) are almost always sinister in meaning if not in name: the telescreen, Ingsoc, Hate Week, the Thought Police, Airstrip One, etc. The names of the four giant Ministries prepare the reader for the later account of Ingsoc's distortion of language, since each Ministry is really concerned with the quality directly opposed to its name. Some of the nightmare quality of this society is communicated by Winston's knowledge, as he starts to write in the diary, that although there are no laws any longer he will, if caught, probably be put to death for doing something which is technically legal.

Winston himself is clearly established from the beginning as an unheroic figure; he is thin and frail, on the way to middle age, and has a leg ulcer (we later discover that he has false teeth and is subject to coughing fits). He may, by his author's irony, have been named after Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister during World War II when he was born, but in many ways it is clear that he is to stand for Everyman.

He is presented as a man from an earlier age, old enough to have a vague memory of the distant world when he was a boy and to respond to objects from an earlier era (the "smooth creamy pages" of the diary, the nib-pen which he feels the diary deserves, and the "soft rainwatery glass" of the coral paperweight). His only memory of unselfish and devoted love from one human being to another comes from his childhood, and the culture on which the world of his childhood was based is so far removed from the one in which he now lives that when he dreams of Julia tearing off her clothes in an act of sexual (and therefore political) defiance, he wakes up with the word "Shakespeare" on his lips.

Because Orwell wants to show him as a representative as well as an individual, it is important that, for example, Winston is shown genuinely to respond to the Two-Minute Hate and not as essentially different in this respect from other Party members, as would happen if he were shown from the beginning of the novel as very strong-minded or with his own clearly formed political ideas. At the beginning, Winston's rebellion consists mainly of a dislike of the physical dullness of the world in which he lives and a vague feeling that things are not as they should be, and his diary enables him to express his unease without having to formulate the principles which he feels Ingsoc has violated. His acts of rebellion against the society in which he lives (buying and writing in the diary, having an affair with Julia, visiting the prole area of the city, renting the room from Charrington, and the most openly political making contact with O'Brien) are, in the last analysis, less important than the rebellion of mind and feeling from which they all spring, and it is for this that he is punished. As he himself reflects in the first chapter: "Only the Thought Police mattered."

His contact with Julia leads him to put into words ideas critical of the society in which they live, which before had been little more than vague feelings of unease "the mute protest in your own bones", as he describes it—even if she hardly listens to him when he explains these ideas to her and does not understand their significance, as when he tells her he has proof of official falsification of the news about Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford.

Knowing Julia makes him—feel that he is no longer, in the words of the original working title," The Last Man in Europe", but also makes him realize clearly that he was doomed from the moment he started writing in the diary. So an act of madness such as renting the room above Charrington's shop and continuing to meet in it (in direct contradiction of Julia's dictum that no meeting-place is safe more than twice) can be seen as an attempt to make the most of the moment before the inevitable blow falls, rather than a seriously-held hope that he can escape punishment for such a flagrant offence. His last words to Julia in the moment before the Thought Police arrest them are: "We are the dead."

His earlier impression of O'Brien as a man of intelligence who has the same doubts about Ingsoc as himself, and the conspiratorial feeling that this creates, are so strong that he trusts O'Brien without question. Both before his arrest and when imprisoned, this trust mirrors something of the emotional dependence which a loyal member of Ingsoc should feel for Big Brother, so that in a sense O'Brien's purpose in their interviews in Miniluv is to turn Winston's love for himself into love for Big Brother. One of Orwell's most important points is that mere obedience is not enough: Winston must achieve a moment of genuine love for Big Brother, just as earlier he achieved a moment of genuine hate for Big Brother's enemy. In order to feel this love Winston has to reject, and to admit to himself that he has rejected, all feelings of love and loyalty to anyone else. In the early stages of his time in Miniluv, although he suffers degradation, torture and humiliation, there is still some integrity inside him. But finally, threatened with what is for him the worst thing in the world, he betrays Julia by begging for her to suffer in his place, and by betraying her he betrays himself. After this, as he himself reflects, something is killed in his own heart: "burnt out, cauterized out". He has lost something vital to himself and is a shell of a man, no longer any possible threat to the State or to anyone else.

Julia is younger than Winston and does not have his memories of the world before Ingsoc changed it. Her rebellion is more instinctive and immediate than his, and she is able to live within the State's system because she has stronger feelings of self-preservation and much greater self-confidence. She is not at all interested in the theoretical basis of rebellion; she starts to listen dutifully to Winston reading "the book" but soon goes to sleep. She is, however, much better than Winston not only at practical arrangements (for making contact, hiding signs of their meetings, etc) but also at understanding instinctively the underlying reasons for some of the Party's policies, particularly those connected with sexual matters. She understands that the reason for the Party's sexual puritanism is that by making the sexual act either a political duty between husband and wife (as it was for Katherine) or for a man a furtive and joyless encounter with a prole prostitute, the Party can use sexual frustration and the resulting hysteria for its own purposes. Therefore any enjoyable act of lovemaking freely entered into by two Party members (as in the first sexual contact between Winston and Julia before there is any emotional contact between them at all) is in itself a political act. Winston begins as a rebel with his mind and feelings and progresses to physical acts of rebellion via Julia's influence. She has been a rebel with her body all her adult life and has learned to survive in ways Winston does not have the capacity for, but both of them believe that "they [the State, in the form of the Thought Police] can't get inside you", and both are proved wrong.

The other characters in the novel are sketched in more lightly. Perhaps the most interesting, and potentially the most complex, is O'Brien. On his first appearance Orwell, through Winston, points up two contrasting strands in his character: a coarse brutality, emphasized by his physical appearance, and the delicacy of gesture which Orwell compares to that of an eighteenth-century nobleman. It is the combination of these qualities which is so dangerous for Winston; O'Brien has the sensitivity to be aware of Winston's secret disloyalty to the State, and the force and ability to indict pain by which he makes Winston suffer for it. He works on Winston in Miniluv with intelligent and fanatical devotion until Winston can be released back into society, cured forever of the infection in his mind (as O'Brien sees it) which prevents him from loving Big Brother. O'Brien is an example of the type of intellectual from whom Orwell feared the worst: he would use his energy and intelligence to preserve and support a dictatorship whose sole aim was to keep power.

Syme's intellectual powers have also been corrupted by the State, although his interests are more academic and he does not possess O'Brien's force. Yet he still sees too clearly and speaks too plainly for his own safety, and, as Winston realizes at an early stage, is marked down for vapourization.

It is more of a surprise when Parsons also appears as a prisoner in Miniluv. Winston had assumed that his limited intelligence combined with his devoted orthodoxy of political views would keep him safe as a valued worker for the Party, but he is doubly betrayed—by his unconscious mind and by the daughter whose skill at discovering traitors he was so proud of—and he suffers the same fate as the others. The image has been built up of a world where no one is to be trusted. People who seem innocent of all deceit, like the old prole junk-shopkeeper, turn out to be members of the Thought Police and are most dangerous because they were never suspected. Winston's visits to the prole quarter, which he thought (once the patrols were avoided) to be a place of safety, prove fatal to him and to Julia.

Considering Winston's belief that "if there is hope, it lies in the proles", a theme which runs through the novel and which we are to understand as coming from Orwell himself, the proles play very little part in the novel. In some cases, like that of the woman singing as she hangs out her washing, they are merely in the background to point a contrast with the lives and behaviour of the members of the Party. When Winston makes an extended visit to the prole quarter and attempts to ask the old man in the pub about his memories of his youth, the response is confused and uninformative. Orwell describes Winston's hopes for the proles as "a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity", and from the evidence in the novel, the latter part of the phrase is the more accurate description. Yet Winston needs to feel that there is some hope somewhere, and certainly there is none in the harsh world of fear and drabness in which Party members live. So the proles become for him not just a romantic hope for the future, but the only hope of all.

In fact, the novel shows no hope, and certainly not for Winston. He betrays Julia and his feelings for her, and thus betrays an innermost part of himself which, once lost, can never be recovered: his personal emotions and his individual integrity, which, for Orwell, should be out of the reach of any powers of the State. Winston is no more heroic under the pressure of Mintluv than he was earlier. At the end he is seen in the Chestnut Tree cafe, where he himself had watched other men who had been broken by the State. Here he finally admits to himself that all rebellion is over and the struggle is finished. Orwell's warning is clear: Winston, with all the force of the State against him, comes not merely to accept that he is powerless against it, but actively to welcome his own defeat: he loves Big Brother. DHHrlP09YXlyOoqLS5XLBeXgCGEoRTmKcHHDznUaOuqjiLEkMhaoF5I3c5mtqYCo