Nineteen Eighty-Four

[Senior Baiano]

Out of copyright now of course, so open season for all sorts of fan fiction bullshit

[touchingcloth]

Nineteen Four-Twenty: Big Boomer

[Senior Baiano]

Nineteen Sixty Nine

[touchingcloth]

Out of copyright now of course, so open season for all sorts of fan fiction bullshit

Well whaddaya know. I always assumed the famous photo of him was taken around the time when Nineteen Eighty-Four was written*, and that he would therefore have died somewhere around 1984. I guess his death at a young age explains why we never got an exploration of the Cold War from him, though given the expiration of his copyrights we may yet see Animal Farm II: Bay of Pigs .

* And looking it up, it was.

[Pink Gregory]

Out of copyright now of course, so open season for all sorts of fan fiction bullshit

you alreadt had Anthony Burgess' Nineteen Eighty Five, which was mainly about how tyrannical...trade unions and muslims take over somehow.  Suprised it isn't a key text among libertarians.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

Someone has already done a sideways look at the boris/corbyn era through the lens of an animal farm sequel. It's absolute fucking shit. Also there's a new book out that's written from Julia's perspective but I haven't read that yet

[dontpaintyourteeth]

you alreadt had Anthony Burgess' Nineteen Eighty Five, which was mainly about how tyrannical...trade unions and muslims take over somehow.  Suprised it isn't a key text among libertarians.

Terrible book, the worst thing he ever did, and that's saying something (I say that as something of a fan)

[Senior Baiano]

Ha, I've read that, it's every bit as good as it sounds. Guess you could already get away with a lot of stuff under fair use/parody, read a post soviet/war on terror themed sequel to Animal Farm once called 'Snowball's Chance'.

[Fambo Number Mive]

I read 1985 a few years ago, it's a vile book. Hateful nonsense that felt a bit like someone from GB News had written it.

[Pranet]

I read 1985 when I was fairly young and it impressed me back then- at least the first half, which is an essay about Orwell (iirc) and I'd never read anything like that before- an essay about a writer. I know.

But even at the time I found the stuff about the unions and muslims a bit much.

I remember it was the first place I read about the idea of having pictures of diseased lungs on fag packets.

I'd quite like to read it again just to see what I make of it now.

[touchingcloth]

Nineteen 14/88

[popcorn]

It's like the villain leaving the room after tying Bond to the machine that is definitely going to kill him.

The thing is though, in the fiction of the Bond films, the baddies are wrong and Bond always escapes.

In the fiction of 1984, the baddie is right and Winston is successfully reprogrammed.

I think it's reasonable to point out that Bond or 1984 are unrealistic in many ways, but it is a fiction, that's sort of the point, isn't it? 1984 uses the fiction to explore ideas. A pessimistic thought experiment about the limits of human resistance, a boot stamping on a human face forever.

I don't find it less effective or frightening just because parts of it are unrealistic. It's the thought experiment of it that's powerful. To what extent can you remake a person? What is truth anyway? etc.

[touchingcloth]

The thing is though, in the fiction of the Bond films, the baddies are wrong and Bond always escapes.

In the fiction of 1984, the baddie is right and Winston is successfully reprogrammed.

I think it's reasonable to point out that Bond or 1984 are unrealistic in many ways, but it is a fiction, that's sort of the point, isn't it? 1984 uses the fiction to explore ideas. A pessimistic thought experiment about the limits of human resistance, a boot stamping on a human face forever.

I don't find it less effective or frightening just because parts of it are unrealistic. It's the thought experiment of it that's powerful. To what extent can you remake a person? What is truth anyway? etc.

I think those are good thought experiments. It's like there are three different but related ones along the same lines: "Imagine if the state tried to reprogramme you", "imagine if the state thought it could successfully reprogramme you", "imagine if the state could actually successfully reprogramme you".

The book explores all three, but in hindsight the ending didn't stick strongly with me because it goes with the last of the three, and even in fiction it's just tooa bsurd to resonate. The idea of me ever becoming, say, a Tory in my heart of heats is absurd enough, so the idea that a regime like the one in the book could manage to make someone do more than just pay lip service to them didn't land with me.

There's lots of the book that I did find powerful and chilling and that has stuck with me vividly for all these years, just not the very ending.

[popcorn]

What if in the end Winston became a Tory?

[famethrowa]

I don't think it's about becoming anything, I think it's more about wiping the mind clean to wholeheartedly support anything the Party says like a good zealot. If they said "we're into free love and free drum solos now" then he'd be cheering that on too.

[touchingcloth]

What if in the end Winston became a Tory?

Cameron, Rees-Mogg, or Dorries?

[famethrowa]

Anyone else read 1986? Seemed ok but the stuff about the astral zombies controlling the food supply with electric pianos was too obvious, and how could they build that hexagonal effigy of Otto Bauer on top of a Sock Shop anyway??

Having said that, the book 1987 was just silly. Winston escaping Airstrip One on a supersonic polo pony with a smouldering copy of Downbeat magazine up his anus? Give me a break.

[FeederFan500]

I liked Brave New World for its approach to that issue, you had a few people who knew what was going on but didn't trust the masses and gave them soma to keep them happy. Even the Savage is just blindly repeating stuff he took from Shakespeare, the alternative voice still doesn't have original thought. Big strands of both left and right irl believe the other side was indoctrinated by the right wing media/left wing educational establishment.

Political positions can be somewhat arbitrary (or pragmatic), the TUC was against immigrant workers post-WWII. It seems conceivable to me that most of us are malleable enough to turn left or right under the right conditions, presumably genetics haven't changed from one generation to the next so what else explains the more individualistic shift in Western politics if not external influences on people?

I don't like thinking too deeply about this as I then go down a 'slave to determinism' thought rabbit hole.

[Ferris]

What if in the end Winston became a Tory?

That's the thing - if I lived in a tory totalitarian regime where even the concept of not being a tory was de facto punishable by death, it's different stakes.

I am a pretty committed socialist - it's cost me economically, academically and professionally in the past but not massively and anyway that's alright by me because it was small potatoes and I'm still basically fine. If someone beat me to an inch of my life, repeatedly, over and over and over for months at a time in a room for absolutely no reason and I was utterly helpless; and that was only phase one of the reprogramming then yeah ok I might end up cheerfully voting for Rory Stewart. Especially if that's what the electro shock interrogations/Room 101 stuff over a period of months drove into my brain.

People have had larger political shifts with far, far less. People are more malleable than they like to think, and it's naive to exclude one's self from that tbh.

If you told me the outcome was sitting about in a cafe drinking gin all day and phoning it in at a do-nothing overpaid government job, I'd probably consider it minus all the physical/psychological torture and rats etc.

[Ferris]

It's one of my favourite books. I would recommend reading We by Yevgeny Zamyatin as well; there's a lot of influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Meant to say - the other bit of 1984 I (perversely?) enjoyed was the contraband expression of humanity in a rigid and brutal system. Sneaking about, finding places where the rules couldn't follow you and being free in those spaces.

"We" sounds like it ticks those boxes, I'll absolutely give it a look. Doubly so if I can read it online on my phone/kindle.

[popcorn]

That's the thing - if I lived in a tory totalitarian regime where even the concept of not being a tory was de facto punishable by death, it's different stakes.

the Home Counties?

[Ferris]

the Home Counties?

I had an uncle who lived in Buckinghamshire but he is dead (and was quite an unpleasant bloke all told, so at worst I'm ambivalent there) plus a former girlfriend from Sussex but that ended quite badly and it took me quite a while to sort myself out.

The home counties have been broadly as inhospitable to me as Airstrip One's society was to Winston.

The point remains - I am right, and everyone else is wrong re: interpretations of this novel.

[wrec]

People have had larger political shifts with far, far less. People are more malleable than they like to think, and it's naive to exclude one's self from that tbh.

Exactly. Happens all the time for all kinds of reasons.

The main tragedy of the book is that Winston and Julia believe the Party can change their behaviour but not their core beliefs - they'll still resist mentally, and still love each other - and this turns out to be entirely wrong.

'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you.'

'I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you that would be the real betrayal.'

She thought it over. "They can't do that,' she said finally. 'It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything -- anything -- but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you.'

'No,' he said a little more hopefully, 'no; that's quite true. They can't get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.'

He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less true when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning. Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

Also it's definitely spelled out that they'll get the bullet in the back of the head eventually and won't even know about it.

My introduction to 1984 was the Eurythmics album (relistened recently - some ok bits, some extremely cringe bits, overall an inappropriate soundtrack) and the film (love it, perfectly cast, skimped a bit on the architecture though), then read the book at 12 or so. Like others, I'm irked by its adoption by idiots. Besides any message or allegorical value it's maybe my favourite bit of dystopian world building.

[Ferris]

@wrec I think that's a really interesting passage, particularly:

With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less true when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning.

...for two foreshadowing reasons.

First, there is a lot of the interrogation within the Ministry of Love where O'Brien knows exactly what Winston is thinking. There are parts of dialogue where Winston thinks something, and O'Brien predicts and reacts to the thought as if it was said aloud. The Party's "cleverness" is absolutely being underestimated.

The second is Winston's assumed knowledge of what is in the Ministry of Love. In fact, he guesses everything that in there that we see; "tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning". He just doesn't think it'll ever get him to change beyond surface confessions because it's an academic thought - suffering in the abstract. Once he gets in there and experiences it, we see exactly how brutal and effective it is. Again, an underestimation of how effective the regime is.

The fact they'll "get the bullet" is another symptom of the brutality of IngSoc society. The circle of Winston's freedom shrinks ever smaller (and he defines what freedoms means to him a few times in the novel) until it just doesn't exist at all. "To die hating them, that was freedom" but by the end he doesn't even have that. At that point, the bullet is moot because he is already totally lost. Euthanizing him is almost a kindness, as explained by O'Brien.

[13 schoolyards]

One bit that struck me as wrong-headed on my first reading but 100% spot on the second time around a few decades later was that in the future, every single child will be an absolute shit

[Terry Torpid]

One bit that stuck out to me was a dodgy racist description. I think someone was a rubber-lipped negro, or something like that.

I can't remember the exact quote, but it wasn't a line from a character, it was the actual voice of the book.

[Pink Gregory]

In many ways I wish Orwell had lived long enough to write more things like Keep the Aspidistra Flying; I maintain that having his personal context is vital to understanding his intent, and Aspidistra is only really the beginning of him looking inward.

[popcorn]

I only have a passing knowledge of Orwell's life and circumstances but everything I've read gives me the impression that he was persistently damp and cold.

[Kelvin]

I never fully understood the very end.

Is it a real bullet that gets Winston or just the final submission of his brain to the deprogramming?

Someone please tell me what to think?

I think its both. As a result of the torture, Winston had finally given in and embraced Big Brother. But like all the terrorists/traitors that get released after they confess their crimes, he's hours or days away from being disappeared for good.

[badaids]

One bit that stuck out to me was a dodgy racist description. I think someone was a rubber-lipped negro, or something like that.

I can't remember the exact quote, but it wasn't a line from a character, it was the actual voice of the book.

I only have a passing knowledge of Orwell's life and circumstances but everything I've read gives me the impression that he was persistently damp and cold.

I don't know if it was unconscious or an active effort but Orwell's ingrained yet co-habiting fascination and disgust of the working class and other cultures often breaks through into the prose of his books and is a feature of his work, even stuff like The Road to Wigan Pier.