[The WordPress widget that posts updates from Goodreads in the sidebar stopped working a while ago, and I can’t find a replacement. So I guess I’ll just have to cross-post my reviews.]
The last (first) time I read this was at least thirty years ago. I would love to say that the fact that it’s gotten more disturbing in the interim is solely due to (a) me being a more mature reader and (b) it being an immortal piece of literature, but while both of those are true, there are plenty of reasons right outside my window as well that this novel jolts like an exposed nerve in a bad tooth. This is not “dystopia” as a trendy YA genre; this is a stark view of the life-hating depravity potential in human beings.
I used to think that the major fault to the premise is its insistence that the Party suppresses the sexual instinct as far as possible, in contrast to Brave New World (the dystopia with which 1984 is usually mentioned in the same breath), where hedonism is a means of control. But now I think that sexual oppression is a genius move on the part of the Party. For those individuals for whom it’s effective, the result is that the energy and passion that humans usually use for sex can be funneled wholesale into support and enthusiasm for the Party. And those, like Winston Smith, who chafe and and rebel (quietly) against the sexual strictures have now set themselves up with a reason for paranoid guilt which drives them to greater visible adherence to the Party to “cover up” their transgressions. It’s like everything that anti-church types say about “Catholic guilt,” times a bazillion.
What still does ring false to me — and which, apparently, rang false to Orwell himself (explained below) — is the idea the Ministry of Truth has to expend so much effort in correcting documentary evidence of a past which doesn’t match the present’s needs. As the present day demonstrates all too adequately, we need no complete purgation of inconvenient facts for people to slavishly support false-to-facts narratives and worldviews, because those worldviews aren’t based on facts to begin with; the narrative exists first, and the facts or pseudofacts are marshalled to its defense. Orwell demonstrates as much when Winston stands in a roomful of people cheerfully accepting the telescreen’s anthems of thanks to Big Brother for increasing the chocolate ration to 20 grams, when Winston knows quite clearly that, only the day before, the chocolate ration had been reduced from 30 to 20 grams. No modifications to the documentary past is necessary for those who will happily ignore it.
Together, 1984 and C.L. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength predict and delineate the horrific attacks against sanity, morality and reality that are the celebrated causes today. Power proudly for power’s sake, reality considered entirely subject to the mind, the complete subsumption of the individual to the collective, the proclaimed virtue of being able to convince oneself that 2 + 2 = 5… More fearsome than any army or disease is the prospect of the human gift turned to its own destruction.