Summer Reading: Post 3 - 1984

"Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces."

My (hopefully consistent) summer reading series about books I somehow missed reading till now continues.  This week I read 1984 by George Orwell (and yes, this was my first time reading it unfortunately).  I read Animal Farm in my sophomore English class in high school and I remember I really enjoyed it, particularly the brief discussions we had in class.   A friend of mine gave me my copy of 1984 for my seventeenth birthday at the beginning of my senior year.  It's traveled with me during my three moves since then, and though I hadn't yet read it, I always included it in my boxes of books, placing it on the shelves with all the others upon arrival in my new places.  For the past two and a half years it's spent its days next to Scott's paperback copy of Animal Farm.

Picture of the slogan in 1984: War is Peace. Slavery is Freedom. Ignorance is Strength.  Source

Similar to Beloved I started 1984 once before, but was unsuccessful, obviously.  But once again, picking it up now I was hooked from the beginning.  Because I'd already read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale twice I couldn't help but envision her world while reading 1984.  I highly recommend both Atwood and Orwell if dystopian literature appeals to you at all.

Even though I envisioned similar 'worlds' while reading these two books, they are not at all similar in their portrayal of women and the working-class (Atwood focuses more on women while Orwell focuses more on the working-class - referred to as the 'proles/proletarains' - there's a lovely diagram of the hierarchy of social classes in Orwell's world here).

Treatment of Women
I'm sure I could write a whole post devoted solely to the differences between how Orwell and Atwood treat women differently (and maybe I will).  Atwood is certainly concerned with how women are currently treated in society, giving us an over-exaggerated version so we can see the similarities between their society and ours - women are often used and viewed only as bodies and child-bearers.  Orwell's, on the other hand, seems to allow women more agency - - you have this (so it seems) kick-ass woman who is rebellious, but also talks of women, saying she lives "always in the stink of women! How I hate women!" (130).  While reading, I was taken aback several times by some of the small comments Orwell makes about women throughout the novel, referring to them as stupid and easily-manipulated, but perhaps we would have gotten similar comments if Atwood's novel had been written from a man's point of view; I'm sure the men in her world were thinking similar thoughts of abuse towards women.  But it was often hard to understand Orwell's motives and message about women (unlike Atwood who sets up a complex feminist agenda - although I'm sure some could and would argue about this).

Working-Class Heroes 
Though I didn't particularly appreciate Orwell's treatment of women, I did find the working-class/ 'proles' commentary fascinating.  Thanks to my last few classes in grad school I am intrigued by working-class studies; in fact, I've just ordered a book called What We Hold in Common: An Introduction to Working-Class Studies, edited by Janet Zaney.  I'm dying for it to arrive so I can explore  this new discipline, and honestly I'm interested in what this community of writers has to say about the working-class.  I'm also curious to see if these are people from the academy discussing working-class issues, or people who come from a working-class background (hoping it's a mixture of both).  Anyway, back to 1984...the proles play a huge role in the story and become quite glorified as a people (for me at least) throughout the book.  Though they are obviously looked down on (or better yet, ignored) by the Inner Party and Party members, the narrator certainly gives us reason to believe they're something special in fixing 'the problems:'

"What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.  The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition.  They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another.  For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world.  The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside.  They had held onto the primitive emotions which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort . . . 'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud, 'We are not human'" (165).

And to me this is so powerful: "The proles were immortal; you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant [woman] figure in the yard.  In the end their awakening would come.  And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill . . . The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing . . . everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable [woman] figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.  Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come.  You were the dead; theirs was the future.  But you could share in the future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four" (221-2).


"And the people under the sky were also very much the same - everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same - people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.  If there was hope, it lay in the proles!"

There were several times when reading about the working-class proles of 1984 I was reminded of two recent films - In Time and The Hunger Games - which both depict working-class characters trying desperately to change the socio-political hierarchies in their respective worlds.  But the working-class characters also display the 'human' qualities discussed in Orwell, examples of humanity in societies that have become inhumane in their actions and policies.

The Role of Sex
Finally, it's interesting that the role of sex is similar in both Orwell's and Atwood's novels.  Sex is repressed by the societies, and sex is only seen as appropriate for procreation (if you've read the book, you'll see why the cover illustration below is so funny - or maybe that was just me).  As Orwell writes,

"Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema" (65).


"What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship . . . When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything.  They can't bear you to feel like that.  They want you to be bursting with energy all the time.  All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour . . . There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy" (133).

Interesting cover art, not at all what I pictured while I was reading (source)

And per routine, here are some more quotes I found intriguing:

"He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.  But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken.  It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage" (28).

"It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones" (48).

I particularly found the discussions about Newspeak interesting: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.  Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well.  It isn't only the synonyms; there are also antonyms.  After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words?  A word contains its opposite in itself . . . Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller" (51-2).

"Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to.  It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different.  In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had enough socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, Tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-colored, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient - nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin . . . Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?" (60).

"The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended.  Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change.  Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth's center" (81).

I guess one of the things that fascinated me most about reading 1984 was how relevant and timeless it is, not in every aspect of course, but certainly in many: "For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they have done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority [a.k.a. the 1%] had not function, and they would sweep it away.  In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.  To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practical solution.  It conflicted with the tendency toward mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals" (190).