‘The best books... are those that tell you what you know already’ - George Orwell

The beginning of the twentieth century saw a major change in the way that novels were written, with writers tending towards doing away with many literary traditions such as the exclusive use of narrative, which for over a century had been the mainstay format for a novel. This change was not confined to the world of literature, nor was it out of place in the world around it. Society itself was going through its next stage of adaptation, to new ideas and technologies; new concepts of modernity that were suddenly thrust into the picture. Nineteenth century society formulated notions of modernity and rationality in a very different way to its successor. There was a definitive self conception of being thoroughly modern - advanced. Equally prevalent was the rationalisation that simply because we think, we are in control of our own lives/destinies. These were comforting thoughts for a society to cultivate, but nevertheless the comfort was not to last very far into the twentieth century. A number of new thinkers including one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, spent the first thirty years of the twentieth century, rationalising and observing in new ways. The radical questions they asked led to answers which broke the security of nineteenth century rationality, and heralded a change in the way that Western European, and in particular, British society was to view itself. The twentieth century was to become known as the most violent century in history¹, it saw vast and rapid technological growth (partly due of course to the many war-machines that required and funded the development of such advances), and arguably gave birth to an entirely new society - what many have described as post-modern. It was a century of contradictions and non-sensical situations. Society saw itself as modern and progressive, and yet it allowed itself to create such violence; such inhumanity. It was the century in which man discovered how to destroy all life on earth and then threatened to use this capability, and yet scoffed at the primitive foolishness of previous periods of time. So is it any wonder, in the face of such an era, that the style and story employed by authors was to differ greatly from previous centuries? The correlation of the novel’s adaptation alongside society’s changes seems to be reflected in George Orwell’s comment “The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already”². This statement however, as I will discuss, can be argued in a number of different contexts and with various difficulties.

Orwell was both an author and a social commentator and in 1984 he combines the two. The aforementioned comment can be used in context both within the story itself and many have argued, as a commentary of the world that Orwell perceived to be either an inevitable future or a subversion of the political and social situation at his time of writing. 1984 has been interpreted and reinterpreted (and indeed arguably misinterpreted) many times, and with many different motives. Conservatives thus primarily read 1984 and Orwell's other popular fantasy Animal Farm (1946) as attacks on communism, and used the texts to warn people against its evils³. However, placing Orwell philosophically, is something only he himself could do (not any politically motivated commentator). For example, although it is true that Orwell supported the British Labour Party, he remained highly critical of groups who called themselves left-wing: Soviet Russia, who he considered corrupt and merely using the banner of Communism; or the left-wing intelligentsia, whose elitism and contentment with being academics, he considered counterproductive, mocking, “generally negative”, with a “querulous attitude” and a “complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion”⁴. He famously fought the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, and so was certainly not of an extreme right-wing persuasion, and added to all of this he considered himself a patriot. Whatever his political standpoint, 1984 certainly seems critical of authoritarianism and reads as though it invites the reader to embrace a more libertarian view.

For anyone who has not read 1984, the story follows the life of a man - Winston Smith, who lives in Britain in the year 1984 (four decades after Orwell was writing). There are at this time three great superpowers locked in a constant war (according to the authorities, although it is made clear that whether or not the war exists is irrelevant as long as people believe that it does), and the threat of the enemy has led to the governing bodies to impose strict rules on people to the point where there are even ‘thought police’. The government or ‘Big Brother’ as it is known, can rule unopposed through these tactics. In a society where even your thoughts are monitored and emotions such as love are prohibited, Winston as with most people (although they would never admit it) desires to break free of this. When he comes into possession of a book telling him how the world came to be as it is, as well as then meeting a woman with similar aspirations, he begins a secret relationship. However, in the end he is caught out and imprisoned and at this time is brainwashed back into ‘loving’ Big Brother and being part of the system again. The book clearly portrays an oppressive authoritarian system - what has come to be known as the ‘Orwellian Nightmare’.

So what is it then that we “know already”? In the story, when Winston proclaims that “the best books… tell you what you know already”, he is referring to the history book he is reading which explains to him how the world in which he lives really is. Because Winston is not a foolish character, many of the things he reads he has already assumed or seem common sensical. That is what Winston means, but what Orwell is trying to portray is more difficult to pinpoint. There have been a number of theorists who have speculated on possible meanings to the text in its entirety and their opinions can be transferred to directly discuss Winston’s statement.

It is possible that Orwell was trying to emphasise the importance of what he had written as a social commentary, and even if he wasn’t, theorists since have certainly placed that importance upon his work. Studies into both the methods of the authorities and the mind-set of the people have been greatly influenced by Orwell and particularly 1984. Since the 1950s, theorists have questioned whether or not Orwell’s fiction may well become (or has already become) fact.

If there is a most obvious underlying theme in the novels of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it seems to be the suggestion that in society, everyone cannot possibly have everything. So how should it be decided who gets what and who is in control? The rich-poor/powerful-powerless/male-female divide has always been a central political and social feature in the novel. 1984 focuses mainly on power relations, a theme that was echoed by many social commentators throughout the late twentieth century in particular. In Orwell’s dystopia, the leadership have seized complete control, and maintain their power through a constant oppression of the people they rule over. All the while they are telling their citizens that their interests are the interests of the people, and that they are protecting them from a greater evil. This style of government was adopted by a number of regimes during the twentieth century in Europe, particularly Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s when Orwell was writing. The longer this goes on and the more established the authority becomes, Orwell seems to be arguing, the greater the oppression and the greater the difficulty to overturn it because with the institution of leadership there simultaneously begins, owing to the long tenure of office, the transformation of the leaders into a closed caste⁵. There has been a tendency for many critics to use this correlation as a way of connecting Orwell’s work to a direct and obvious critique of the Soviet Union (this includes both 1984 and Animal Farm). However, even away from the totalitarian dictatorships of the century, this trend can be seen even if on a much lesser, subtler scale. Britain during the Second World War was using a similar system - In spite of everything, the upper middle class remained more equal than the working class. Food was the most obvious case in point⁶. In the class system underpinning British society at this time, the rationing of food was a very unequal business - the rich and powerful middle class taking the best and greatest amounts of food, leaving the poorer working classes with the lesser goods and amounts. Those who would wish to use his novels as fodder against Cold War Communism would have to take this further correlation into account, but still many have argued that even this comparison falls short of understanding what it is Orwell is trying to say. A further element that links 1984 to 1940’s Britain, is a comment Orwell is said to have made on the real Ministry of Information who were controlling broadcasts domestically and worldwide during the Second World War, and the Ministry of Truth in his story. During the war, Orwell worked for the BBC who were under the direct control of the Ministry of Information. Their use of propaganda and other common traits are similar with or without Orwell’s input on the subject.⁷

What has become known academically as the ‘challenge of democracy’ changed from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. The idea of political democracy, for example voting rights which had been so prevalent in the 1800s, was replaced by a new importance in democratic access to production, consumption and distribution (the infrastructure of the state). New impetus on this access had far reaching effects on the nature of the political agenda. The issue was no longer the power just to choose your leaders, but your ability to gain equal opportunity to own that which affected your everyday life. It is popularly argued that this shift to the idea that the interests of the state are the interests of its citizens is what Orwell is actually commenting on. Who controls the infrastructure of the state controls its citizens and can use this power to control both openly and more subtly. Advancement in technology and specialisation in the 1900s also adds to the citizen giving up some freedoms to the state. The worker who is reliant on technology owned by their employer to work is at the mercy of that authority, equally those who specialise in one area are reliant on others to provide the other aspects of life not achievable with one specific skill. All the while these changes have been occurring, the people have been convinced to continue this system despite its possible irreversible oppressive possibilities. Freedom from work thanks to technology and the equality of people to access consumer goods are, thanks to this system, not necessarily advantageous to the citizens as sociologist Herbert Marcuse emphasises: “The prevailing mode of freedom is servitude, and the prevailing mode of equality is superimposed”⁸. Giving up certain freedoms to the state is how Orwell’s world in 1984 can begin to come about. For the greater good - that laid down by the authorities - we must trust the state to work for us against a common problem. Like Marcuse and the Frankfurt School (a sociological school of researchers prominent in the 1960s who believed that a better world was possible and that it could be achieved by casting a critical eye over the doctrines employed throughout history), Orwell believed that with the rise of totalitarian societies we live in an age in which the individual is ceasing to exist -- or perhaps one ought to say, in which the individual is ceasing to have the illusion of being autonomous⁹ Societies in the twentieth century were often attemptedly made into nations through the demonising of an external enemy. The Jews in 1930s and 1940s Germany, the ‘West’ in the Soviet Union, and the Communists in the Cold War United States, who it has been argued, at the end of the century adopted Islamic Fundamentalists to replace their old Cold War rivals in a changing political climate, all played the demon role. Societies have been shaped further by the use of language. The meaning of the words ‘peace’, ‘freedom’ and ‘nation’ changed depending on which regime you lived under. During the Cold War in the United States freedom was their form of democracy - the ‘American Dream’; the rights of the individual to do as he liked. In the Soviet Union freedom was attainable through working together and was the ability to break the exploitation of capitalism. The familiar Orwellian language - ‘peace is war’ and ‘war is peace’¹⁰ is a good comparison between Orwell’s dystopia, the time he was writing, and the decades following the publication of 1984. The notion that there can be no peace without war was and still is a commonly used line among many politicians around the world.

So according to many theorists what we “know already” of the realities of the relationships between governments and their citizens, the nature of twentieth century modernity and rationality, were all examined in 1984, which was published before the half way mark of the period was even reached. If it can be agreed then that there is a definite correlation involved, is it that Orwell is writing a prediction - a vision of the future if things continued the way they were going in 1948, or are the correlations merely coincidental and all he was trying to do was write a guide to lessons that must be learned from the first half of the twentieth century? Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World (another story of a dystopian future) commented that George Orwell's 1984 was a magnified projection into the future of a present that contained Stalinism and an immediate past that had witnessed the flowering of Nazism. Brave New World was written before the rise of Hitler to supreme power in Germany and when the Russian tyrant had not yet got into his stride. In 1931, systematic terrorism was not the obsessive contemporary fact which it had become in 1948, and the future dictatorship of his imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell. In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change.¹¹ 1984 was written at a time of great atrocity, the likes of which had not been seen in living memory, it is not surprising then that his writing was of a pessimistic tomorrow. If 1984 is to be considered a book that tells you what you already know, perhaps Orwell had resigned himself to the idea that this was an inevitable future. However, is the story merely a reflection of a bad time when there was no hope in sight or has it come to pass that, prediction or not, some aspects of 1984 were visibly active in the latter half of the 1900s and even now in 2005? It is easy to make comparisons for example, between the Cold War and the nature of the rise of oppression in Winston Smith’s world with hindsight, but then it is equally easy with such powers to say that Orwell was just writing about his worries of his own time. In Sigmund Freud’s Civilisation & Its Discontent written in 1929, before even the rise of Nazism (although Fascist Italy had been in existence since 1922, it had never committed the atrocities that were to follow the rise of Hitler) a predictive statement is made as a conclusion to the book. It reads “the fateful question for the human race seems to be whether, and to what extent, the development of its civilisation will manage to overcome the disturbance of communal life caused by the human drive for aggression and self-destruction. Perhaps in this context the present age is worthy of special interest.”¹² The twentieth century - the most violent in history, follows this comment and the ‘present age’ he spoke of was certainly given special interest in literature and in particular by Orwell. If other theorists and academics had seen similar worrying traits to that of Orwell, then 1984 is a book which not only described what many already were foreseeing or at least worrying about, but is also a text important to the study of that age and to social science and cultural studies. It is of course a very important book in literary terms, as I have described when I discussed the changes in the way novels were formulated in the first half of the twentieth century - it is a model of this, but it has equal if not greater importance as both a text referential to its time of publication and as a sociological work, which is important enough to be studied into the early twenty-first century. In the twentieth century, George Orwell's vision of totalitarian society in 1984 has had a major impact on how many people see, understand, and talk about contemporary social trends.¹³ Its importance in literature is made clearer by its use in Britain as a text on the National Curriculum, but what makes for interesting sociological study is the way in which a book, which as I have said can be argued to criticise 1940s British politics and society, has been adopted by the government as something important to read. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that “By universally imposing and inculcating (within the limits of its authority) a dominant culture thus constituted as legitimate national culture, the school system, through the teaching of history (and especially the history of literature), inculcates the foundations of a true ‘civic religion’ and more precisely, the fundamental presuppositions of the national self-image.”¹⁴ There is the suggestion that by adopting Orwell, the authorities make him a part of their own history and while perhaps admitting some criticism of themselves, use his work to boost their image as being one with the people. Were this argument to ever be proven to be true, Orwell’s vision would be creeping ironically closer, whereby he himself would become a tool by which governments impress their citizens.

The teaching of literature is important in creating a reality (even if only as a negation of a fiction) needed by the governments and to a degree by its people, and Bourdieu goes on to suggest the equivalent importance of social science. “From its inception, social science itself has been part and parcel of this work of construction of the representation of the state which makes up part of the reality of the state itself.”¹⁵ Although social science is often very critical of society, could it stumble into the same proposed fate of 1984? In this way, could the study of the book be telling sociologists “what we know already” could happen to the use of social science? All this is of course mere speculation, but an interesting point to take into account.

The current theorists discussing the idea of a post-modern society have observed many of the aspects that could be considered reminiscent of Orwell’s world in 1984 to be possibly true today. The United States’ and Britain’s ‘War on Terror’ - a generalised military campaign against an enemy whom the American and British citizens appear to feel that they are never really sure is a threat, but against whom many have, to a great degree, given over some of their freedoms in order to feel secure against this enemy. ‘Anti-Terror’ laws have been passed whereby those suspected of ‘acts of Terror’ can be imprisoned without trial for an indefinite time. Not only are the terms ‘War on Terror’, ‘Anti-Terror’, and ‘acts of Terror’ entirely ambiguous but they don’t really describe anything specifically dangerous - just fear. Yet people have allowed governments to take some liberties from them in order to protect themselves. This is scarily reminiscent of the constant war against enemies who are never seen but, whom the people in 1984 are told exist. Our situation certainly hasn’t reached the extremes of 1984, the sheer fact that when things like this happen, there is little or ineffective protest, and more importantly that we call this situation an ‘Orwellian Nightmare’ surely sums up the admission of some correlation and our seeming inability to stop it. In reading 1984 in 2005, are we reading about a system which we already know is possible, or even existent in the same way that Winston Smith read about the world he knew?

By David Nettleingham

¹E. Hobsbawm Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914 - 1991 2002 Abacus
²G. Orwell 1984 2000 Penguin
³D. Kellner From 1984 to One-Dimensional Man: Critical Reflections on Orwell and Marcuse, 1984 www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell13.htm
⁴G. Orwell Why I Write 2004 Penguin
⁵R. Michels Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy 1962 Crowell-Collier
⁶A. Calder The People’s War: Britain 1939 - 1945 1999 Pimlico
⁷D.J. Taylor Ministry of Misinterpretation 1992 (13th December) The Sunday Times
⁸H. Marcuse One-Dimensional Man 2002 Routledge
⁹D. Kellner 1984
¹⁰H. Marcuse 2002
¹¹D. Kellner 1984
¹²S. Freud Civilisation and Its Discontents 2002 Penguin
¹³D. Kellner 1984
¹⁴P. Bourdieu Practical Reason 1998 Polity Press
¹⁵P. Bourdieu 1998

Copyright June 2005