A reader never reads alone, even if she is in solitude. At places, she pauses and ponders on what she has perceived and communicates to a fellow imaginary reader. Below are the different things, that I had discussed with my fellow reader in course of reading the novel 1984 by George Orwell.

Spectrum of Orthodoxy

In the story, the characters lie on a spectrum of orthodoxy. There are some like the Parsons on one end of the spectrum, who adhere to the rules without being aware of the fact that their freedom is being snatched. There is Syme, who is aware of the suppression and yet follows the system. And we have Julia, who does not worry about the past or future or others in the present until the rules restrict her. She is smart enough to find ways to cheat the party by acting disciplined when required. If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. And we have the protagonist Winston Smith on the other end of the spectrum, who is concerned more about reality, like all deep thinkers are. Winston is desperate to know how things were in the past and wants to understand the methods and intentions of the party. He believes in the human spirit that fights to be free. As Winston puts it to O’Brien

In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces….I don’t know, some spirit, some principle –that you will never overcome…..The spirit of Man

Big Brother is not same as The Grand Inquisitor

Another thing I found interesting from the book was that Big Brother is nothing like the Grand Inquisitor. When O’Brien asks Winston what he thinks is the main aim of the party in grabbing away people’s freedom. Winston answers that the party believes humans can’t handle the burden of choice. They have to trade off freedom for happiness. He thinks that the party believes in giving happiness at the cost of freedom. And that is what the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov believes. But O’Brien reply states that the party’s intentions are completely different from the Grand Inquisitor’s. The party rules for its own sake. They are power-hungry. They don’t care about the good of others or wealth, they want pure power.

Language Shapes Thought

Anyone who has thought enough about words and emotions understands the influence of language on thought. Orwell showed it interestingly through Newspeak, an incomplete language that is incapable of producing politically rebellious thoughts. Orwell has elaborately explained his ideas in a separate appendix about how language could be used to limit one’s thoughts. To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, The limits of my language are limits of my world. One cannot express political freedom using Newspeak because there is no political freedom!

The most interesting part of the appendix was thought the language was capable of expressing sentences that could contain seeds of rebellious ideas, like Big brother is ungood and All men are equal; yet one cannot justify reasons for such sentences in Newspeak. They would be self-evidently false. There is not enough complexity in language to reason why Big brother is ungood. And All men are equal does not make sense as equality only means similarity in physical features in this context.

A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of “politically equal”, or that free had once meant “intellectually free”, than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook

Some damn good lines

If its only that story that you had enjoyed, you missed the literary beauty present in the novel. Here are some of those doubleplusamazing lines. Revisiting some lines and ideas from the book that you have enjoyed during the first read is a beautiful mental trip.

How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.

The phrase mute protest in your own bones so nicely describes the discomfort Winston feels.

He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.

When Winston suspects that Julia might be a member of thought police, a plan to kill her strikes his mind. But he eventually doesn’t do that. It is a common observation that in fear and pain, human body freezes and doesn’t respond as expected. The observation is so well expressed. Good writers describe such observations with great clarity and beauty.

A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him!

Anxiety of every young man!

He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst

When Julia and Winston meet for the first time at the Golden Country, Winston starts the conversation with how he initially thought about Julia as a member of the thought police and planned to kill her. The present appears to be more beautiful because you had imagined it to be much worse in the past.

… there was still that memory moving round the edges of his consciousness, something strongly felt but not reducible to definite shape…

A snappy line to describe vagueness in thoughts of the human mind.

…magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.

I never imagined action as simple as flinging away one’s clothes could be associated with a large act of annihilating a dystopian civilisation. A world where basic human instincts such as sex are curbed, such simple acts become powerful. As Orwell puts it at the end of the chapter the fornication was a political act.

No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred

Fear and hatred pollute beautiful emotions.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones

Julia’s way of living in one line.

She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to.

Another line that describes the anxiety of a young man in love.

Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there.

Winston uses these words to describe the importance of the paperweight to Julia. As O’Brien says later in the book, the past exists in records and memories. All the records of the past have been burnt and the party controls people’s memories. Hence the past has been abolished. Only a few objects like the lump of glass are remnants of the past. Hence he was attached to the paperweight despite its apparent uselessness. He believed that the paperweight was one of the things from the past that the party hadn’t destroyed. But later we find that when Winston and Julia get caught, the paperweight is smashed into pieces. A symbol to depict the immense power of the party that is capable of destroying everything that belongs to the past.

Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant.

Julia’s character is interesting in a sense that she doesn’t fully grasp the aim of the party. She is not concerned about double think, manipulating the past and newspeak language. She only bothers about the restrictions that only affect her directly. She understands the reasoning behind party restricting people having sex, so she smartly identifies people who would be brave enough to sleep with her. Other than that, she tries to smuggle coffee and chocolate that only inner party members have access to.

Winston on the other hand bothers about humanity and its suffering under the party’s rule. He wishes to understand the ideas and ways of the party and is desperate to fight against what he believes is injust. He finds great pleasure in doing things that he could do as a free human.

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

The sentence was used to describe love that Winston’s mother showed towards him. A sentence whose meaning I didn’t fully grasp, yet found it delightful when I read.

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

Here, Julia and Winston believed that one’s thoughts are beliefs are always their own and the party cannot change them at any cost. But towards the story’s end we see that party did manage to change their believes via torture and killing love. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.

This line depicts that the uncompromising nature of hard science. Laws of nature are immutable!

…In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order….The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already

There is a great sense of satisfaction when your ideas are validated by someone else. Finding your ideas and beliefs in a book makes you love the book more.

The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious,or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt

Doublethink has to be both conscious and unconscious to be carried out correctly. The line explains with great clarity the thought process involved in performing something counter-intuitive as doublethink .

Sanity is not statistical

When Winston’s ideas were validated by the book, he felt that he was right though he had been in the minority. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is doing it; right is right even if nobody is doing it. But like many of his realisations, this one too changes at the end of the book.

The flagstones were wet as though they had just been washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots.

Winston’s feelings when he was looking through the window of his hiding room.

“She’s beautiful,” he murmured.

“She’s a metre across the hips, easily,” said Julia.

“That is her style of beauty,” said Winston

Before Julia and Winston get caught, as Winston continues to observe things from his window, his perception gets deeper and deeper. He starts to find the stout woman washing clothes beautiful. As Orwell put it, The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

O’Brien tortures Winston to hell. Yet, Winston carries a kind of admiration for O’Brien in his heart because he had really understood Winston’s thoughts and feelings. Winston’s thoughts were a subset of O’Brien’s thoughts. For a deep thinker like Winston, he was happy that his ideas were understood though O’Brien was his foe.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing

From a non-physical perspective, a human boils down to the mind. Having control over the mind gives you control over the human and that is the sign of true power.

Miscellaneous

  • At places, I saw the novel being called as a prophetic novel by comparing the Big Brother’s surveillance to social media apps’ surveillance. I feel that it is an unjust critic of the novel. Orwell wanted to depict extreme conditions and human suffering under a power hungry totalitarian regime.
  • The story is narrated from Winston’s perspective. This kind of narration seems the best way to illuminate human condition and emotions. Dostoevsky, the master of describing psychological and philosophical conditions of man used this style of narration in many of his popular works.