DYSTOPIAN VISIONS : Nineteen Eighty-Four

Dossier: Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four [Martin Secker & Warburg, 1949].

Filetype: Book

File Under: Statist Dystopia

Executive Summary: Winston Smith, a worker for the oppresive Oceania state, helps in the rewritting of history to support the Party's propaganda. The population is divided into the Proletariat and the Inner Party members, whose iron fist bans any rebellion or sedition, even in an individual's mind. An endless war with the other regions on earth and a constant barrage of misinformation on enemies of the state ensures loyalty to the mythical leader, Big Brother. Smith begins small acts of rebellion which psychologically-coalesce into a secret love affair with a young woman from the Junior Anti-Sex League and discovers what may be the truth behind the Party's lies. Meanwhile mysterious Party official O'Brien and the Thought Police close in...

Dystopian Visions: The Party, and, one assumes, its two counterparts in the other regions, have absolute and immortal power over society, through a perpetual police state which extends its powers to controlling our very thoughts and desires. Family members shop each other in for Thought Crimes, work is unrelenting, a pointless charade, and prevents a private life of any note, culture and fun are replaced by rallies and all jointly staring in pure hate at a face on a big screen. 

Utopian Undercurrents: Even the Inner Party officials like O'Brien enjoy no seeming freedom of thought, and although they might go off and enjoy a glass of wine behind the scenes, our only viewpoint is from a prole, and for them life offers no hope or joy (if you don't count a cheeky painting, looking at a field and a few shags before being tortured and beaten for months). Even the gin is crap. Only the human hope in small moments like Julia's note of "I love you" shines through bleakly as a flickering flame of humanity, long after the story is over. I still see Orwell's statist hell as an allegory rather than a real possibility, that humans' individual spirit will out. But then maybe I just need some gentle rat-in-a-cage educating...

Level of Hell: Sixth. Or Tenth. There are no mutants, no everyday threat to life for most, and food (albeit shite) is available. People still hang out washing in the sun. People still make coffee after (illegal) sex. But when thought itself is controlled, does it matter how nice the coffee is or how warm the sun is? Any idea of hope is crushed in the final part, forever. It's almost worse that no physical apocalypse occured, that it was all the result of power-obsessed politicians and the blind nationalism of the masses. So Tenth.

Legacy: I was ready to find a disappointment in me at the end of re-reading this, one of the more astonishingly-bleak and impressive books of my childhood years (and I have read all of William Golding, so...). I based this mainly on its legacy. Endlessly-referenced phrase like 'two and two make five' , 'freedom is slavery', and 'Big Brother is watching you', and lines such as,'imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever', had made Orwell's final novel close to a self-parody in my mind. However, the depth and detail of the discourse here, and political world-building, outshine any senses I had that perhaps its originality was buried under its own subsequent fame. Everything from V For Vendetta to The Handmaid's Tale to Children of Men in our season on Dystopian Visions owe a huge debt to this novel, and I would suggest his warning - initially praised (and indeed marketed as in the U.S.) as an anti-communist one - has influenced us all, even those who who have never read it. The fear of loss of individual thought, the fear of the loss of diversity of culture and country, the fear of dictatorial control, all were ancient notions before Orwell even began writing, yet his masterpiece raised the flag of 'where-never-to-go' over so many minds that it can only be hoped that his vision will never see the light of day.

In Retrospect: In popular understanding, this is the benchmark of dystopian fiction, and this stems partly from the unrelenting grey hell it promises us. Even as the numerical year of the title is left far behind us, the threat of a time where power wins over individuality utterly and forever is a constant fear. ' What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?'. Reading this line again in our current times of false-populism, fake news, revised history and a revival in personality politics, I shudder with that same fear. 'America First', 'Brexit means Brexit', and anything by Le Pen et al. Philosophy of almost calming horror fills the pages that Eric Blair ended his days by filling. He was writing not just from the experience of WW2, Nazism and Stalinism, but of the failure of the British Left to uphold values in the pursuit of power, and his own personal experiences of the totalitarian Soviet machine lying to the people and creating false enemies while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. 
On reflection, I discovered a Smith-esque rebellion against the authority the book's renown held over me, an authority ordering me to respect and adore it. I found fuel for this rebellion in its partial, and ultimately slight, failings as literature - the one-dimensional supporting characters, the lack of recognisable everyday human warmth in interactions (which of course is the point, but the film with Hurt and Burton did much to overcome this through the actor's eyes) and the determination in its singular purpose - the scream as hope is crushed. However, like Smith toward the end, but without the need for dials of torture, I found the last gasp of my resistance collapse under the sheer excellence in the piece. It is that rare thing - a classic that should by now bore with obviousness due to its novel ideas rendered into cliche, its fame the killer of its verve, but which flares out at you still, even decades on from your first experience of it. More than this it is greater than merely a dazzling prose exercise, or a political nightmare. It was often mocked as one of those books you 'had to' read at school here in Orwell's home country. Yet like fellow standards of the teenagers' curriculum like Lord of The Flies, it shows our darkest natures back at us and dares us to fight the hard fight to resist the darkness. This is a harsh lesson we would do well to hear loud and clear in the coming years.

Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read today: 4/5, for it cannot help but slightly pale as history and literature catch up and overtake its ideas.
Oppressometer Readout: 9/10.

Posted by English Scribbler, who lives in hope, and in a flat, and has contributed to Nerds of A Feather since 2013.

DYSTOPIAN VISIONS: It's Always Happened Here

For reasons that are probably pretty obvious, I recently picked up a copy of Sinclair Lewis' novel It Can't Happen Here. I'd actually never read it, though it had been on my mind for a while. A film I directed a couple of years ago made liberal use of public domain WPA posters for set decoration, and a number of posters for the stage adaptation of Lewis' book wound up slightly out-of-focus behind our actors' shoulders. During the edit, I often found myself thinking, "I should read that one of these days."

Not familiar with it? I'll brief you:

In 1935, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis wrote a book about fascism coming to America. Let that year sink in. 1935. In real life, Hitler wouldn't go into Poland for four more years. The book begins in 1936, the tale of an alternative future where FDR loses the presidential election to populist Buzz Windrip. And just so you're clear, yes, his name is basically "Buzz Fart." In 1936, in our actual timeline, Franklin Roosevelt won re-election for the first time, and would go on to win re-election twice more. In Lewis' novel, Buzz Windrip is a guy who talks a lot like our current, actual, president did on the campaign trail. Seven days after his inauguration, he has used his personal militia to imprison all the Congressmen (they were all men in '35) who wouldn't willingly play ball. Within a year, the states have been dissolved, the country re-divided into districts, and those without jobs or those found guilty (by virtue of being suspected) of dissent have been rounded up and placed into concentration camps. The main character of the book is Doremus Jessup, the editor of a small-town Vermont newspaper. Since the free press has been the enemy of the people since 1791, Doremus falls under particular scrutiny from the new regime, tries to flee the country but is prevented, and takes up surreptitiously printing pamphlets about the horrors that are happening under President Windrip, but which are not being reported. This is actually how fascist governments work, as evidenced by the recent uprisings in Ukraine, where old Communists are only now learning of the horrors that took place under Stalin.

Early discussions about this series, Dystopian Visions, were taking place about the time I started reading the book, and I kept trying to figure out which bucket to put Lewis' novel into. On the one hand, the author certainly never intended it to be a genre novel, likely never considered himself of the tradition of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. On the other hand, while reading it I couldn't escape the similarities between It Can't Happen Here and other books I was reading in preparation for the series, such as Fahrenheit 451 and one of the ur-dystopias, 1984. This is a Literary novel, written before the term "speculative fiction" had any currency, but it's clearly speculating, and fiction, so should I be writing a Dystopian Visions Dossier about it? What makes this alternative future different from the alternative history in Keith Roberts' Pavane, for instance? Does the fact that it takes place only a year into the future make it inherently different from 1984, which was set 35 years in the future?

I don't know. But to the larger point, it doesn't matter. Because what really jumped out at me was that Lewis was painting a picture of a dystopian United States based on the real-world example of Germany's descent into fascism, which was really happening as Lewis typed. The horrors he was "imagining" for the United States were simply transposed from what was actually going down in a real country just across the Atlantic. This, for me, put the idea of "dystopia" into a totally different context. Maybe because I'm white, and my folks are middle-class, and because I went to college, the idea of dystopian literature always seemed cautionary. I think, originally, many of the hallmark works of dystopian literature were no doubt intended to be cautionary, rather than descriptive. The "what if?" asked by college graduates of what could lie ahead on one of any number of possible roads. But looking at the wide world around me today, beyond any fears of fascism or tyranny engendered by the current administration and its troubling relationship to what words mean, it's clear that dystopia is not the sole province of the speculative. You cannot convince me that a man who was a doctor in Aleppo, Syria, ten years ago with a prosperous career and happy family and has now found himself in a refugee camp or on a mortally overcrowded boat to Europe, or even trying to care for the sick and wounded in a bombed-out hospital still in Aleppo, isn't living in an honest-to-God dystopia right now. And you cannot convince me that American citizens suffering under the "separate but equal" conditions of Jim Crow laws in 1935, as Sinclair Lewis imagined a fascist America, were not living in a dystopia. Yevgeny Zamyatin and Orwell and Bradbury described dystopian police states where agents of the government could and did exercise total power over a person's body, possessions, and even life. How is that different from the real-life situation that untold millions of Americans faced because they were black and born in the century following the Civil War and before the Civil Rights Act? A situation where the government has codified its antagonism toward a huge group of people, to such an extent that those individuals must go so far as to rely on a secret book to try to stay safe while traveling, feels like the trappings of a dystopian novel. How much different is one from the other? Or, if I'm being really honest, how much different is it from the lives of many Americans right now who are living in fear of their next traffic stop? Worried that flashing lights in their rearview mirror might mean they'll never see their families again?

The point is, speculative fiction is always about "now." Usually, authors are projecting the fears they feel right now into some imagined future, but that means those stories are still anchored in the "right now" part of the equation. Listen to a few X Minus One episodes to get a handle on the anti-Communist zeitgeist of the 1950s and 1960s, whether the episodes are set on a distant planet or in a distant future. But you can also, if you're willing, read dystopian literature with an eye on what they tell us about our "now." Dystopian societies — the ones we read about, the ones that have become canon, and the ones that continue to be written today — are presented as situations to be avoided. So it can't hurt to close your eyes and listen to echoes of those societies that are sounding all around us right now.

The idea of dystopia being some far away puddle of quicksand we can avoid if we're vigilant is, itself, a trap. The fact is, there are some of us — perhaps "others" that may sit just outside of our usual field of view, perhaps not — existing in Orwellian conditions right now, here and abroad. The parallels to the works we've become so familiar with are inescapable. More than one veteran I know has described trying to get care from the VA as Kafka-esque. I think, increasingly, it is becoming crucial to not let the lessons of these writers remain in some far-off place I'd love to sidestep if only I stay on top of my sample ballots I get in the mail. It is important to recognize not only that it can happen here, but it does happen here, and it has always happened here.

It's up to all of us to do better. We've been warned.

But that's one of the gifts of nerdery and one of the long-standing fantasies when we make heroes of ourselves in stories. From War Games, where the computer nerd is the one guy capable of averting nuclear war, to Shaun of the Dead, where a pair of nitwits are perfectly positioned to battle zombies because of all the movies they've watched, to Galaxy Quest, where actors from a campy sci-fi TV show are able to fight off real aliens, it is the nerds who wind up ready to face a challenge because fandom has prepared them.

Maybe this is an actual opportunity for us to step into the breach. We may not all get a chance to fight the zombies, or the aliens, but if we look around and see something going on that looks like a stepping stone to The Hunger Games, we've been prepared enough to hopefully make some noise about it. Or, if we remember the image of the citizens of Fahrenheit 451 at the mercy of their screens, which dominate their lives and blot out the opportunity to speak to each other or notice what nature looks like anymore, maybe we can have a little more awareness of our own actions and behaviors. Maybe we can approach some of our interactions with a little more critical thought. Because it seems like the two things so many dystopian works prize above all else are critical thinking and human connection. Almost like those are antidote to dystopia.

So as we all move together into a future that is in many ways shaped by the predictions of science fiction, or a desire to actually make those awesome gadgets we all grew up desperately wishing were real, it can't hurt to recognize that we've already inherited some conditions that we've been warned against, and it can't hurt to take actions that try to move the needle away from those conditions.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer, sometime book reviewer, goddamn folk musician, Emmy-winning producer, and Hugo-nominated co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012.