In a sense, Nineteen Eighty-Four is sui generis. This is not because Orwell's writing style is unique, whatever the claim made for his clarity of language, nor is it because he was alone in his projection of dystopia.

Instead, Nineteen Eighty-Four was set apart by those who reviewed and later taught it. It was far from the first novel to warn against the perils of the machine society, but it was the first after 1945 which, irrespective of Orwell's later qualifications, directed its warning against the perils of a contemporary enemy. In Britain and the United States, science fiction of the 1950s would use other threats to represent the Communist menace, but this was not the same as the depiction in Orwell's “fantasy” of a present danger. Orwell would have the advantage of writing in a style and technique which many considered superior to that of science fiction or other genres such as the Western or the detective novel, which pursued Cold War tropes. Moreover, Orwell's fantasy would soon be hailed as a vision or reality.

THE SATIRICAL NOVEL

Nineteen Eighty-Four is often compared, by those who admire Orwell, with the work of Jonathan Swift, in particular the satire Gulliver's Travels. The comparison is not as obvious as that with Animal Farm, given Swift's use of animals in his work, but Orwell scholars have focused on Part 4 of Gulliver, where the protagonist is stranded in the land of the equine Houyhnhnms.

Through Gulliver's explanation of his society to his Houyhnhnm master and his observation of the brutish human Yahoos “kept” by the Houyhnhnm, Swift critiques the hypocrisies of “civilization.” As Gulliver tells his master of the violence and vices, he begins “to view the actions and Passions of Man in a very different Light, and to think the Honour of my own Kind not worth managing.” Gulliver concludes to his readers, “I here take a final Leave of all my Courteous Readers, and return to enjoy my own Speculations in my little Garden at Redriff, to apply those excellent Lessons of Virtue which I learned among the Houyhnhnms, to instruct the Yahoos of my own Family as far as I shall find them docile Animals.”¹

In this sense, both Orwell and Swift can be seen as literary “dissidents,” questioning the presumption that the rulers of a society must be just. Winston might be a 20th-century Gulliver, awakening to the realization that he cannot passively accept the tyranny of the State/Party. The link, however, is tenuous, both in the content and the style of the novels. Gulliver's English government may be far from optimal but it does not begin to approach the totalitarianism of Oceania. Gulliver may be chastened at the end of his adventure, but he is not crushed. Indeed there is a hope in his proclamation that he will “instruct” his fellow Yahoos. Swift's mockery, even in the depth of his frustration, also eases the evils of his world, even if it does not remove them. Orwell never approaches the humor, albeit a black humor, that is present in Gulliver's Travels.

There seems to be another, non-literary agenda for juxtaposing Swift and Orwell. The latter can be seen as the 20th-century descendant of the former, upholding the tradition of the English “dissenter” maintaining independence against the pressures of the State. (Of course Swift was Irish; however, English critics have a habit of adopting Irish writers as their own.) Fredric Warburg wrote in his publisher's summary of Nineteen Eighty-Four, “The savagery of Swift has passed to a successor who looks upon life and finds it becoming ever more intolerable.”² Bernard Crick, quoting Orwell's friend T. R. Fyvel, would elevate the author as “the independence of Swift mixed up with the humility of Oliver Goldsmith.”³

THE DYSTOPIAN AND FUTURIST NOVELS

In the first half of the 20th century, there was a plethora of novels which projected future societies. Perhaps the most famous were the works of H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley, but there were other popular authors such as the poet Cecil Day Lewis, the political activist (and later Member of Parliament) Feener Brockway, and established writers Storm Jameson, Patrick Hamilton, and Kenneth Allot.⁴ And, of course, there was Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, to some the “inspiration” for Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Andy Croft has argued that the promotion of Orwell ensured the eclipse of almost all of these works. Other scholars, however, point to essential differences. Orwell's Oceania was not of the future but of the near-future or even of the present gone wrong. Orwell's vision of political systems was not based on speculation about what might happen socially, economically, and technologically over several hundred years but upon observation of what actually existed in 1948.

In fact, this division between Orwell and other authors of dystopia is contrived. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), perhaps the best-known futurist vision in Britain, may be dealing with a genetically and psychologically-engineered Utopia of the 26th century; however, Huxley is concerned with many of the issues that occupied Orwell.

At the heart of both works is the question of the relationship between the individual and a system which will not tolerate individuality. Huxley's Bernard Marx cannot accept the established ideology, beliefs, and conventions of his society. That ideology is directed toward the assurance of happiness (rather than Oceania's crushing of the desire for happiness) through conditioned acceptance of a place within the hierarchical society. “Thought” is replaced by a full schedule of sporting and sexual pursuits and the consumption of soma, a drug which brings contentment.

Huxley goes even further than Orwell by offering other protagonists in search of themselves within Utopia. There is Bernard's friend, Helmholtz, who aspires to turn his writing talents from “emotional engineering” into poetry about solitude. There is John who, through a series of accidents, is the offspring of two citizens of Utopia but is born and raised in the Savage Reservation. He is taken by Bernard to the Utopia where he rebels against being displayed, swaps poetry with Helmholtz, and challenges the society's views of sex, marriage, death, and happiness. The personal “revolutions,” like Winston's, end in failure: Bernard begs for forgiveness, blaming the others for his transgressions; Helmholtz leaves for the “thoroughly bad” climate of the Falkland Islands to write his poetry, John hangs himself.

This, in itself, offers much for comparison with Nineteen Eighty-Four, but Huxley went even further with a foreword to the novel, written in 1946. Unlike Orwell, he turned upon his novel to seek an ending beyond the pessimism of the defeated individual. Whereas the “hope” of Nineteen Eighty-Four has had to be manufactured by defenders of Orwell who cannot accept the bleakness of the vision, Huxley wrote:

Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon. I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it.⁵

It is worth quoting Huxley on his hoped-for society at length, not only to establish an alternative to pessimism but also to burst the depiction of Orwell as the repository of English “decency”:

If I were to now rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reservation. In this community economics would be decentralist …, politics … co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not … as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligence pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of High Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle—the first question to be asked and answered in every of life being: “How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?”⁶

Huxley's work does draw upon the stereotype of the “noble savage” present in European writing since the 16th century but, unlike Orwell's one-dimensional and ultimately empty recitation of hope in the proles, Huxley offers a considered evaluation of hierarchy without simply elevating the “primitive” above the “advanced.” His critique shows a consideration and appreciation of political, economic, social, philosophical, and religious theories which Orwell shunned.

One other aspect of Brave New World, in comparison with Nineteen Eighty-Four, should be noted. The work is playful in its satire, showing a lightness of touch that Orwell only approached in Coming Up for Air. The Utopia's “God” is Henry Ford; its sign the “T” (the Christian cross with the top cut off) of Ford's Model T. The production line of automobiles has pointed the way for the production line of human beings. Huxley also dabbles with playground rhymes, psychology (at one point, “Our Ford” becomes “Our Freud”), and the language of Shakespeare; in comparison, Orwell's use of “Orange and Lemons” is harsh and somewhat clumsy. Huxley's fancy offers relief from his nightmare; Orwell's literalness gives no such respite.⁷

THE “TOTALITARIAN” NOVEL

In its glum portrayal of an individual crushed by a relentless system without humor, without joy, Nineteen Eighty-Four is possibly best compared not with Swift or Huxley but with Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Rubashov is a member of the Inner rather than the Outer Party, and he is more of a “believer” in the system than Winston; however, the crushing of his spirit is just as poignant as that of Winston's will in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Koester's work arguably carries more impact than that of Orwell. Because of Rubashov's genuine adherence to Communism, his disillusionment and anguish have a depth not matched by Winston's giving up of “2 ＋ 2 = 4.” The sacrifice of Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist is ultimately personal, whereas Rubashov has given up a lifetime of political belief. This loss is heightened because Koestler is clearly referring to a real-life system, in this case the Soviet Communism of The Leader (Lenin) and Number One (Stalin). Orwell, in contrast, always maintains a “general” conception of a totalitarian system which is not tied to a specific country or ideology. As O'Brien makes clear:

There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. …

In the old days the heretics walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out.

(890)

Another difference between Koestler and Orwell would ultimately work to the latter's advantage. Whatever the power of Darkness at Noon, Koestler was in the end a foreigner. Orwell could uphold Nineteen Eighty-Four as an Englishman.

ORWELL AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

British literature featured a rich variety of authors in the middle of the 20th century. Despite this, Orwell is usually considered a special case, treated separately not only from the novelists of the previous generation such as Virginia Woolf, poets such as W. H. Auden, and critics such as Cyril Connolly (a good friend of Orwell's), but also contemporary novelists such as Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene.

In part, this is due to Orwell's distancing of his opinions and his work from fellow writers. He was well-known for his attacks upon the character of contemporaries as well as their publications. W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and “the rest of that gang” were “of the pansy Left,” writers of the “public school-university-Bloomsbury pattern” of “the soft-boiled emancipated middle-class.”⁸ It is notable that Orwell's major essays of literary criticism were either of past British authors such as Charles Dickens or Rudyard Kipling or of recent or contemporary American authors such as Jack London and Henry Miller. His criticism of contemporary British works, in contrast to his sweeping attacks on the British “literary clique,” was limited to reviews of books by minor authors.

Orwell himself had been set apart from other novelists by critics long before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In a sense, this was due to Orwell's relative failure as a writer of fiction before 1945. Q. D. Leavis, in the only comprehensive review of Orwell's work up to 1940, wrote, “if he would give up trying to be a novelist, Mr. Orwell might find his métier in literary criticism, in a special line of it peculiar to himself and which is particularly needed now.”⁹ Later critics agreed, as in John Wain's assessment, “Orwell's essays are obviously much better than his novels.”¹⁰

However, this still does not explain why the “established” Orwell, with Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, was not compared with those writers who followed him. Less than a decade after his death, critics would be labeling novelists and playwrights such as John Wain, Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, and Alan Sillitoe as the “Angry Young Men” of British literature. Few made the obvious link with the work of Orwell who, like these writers, had condemned the materialism, hypocrisy, and grimness of modern British life. Nor would Orwell be considered with Ray Bradbury, whose Fahrenheit 451 would appear within a few years of Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Anthony Burgess, whose Clockwork Orange (1962) would further Orwell's consideration of the individual, violence, psychological “adjustment,” and society.

It appears that Orwell has been privileged because of his special linkage of internal and external enemies, particularly in the late 1940s. Auden wrote about the civil war in Spain, in a poem which was attacked by Orwell, and Isherwood set his novels in Germany, but both were left behind once the menace was Soviet Communism. While Graham Greene had established himself, his novels and nonfiction about Englishmen and Americans abroad, with their scathing critique of the hypocrisy of Western foreign policy, were still to come. The “Angry Young Men” offered an “inward” examination of Britain, never linking social problems to evils abroad.

UNIVERSALITY OF THEMES IN NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

It has been the special fate of Nineteen Eighty-Four that not only are its themes held up as universal but that the novel established how these themes should be considered. Whether or not Orwell intended the work as a commentary on the Soviet threat, the book would be held up as the consummate “Cold War novel.”

You must read [Nineteen Eighty-Four], sir. Then you will know why we must drop the atomic bomb on the Bolshies.

(New York bookseller, 1949. Quoted in Isaac Deutscher, “1984—The Mysticism of Cruelty,” in Russia in Transition and Other Essays [London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957]: 245)

(A valuable comparison is with Norman Mailer's Naked and the Dead, which was published the year before Nineteen Eighty-Four. Mailer's study of the effects of war on an American unit in the Asian theatre in World War II was not only specific but general, raising the question of whether conflict produced an American embrace of authoritarianism and fascism. While the novel would receive literary acclaim, its political message would be set aside in the 1950s.)

Nineteen Eighty-Four was a broad enough work, however, to move beyond the immediate environment of anti-Communism. In the 1960s Orwell and the novel would be adopted by some “New Left” activists to criticize the expanding authority of Western governments. Even more importantly, Nineteen Eighty-Four has survived because, although the conflict with Soviet Communism ended in 1991, other themes of the novel continued to have contemporary resonance. In particular, Orwell's picture of the “surveillance society” has been used to question the introduction and expansion of computer records, closed-circuit television, and electronic and satellite spying from the 1960s.

Yet even this may not be enough to secure the novel's lasting reputation, at least as a harbinger of danger. In recent years, the “surveillance society” has been accepted in many areas, with Western cities now featuring cameras in public areas as well as in many “private” neighborhoods and with the economic life of most people well-documented by financial agencies if not “the State.” The adoption of Nineteen Eighty-Four for the global phenomenon “Big Brother,” in which contestants compete by living “on-camera” 24 hours a day, raises the question: will Orwell and his dark vision ultimately become part of a world of light entertainment more akin to the Brave New World of Huxley?

SYMBOLIC APPROACH

A symbol, in the broadest sense, is an image, an incident, or an item in a work that takes on a significance other than its evident objective meaning. Unlike most literary works, where the symbolism is latent or even unintended, the political nature of Nineteen Eighty-Four means that much of its symbolism is usually “given” by Orwell to the reader. Thus the portrayal of the leader, Big Brother, stands for the totalitarian nature of the Party “watching” over the populace. Other intended symbolism is subverted by Orwell's critique of propaganda. There is little that is victorious in Victory Mansions, Victory Gin, or Victory Cigarettes. The Ministry of Love is far from loving and the Ministry of Peace far from peaceful.

This overt symbolism extends to other aspects of the novel. The meaning of the Golden Country is apparent in its name. The antique hemisphere of coral in Mr. Charrington's shop, as well as the nursery rhyme “Oranges and Lemons” and the associated churches of England (including one, St. Clement Danes, whose painting is on the wall of Winston and Julia's hideaway), also represent the “lost” England. These symbols are also “lost” or subverted when the Thought Police smash the hemisphere and Mr. Charrington adds the lines to the nursery rhyme: “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!” (869) A more subtle subversion is within the name of Winston's pub, The Chestnut Tree Café. The pub is grimy and filled with sadness, but it is here rather than in the Golden Country that Winston comes to rest after his torture and betrayal of Julia. This is echoed in a song heard in the pub earlier in the novel, “Under the spreading chestnut tree / I sold you and you sold me: / There lie they, and here lie we / Under the spreading chestnut tree.” (788)

ECONOMIC APPROACH

Orwell establishes a clear economic as well as political and social structure in Nineteen Eighty-Four with the division between the Party members and the “proles.” The structure is defined not as much by the caricatured depiction of the proles as by the explanation in Goldstein's manifesto. The book offers a Marxist explanation of imperialism, “All of the disputed territories [between the superstates] contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour.” (854) It then turns to the necessary division of the classes at home:

An all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. In a world which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. … In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

(855)

Orwell's explanation, through Goldstein, is the most complete development of economic theory to be found in any of his writings. It is undermined, however, by its place in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is not integrated into the novel but attached, somewhat artificially, as an exegesis. It is likely that many readers skip the description altogether, especially as some editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four print it in small typeface which is difficult, even painful, to follow. The worth of Goldstein's explanation is also questioned by O'Brien's revelation that it is not “real” but is the creation of the Party.

HISTORICAL/POLITICAL APPROACH

The dominant approach of critics towards Nineteen Eighty-Four is the evaluation of its representation of history and current events as well as its political significance for later generations. For most, the strength of Nineteen Eighty-Four is its “realism” in portraying actual conditions in post-war England and its portrayal of a totalitarianism which might control Britain in the near-future. That strength, however, was undermined by Orwell's refusal to define whether the novel was a specific criticism of Soviet Communism and the threat of its expansion, whether it was directed at political philosophies, apart from Communism, which existed within Western countries, or whether it was directed at a general psychological tendency which transcended a specific political movement or philosophy.

Orwell's position was further complicated by his own record of anti-Communism, which included savage attacks against non-Communist figures whom he believed too “soft” on the Soviet Union, and by his place within a network of anti-Communist writers, political activists, and intelligence officers in postwar Britain. The eagerness of Orwell's publishers, especially in the United States, and subsequently his widow to work with Government authorities to promote Nineteen Eighty-Four would also contribute to the novel's specific positioning within a political as well as literary environment.

Thus no “pure” or transcendent reading of the novel may ever have been possible. Defenders of Nineteen Eighty-Four often start from the premise that Soviet Communism was evil; the novel took a stand against that Communism; therefore, the novel is “good,” whatever its literary merits. Conversely, other critics have started from the premise that anti-Communism was a destructive force in Western societies; Nineteen Eighty-Four was an important weapon in the hands of anti-Communists; therefore, Nineteen Eighty-Four was “bad,” whatever its literary merits.

A historical approach might “rescue” Nineteen Eighty-Four by taking it out of this immediate Cold War environment. One could argue that the Soviet Union, with the death of Stalin, changed significantly only four years after the death of Stalin and that by 1963 the immediate conflict between Washington, London, and Moscow was replaced by “co-existence.” It might be observed that the costliest conflict for the United States, both in the cost of lives and in the effect on national psychology, was not with Communism but with the nationalist movement in Vietnam. One might also ask how Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is primarily based on a vision of North American and European systems, could be read in the “emerging” countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

Thus Nineteen Eighty-Four's significant political impact in countries in Eastern Europe up to the fall of repressive systems in 1989 could be upheld, as Orwell may have intended, as a victory against the general tyrannies of States rather than a specific Red threat. If so, one might argue that the book's mission had not ended, for repressive States were arguably as common and as pernicious in the non-Communist world as they were beyond the Iron Curtain.

With such an approach, the book might offer new challenges today. The reader might pause, for example, to consider if the State can continue to mobilize mass hatred against new enemies, if patriotism can lead to further destruction rather than progress, or if a “war against terrorism” abroad might lead to curbs on civil liberties at home. Above all, in a world where the terms “good” and “evil” have been invoked with as much or more strength than they were in the late 1940s, the reader might consider that Nineteen Eighty-Four finds that the pursuit of such “good” and “evil” is the justification, rather than the cure, of the all-powerful State.

Notes

1. The text of the 1726 Motte edition of Gulliver's Travels, with corrections from the 1735 Faulkner edition, is available at http://www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/contents.html.

2. Fredric Warburg, “Publisher's Report,” in George Orwell: The Critical Heritage, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975): 24.

3. Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982): 58.

4. See Andy Croft's “Worlds Without End Foisted Upon the Future—Some Antecedents of Nineteen Eighty-Four,” in Inside the Myth: Orwell, Views from the Left, ed. Christopher Norris (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984): 183-216.

5. Aldous Huxley, 1946 foreword to Brave New World (London: Harper Collins, 2001): ii.

6. Ibid, iii.

7. When one compares Huxley and Orwell, Bernard Crick's paean to the “humour” of the latter is curious. [Bernard Crick, “The Reception of Nineteen Eighty-Four,” in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Apocalyptic Imagination in America (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1985): 18.

8. George Orwell to Cyril Connolly, 27 April 1938, 328; and George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters of George Orwell, eds. Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell, Vol. 1 (London:Secker and Warburg, 1968): 493-528.

9. Q. D. Leavis, “The Literary Life Respectable: Mr. George Orwell,” Scrutiny, September 1940: 173-6.

10. John Wain review, Twentieth Century, January 1954: 71.