
Chills at Christmas
A consideration of spooky tales for the festive season by David Stuart Davies
...
Dec
18
Dec
23
George Orwell is a chronicler of the past, a
reporter of the present, and a seer into the future; but even he could not have
predicted a year in which his name, work and ideas have been drawn on so often.
‘Orwellian’: that epithet has been applied to the America of Trump’s fake news,
to a Europe in which many citizens have had to print a certificate of
permission in order to go out in the street, to a world where free movement can
be suddenly halted, passports no longer guarantee entry into another country, or
even your own, and the State everywhere has taken measures of control over its
peoples unprecedented outside wartime. In this new virus-haunted world we all
came to rely on meeting each other through digital images on a flat screen, and
previously private domestic spaces were open for all and sundry to see on
social media. The books on the bookshelves behind talking heads were examined
and cruelly satirised. We were only a step away from the telescreen being ‘on’
all the time, and certainly we composed our faces carefully for Zoom
encounters, either to disguise any signs of incipient derangement from the keen
gaze of fellow employees and employers, or to reassure our nearest and dearest
we were still well, still inherently ourselves.
‘Orwellian’ is itself a sort of misnomer;
as Dorian Lynskey says in his self-styled ‘Biography of George Orwell’s 1984’,
‘ the word Orwellian has turned the author’s own name into a capacious synonym
for everything he hated and feared’.[1]
Most of the things people deem Orwellian in the modern world are drawn from
ideas in his final novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four: the alteration of the past (Winston Smith’s job in The
Ministry of Truth), the loss of individual liberty (it is ‘reasonably certain’
that the simple act of writing a diary ‘would be punished by death’), the
dominance of technological surveillance (telescreens), the possibility of
external control of the mind as well as the body (Room 101), all stem from
Orwell’s vividly imagined totalitarian state in which Big Brother rules
supreme. Animal Farm too embodies
that vision, in a more strictly allegorical way, and thus one which we can
immediately understand and internalise. Even those who have never read this
political ‘fairy story’ will recognise the memorable irony of ‘All animals are
equal but some animals are more equal than others’. The innocent creatures of Animal Farm, who start with such high ideals, eventually divide
into the rulers and the ruled, in a way that seems more poignant because they
are animals. Even in the final chapter, after years of harder and harder work,
‘the animals never gave up hope. More, they never lost, even for an instant,
their sense of honour and privilege in being members of Animal Farm. … if they worked hard, at least they worked
for themselves. No creature among them went upon two legs. No creature called
any other creature “Master”. All animals were equal.’ It is soon after this
that the pigs get up on their hind legs, whips in hand, and the new slogan,
‘some animals are more equal than others’, is written on the barn wall. As the
pigs turn inexorably into humans, so we measure their gradual corruption, and
in Swiftian manner the writer’s sharp eye is turned from the page to ourselves.
It is the imaginative power of these
fictions which has fixed them in reader’s minds. In Animal Farm we see the puzzled creatures, who have become individual
characters for us, trying to adapt to this new contradictory commandment, and
we could weep for them. In Nineteen
Eighty-Four, it is through the experience of the central protagonist,
Winston Smith, that we understand the horrors of the world he inhabits. At the
same time this inventiveness and engagement of the reader’s empathy are also in
the service of the powerful ideas Orwell wants to put across. Central to these
is his warning of the potential all-consuming power of the state over the
individual and the inherent corruptibility of any ideology which is enforced
without consent. This still speaks significantly to a contemporary readership. Yet
the totalitarianism that Orwell saw as such a major threat to liberty in the
1940s, embodied in Communist (USSR) and Fascist (Germany and Italy)
authoritarian states, has arguably receded from rather than encroached on the
West in the seventy years since his death. Orwell was certainly aware of China
as a prime example of totalitarianism, but the more local Communism that he had
experienced himself in Europe was what he drew on principally in his dystopian
fictions. The collapse of the USSR might look like a counter-example to his
vision, as indeed might China’s embrace of the capitalist market. What resonates more now from his powerful
warning against totalitarianism is the way in which the citizens of liberal
democracies have colluded in their own fate. We carry our own telescreens with
us, and see them as an extension of our personal liberty rather than a threat
to it. We have somehow allowed the notion of a ‘post-truth’ world to creep into
our consciousness though most of us still adhere to the possibility of
objective truths, accurate news, and actual facts. At the same time most of those
of us who live in a liberal democracy still prize its institutions and its
central values; authoritarian ideologies remain a present threat to those, and
so Orwell’s fearful vision remains fresh.
One of his shorthand ways of demonstrating
that threat in terms of individual freedom of thought is through Winston’s
capitulation to his torturer O’Brien, which comes when he loses his hold on the
unalterability of the equation ‘2+2=4’.
For Orwell, it was still the case, in the non-fictional world, that ‘two and
two have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an
aeroplane’ (‘The Prevention of Literature’, 1946). But in his essay ‘Looking
Back on the Spanish War’, his experience of propaganda during that war had also
shown him how easily truth could be subverted and ‘facts’ manipulated, to the
point that ‘it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective
truth is fading out of the world’. In
turn this allows the possibility of a world in which ‘If the Leader says of
such and such a thing, “it never happened” – well, it never happened. If he
says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect
frightens me much more than bombs... ’. This was Orwell writing in 1943 – the
year before President-elect Joe Biden was born. I think we all hope that Joe
Biden is a ‘2+2=4’ kind of guy. In the same way, we hope that the pig-dimension
of the human personality can still be eclipsed by the solid virtue of a noble
Boxer. Orwell’s fictions are warnings rather than predictions; they allow us to
see, as he said of Nineteen Eighty-Four, what could happen, not
what necessarily would. Armed with this imaginative knowledge, we can be
forewarned to prevent it.
Orwell’s essays are gems of prose, and they
explore many of the same ideas as the fiction; we have included in each of the
three volumes a number of the essays relevant to each text, so that readers can
easily refer to them. But it is not surprising that it is initially his
fictions, the fabulist Animal Farm
and the futurist Nineteen Eighty-Four,
that have seized readers ever since these works were first published. Animal Farm has never been out of print,
and is a regular text in schools; Nineteen
Eighty-Four has found its way into all sorts of cultural forms. Both have been translated into many languages,
testament to their ability to cross cultures. There is a malleability in these
works; in spite of their appearing to be firmly founded in a historical and
political moment, they keep reinventing themselves across time, culture,
language and politics. Thus, though we have given a clear account in our
introductions of the particular history in which they are founded in order to
help the reader locate them, we also urge readers to roam beyond that context
and read these as fictions in their own right, for our moment, but also for
other moments.
The two non-fiction works, published in one
volume, speak to us today in a different way. I said that Orwell looks to the
past as well as the present and the future, and in these two works, one of
memoir (Down and Out in Paris and London)
and one of what we would now call investigative journalism (The Road to Wigan Pier), he places
himself in a long tradition of writing about the lives of the least fortunate
in society which developed strongly in the nineteenth century. Orwell himself saw
Down and Out as an expiation of the
guilt of his former self, old Etonian, member of the Indian Imperial Police in
Burma, one of the privileged wielding power over the less privileged. Orwell is
always interesting when talking about class. In Down and Out he investigates class differences by wrenching himself
deliberately out of his own class into what we would now call the underclass,
living amongst the lowest manual workers (a plongeur
– a washer of dishes) in the kitchen world of Paris, and taking himself into a
further level of deprivation in London by becoming a tramp. Then he writes up
his experiences. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he approaches the working-class world
overtly as a journalist and social investigator, but even here he plunges
himself into the experience of that world, living amongst those he is writing
about. Temporary as this may be, he gets his hands dirty, and learns what it is
like to walk bent double along a deep mine-shaft before you ever start work on
the coal-face. He doesn’t attempt the
coal-face itself; as he readily admits, a few weeks as a miner would have
killed him. But even his brief experience shines through in the writing, as
does his respect for the hard life of any manual worker.
Here Orwell plugs into that tradition of
excavating lives that have previously been hidden. He is always aware that he
comes from outside those lives; but he can make the effort to understand them
by inhabiting them, however briefly. And here again, he speaks to us still. We
find ourselves once more in a time in which there is great social deprivation,
when food banks are needed by the employed as well as the unemployed, when widespread
homelessness is a fact of life. Ours is an age of greater affluence,
ostensibly, than the late 1920s/ 1930s when Orwell was reporting. His word-pictures
might seem like black and white photographs, social documents of a harder time.[2]
But the reality of deprivation in the present is exactly the same as the
reality of deprivation in that past. Orwell sets out what is the ‘indispensable
minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all’:
Enough to eat,
freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your
children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably
often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you
with a little energy when the day is done. (‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’)
Too many people at present do not have that
‘indispensable minimum’.
………………………………………………………………………………….
In recent weeks I have been dreaming of libraries.
It is a leap from not enough bread on the table, to the importance of libraries.
But Orwell was aware of the interdependence of the two. The libraries I have
been dreaming of range from the very first library I knew, the mobile library
that came to my village, bringing to my mother, and later to me, a world of
knowledge in the small span of a van, to the idyllic Oxford interiors of the
Bodleian and the Radcliffe Camera – privileged as Orwell’s Eton. But never mind
where the books are to be found, it is the books themselves that matter. Orwell
had a profound understanding of the power of writing, of the way words can leap
from the flat page straight into the minds of readers. His books perform that
act of transmigration and imaginative transformation like no other. As the
world of 1984 recognised, there is nothing more subversive than words on a
page:
Winston fitted a
nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an
archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one,
furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the
beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib … he dipped
the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone
through his bowels. To mark the paper was a decisive act.
We make the same decisive act when we read;
these works more than most command our attention.