Hey Y'all! We are trying something new here, so let's jump in and see how this goes.
The next book on the list is 1984, which is a phenomenal book, and a book that everyone should read and most people want to read, so I am hoping to have some people play along. I will post my regular blog about the novel when I have completed reading it this time through, but before then, I am starting this thread to let anyone who wants to to make comments about the book.
So all you have to do to play is click on the comment area below and leave a comment. It can be anything you want: something you love about the book, a great sentence, a cool idea, a diatribe on Orwell's use of pronouns--I don't care! If you think it and want to share it, throw it in there. It's a reading/discussion group for anyone who wants to play. I've made a few comments below to get thing rolling.
I myself will be absent for the next week or so (I promised the family I would read the last two books in the Hunger Games series so they can discuss it openly!), but then I will be back and in full swing. Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves. Go get your copy of the book and dig in!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I don't know what "Hate Week" is, but I'm excited to find out!
ReplyDeleteHow much do you love that the telescreen cannot be turned off or muted, ever? When we control your media and your stimulation, we control you!
ReplyDeleteI need to read the last two Hunger Games books too. But the first one made me cry so much that I probably need some recovery time first. ;P I'm off to find 1984 for my kindle!
ReplyDeleteSo excited to have your company here, Sarah! I'm cutting through Catching Fire as fast I can to get back to 1984, but I'll be following along with anything you post. The novel will not disappoint!
ReplyDeleteHunger Games trilogy is done! The timing is perfect really, since it follows in the tradition of dystopic fiction, a tradition shaped primarily by Orwell's 1984. Both works of course have a central government that is structured to maintain power and keep those who would change that in check. Really, beyond that the comparison has to end, in part because Hunger Games is written for the juvenile reader. President Snow is a palpable evil, a figure that can be hated and destroyed. Big Brother does not seem to be a singular or real person. Big Brother cares only about the "party members," the middle managers of government and leaves the proletariat to their own devices. Snow has no middle class to speak of, only the obscenely well off and the workers. The former party while the latter are slaves. Snow rules by threats and violence. Big Brother makes its members police themselves and each other. One gets a hot young thing to dress up in a superhero costume and wield a tricked-out bow and arrows, and the other features a middle aged man with ulcers and overalls who has no hope of finding any fellow rebels or free-thinkers. To compare the two, then, isn't really fair, so I will move on to some thoughts that have hit me as I've been reading.
ReplyDeleteI am only to chapter VIII, and my first thoughts are about the world that Orwell has created. There is something clever is making the world one that is in transition. Newspeak has begun circulating, but the full conversion to Newspeak is not scheduled to take place for another 60 years. And Winston, our hero, has memories from childhood of a time when Big Brother was not in power. Really, this is a kind of necessity for this story to even exist. If we were dealing with a time when Newspeak is the official language and no one alive remembers the days before Big Brother, then there is no way a rebel like Winston could even exist, could feel that things are wrong, could want something different, or could even have the language to think differently. So the world has to be old enough to have established its mode of power, but young enough for resistance to still be possible. So cool.
ReplyDelete"Who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present, controls the past." The mechanism for altering the past so that you can be sure of nothing so that whatever BB says could just as easily be true as false is chilling.
ReplyDeleteOne of the brilliant constructions here is that BB can be so open about its means of control. You can know exactly how it works because your knowing gives you no aid in changing things. In fact, the more you know, the more you fear, and the more you fear, the more you monitor and police yourself. That's a mess of a trap, and intimately related to the heart of BB's control.
It's not that different from doublethink as Winston defines it: "To know and to not know. To be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself--that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed" (Chapter III).
Once that's accomplished, the thought police are completely unnecessary.
"Facecrime." Love it. The whole appendix on the principles of Newspeak is an incredible analysis of the political manipulation of language. One of my favorite parts is the idea that shortening of an idea in politics helps remove meaning from the original phrase. His example is Ingsoc, which is for English Socialism. That's an incredible insight, I think, and one of the reasons I love reading Orwell. How can a person think so deeply and communicate it so clearly?
ReplyDelete"The heresy of heresies as common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right."
ReplyDeleteDoes Orwell have some sexist issues here? Winston has a lot of anger towards women and sees them as the greatest lackey's of Big Brother. I can't tell if Orwell is supporting the idea that women's consent is the greatest support of an oppressive regime, or if Winston channels his anger towards them due to the Party's perversion of all things sexual. He has rape fantasies and anger issues that could be attributed to "sex gone sour," as Julia put it in chapter 3 of the second section. I'm on the fence. Thoughts?
ReplyDeleteI love the final chapter of the first section, in which Winston wanders through the streets of the prole section of town. Eventually he enters a pub and finds an old man looking for some evidence that Big Brother has lied about the past, the capitalists, the whole of London's economic and social history. He realizes the old man would have been fully grown before the Party took over power.
ReplyDeleteNow at this point to a writer, the possibilities are infinite. The protagonist has a clear goal and knows the path he is going to travel. That goal can either be met or thwarted. If it's met, it needs to be met unexpectedly, and if it's thwarted, it needs to be thwarted completely. Orwell could have had the old man be suspicious and unwilling to talk. He could have been easily angered. He could have played with Winston and toyed out the information. I think it was a stroke of genius to have the man eager to talk, and "brighten" repeatedly at Winston's questions, and then give him nothing but junk. The effect is to watch Winston deflate as we ourselves deflate. We know the truth (to some extent) and want Winston to have a glimmer of hope. The conversation is gripping and frustrating and utterly demoralizing both to us and Winston. By the time section one ends, everything seems pretty hopeless. Winston is up to his neck in danger, has no way of discovering the truth. Meanwhile, Orwell has defined his world and its characters fully and vibrantly. Classically and wonderfully done.
"I Love You." To turn this into a love story (of sorts) is sooooo good! What better way to make the personal at odds with the Party? To test loyalties and inner resolve? It is the ultimate test of the individual's heart and mind against the seemingly all-powerful force of Big Brother.
ReplyDeleteThis is my third time reading _1984,_ but this is the first time I found the final section persuasive. I've always enjoyed the Ministry of Love section, but I was never fully convinced of Winston's conversion. I don't know what the difference is this time around, but I found the section very compelling, and impressively organized and well-thought out, as Orwell always is.
ReplyDeleteIt's really the only ending possible, isn't it? Any other way, and Winston wins, a small victory is scored against Big Brother, and as Orwell has set it up, Big Brother will always win.
I am intrigued by BB's use of relativism to win its victory over Winston (and presumably others). I haven't done the research, but I suspect that relativism was somewhat new or in vogue at the time Orwell was written. I wonder if it was being used to excuse all manner of atrocities at that time. Anyone know?
ReplyDeleteRichard Rorty drew some flack for his analysis of Orwell, but he posits that the entire last third of the book is not about Winston at all, but should be viewed as entirely about O'Brien. Orwell certainly had no love for Ironism, which was starting to get better-developed (I think Heidegger was the big name, after building on Nietzsche). Having said that, Rorty doesn't see Orwell particularly focused on Nazi Ironism, which would have been self-evidently awful. Rather, Orwell was concerned with the intellectuals in Britain who were eager to chase Ironism and in the process throw out liberalism.
ReplyDeleteBB seems reminiscent of a Discipline model of power from Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Foucault, however, would see 1984 as troublesome, I'd imagine.
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault suggests that the hypothesis that sexuality was repressed in the past and is being more openly discussed is a red herring that obscures the subtle ways that sexuality is being policed - and when we talk about "sexuality," we tend to focus on only certain forms and expressions of it. That Orwell built Winston's relationship with Julia in opposition to Big Brother seems exactly the sort of narrative that Foucault would consider problematic. The danger, Foucault might say today, is not necessarily that of an oppressive government (though, of course, he'd argue for caution), but rather of an illusory freedom we create for ourselves. I'd argue that Winston is in many ways as trapped by his relationship with Julia as he is in the Party.
The name Rorty is relatively new to me, and though I read up on the concept of ironism, I can't say that I understand it. I see that it applies to the political construction of language that is a central concern for Orwell, but I don't see how it plays into a reading of the text. Any elucidation, if you have time, would be much appreciated.
ReplyDeleteFoucault I am familiar with, although it has been almost 20 years since I have read The History of Sexuality. I'd be interested to hear how you think Winston is trapped by his relationship with Julia. The concern for an illusory freedom is everywhere in 1984: the party members police themselves and believe they are privileged when they are anything but. Even Winston is lead to believe that his acts of rebellion are real, when they are monitored and watched by Big Brother. His relationship with Julia, such as it is, seems the least of his problems. The "Illusory freedom we create for ourselves" that concerns Foucault seems like a greater concern in the lack of an openly oppressive government, unless you were to argue that that oppressive government oppresses primarily through the manipulations of those illusory freedoms.