Hello, integro-ga!
Well, I must thank you for making me read this book again! When I was
in junior high, it was mandatory reading along with Animal Farm. Of
course, in the 1960's, I remember the teenage "fear" ascribed to the
actual reality of "1984," and the curious anticipation that life would
be just like the book as 1984 approached. Of course, the young
"hippie" generation loved to read such novels and entertain any type
of superstition against the Government at that time!
Since your question is so broad, I have taken each concept, explained
it simply, and then followed it with examples from the novel. However,
I must admit that the concepts are really so intertwined that it was
hard to break portions of the book into categories.
Lastly, I have given you my interpretation of your questions as they
pertain to the novel. There are numerous essays and opinions
available on the internet. If you want some different opinions, you
can simply type in "1984" into the search engine of your choice, and
you will likely be inundated with various websites where you can read
other opinions and summaries of the novel.
Creating a "Common" State History
**********************************
A major goal of the "Big Brother" political system was to totally
eradicate any memories of true history, and replace historical facts
with imaginary ones, which, with time and indoctrination, became
"real." The eventual creation of a "Common History" was the ideal
method to create mass belief in a past that involved no independent
memory or thought. With no memory of past history to contradict the
new "past," the future could be easily manipulated.
History, as fact, no longer existed, but was re-written for the
benefit of Big Brother's control over the people. Without true
historical memory, or accurate facts, brainwashing and domination of
the population was not hard to imagine.
===
Though compelled to write in a secret diary, Winston struggled to
find any meaning in compiling his thoughts. "He wondered again for
whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past - for an
age that might be imaginary....Only the Thought Police would read what
he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of
memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of
you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could
physically survive?" (Chapter 2)
The ability to fabricate a false memory of history so that it
eventually becomes "real" was more terrifying than torture or death.
"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or
that event, it never happened -that, surely, was more terrifying than
mere torture and death."
(Chapter 3)
"Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future:
who controls the present controls the past." All the Party needed to
do to accomplish their goal was to employ "Doublethink," or a form or
reality control that eradicated true historical memory through a
series of victories over independent thought. (Chapter 3)
Winston Smith was enlisted to "rewrite the archives of the London
Times so that they are consistent with current Ingsoc policy. When
Ingsoc changes its political alliance with another superpower and
begins waging war on a former ally, Winston's job is to rewrite all
the prior information to show that the old alliance never existed. So
addled are the minds of the people he meets that they don't even
realize that these changes have been made.
From "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength."
Newspeak.com
http://www.newspeak.com/1984.htm
"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to
date." (Chapter 4)
Winston was in awe of the willingness of his "comrades" to accept the
re-writing of history as early as a day after new news had replaced
old. The rationing of chocolate from 30 grams to 20 grams is applauded
the next day, as history is re-written and news is broadcast that the
populace is thanking Big Brother for "raising" the rations to 20
grams. "And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that
the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible
that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? (Chapter
5)
In a most insidious method of mind warp and ultimate control, the
language of "Newspeak" was constructed and employed.
"The purpose of Newspeak was to drastically reduce the number of
words in the English language in order to eliminate ideas that were
deemed dangerous and, most importantly, seditious to the totalitarian
dictator, Big Brother and the Party. "Thoughtcrime," the mere act of
thinking about ideas like Freedom or Revolution, was punishable by
torture and brainwashing. Newspeak was the sinister answer. A
character in 1984 describes it succinctly: "Don't you see that the
whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end,
we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be
no words in which to express it... The whole climate of thought will
be different. In fact, there will be no thought as we understand it
now."
From "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength."
Newspeak.com
http://www.newspeak.com/Newspeak.htm
A common history fed the belief that the Proles were harmless, and
would not rebel against the Party. According to Winston, "if there was
hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming
disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania,
could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated." However,
"until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after
they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." Thus, the common
belief in history prevailed. (Chapter 7)
Strangely, although Julia was against the Political system, she was
too young and naive to be aware of the re-writing of history. She not
only felt it did not matter, but had not interest in learning.
As Winston realizes, "Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to
present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of
what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed
itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it."
(Part 2, Chapter 5)
The creation of a common state history lies in the ultimate control
of all that occurs in Oceania. The control, according to Big Brother,
lies in the possession of the individual mind. As Winston questions
O'Brien about how Big Brother can control matter, the response is
telling. "We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is
inside the skull." When Winston questions him about nature, God and
the Universe, O'Brien's reply can be summed up in two sentences. "You
must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of
nature. We make the laws of nature." (Part 3, Chapter 3)
For Winston, in the end, history is finally rewritten. He becomes a
part of the common state history, and the union of thought. Upon
looking at a picture of Big Brother, he realizes how foolish he has
been to mistrust Big Brother. "Forty years it had taken him to learn
what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache.....But it was
all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had
won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother." (Part 3, Chapter
6)
The role of history and nostalgia
**********************************
Without a memory of history, nostalgia ceases to exist. Without
written records, memories of home and childhood are hard to
substantiate. Without human emotions, which the Party desired to dull
and eventually eradicate in it's followers, nostalgia dims and
eventually dies.
===
Winston yearned to "squeeze" out the slightest memory of the London
of his childhood. Did the old London of his youth look like the view
outside his window? "Were there always those vistas of rotting
nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with balks of
timber...?" Try as he might, Winston memory fails him. "But it was no
use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a
series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and
mostly unintelligible."
(Chapter 1)
In the struggle to remember his own childhood, Winston realized with
grim reality that "when there were no external records that you could
refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You
remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you
remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture
their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could
assign nothing." (Chapter 3)
Winston could remember the grip of his father's hand, and the sorrow
expressed by the old man he had seen crying after an air raid during
his childhood. He could remember the "slow, dreamy way" his mother
followed them deep into the earth, carrying a bundle of blankets that
might have held his baby sister. But the actuality of the events lay
hidden, taken away by the rewriting of history. Nostalgia for his
childhood was ripped away when the reality of past events were mired
in a haze.
"For several months during his childhood there had been confused
street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly.
But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was
fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible,
since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any
other alignment than the existing one." (Chapter 3)
"The past had not only been altered, it had been destroyed." (Chapter
3)
Yet, when Julia brought a packet of "real" coffee to their rented
room, it gave a "rich, hot smell which seemed like an emanation from
his early childhood..." (Part 2, Chapter 4)
It is hard to be nostalgic for memories you have never experienced.
After a night of lovemaking in a double bed in their rented room,
Winston wonders at the peace and comfort of making love without worry
or time. "He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had
been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a
summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when
they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to
get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds. outside.
Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary."
(Part 2, Chapter 4)
Memories and Dreams
*******************
Memories and dreams are an integral component of a person's private
being. They set each individual apart from one another. They help to
define a sense of self, and nurture the individual soul.
The Party would achieve it's ultimate success when memories and
dreams could no longer spring from individual, private thought. Once
an individual lost all sense of a private history, and was reduced to
the shortened vocabulary of "Newspeak," individual dreams and thoughts
could be successfully eliminated, and a person's ultimate privacy, the
privacy of the mind, would be eradicated.
In the end, Winston succumbs to the torture and retraining directed
by O'Brien. His memories are no longer real, but fabrications. His
mind is truly under control of Big Brother. The Party has won.
===
Winston highlights the preciousness of retaining memory and
individual thought under Big Brother's regime.
"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your
skull." (Chapter 2)
While Big Brother could destroy history by sending papers down
"memory holes," it would take some time before memories could be
erased within one's mind. Winston, for instance, still realizes the
fallacy of the Party's claim that they had invented the airplane. "He
remembered airplanes from his earliest childhood. But you could prove
nothing. There was never any evidence." (Chapter 3)
Memories and dreams were the essence of keeping Winston "alive." His
diary represented a semblance of privacy that Big Brother vowed to
destroy. "He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would
ever hear. But so long, as he uttered it, in some obscure way the
continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by
staying sane that you carried on the human heritage." (Chapter 2)
The dream of Winston's mother and baby sister, dying so that he might
live, was a particular testimony to the loss of human emotion that the
Party succeeded in destroying. The pain and sorrow that Wilson felt
were wrapped around a tragedy and emotions belonging to the past, a
"time when there were still privacy, love and friendship, and when the
members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the
reason."..."Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there
were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion or deep or
complex sorrows. (Chapter 3)
The significance of Winston's dream in which the naked girl flung her
clothes aside with indifference and carelessness also testified to an
earlier time, when individual thoughts and decisions were the norm.
The gesture, "with its grace and carelessness...seemed to annihilate a
whole culture, a whole system of thought, as thought Big Brother and
the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness
by a single splendid movement of the arm." (Chapter 3)
When Winston's dream became reality, the significance of her
indifference was more pronounced in Winston's mind. Coupled with a
delight in the sensuality of the lovemaking was an overriding hatred
toward the Party and her part in corrupting it's members. There was
also a certain sadness in the loss of pure emotion, which, again, was
part of lost history. "But you could not have pure love or pure lust
nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with
fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a
victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political
act." (Part 2, Chapter 3)
Possession of memories often caused Winston to question his sanity,
as well as the ultimate truth of present situations. Knowing that the
photograph he had found of the three Delegates proved that their
confessions were a lie, only caused him confusion. He had thrown the
photograph away. "Was the Party's hold upon the past less strong, he
wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once
existed?" (Chapter 7)
But it was not the possibility of lunacy that troubled Winston. It
was the possibility that he might actually be wrong, and that his
memories might trick him. "It was as though some huge force were
pressing down upon you - something that penetrated inside your skull,
battering against your brain, frightening your out of your beliefs,
persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses.....And
what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking
otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we
know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works?
Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external
world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable -
what then?" (Chapter 7)
In his reflections on the rationing of chocolate and the animal
stupidity in which his comrades accepted the re-written news of the
day before, Winston speculates on his sanity. "Was he, then, alone, in
the possession of a memory?" (Chapter 5)
Memory must be an integral component of human existence, Winston
reasoned. "And was it not some sort of "ancestral memory" of a
different, past life that allowed Winston to feel revulsion at the
disgusting environment in which he now lived? (Chapter 5)
Memories could also be a source of torment. Reliving the sexual
relations he had with the aged prostitute were impossible to quell,
but were undeniably disquieting. The recognition of the human lust
that normally accompanied sexual relations merely fed his revulsion
toward his wife and her sexual rigidity. Furthermore, the memories of
sexual conquest served only to nurture his desire for rebellion, for
"desire was thoughtcrime." (Chapter 6)
Winston was old enough to retain a degree of memory which was
disturbing to him, for he was never quite sure if the memories were
based on events which had a historical reality. The taste of the dark
chocolate given to him by Julia brings on a disturbing sensation of a
memory he cannot quite grasp. "The first whiff of its scent had
stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was
powerful and troubling.".... "The first fragment of chocolate had
melted on Winston's tongue. The taste was delightful. But there was
still that memory moving round the edges of his consciousness,
something strongly felt but not reducible to definite shape, like an
object seen out of the corner of one's eye. He pushed it away from
him, aware only that it was the memory of some action which he would
have liked to undo but could not." (Part 2, Chapter 2)
The memory of the chocolate is finally fleshed out in a dream which
elicits a flood of human emotion that the Party had come close to
stifling in Winston. He remembers stealing the chocolate from his
dying sister. He remembers the loving, protective gesture of his
mother's arm. Winston realizes the human emotion that has been
stripped away by the Party.
"The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that
mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same
time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you
were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you
did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever
happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever
heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history.
And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have
seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter
history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not
question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a
completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a
dying man, could have value in itself." (Part 2, Chapter 7)
The dream forces Winston to realize the essence of humanity, the
inner being. It was the inner being that could beat the Party. "With
all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out
what another human being was thinking." If the ultimate desire was to
remain human, even while losing one's life, then an individual could
beat the Party. "But if the object was not to say alive but to say
human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter
your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, eve
if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything
that you had done or said or though; but the inner hear, whose
workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable."
(Part 2, Chapter 7)
Yet, under retraining, Winston's feelings and thoughts begin to fall
away. Individual thoughts and memories are replaced by the
infiltration of Party propaganda. Winston's mind is not his own. As
O'Brien so chillingly explains to him, "Never again will you be
capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you.
Never again will you be capable of love, courage, or integrity. You
will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you
with ourselves." (Part 3, Chapter 2)
The memory of Julia still resides in Winston, long after his body has
been destroyed. He holds on to that one bit of strength and control
that remains; the fact that he did not betray her. Yet, at the final
moment, when faced with ultimate fear, even that final memory of
non-betrayal is ripped from him. "Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not
me! Julia!" He is left with the memory that Big Brother wants him to
retain.(Part 3, Chapter 5)
A final memory of long ago, of childhood, his mother, his little
sister, comes to him. A candle, a room, a game of Snakes and Ladders.
Laughter, love and happiness. "He pushed the picture out of his mind.
It was a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally.
They did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were."
(Part 3, Chapter 6)
============================================================================
Thank you, integro, for a most interesting journey. I enjoyed reading
"1984" far more as an older adult than I did at 13! But now, I think I
will go read something a little lighter!
umiat-ga
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