Saturday, March 12, 2011

142. 1984

George Orwell 1949

A thought-provoking dystopian novel about an evil totalitarian regime where 'Big Brother' keeps tabs on every person's actions and thoughts. Among other things, there is perpetual war, thoughts are monitored constantly to make sure one 'doublethinks', truth and historical facts are revised and altered, the past flushed down the 'memory hole', language destroyed to the simpler 'Newspeak', and any person who tries to rebel is arrested and 'changed'. Which is why when Winston Smith, the protagonist tries to conjure ways of rebelling and continue to have one sliver of hope for change, the party tries to crush his soul. Such a disturbing and scary possibility!

'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.'(opening lines)

'From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH'(7)

'They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for the economic affairs. Their names in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty.'(8)

'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 the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.'(10)

'The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing screaming lunatic.'(16)

'His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to 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 on democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you just had performed. Even to understand the word "doublethink" involved the use of doublethink.'(32-33)

'If there is hope (wrote Winston) it lies in the proles.'(60)

"My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He was vaporized when I was eight -- at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was," she added inconsequently."I've seen oranges. They're a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin."
"I can remember lemons," said Winston. "They were quite common in the Fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell them."(121-122)

'Both of them knew -- in a way, it was never out of their minds -- that what was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking.'(125)

'Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.'(128)

'In a way, the world-view of the party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.'(129)

'If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them... Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.'(138)

'The best books he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.'(165)

'The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison they never even become aware that they are oppressed.'(171)

'Sooner or later it would happen: strength would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal; you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.'(182)

'The Party is not interested in the overt act; the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.'(209)

a Signet Classic edition
245 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
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