Most cover art variants for 1984 involve a watching eye or gaze, as does this cover art by Shephard Fairey for the 2008 Penguin edition (fair use)
(2) GEORGE ORWELL –
ANIMAL FARM & 1984 (1945 & 1949)
All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Big Brother is Watching, or if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
The influence of George Orwell in popular culture or imagination, encapsulated in the use of Orwellian as an adjective, is difficult to overstate – as is the extent to which these two books are etched into my psyche since reading them, hence the god-tier ranking.
Of the two books, 1984 has the far greater influence, both for me and for wider popular or political culture. Don’t get me wrong – Animal Farm is a ripping yarn but it lacks the sheer memetic impact of 1984. 1984 is essentially the entirety of the basis for the use of Orwellian as an adjective “describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices” – as well as the entirety of the source for Orwell’s neologisms that have become part of the English language – “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, Room 101″, “Newspeak”, “memory hole”, “doublethink” and “thougtcrime”.
I can’t resist quoting Archer’s one line of summary of Animal Farm, although I disagree with his spoiler alert – “It’s an allegorical novella about Stalinism by George Orwell, and spoiler alert, it sucks! Although I was talking about an actual animal farm…”
That pretty much sums it up, except the allegory is by way of beast fable, with the partly anthropomorphic (in behaviour) farm animals standing in for various people or aspects of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Three of the pigs are the most obvious as representing people – Old Major as a conflation of Marx and Lenin, Snowball as Trotsky, Napoleon as Stalin. Beyond that, the allegories are more general – Boxer as the proletariat (but perhaps also Alexei Stakhanov), and so on.
Ironically the human characters are similar to the pigs in their straightforward allegory – Farmer Jones overthrown by the animals is of course the Tsar while Frederick and Pilkington are Germany and the United States (or Western democracies) respectively.
Animal Farm doesn’t have the memetic depth of 1984 – with people usually remembering most my featured quotation, the subversion of the original commandment among the animals.
TV Tropes sums up 1984 as “one of the most horrifying and depressing codified for the dystopian genre, ever, notwithstanding its now-outdated title”. Orwell selected the title as an inversion of the last two digits of the year he wrote it in 1948, but in fairness, whether 1984 is the actual year is something the protagonist simply doesn’t know. Only the Party knows, if even it does – “the Party rewriting history certainly does not help matters”.
Even much of the setting and world-building is iconic. The book is set in London, although the United Kingdom is now prosaically called Airstrip One, part of the superpower of Oceania – essentially the former Anglo-Saxon nations of the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australasia, South Africa, give or take the rest of the Americas and some other territory.
Oceania is ruled by the Party in the most totalitarian regime in fiction or history – essentially Stalinism turned all the way up or a state “in which every single thing has become monstrously overwhelming”, despite having originated from Ingsoc (or English socialism). The actual Stalinist Soviet Union has taken over most of Eurasia to become, well, the superpower of Eurasia, while east Asia centred on China has become Eurasia, each as totalitarian as Oceania.
Life in Oceania – and presumably the other superpowers – is as bad as you’d expect. Standards of living are low due to perpetual war (with Oceania constantly shifting between fighting Eurasia alongside Eastasia as ally, or fighting Eastasia alongside Eurasia as ally). State surveillance is omnipresent and everything, including language itself, is heavily controlled and censored. Perhaps worst of all, the Party bans s€x as much as possible outside procreation – “We shall abolish the 0rgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.”
The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, a member of the middle-class Outer Party, secretly thinks of rebellion before being coaxed into it by a relationship with another party member, Julia, and a chance discovery of an apparent opposition or resistance movement within the Party. with a resistance movement. Needless to say, that does not work out well for him (or Julia).
1984 is frequently compared to Brave New World, with the latter as a competing fictional model of dystopia where hedonism rather than state terror is used as a means of control. The latter seems more plausible in the contemporary world rather than the heyday of totalitarian states in the twentieth century – and contemporary political culture often conflates the two in predicting or warning about real life dystopian scenarios.
RATING: S-TIER (GOD TIER – OR IS THAT BIG BROTHER TIER?)
