Rant Number 584 6 May 2014
1984
‘You are only a rebel from the waist downwards’ jokes Julia with her lover Winston in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. Because, for the ubiquitous Big Brother whom they hate, ‘the sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion.’
At the Playhouse Theatre, where last night I saw a stage adaptation of Orwell’s celebrated work, the former quip drew the audience’s delighted laughter. Wish fulfilment? An erotic Robin Hood as the perfect super hero of our time? Being a sexy, revolutionary beast could be the dream of many a suburban nonentity. And, as the Marquis de Sade so wickedly put it: ‘What is revolution without general copulation?’
1984 is a Zeitgeist book. Published in 1949, it expresses the trend of thought and phobias of the period. Big Brother, with his ‘heavy black moustache’ is unquestionably Uncle Joe Stalin, Britain’s former wartime chum, mutated into the West’s malignant new bogey. (The book’s arch-villain, the heretical Goldstein also evokes Stalin’s antagonist Trotsky – real name Bronstein) And the totalitarian nightmare doomed lovers Winston and Julia inhabit is recognisably the Soviet Union, with its omnipotent Communist party, secret police, stifling surveillance, Gulags, terror, tortures and executions.
That being so, 1984’s message, once so alarmingly resonant, seems dated. Communism, along with its posturing at world conquest, is down the drain. Not even the CIA could make out Putin, despite its former KGB career, as a novel Big Brother. Where book and play still score well is as melodrama. An extravagantly sensational thriller, with stock heroes and villains and oozing sentimentality. Orwell’s philosophical and linguistic lucubrations are very well but without the daring love affair between Winston and Julia the story would be just another anti-Communist pamphlet, a cerebral tract. Nietzsche once wondered why the love story had become so important in modern fiction. Poor, mad Fred! A question only an underman, a semi-eunuch would ask. The short, lapidary message on a scrap of paper that Julia manage to pass on to unsuspecting Winston, ‘I love you’, is the fuse that lights the dynamite inherent in the plot. Love as truly the Archimedean point to lift the world, ‘the power that moves the sun and the others stars’. And, up to a point, as love always does, it works.
Nonetheless it is not very persuasive that amongst its inhumanly controlling aims the Party should seek to eradicate the sex instinct and ‘abolish the orgasm’. Like Canute, surely Big Brother would know that you cannot stem a tide! Unless, implausibly, the Machiavellian party boss O’Brien shared St Augustine’s objection to sexual arousal as the triumph of irrational flesh over human will and reason. Odd that it did not occur to Orwell to make the shadowy Big Brother into a sexually potent figure, magnetically attractive to females. After all, many real, dodgy cult leaders, from Rasputin to Bhagwan ‘Osho’ Rajneesh, have derived much of their power from that.
Nor is the naked power worship concept expounded by O’ Brien to his captive Winston very credible. ‘Power is not a means, it is an end’ he preaches. True, some fringe psychoanalysts like Alfred Adler have claimed that power is the chief motor of all human actions, but that is simplistic, reductionist. Power takes many forms. It would be trivial to assert that the capitalism is essentially about power over workers. Marx and Weber have demonstrated how much more sophisticated the basis of capitalism is. Behind the rhetorical figure of O’Brien I discern many possible influences. Maybe the heterodox Islamic sect of the Assassins. The rank and file were taught all sorts of supernatural beliefs but the men at the top supposedly believed nothing, only in their power. Or perhaps the presence of Dostoevsky’s Great Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov. A literary conceit, an extreme Russian Orthodox travesty of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. But at least Rome and the Jesuits are historical realities. O’Brien’s creed conversely is spun out of Orwell’s unconvincing, doctrinaire fantasy.
The sensitive spectator may, like my friend Carolyn, baulk at some of the play’s torture scenes – Winston being given electric shocks, spitting out blood, teeth being pulled and ultimately being exposed to hungry rats. Thanks to the power of modern drugs, sophisticated dictatorships today may have less messy ways of subduing recalcitrant dissenters. Still, torture is topical. Nothing fictional about it. Groan…Despite international law and universal condemnation states still engage in it. You do not need a Big Brother regime to witness this melancholy reality.
Analysis of the artificial, official and evil language Newspeak, made much of in 1984, is a matter for another Rant. However, reflecting on how Newspeak is meant to eliminate ‘undesirable words’, the priest notices that words like ‘father’ and ‘mother’ are now being driven out of public discourse. Instead, you hear or see the word ‘parenting’. As if mothers and fathers were either unimportant or interchangeable terms or roles. Similarly, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ are being replaced by the anodyne ‘spouse’. And ‘he’ and ‘she’ get substituted with the incongruous ‘theirs’ or ‘them’. Methinks I detect Big Brother’s dab hand at work…
A Marxist-Leninist, I imagine, would consider George Orwell as a petty bourgeois, counter-revolutionary author. Not too much off the mark. Orwell was a 100% English. He detested the idea of a radical, total transformation of his country. But he was still a fine, inspiring and jolly good writer. Reading him is a pleasure.
It is impossible to avoid noticing, though, how 1984 fails to predict the key relevance of the religious factor. Naturally, Big Brother has no time for God – don’t blame him, it is something he has in common with the democratic rulers of today. Again, as an Englishman Orwell would hardly have felt religion as a vital force. Well, as Western political consciousness of his time was framed by fear of Communism, today it is framed by fear of Islam. I wonder: the ‘terrible book’ of the awful Goldstein turns out to be a bit of a damp squib. But what if that dangerous book in reality was…the Bible? Or…the Qur’an?
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