Reading Orwell’s 1984
54: Part 1 of 6
Welcome to The FLARE, a call out to the hearts of readers everywhere. Last week, I published an offhand Note that racked up 1.1k likes and drew over 100 new subscribers! I am so grateful you’ve joined me. Special thanks to R.M. for being the first to drop a tip on my PayPal. 🥰
The next newsletters will be a six-part series rereading 1984 by George Orwell with chapter summaries, my thoughts on the reading, and some discussion prompts. I invite you to follow along as a celebration of both the book and people born in that year. Some of us, like the main character Winston Smith, are 39 and thinking of rebellion.
Part one of six is the first five chapters. I will be using the 75th anniversary Signet Classic published edition and the Audible audiobook read by Simon Prebble for reference. You can follow along by reading pages 1-63 in the paperback or listening up to 2:12:57 in the audiobook.
Chapters’ Summary
In his apartment, just outside the watchful eye of Big Brother on the telescreen, Winston Smith, a frail man of 39, begins the radical act of engaging in free thought. He opens up a notebook on April 4th to begin a very risky account of his life under the (sole political) Party. He can hear a police patrol helicopter hovering outside, peeping through people’s apartment windows.
The telescreen is a transmission and receiving device where you could be seen or heard at any time. One could not know if they were being heard or watched at any given moment, so they behaved as if they did. The only other threat presented is the Thought Police. There are no laws but the greatest offense is thoughtcrime, an infraction that Winston is committing with his diary.
The story takes place in London, a main city in the Airstrip One province of Oceania. It is nothing like the city we know today. Through Winston’s accounts, the landscape is inescapably dull and grimy. There is always a pair of socks with holes, an elevator out of service, a belly rumbling, and a chill in your apartment. Things are never comfortable, never easy, and the whole world seems to defy what the Party tries to achieve. Despite their reports of prosperity and victory, the day-to-day does not reveal such advancements. His dingy apartment on the seventh floor is in a building ironically named Victory Mansions.
There are four ministries representing arms of the government: the Ministry of Love, Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Plenty and the Ministry of Justice. They are housed in the most striking and distinctive buildings in London with high security at the Ministry of Love and Party slogans prominently affixed to the Ministry of Truth. All are quickly revealed to represent the opposite of their titles. Winston works for the Ministry of Truth, where he “rectifies” news articles. In that way, he himself is stuck in the present moment, of what he knows today and not of what he knew before.
War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength
Party slogan
Winston’s memories of his childhood and early life are vague. He harbors guilt over what he believes is his mother’s sacrifice of her life and that of his baby sister to preserve his. He recalls his father as slender and neat with glasses but not much else. These memories surface in dreams and he is convinced that there must have been a time before when things were different. He is filled with doubt, partly because of what he does everyday: alter history to reflect the present position of the Party. Previous copies of any piece of media are destroyed and replaced with the current stance. It is almost impossible to know even what year it is, for certain.
We are introduced to three terms: INGSOC (English socialism), Newspeak, and doublethink. Newspeak is the official language of Oceania which truncates English into smaller words and phrases. The Ministry of Peace is Minipax in Newspeak which tells one nothing about what the department does. The meaning fades, as it does with other words translated to Newspeak, so that the public relies on their conditioned rage and not their understanding of a subject or even a term. Doublethink is explained as believing two contradictory pieces of information at once, which is much more than what we might call cognitive dissonance. It’s a baffling form of conscious self-deception. INGSOC is not yet defined.
We learn Winston has been gearing up to write in this diary for years. His first musings are from violent scenes in military movies at a theater where people are killed and the audience cheers. He writes this passage because something else was on his mind. It involved what happened at work that morning.
At the Ministry of Truth and presumably on every telescreen in the province, is a daily broadcast called the Two Minutes Hate, where the supposed traitor and revolutionary Emmanuel Goldstein is almost always highlighted as an Enemy of the People who seeks to overthrow them. Goldstein escaped execution for betraying the Party and has since orchestrated every type of sabotage imaginable. Winston even has a visceral reaction to sight of his face, which is described as sheep-like with a bleating voice.
Before the Hate film, we meet both a young woman who works in the Fiction department whom Winston is repulsed by and an Inner Party official named O’Brien who Winston is drawn to. O’Brien seems safe to confide in but Winston tries to be careful not to even betray the look on his face. Winston imagines he knows what O’Brien is thinking and that’s there’s a message between them when they meet each other’s gaze.
During the Two Minutes Hate, we see Winston’s conflicting feelings about Big Brother as “loathing … changed into adoration”. This particular propaganda film, one he is required to react to, whips him into violent fantasies of the woman who works in the Fiction department seated behind him. Winston fears and despises this woman because he is attracted to her, but cannot have her. She also seems dangerous since he suspects she’s a spy and represents the most staunch bigots in the Party.
The Thought Police are his biggest adversary since there was never a trial or report of crimes, people’s existences were “vaporized”. They were blotted out of records as if they never existed. When he thinks of what might be seen as an infraction worthy of death, he begins writing in a frenzy:
Down with Big Brother
Down with Big Brother
Down with Big Brother
Then one of Winston’s neighbors, Mrs. Parsons, interrupts his thoughts to ask for his help. There is a blocked sink and her husband Tom is not there to fix it. Tom is described as an athlete who is fiercely loyal to the Party and encourages his children to be spies for the Thought Police. Mrs. Parsons is a meek woman of about 30, who has little control over her children. Winston suspects the children will one day send her to her death.
“You’re a traitor! You’re a thought criminal!” the elder child yells at Winston during a game. The younger parrots him. We know Winston’s journal is still open with visible, incriminating text and we know the children are correct. Winston is a thought criminal.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness
Winston had a dream where O’Brien spoke to him and soon thereafter, they met for the first time. He does not know what it means, but it feels significant.
Winston is tortured by the fact that he had evidence of lies that he could not keep. Oceania was in alliance with Eurasia and at war with Eastasia, but narratives now say the opposite. Instructions for rectification of articles and Winston’s personal notes are thrown down “memory holes” which are connected to a furnace. He knows, however, how that rectification process changes the enemy and how quickly people accept it.
The last character we meet is Syme, a philologist who is composing the latest edition of the Newspeak dictionary. He is an absolute authority on the creation of the language and reasons behind it. The opposite of good is ungood. We will no longer say excellent, but plus good. Syme says we are rapidly destroying words and eliminating what are seen as redundancies in synonyms when one word will do just as well. He posits that Oldspeak will eventually be eliminated and the concepts with the words, abolished. He cites freedom as an example. Winston suspects Syme is too smart, too loose-lipped, and will be vaporized.
Despite Winston’s internal tumult, he enjoys his job immensely and values his work. He is solving problems as he would in math. He creates “delicate pieces of forgery” that take knowing what the Party would say and what would be most believable, even if outlandish. He fabricates the life of a soldier named Ogilvy who never existed to cover up some “misquoted” previous article. He’s proud of his version of events and is sure it’ll be chosen to run in the corrected paper.
My thoughts
Last year was the right time for me to read 1984. The story itself is dense, with a wealth of interpretation on nearly every page. It is not a hopeful story or one in which the main character ultimately overcomes evil, but the book is an opportunity for deep contemplation. The difference with reading 1984 for the first time as an adult is that I’m not disillusioned by the world Orwell created, but inspired by it. I’m morbidly interested in the ways a society is systematically stripped of humanity and controlled, as we undoubtedly are today in ways that are remarkably familiar.
The initial descriptions of Winston’s environment conjure a bleak picture of a near-starved life. It’s not even about physical hunger, but an existential hunger that is continually suppressed. There is always some scarcity that drives up desirability of an item, no matter how small. The constant stimulation on all levels keeps people occupied with survival and nothing else. To a certain extent, I recognize that in modern society as well. If we are always hungry, we are beholden to an employer who holds our survival in their hands. And if there is always scarcity of some item, its value goes up.
With Big Brother and its ever-present eye, I am reminded of the panopticon1, where one is watched or believes they are watched, at all times. That type of compliance tool lulls people into a state of indifference to surveillance, where they don’t value privacy for privacy’s sake and won’t preserve it for others. It made me tense to even read that Winston was overcome with the desire to buy that diary. A part of me thought someone saw it, reported it, and Big Brother keeping tabs. Winston might have suspected that as well but the need for self expression was too great to continue holding back. I was connected with him as he stared at that first blank page. What should one say about the world?
The Ministry of Truth’s “primary job was not to reconstruct the past, but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programs… with every conceivable kind of information, instruction or entertainment.” The minutiae of information forged reaches such a specific point that even what people don’t care about it false. Extraneous information is false. It makes me consider what we accept as truth, even those tiny details. It takes the most shrewd among us to pick up on those fabrications which can unravel a web of lies. Only in this society, there is no one to do that. The idea of continuing to redefine truth itself is disorienting. One cannot actually know what is true. It is easier to swallow it whole than fight against it. How much of what we accept as true actually is?
Newspeak felt like forced semantics where we change the word meaning and its context for the purpose of manipulation. We obscure what a word or phrase is used for. Minitrue becomes a name, not an organization that ironically creates stories out of the ether and changes history to fit present narratives. There is no nuance to language with Newspeak and it renders terms meaningless as vocabulary becomes smaller and smaller over time.
I see Goldstein as a symbol. The Two Minutes Hate is a conditioning device to rile up the people to continue their conformity. As to whether the object of their hate is alive or even real, is questionable, but the inescapable reaction to his face and voice are a litmus test for whether or not conditioning is working. It makes me thinking of not only our collective outrage but the backlash against our outrage. One side may say we are too sensitive while another claims we are not sensitive enough. That starts to feel like conditioned arguments where we predictably react and remain distracted from a more significant con.
The Parsons family is an interesting look into the life of the proles. They seem a lot like average citizens interested in communal activities and loyal to country despite their conditions. Their entire existence seems a realization of doublethink, where they can accept what they know to be false but can, with ease, dismiss truths as lies when needed. The children show how indoctrination can start as games that are actually practice for life.
I felt strongly about Winston struggling with who he was writing for because it would never reach anyone who cared or it would be destroyed. Writing was his way of maintaining sanity and humanity. It was enough to make the decisive act to say something, defy condition, defy systems of control, and preserve our words for all time. It reminded me of the courage we must have to put our words out there.
I loved what sounded like a transmission across space and time:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone —to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink— greetings!
Discussion prompts:
How well do you understand what is “true”?
Would you have the strength to rebel in this society?
Have you engaged, even in small ways, in doublethink?
What’s next?
Part 2 of 6, pages 63-104 or up to 3:41:14 on the audiobook
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https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/about-jeremy-bentham/panopticon
Not even my children are supposed to use Wikipedia so I should back off references from them too. Something something academic honesty.
The true horror is that for some this book is not a problem but a blueprint. An aspirational one.
I read 1984 many years ago and reading your notes now shocked me. I’m not sure if it’s reading the synthesized version of the book or the way you present it, but it’s eerily similar to the communist world in which I grew up. I have a memory from when I was 5 years old. We lived on the ground floor of an apartment building. It was summer and I was sitting in the kitchen with my mother. The kitchen window was open to the alley on which people walked. Out of the blue I asked my mother: ‘Who is this Ceausescu you’re always talking about?’ I will never forget the fear on her face. In one sweep she shut the window close, came to me and said: ‘Never ever ask me this question again! Do you understand? You’ll have us put in jail’.
My parents never talked about the dictator in front of me again after that day.