Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - 1984 (the BOOK not the year)

Episode Date: August 20, 2019

Your host has always wanted to talk to someone about 1984 the book and Dorian Lynskey totally delivers. He just published The ministry of Truth a biography of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Dorian tells us why and how this book has helped generations of readers to decode the world.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called 1984, the book, not the year. During his lifetime, the writer George Orwell was mostly known for his journalism, his reviews, and his essays. But what he wanted to be doing was fiction. The war also made things difficult for Orwell, the fiction writer. In 1942, he wrote to a friend that only the mentally dead could sit down and write novels while this nightmare is going on. He had a very conflicted sense of what his destiny as a writer was. He really thought of himself as a novelist. And he just thought if the world wasn't so terrible, then he would be very happy being a novelist. And he kind of resented the fact that he had to do all this journalism

to make ends meet. And because particularly once the war started, he just couldn't seem to get into that sort of fictional headspace. He was constantly feeling that he was being distracted from his true calling. That's Dorian Linsky, author of The Ministry of Truth, a new biography of George Orwell's novel 1984. It's one of the best works of non-fiction that I've read in quite some time. And I'm not just saying that because I'm totally obsessed with 1984. Okay, perhaps that's part of it. But to be honest, I have always wanted someone to talk to about 1984, the book, not the year. Hey, Dorian, thanks so much for taking the time out to do this. You know, reading your book made me realize that I never knew just how tortured Orwell was

over having two careers doing both fiction and journalism. And I feel like I need to reread some of the essays he wrote about writers now, writers like Henry Miller, who were able to ignore the political realities of the time and devote themselves to fiction. Yeah, I think to him, I think Miller represented a sort of liberation, like, oh my God, what could you do? How could you live? How could you write if you just genuinely just decided

you didn't care about politics, even as it was consuming the world? It was an attractive fantasy, but Orwell was completely incapable of thinking or living like that. You write about the encounter they have in Paris in 1936 when George Orwell's on his way to volunteer and go fight in the Spanish Civil War. Apparently, Henry Miller thought that Orwell was stupid to risk his life for a political cause yeah but but let's talk about Spain why did Orwell go there were two motives and it's not entirely clear which was the most sort of prominent one was that he wanted to fight fascists he was a very kind of active man he kind of wanted to experience things for himself and he wanted to

be a part of things and he felt that it was very important to be part of this struggle. But he also thought that there would be material for a book and there are conflicting accounts of whether he went to fight and ended up writing or whether he went to write and ended up fighting. But he certainly did both. Like many people on the left he just thought that this was where the world was headed this was socialism versus fascism so the book that he ended up writing homage to catalonia is now considered a key account of the spanish civil war but but you write that this would rile orwell up because he never sent out to do journalism he he just just wanted to give the world a close look at

the Workers' Party of Liberation, the PUM, who you call the losers of the losers. Not only would they obviously be in the losing side because Franco won, but they also lost this kind of weird sort of civil war inside the left, because the communists had all the money from Russia. They had the weapons, they had the power, they had the media on their side. So Putin was just incredibly lonely and isolated, and were essentially crushed by the Stalinists. And this, to Orwell, was this seismic betrayal, which sort of stuck with him for the rest of his life. I've always felt the connection between, say, Winston Smith in 1984 and Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. But, you know, you made me realize that we could add the poon here, losers who are forced to reckon with the impossibility of resistance.

But could you talk about some of the other discoveries you made when you put homage to Catalonia under the 1984 microscope? What did you discover? Well, there were certain kind of phrases and ideas. Like he talks a lot about the nightmare atmosphere of Barcelona after the May Day, so basically the communists took control of Barcelona, which a year earlier had been this kind of very briefly this sort of anarchist paradise. And now, you know, basically, the wrong leftists were being rounded up by the kind of Soviet secret

police and their allies. And he describes this atmosphere, this kind of awful mood of paranoia and suspicion. And that was Orwell's only experience of the mentality of a police state and what that does to you, how that makes you feel. And that's vital because most of what he knew about totalitarianism, he read in books and pamphlets. So this visceral memory of how it felt was really important for 1984. There's another essay looking back on the Spanish War from 1942. This one really seems to cement these connections for you. Yeah, it's the perfect bridge.

It's like midway between Homage to Catalonia and 1984. It's like that he's really writing about Spain, but he's using so many of the phrases and concepts that ended up in 1984. It's been quoted quite a lot during the Trump years, actually, because there's a lot of the things about, you know, this contempt for objective truth. And that's the essay that makes clear that that sort of 1984 really started in Spain. So if 1936 is this new beginning for Orwell, I'd love to hear what you think ends. What part or parts of Orwell died in Spain?

I suppose his sense that the left will behave better than the right because he was always like a man of the left. He always identified with the left. But I think he was genuinely shocked that communists would behave in that way. And these were people that some which, you know, he'd written for or they were, you know, his publisher, his editor, his friends. And I think that was really what made him, you know, to the end of his life, this determined anti-Stalinist. And his point was always like, I am a democratic socialist and I'm an anti-Stalinist. A lot of people felt that in order to be a socialist,

you had to defend Stalin. And his argument was like, no, quite the opposite. It's like by defending Stalin, you're basically debasing and discrediting socialism. And obviously, in that sense, he was proven completely right. But at the time, that was quite an unpopular thing to say. So let's move on to fiction. In your book, you take us deep into Orwell's library to show us novels that influenced him in 1984. And I guess the one to start with is H.G. Wells, because

as you write, Orwell probably read everything that Wells wrote. But at the same time, you tell us Orwell, like other writers, when they responded to Wells in their own work, they set out to prove him wrong. Let's start with that. Can you tell us about how 1984 does that specifically? Well, there's a lot that's particular about 1984. The first time that Orwell writes about being very annoyed by Wells is 1936, which was the year that the movie Things to Come came out, which is based on Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, which ended up inspiring lots of things, including George Lucas's first movie. But this very airless, high-tech utopia run by the ostensibly benign but kind of creepy meritocracy and Orwell just thought that Wells was wrong about technology technology is not going to create a better world because

look at the way that you know radio is used for propaganda and airplanes are used for dropping bombs on people and in Wells's world the scientist was benign and then you would have the malign primitive and all while we're saying well you know look around you it's like we've got some real brutal atavistic emotions being harnessed to technology like this this is what hitler's doing and that basically wells had got it wrong because wells did have this great faith in basically sensible men with wonderful new machines building a better world. Yeah. Wells didn't like this critique, though. And in fact, it led to their falling out. Tell us about their final interaction.

Oh, yes. Orwell invited Wells to dinner. They had a huge argument over an article that Orwell had written. Then they kind of patched things up. Then Orwell wrote another essay making basically the same point, that Wells just didn't understand human nature, didn't understand the way the world worked. And Wells just wrote this furious letter to him going, I don't say that at all. Read my early work, you shit. And that's the last thing Orwell hears from his idol. That's the last thing he hears from his idol, yeah. And Wells was right. In his early work, of course, you know, Island of Dr. Moreau, Invisible Man, books like that. It's full of evil scientists doing horrendous things.

So Wells had that side. Basically, Wells was at his best when he was writing about how things can go wrong. And whenever he turned to creating these utopias, they were not just sort of boring, but also just sort of seem to misunderstand the world. But I mean, the response to that would be all like, why was that only in your early work?

Like why was all this, why was all these observations about the kind of the darkness in human nature? Where was that during the rise of fascism and Stalinism? Where it would have been more appropriate? And Wells was just someone who was an amazing visionary figure, but he just kept being tripped up by history. And it really drove home to me

how much Orwell's reputation has benefited from the fact that he died when he did at the age of 46. And Wells' example made me think that even Orwell, if you push him forward into the era of like the Korean War and Vietnam and the new left and decolonization, all these kind of things, it's like, well, would Orwell have started making some really bad calls as well? Yeah. I see why you find it so compelling to imagine who Orwell may have become had he lived longer and written more novels. And to that point, it's also not that difficult to imagine him writing some young whippersnapper in the 70s. Read my early books like 1984, you shit.

But let's talk about two other books in Orwell's library that are crucial to 1984. We by the Russian writer Zamyatin and Darkness at Noon by Arthur Kersler. You can definitely look at those two books and go, oh, right, 1984 would not be the same had he not read them. And We, you believe, was also influenced by Wells. It's obviously influenced by Wells, but he introduces certain kind of features of dystopian literature that we would recognize now. The constant surveillance, the ruler who's a dictator but pretends to be benign is not a kind of obviously villainous figure.

The average sort of drone who works for the system but gets lured into rebellion by this sexually exciting, rebellious woman. There's an underground movement. And what's interesting is that there's, I mean, there's evidence that Orwell didn't read Wee until after he'd written his outline for 1984. If you look at the outline, all the ideas are there, but the plot isn't. And so it seems pretty obvious that he kind of took some plot ideas from Zamyatin. But if you actually look at the philosophies of the two writers and the two novels, they had such different ideas about

politics and human nature. Yeah, I think you make a pretty compelling case that Orwell did not plagiarize Wee. But you also want to point the finger at someone who did in her novel Anthem. Ayn Rand, who I believe did plagiarize Weed, then accused Orwell of plagiarizing her. And she almost gets away with it. But let's talk about the other book on Orwell's 1984 shelf, Darkness at Noon. So Darkness at Noon was Arthur Kersler's fictionalized attempt at trying to understand what happened during the Starling Show trials. Why did lots of communist officials confess to crimes that they hadn't committed? And that gave Orwell not just the texture of life in prison, which really informs the scenes in the

Ministry of Love, because Kersler knew about prisons, he'd been in a few, but also the psychology. How do you break people down and And how do you convince them, essentially, that two plus two equals five? And that was really important. And he ended up becoming close friends with Koestler for the rest of his life. Yeah. And I just want to reiterate for the listener that you spend a lot of time in Orwell's library. It's way more than these two novels. In fact, if anyone's looking for a great dystopian reading list, pick up a copy of The Ministry of Truth. But Dorian, I want to talk about where you end up. You write, sure, we could look at these

dystopian novels as seminal works of individual genius, or we can open up our eyes and look at them more the way folk songs work. Tell us what we can see if we view dystopian literature as folklore. It's just the idea, the way that everybody's sort of taking elements of the kind of existing anti-utopian form and then adding their own original stamp. And what I kept seeing, and then adding their own original stamp. And what I kept seeing, and I think it's even more the case now, is that a lot of these ideas are impossible to kind of trace. If you look at, for example, the Apple,

and I'm jumping forward a bit here, but the Apple advert 1984, there's a bit of 1984, but it seems more like Wells' Things to Come in the look of it and it feels a little bit like Sam Yat-Tin and actually a lot of these sort of tropes that we think of as dystopian, they're sort of a jumble of ideas from various people and they accumulate and what's crucial in every case is what is the world view of the artist. So when George Lucas is taking some of these ideas in THX 1138, it's George Lucas commenting on Los Angeles in 1970.

And so even though you can say, well, this seems like he got it from here, this seems like he got it from there, it's still him making a very personal statement about the world around him. And I think that's the same in every case. It's really like the individuality of the author is so important and so much more important than going, oh, well, you know, where did you get the idea of giving them blue overalls from, for example? It all swirls around. And I think particularly in the decades after 1984, it sort of becomes, I think a lot of people don't even know where they're getting this from. If you ask someone, what does dystopia look like?

I bet they'd have a pretty clear idea pieced together from all kinds of sources. Well, for me, it's hard to picture dystopia as anything but a mixture of the book 1984 and the year 1984. But you got me thinking about what is indivisible about this novel. And I would have to say it's the story. I mean, 1984 is not a political message dressed up as fiction. It's a story, a great story. And I'm curious, how much of this novel's success would you say comes down to this? The really exciting bits of 1984 is when he thinks he can trust O'Brien and he thinks he's going to

join the Brotherhood and he's conspiring with him. And there's a total spy movie moment where it's just like, well, you know, meet my manservant and he will pass you a briefcase. And in the briefcase is this secret book. And then there's the moment of betrayal in the room above the junk shop where Winston realizes that he's been spied upon all this time. And all the people he trusted, apart from Julia, have betrayed him. This is stuff from spy fiction. This is stuff from thrillers. And I think he felt that that was really important.

And it's actually more visceral. And it really struck me how important those thriller aspects of the book are to why it's read now. Because if it was all like the Goldstein book, if it was all like the essayistic stuff and the exposition, then people wouldn't read it in the same way. Likewise, you know, the love affair is really important. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting that you bring up the scene above the junk shop, because Winston doesn't just realize that everyone is spying on him. He also comes to realize and accept that resistance is impossible, which is, you know, why the ending is so dark and bleak. But for me, I think, you know, this is exactly why 1984 is such a great story because of this dark and bleak. But for me, I think, you know, this is exactly why 1984 is such a great story because

of this dark and bleak end. But the ending of 1984 is something you return to again and again in your book. And I have a few things that I'd really like us to talk about. I guess we should just start with the appendix theory and get that out of the way. Because if it's true, that means that I and maybe, you know, millions of others are just wrong about the novel ending on such a dark and bleak note. Okay, so what I call the appendix theory is this idea that Margaret Atwood and Thomas Pynchon believe. Basically, there's a kind of logical inconsistency in the appendix. A lot of people don't read the appendix, or they skim it, or they don't think about it, because they're like, well, look, man, the story's over. And now there's this kind of weird thing explaining what New

speaks about. But there's something odd about the way that it's written, because it's not a text that exists in the world of Winston Smith. Like Goldstein's book is something that Winston could read. Winston could not have read the appendix because it refers to Winston. And it's written in the past tense, and it's written in our language, our English, Old Speak, and it contains basically language and knowledge that would not be possible if the Ingsoc regime still existed. So it's an odd one because you think, well, if Orwell really wanted this to be the case, he would have spelled it out the way that, in fact, Margaret Atwood spells it out in her version of the appendix in The Handmaid's Tale. I mean, that is a tribute to the appendix theory, but she

really spells it out. There's no ambiguity at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, you get it. You get that Gilead fell and that this is academics discussing the book you've just read. Whereas it doesn't quite add up. That's why it's just a theory. It doesn't quite make sense, but then the alternatives don't make sense either. So I just find it like a wonderful way of reading the book differently. Sure, sure. Sure. With an intention though. I think that Margaret Atwood's point about needing a glimmer of hope, it's crucial to seeing why someone would even gravitate to that theory. But it definitely dovetails with another one, which is that the book killed Orwell physically, which is why the ending is so bleak. And these images you give us of him typing

and just laboring in his bed in pain, you know, it sounds so awful. But you take issue with this theory that the ending is bleak because the book killed him. I really resist that theory. I think it's kind of insulting to him as a writer and a thinker, because I realized just how much he thought about this, how much he rewrote it, how many different

sources he really smoothly synthesized into the book. It's an incredible sort of feat of writing and thinking. And also it doesn't add up because in the outline, I mean, he was never like super healthy, but he certainly wasn't very ill in 43. And he mentions, I think, final defeat, like in his notes for the last chapter, it's like the final defeat. So it was always meant to end like that. And then you go back to Burmese days or keep the Aspergistra flying, coming up for air. It's like his novels always end with the person trying to rebel against their system they find themselves living in and failing and kind of ending up at best back where they started so i can't imagine another

version of this book. I kept a diary in the year 1984 when I was 12, and I go on this detective mission. Basically, I use the book as a lens to understand the year. And a couple of years ago, I made an episode for my podcast based on these diary entries, which I hope I can convince you to listen to. I will. Through this conversation. Every sound in the episode comes from the year 1984. And this is why I loved your book so much. You made me understand that, you know, I wasn't a crazy obsessive. I'm just merely one of thousands who use this book as a lens. But let's go back to when the book comes out in 1949. Tell us why it was such a hit for people who wanted to read the world. It was the first book that really nailed

totalitarianism and seemed to sort of speak to the anxieties of its age. It came out before Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. And it just seemed to sort of sum up what everybody had just sort of lived through and then go, oh yeah, and it could get worse. And it was just assimilating so many of the things that people were worried about. And the reviews, the language of the reviews is so striking. And the letters he was getting from friends and writers, they're genuinely shocked. They couldn't sleep. And it was this kind of shocking, upsetting, important book. Everybody agreed that it was important. Even the people that hated it, the Stalinists, it was important enough for them to put a lot of energy into hating it.

So it was like a very rare book that was a big deal from the start and never stopped being a big deal. Yeah. The novel instantly became a cultural weapon for the Cold War. And in the 1950s, it was definitely a big deal for the FBI and the CIA. But then in the 60s, it takes on a whole new life. How did this happen? It becomes this radical text, you know, and conspiracy theorists kind of dug it because the whole mindset is, I mean, you know, there is a conspiracy in the book. It's definite. And there's a lot of kind of paranoia and uncertainty and not knowing what's real. So it really becomes a book that the counterculture could embrace as well. And he keeps finding new readers, all of whom seem to think that it's on their side and that Orwell himself is on their side, which is a peculiar phenomenon, I think.

So that brings us up to 1984, the year. That summer at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the American critic Neil Postman got on stage and gave a keynote lecture. And he announced that it was time to put Orwell away. And he held up Brave New World as an alternative. But, you know, this totally rang false to me. You know, the 12-year-old detective, for me, it was all there. The consumerist fake resistance of edgy advertising.

Ronald Reagan was obviously big brother. But more importantly, Reaganomics was 2 plus 2 equals 5. But 1984 was also the birth of the home video camera, a new form of self-surveillance. And I want to come back to technology because when we were talking about Wells earlier, you said that Orwell had something very specific to say about technology in his book. But in 1984, people were mocking Orwell. They were saying, oh boy, did he get technology wrong? But I feel sadly that we're just now realizing how

misplaced and wrong this mockery was. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was just thinking about the sort of techno-utopianism of the early days of the internet. Happened again with the early days of social media. You know, I was listening to something recently about a panel of tech journalists saying how the writing about tech had changed quite dramatically just in the last few years. And there was that Wellsian spirit

which is enormous in Silicon Valley. It's just like these fabulous machines will enable humanity's best instincts and help us combat the worst. You feel like, well, you know, Orwell's version, unfortunately for us, Orwell's take was probably more accurate. Yeah, yeah. But that is actually what I saw in 1984. You know, this was year zero for the personal computer, thanks to Apple and personal video recording. It was everywhere in the culture. And both of these technologies were talked about as if they were completely liberating forces and

totalitarian proof. But, you know, let's move to the present because, you know, the reason people are picking up the novel today is because of Orwellian phrases like alternative facts. It seems that people are once again returning to the source to try to make sense of the world, growing nationalism, the rise of the alt-right. But why do you think so many people are picking up the book again as a way to read the world? What happened with alternative facts and with Trump's pathological dishonesty and the way in which he lies is that that's the aspect of the book that becomes most powerful. You know, you look at the things that people quote in tweets. You have to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears.

You know, that was the party's misquoting. That was the party's last and most essential command. People quote that a lot because things that Trump and his spokespeople say is essentially saying that. It's just like, oh, it's gaslighting. Orwell would have known the play Gaslight and the movie, but he would not have obviously known it as a verb. But I mean, he writes a lot about

essentially gaslighting. And this is why the, you know, the title of the book came to me again quite late in the day, because I was like, okay, there's so many things to say about 1984. What's the important thing that I want to zoom in on in the title? And it was the Ministry of Truth. It was the combination of this unfortunate historical synchronicity of having awareness of massive disinformation, organized disinformation online, much of it stemming from Russia, with our own inability, essentially mental inability, to process information online. So a lot of disinformation is literally just people getting stuff wrong.

There's nobody in St. Petersburg making them believe that. It's people essentially kind of fooling themselves, combined with a US president with this almost psychedelic disregard for the truth. And the point is really not to convince people, but it's almost to dismantle the sense that there is objective truth and then there are lies. And the idea is to create this kind of like cynicism, which Julia in the novel experiences. I like everybody lies. Who cares what the truth is?

You just pick your own truth, whatever kind of gets you through the day. That is what I think it's about now and I think that's what people are turning to. That's why his publishers very cannily put out a real slim essay collection called Orwell on Truth. This is why Orwell keeps being quoted in books about post-truth and the death of truth and so on. It's like that's what the culture has decided that this book is about. But it's still about all those other things as well. It's still about so many things and that's why it endures,

because each generation manages to kind of fit it into its own political context. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called 1984, the book, not the year. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway, and it featured Dorian Linsky, author of the must-have on your dystopian bookshelf, The Ministry of Truth. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm