In Our Time - Nineteen Eighty-Four

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss George Orwell's (1903-1950) final novel, published in 1949, set in a dystopian London which is now found in Airstrip One, part of the totalitarian superstate of Oceania which is always at war and where the protagonist, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth as a rewriter of history: 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' The influence of Orwell's novel is immeasurable, highlighting threats to personal freedom with concepts he named such as doublespeak, thoughtcrime, Room 101, Big Brother, memory hole and thought police.With David Dwan Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at the University of OxfordLisa Mullen Teaching Associate in Modern Contemporary Literature at the University of CambridgeAndJohn Bowen Professor of English Literature at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Double Think, Thought Police, Room 101, Big Brother is watching you, just some of the ideas George Orwell coined in his last novel 1984, and which we use still today.

It's a prophecy and a warning about, totalitarianism, what it looks like, and through the character of Winston Smith, what it feels like, when there's no freedom to act or think, and when the leader chooses what are facts, what is true. Love here is impossible. In its place is a daily ritual, the two minutes of hate, an ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness. With me to discuss 1984, I, David Duane, Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Oxford. Lisa Mullen, teaching associate in modern contemporary literature,

at the University of Cambridge, and John Bowen, Professor of English Literature at the University of York. John, 1984 set in London, but not quite the London that we know. How would you describe Orwell City? It's grottie, is the grim, miserable place. It's a bit like post-war London, but after the war's been going on for 40 years. The food is disgusting.

It looks like vomit. Everything smells of cabbages and bad lavatories, he thinks. So that everything is sordid. and ugly and bestial and brutal. Sex is outlawed. There's an anti-sex league. It's all misery. There's rationing.

The children have no shoes on their feet. It's a grim world overlooked by Big Brother and the Fort Police. That's what I went back to it. I'd read it a long time ago and I'd made a film about it. But I suppose as you get older, books read you more. And I had not realized the density of the attack. on people, on society, on what was happening at that time,

it is remorseless, isn't it? It's a terrible place. It's relentless. There is a kind of grim brio to the way that he writes about it. It takes pleasure in the sheer disgustingness of the way that the roofs leak and everything is miserable.

But yes, everyone seems to be ugly, says Winston, to himself at one point. And that's exactly what the world is like. There's almost no hope or no flicker of joy or beauty there. By everything he means feelings, acts towards each other, things that you see, you enjoy the

most awful things, or enjoys the wrong word, isn't it? That's what you... Yeah, the entertainment is public executions. Yes. There's grim physical jerks on the television screen every morning which is also watching you all the time so you're constantly under surveillance. The young children go

join the spies, learning how to spy on their own parents. Yes. If it gets under your skin, which you did this time, didn't before tell her through. I read it and thought, well, really good. I hadn't, and you thought it could be like this? It is really a visceral novel. It's very

interested in bodily feelings and disgust and nausea. And yeah, and so much of what the thought police wants to do is change your emotions as well as your ideas. Change their emotions to what they want. Can you, for those who don't know, could you briskly outline the plot? Yeah, well, it's quite a simple plot, thank goodness. It's got three main characters.

Winston Smith, who, now the whole world is divided into three groups of people, the proles, the inner party who are the elite, and the outer party. Winston's a member of that. He's a bureaucrat. He's dissatisfied in some deep way, like so many of Orwell's main characters, and then he meets Julia. Julia takes the initiative. She tells him that she loves him. They conspire together. They suddenly create a world outside the control of the party. They meet O'Brien, who is a member of the inner party, who we think is a rebel against this world of Big Brother, but in fact he betrays them. And then the final third of the book is Winston being tortured to within an inch of his life and his whole thought

process recomposed. Yes. And the book gets inside his head and he is forced to think and accepts that he will think in a different way, that the thoughts he had and not the thoughts he must have. And then in the end, the thought he wants to have. Yes. And the very last line of the book is he loves Big Brother. It's a terrifyingly bleak ending. It is. And one of the wonderful things about the book is it seemed relevant in so many different societies in the 1950s in the Cold War,

with the worry now about truth and fake news. Every generation seems to find something deep about modernity and the modern state in this book. Lisa Malin, Orwell's life story is inseparable from this. What ought to we know about the background to his novel? especially talk about his time in Spain and the homage to Catalonia

of the book that came out of it. Yes, exactly. So as John's been saying, this is a book which seems relevant to so in different societies, places and cultures. And yet we have to remember that it's actually deeply rooted

in Orwell's own life and his own sense of his development as a political being and as a writer and those two things are always connected with Orwell. So his experience in Spain was absolutely pivotal.

I think that the whole of his work can be organised around that central, moment. He goes to the Spanish Civil War to fight fascism. He says all his life has been a democratic socialist. Exactly. Yes. So off he goes to Spain with joy in his heart and he finds this kind of paradise in Barcelona as he describes it at the beginning of homage to Catalonia. This paradise where it's a sort of brotherhood of man. Class has been abolished. Status has been abolished. Everyone is helping everyone else. This is the Republican utopia. And he is completely blown away by that.

He thinks this is the answer. This is what we all need to do. But then during his months in Spain, that utopian ideal gets eaten away and he suffers this terrible kind of fall from grace politically. And the reason for that is because what he sees is that rather than being there to fight fascists, many of the people on the left that are fighting for the Republican cause actually spend a lot of time fighting each other. And the factionalism within left-wing politics in Spain is, to Orwell, the greatest tragedy of Spain.

The reason fascism ultimately triumphs is because the left is to be, busy being at war with itself. And in particular, what he sees is that the sort of Soviet-style Stalinist version of communism, which is holding sway, has nothing to do with freedom, has nothing to do with the ideals that he believes in and that his comrades on the, on anarchosindicalist side in the militia which he's fighting with, called the Pum, they, it seems to Orwell, they believe in a true kind of socialism, whereas Stalinism is something else. Stalinism is about controlling you. It's about arresting you if you don't believe the right things. And there immediately we can begin to see the beginnings of 1984 starting to grow in his mind. So he moves away to anachosynicalism

and almost bulletin at the same time. He is wounded. Yes. He is literally wounded in the throat. Yes. Yes. Exactly. At the same time as he's sustaining this terrible kind of political wound, this wound to his idealism and his beliefs. He also sustains this near-fatal bullet wound to his to his neck. He goes to the out of Jura, a long way from the London that you're describing, to get on with this book, not to be distracted by the numerous essays he was writing for Tribune and to other magazines. What was his health like at that time? His health was terrible at this time. He had tuberculosis and quite badly. He didn't immediately know that he was going to die of it, but I think he became more and more aware of the fact that this was an illness which was not going to go away.

And I think... It wasn't going to get better. It was not going to get better. And his experience of tuberculosis, I think, colours the novel in interesting ways. I think there is a definite sense that in some ways this is... It's very much a deathbed novel. It's a novel that he writes,

knowing that he's on his, probably his last book. And it's a novel, therefore, that has this incredible, sort of passionate intensity, this vividness. And as John was saying, this kind of brieo to it, it's all well with no filter, with the brakes off, with all the stops out. He's going to say,

what he wants to say once and for all. So I think that contributes to the power of the novel. But at the same time as well, I think his experience of being a tuberculosis patient kind of finds its way into the novel. Tuberculosis is a disease at the time. This is before widespread antibiotic use that could help patients with tuberculosis. At the time, the treatment for tuberculosis was about subjecting yourself almost to a kind of totalitarian regime.

You'd be sent off to a sanatorium. Your freedom would all be taken away. you'd be confined to bed, you wouldn't be allowed to sit up, you wouldn't be allowed to speak, you couldn't read or write anything, which obviously to Orwell was torture. You had these incredible painful procedures where, you know, terrible huge needles would puncture your lungs and inflate them and deflate them, and you'd be sort of constantly surveilled by a regime of daily x-rays and so on. And when you sort of think about what it must have been like for Orwell as a patient, as a tuberculosis patient, suffering from that kind of

very intrusive kind of medical regime, I think that also is there in 1984, quite apart from the sense of urgency of a dying man writing. It's also about what it's like to be in a place where you have no freedom, where

your body and your mind are being controlled. But I remember there have been TB places where people went by the seaside in hastily built sheds sometimes, but still the best that people could manage to recover. and they recovered of being isolated, exactly as you've said. So it was something that was widespread.

I mean, people would pick it up, I mean, in the book very easily. Yes, they would. And for that reason, that led the governments of the day in the UK and elsewhere to want to surveil their populations very closely. And so if you worked at a factory, a van would arrive and you'd all be sort of trooped off to have your chest x-rayed. And if you came up with a positive result, you'd be whisked straight away off.

It was like being arrested. It was like being policed in a way. Obviously, there were sort of public health reasons for that, but you can see to a mind like Orwell's, that looked pretty sinister. He could see in that a kind of pattern of state control of the individual, which he didn't like at all.

Thank you. David Duan, he had a perfectly okay life as a novelist, brilliant life as a journalist, and then he hit gold with Animal farm and that brought him to a great deal. One could almost say world attention. Does that throw any light? Does Animal Farm or any of the others throw any light on what we're talking about? Yeah, you're absolutely right. He became a household name and an international figure with Animal Farm. Animal Farm, of course, is an allegory of the Russian Revolution and a

fairly stinging indictment of Stalinism. And in many respects, that attack on Stalinism continues in 1984, the posters of Big Brother Bear a striking resemblance to Uncle Joe, although Orwell is clearly other forms of totalitarianism in his sights. I think also that the book is very much informed by some of the essays of the 1940s. So, you know, many of the views that he erred in those

essays, for instance, that the pursuit of power had exceeded all moral limits and had become an end in itself, the fear that objective truth was fast disappearing from the world, the idea that he, history as an impartial process or as a fairly trustworthy resource had stopped. What did you mean by that? So that basically after encountering one of the issues, I suppose, that produced this fear about objectivity

was the mass propaganda in the Spanish Civil War. And he felt an impartial account of that conflict was now no longer available. This stoked anxieties that he had in general about. how an accurate account of history could ever be generated because you can't touch and feel the past necessarily and Orwell was somebody a real empiricist in a way who believed that all truth must be derived from what you can touch and feel.

So it led to a certain kind of scepticism about history and the recording of history and he was worried, I suppose, also about the fate of history in the face of its mass falsification under Stalin. Can we know a little more about Orwell's politics? I've talked about him saying I've always been a democratic socialist. What did he understand by that?

Did he feel that the power or the effect of that position was sliding away? Absolutely. I mean, Orwell was considered himself an old socialist, and he based this old socialism very explicitly on the Trinity of the French Revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity. And I believe very little of this moral legacy was being pursued by the Soviet administration. So he was extremely hostile to Russian communism

and remained faithful to an old but departing faith. And this is very much evident in 1984. He saw his own politics as very much a form of humanism as well. And I think it's quite interesting that you could look at 1984 and see that it's a kind of impassioned defense of human rights by outlining the kind of moral horror that arises from the abrogation of these fundamental rights. I think it's worth stressing that that 1984 was written six months after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Orwell had been calling for such a charter, you know, from much of the 1940s.

So if you think of simple aspects of that declaration, say the right to a fair trial, that is completely demolished. the right to privacy, that's completely demolished in the book. Article 18, the right to freedom of thought. Absolutely no possibility of that in 1984. So in many respects, 1984 was an elegy for human rights six months after they've been newly codified. And it's also an elegy more broadly for the human

or for the moral properties that had often been kind of associated with the humans. So reason, dignity and freedom that we might associate with a humanist, they no longer exist there. And I think it's in that context really important to stress the fact that the original title of the novel was the last man in Europe. O'Brien identifies Winston as the last man and wants to convince this last man that he is simply a bag of filth. So the novel is very much written by a socialist but also a committed humanist, very anxious that these values are disappearing from the world. John John Bowen, let's turn to Winston Smith, the lead character, through whom we appreciate and understand. A lot of the book, particularly a lot of the attitude.

Can you tell us about him? Yes, well, I mean, picking up exactly what David was saying, he's very ordinary in a way. He's 39 years old. He's got barriced spains. He's got five false teeth. He's small, feeble. He's not heroic.

He doesn't really want to overthrow things particularly. It's that he wants a problem. private life. He wants a human life. He wants all those things that you take for granted in a way. And so much of the book and the way it's narrated is focused through his consciousness. So we see him very intimately. We learn about his dreams. The fear that he has that he might have killed his mother, he thinks. And they're often quite dark feelings that he has. So he's deeply misogynistic. When he first sees Julia, he says he wants to flog her to death with a rubber trundgeon. He wants to rape her, he says.

This is the woman he proposes then to fall in love, but she calls, declare she falls in love with him. Absolutely, absolutely. It's one way, this time of the book, yes. In one way, Orwell takes us right into his consciousness, so we live through that vulnerability, that ordinariness of him, he's called Smith,

but at the same time also, he's also called Winston, which is not ordinary at all. No, I guess, it's the 19, that's the way it locates his birth time, doesn't it? Yeah. And so he's, so there he is. and in some ways Orwell doesn't just make him

and every man figure because of these very dark undercurrents in his life and in his fantasy life, I think. He's been almost colonised by the society profoundly in the whole way he thinks. It is horrible really. He goes and sees children being bombed, refugees being bombed and he enjoys it.

He does. And that's just one of the things. Absolutely. The first thing we see, of Winston, is he goes to the cinema and he's like, he says, a beautiful shot of the refugees being bombed and he's

anesthetized to the feelings I think and he aestheticizes it as well so yeah so it's a tough entry into the book it's not a simple identification and there's nothing simple about that there's a tough entry to most paragraphs I found it's a book that

was easy to put down because can I and then you have to pick it up again it is a book about suffering and I think and it's not afraid to be brutal in the way it treats its readers yes and it makes other people suffer. I mean, just like his woman he knows, he thinks he would like to shoot arrows in her, like the arrows were shot into San Sebastian.

How weird is that? I mean, it's almost kind of queer, is that? It seems to have more tender feelings towards O'Brien often than to Julia. So there's a homoerotic system. Brian, the chap you think he's on his side. There's sort of big, big cheese somewhere other in this ever-receding power struggle. Lisa, what makes, this chap? Why are we interested in him?

Well, yes, why indeed? He's no one's idea of a hero. He is, you know, he has been anesthetised in one way, as John says, but also kind of brutalised, as you were saying, Melvin. You know, he has been completely warped by the regime that he's living in. But because of his age, because of his vintage as a Winston, as somebody who remembers the world before the party regime got going, he has these glimmers of memory and a suggestion somewhere deep in his belly,

in his viscera, that there's something very, wrong, that this is not right, that there ought to be another way, there ought to be a way out of this. And that sense that we have of following Winston as he tries to find out what that is, what exactly is wrong with this society that everyone else around me seems to agree is absolutely fine. Why don't I find it fine? Why am I so uncomfortable about it? And then the novel really sort of shows him trying out various different ways of trying to answer that question. And we're right along with him. We are inside his head. head, we understand only the world only through his point of view. We don't know anything that he doesn't

know. And so we share his bewilderment and we share his sense of kind of existential panic in a way that he feels that he's not even sure if he is alive, if he's sane and so on. And so we follow him as he tries out these various different ways of trying to alleviate this discomfort that he's feeling. And that's what then compels the book forwards. It's our sense of rooting for him in a way to actually to find out and to be able to tell us and to break out. And to break out. But of course, it's a hopeless task because he's so brutalised by the regime. The things he tries are all sort of strangled at birth. He tries to become a writer.

He buys this kind of contraband, beautiful notebook with lovely creamy paper and a fountain pen. You're not allowed to have a fountain pen, but he finds one in a junk shop. And he tries to express himself in words, but all he does is just kind of just pour out this nonsense, this kind of ugly nonsense. That's not going to be the saving of him. It's like one of those knots at the harder you try to loosen it,

the tighter it gets. But that's the thing about the regime. It doesn't, there is no escape from it. It's a sort of perfect trap. And then he tries with Julia, he tries to get in touch with ideas about intimacy and sexuality. What does you say? She's... Well, from the waist down. That's right. From the waist down.

Yes. So she's a one, isn't she? He hopes that she's going to kind of open the door to something that he He doesn't have access to. But of course, that's hopeless, too, because he can't see her as a real person. But, yeah, she's delighted that she's at a big sex life and continues to have. Yeah, I mean.

So, why did that take him? It doesn't take it. The trouble is it doesn't take him anywhere. It turns out not to be the thing that is the answer any more than joining this fictitious idea of the brotherhood is going to take him where he needs to go or any of the other things that he tries. David. Yeah, I think Julia is a very important figure in the novel, in fact. She's in many respects of born-again headnest, as you say,

Melvin, love sex, which Winston celebrates as impurity, which might suggest he's a bit stuck in the puritanism that he wants to dislodge. But she exalts in the joys of chocolate and in good coffee, etc., etc.

And I think... Yeah, and lipstick. And I think Orwell was very conscious of the fact the way pleasure might lead us to opt out of freedom. And I think this view is very much communicated through the proles, the beer swilling, porn-consuming, lot of very addicted proles.

I'm coming to the pros. I mean, I think he communicates, kind of worries about pleasure, but he also gives two cheers to pleasure through the figure of Julia. He kind of thinks that through kind of raw desire or basic need, one might be inclined to throw over groupthink

and rebel and pursue one's own independent ends. I think, though, that Julia also embossed, the limits of this type of unorthodoxy. And as you say, Melvin, she's, to use Winston's rather dubious, she's a rebel from the waist down. She's no interest in a more systematic critique of the party. When she's exposed to Goldstein's book,

she simply falls asleep. And I suppose you might say, fair enough, maybe she knows in advance that all forms of critique are rigged by the party, and you might say this is where her wisdom is expressed. But you might say there's also something pretty gendered about this account of Julia, where she's sensuous, but kind of intellectually frivolous.

And the fact that we don't have access to our thoughts and consciousness doesn't allow necessarily for a more textured vision of her to emerge. I wonder whether there's another aspect to her critique. I think in some ways she also kind of, she's there to embody the All-World's own critique of a kind of psychological, of a kind of Freudian idea of society

and what makes people tick. Julia is given the idea to say of all this marching and flag waving is simply sex gone sour which is a kind of, it's a sort of Freudian idea that if you repress yourself sexually it will come out in other ways. And I think Orwell in this book

is partly placing her there as a critique of that whole idea that Freudianism and psychology is not that's not going to do it. You need politics, you need socialism actually, you need democratic socialism, not Freud. Yeah, John Byrne, it's a visceral novel.

Can you tell the list of more about emotions in it and like those two days of hate for instance in from the ministry directed by the minister of love and so on just so listeners of having really get some idea of the of the violence of the attack he makes on the society in which Winston Smith finds himself yeah I mean we've just been talking about julia and political desire and that's absolutely the heart of the book the emotional range of it in some ways it's a bit like a gothic novel it's full of terror it's full of horror it's full of anger and the party manipulates people's emotional lives through the two minutes hate and then the hate week in which they can as it would turn people's emotions almost like a blowtorch

onto some random scapegoated individual or group so it is a emotionally it's a very dark book i think is there is there much wrong for hope very little i think i mean he does have a dream of the golden country in one of his many dreams in the book this idyllic place. And when he goes off with Julia, he recognises it. So it's almost like a prophetic dream, strangely enough, in which he sees the golden country,

and that's somehow some nostalgic, natural place. So Winston Conscience has these little sparks of knowing that there's more to this world than what the party allows, and he gets glimpses of it, but can never articulate it into a vision, really. Yeah. Liza, Can you find the connection in this novel

between, let's say, personal freedom and truth? Yes. I mean, big concepts, aren't they? And although I was not afraid to play with those concepts. But absolutely, the idea of personal freedom relates back to what John was saying about what Winston kind of holds onto in his own mind. He has, as he describes it, a few cubic centimetres inside his skull, which is free.

which remains his own. And that is what Winston is terribly worried about losing out on. But how does the party invade those cubic centimetres? It does it via the attrition of truth. It attacks truth. It attacks memory. It attacks any sense that there can be something verifiable. Two plus two equals five.

Two plus two equals five. And this was an idea that Orwell first tried out in his essay on the Spanish Civil War, back on the Spanish War, which he wrote in 1942, where he says, if the leader says of such and such an event, it never happened, well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five, well, two and two are five. And then he says, that prospect frightens me much more than bombs. That to Orwell is the ultimate terror. That is the ultimate nightmare. And that is how the party and the big brother regime is going to invade Winston's precious cubic centimetres of freedom inside his skull. And of course, ironically, that's what his job is.

He works in the Ministry of Truth, destroying and rewriting the records of the past. Destroying truth. And sticking them into what is wonderfully called memory holes. And he glimpses the truth momentarily there. And then in it goes into the flames. David, can I turn to you? It's famous for some of the phrases. Do you want to go through some of them and give your opinion and their resonance?

Yeah, I mean, Orwell was a brilliant mimic of... a certain kind of bureaucratic language. He had turned his critical eye to the language of advertising in some of his early books. But this time around, he is very much the language of state bureaucracy in his sights. He's fascinated by the way language conditions thought and the way thought can be reconditioned

by the manipulation of language. And so he gives us new terms like the grim intimacy of Big Brother. He gives us the terrifying concept. of the thought police. He gives us the kind of weirdly banal evil of the nondescript room 1-01. I think we're still drawn to terms

like Doublethink because it captures, you know, in many respects, the pervasive hypocrisy of modern political life. But, you know, you can say one thing to appeal to a broad constituency and Orwell was worried that democracy in particular

fostered hypocrisy. But I think he was also fascinating. by the way, that, you know, the human mind is capable of subscribing to contradictory beliefs simultaneously. Can I turn to one point? What we've been talking about is consistently what he sees wrong with society. One of the things you see he dismisses are the proles. He was criticised by that, in my view, not quite enough. I mean, he has got nothing to say for the proles. I'm trying to find a bit here where he says, well, he says, I can remember enough of it. They're stupid. and they're unintelligent, they're mindless, that's another word he uses,

they're only interested in beer and entertainment. And the lottery. And the lottery, yes. So this is 85% of the population. Seems to me, and I suspect to you, a bit rough. Yes, it is. And also I think politically, it's completely weird that there's almost no surveillance of 85% of the population. No. No.

If you give them cheap pornography and beer, his view is that they will be totally happy. But for anything else, it's totally untrue. Of course it is. It's the great century. You know, this is at the time of the first Labor government, full of working people. It's the great century of working people being socially... So what do we make of something you could say that?

Well, we see it through Winston. That's one thing. So we don't see it subjectively. But yeah, there is a contempt, I think, for working people. I mean, there's a contempt and sentimentalisation. On one level, he says, the proles have stayed human. They had kept in touch with their primitive emotions.

and there's a big emphasis in Orwell throughout Orwell on the importance of emotion as being a foundation to ethics on some level but on another level they lack one fundamental faculty of the human which is the capacity to think we hear that until they become conscious

they will never rebel and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious and the absence of consciousness is a pretty big absence we hear of a parole woman I mean it's a big big statement I mean what sort of the truth is there in that sort of

wafted generalisation. It's a self-serving. It doesn't actually accurately, in my view and experience, refer to anything in any way in which other things are, I've discussed. All of a certain 85% of the population is

whoop, let's get rid of them and get on with the real business which is 15%. And he sees us on little particulars to kind of indicate this point. So Winston has a sentimental moment where he hears a parole woman saying, and he goes, the woman down there had no mind. She had only strong arms, a warm heart and a fertile belly.

Well, I think that's disgusting. She might have a very strong mind, yeah, I completely agree with you, that especially to us reading now, that seems like a massive hole in the book. It seems ridiculous. I think if we are to try and defend Orwell's, you know, the way he portrays the proles,

you could see it as part of his critique of kind of apathy and the narcotisation, the way, the way people who choose to, in some way, it is a sort of willed apathy about the proles. They have chosen to just be infantilised, just to be sort of, you know, to fed these lies and they're going along with it. And in some ways,

all worlds kind of trying to sort of make a point about how, if we're just apathetic, we can end up losing our freedom without, we'll sleepwalk into it. We'll never even realise it's happened to us. But I agree, making 85% of the population fall into that category, you know, I think is certainly,

if nothing else, a missed opportunity in the novel, for sure. One of the strange things is that the opposition leader, Emmanuel Goldstein, in his book that we read short sections of in the middle of the book, he too shares that contempt for working people too. So it's not just that Winston has it and that we can say, oh, that's Winston's views. It's also there in the political opposition. In many respects, 1984 is written in opposition to Aldous Huxley's conception of the future,

where the whole world has become a Riviera hotel. and people have been opted out of their freedom in the pursuit of mindless pleasures. But the proles are there very much to continue aspects of Huxley's critique, I think, but it's a fairly damning vision of an entire clan. One thing that surprises me about the attack on the proles is I did an investigation on a film about the road to Wigan Pier

and went and met a lot of the people who'd known him and so on. And he respected, I think that was where he got his respect for it. In Wigan, dang the minds, talking to the people, people who are leading marches and that sort of thing. And then all of a sudden we have this 85% of prose, which about 10 years later or something, eight years later, what's going on? Well, they have to be conscious in that Marxist sense.

They have to be political. They're not exposed. They're pretty political in Wigan. In Wiggin they are. But not in Oceania. That's what's been taken away from them. And that's why they've kind of fallen into this kind of sort of almost subhuman state.

They weren't like the people of Wiggan because they didn't have any sense of their own freedom. They didn't have any sense of politics. Can we turn back to the main, perhaps the more, John, John Bowen, we have the Brotherhood there, and it's an important element. Can you tell people, the listeners, about the Brotherhood and how it fits in? Yes.

So the Brotherhood is the main thought that there might be a political opposition in the book. And Winston and Julia find out about it through this figure of O'Brien, this very equivocal figure who's a member of the inner party. and he invites him to his flat and he tells him that there is a brotherhood secret, they don't even know each other's names and they seem just to do random terrorist

outrages throwing salt they say are you prepared to throw sulfuric acid in a child's face? O'Brien asked Winston and then we learn a bit more about it when he gives him a copy of the book which is the book written by Manuel Goldstein who's the leader of the

brotherhood and we get bits of it so Winston reads it out in a sexist way Julia falls asleep when he's reading it out. And that gives us some analysis of what this society is like. But what we learn from O'Brien in the final section of the book is that he helped write it, that the inner party wrote this opposition manual. So there's a way in which it's futile in itself or seems to be, just random terrorism, and also part of the manipulation by the party.

So it's a way that all in a way cancels politics in the book. It's a very political book. But political activity, or the possibility of it, seems to be completely cancelled by the book. Yes, and Big Brother is always out there and somehow never inside the book. Yes, and we don't even know if Big Brother exists in a way. We don't know if Goldstein exists. Epistemologically, or in terms of what we know for sure, my God, it's quite hard to know that we know anything for sure, really. Lisa, the novel plays of ideas of hope and false hope.

So can you develop that? Yes. I mean, it holds up hope to Winston as a Camira, as a mirage. He wants to find hope. He looks for hope in various different ways. But that hope is constantly sort of snatched away from him and from us because we are experiencing it through him. And that's why it's such a kind of bleak novel to read.

That's why, as you were saying, you know, you can want to put it down at times because there's no resting place. We can't, we never find a place where we can, you know, find that sense of relief from the grimness and from the lack of freedom. And I think it's a novel which we hope along with Winston as he tries to find these various different remedies. But if we're paying attention, actually, we can see that these hopes are false, even as Winston believes in them. We can actually have enough distance. I think particularly in that scene where he's in O'Brien's flat and his beings, supposedly inducted, he and Julia, supposedly being inducted into the Brotherhood,

when O'Brien starts asking him questions about that, you know, would he commit atrocities, would he throw acid in a child's face, would he kill innocent people? And Winston goes, yes, yes, definitely, definitely. At that point, your heart should sink. You should go, uh-oh, the whole novel up to this point has been leading up to this, as this great hope. And at that point, your heart is in your boots and you know it's not going to work. This is not the answer. And we are doomed from that. point onwards and everything that happens in Room 101 is foretold in that moment there is no hope. Give it up. You know, this is this is a nightmare. The only way you're going to get out of it

is by by walking yourself back out of it. You can't, you can't. Or by submitting to it. By submitting to it, completely submitting to it. I love Big Brother. He loved Big Brother. I think that's a last line. Yes, that's that's where Winston turns up. But that's not where Allwell wants us to go. That's what what he wants to warn us against. Was there any way in which Orwell took inspiration from other books of the time? Was he part of other people writing in this way? Or was he a figure alone? Yeah, I mean, there's almost too many influences to list.

So I'll just kind of maybe touch on one or two. We mentioned the fact that he's in a kind of tussle with Huxley about the shape of the future. He believes that Huxley's sense. sense of a hedonistic future is mistaken, that hedonistic societies, you know, while having superficial attractions, don't have the commitment to martial valor

to kind of sustain their own security. So there's not much hope for them. The rise of people like Mussolini and Hitler had convinced him that a very different type was emerging. This was a type of leader committed to martial glory, violence, powers and end in itself, and a kind of vindictiveness

that John has already told him. about and something that we see in the book. So in some respects, 1984 is a repudiation of the Hoxleyan future. He had always a kind of begrudging admiration for H.G. Wells, but he's very much keen to invert Wells's confident predictions of a glitzy, sheeny future that might be captured in modern utopia. Wells himself undermined the idea of the future being nice and squeaky clean in books like the Time Machine or the sleeper awakes. And I think Orwell radicalises that kind of criticism, not least by showing how just economically, badly off people are in the future and how miserable everything is. So instead of the glass

and steel that you might associate with a clean, Welzian future, everything is dark, miserable and dirty, we hear. John, what evidence is, though, that do you think that Allwell's not so much predicting as warning? That's what he says. He says it explicitly that it's a warning. And he does say somewhere else, I think earlier in a piece of journalism that most political predictions are wrong. So I think it is, he's thinking an extreme case and he's thinking it through, and it clearly touches on very deep things in himself. So yeah, this is the great warning that he feels that the world is dividing into these great power blocks, that democracy is under extreme threat, that the technologies of surveillance are extremely powerful. And that the

intellectual classes, in particular he feels have been complicit with Stalinism, are too ready to excuse it, and that this is, as it were, a warning shot, particularly, I think, to left intellectuals not to be complicit with the worship of power. Lisa, what do you think is essential in the book, in the sense of that it continues to be something that people not only refer to, but it's some sort of touchstone, isn't it? I mean, clearly it does relate very strongly to what's happening in the first half of the 20th century. But also I think what Orwell wants us to see is that there's something fundamental about human nature, which is being played out in this book. That human nature is inclined to want power for its own sake, and we have to be careful of that.

And other kinds of human nature are inclined to want to be infantilised and to be led by the nose and to have ideology answer all their problems for them so that they can just give up on any kind of sense of individual. And I think he wants us always to pay attention to what's uncomfortable. It's an uncomfortable book. He wants it to be uncomfortable because where we are uncomfortable, that's where we'll start to see what's actually going on. Yeah, there's a really interesting anxiety about human nature in the book because in the left in the 1930s it was sometimes deemed to be kind of conservative, to believe in the idea of a stable human nature, that it would limit the amount of social progress one could make.

and it overlooked the fact that human beings were socially constituted and could be radically altered. And Orwell for a long time said, yeah, human nature is absolutely malleable. But in 1984, he's really worried that many of the things that we associate with human nature are ending, hence the last man in Europe. And, you know, it's O'Brien in the end who said, you think there's something in human nature that appores what we do? Hey, we make human nature.

But in the end, it will be the body that kind of, of is the reservoir of some kind of truth. He says that actually in the end, we recognise fascism because we feel in our belly that there's something wrong about it. Although he also says the body is the great betrayer of oneself and the torture scenes maybe bear some of that out. I think the three or four things that he really wants us to think about

are the way that democracy can become oligarchical. He's very troubled by oligarchy. He's very interesting in surveillance and the power of surveillance and the way in which desire can be manipulated. Well, thanks to Lisa Mullen, David Duane and John Bowen. That was terrific. And to our studio engineer, Michael Millam. Next week, the Lost World of Atlantis,

a fantastical story created by Plato that's been taken as fact by many since the Renaissance. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What do you think we're left out? Gosh, what do we leave out? Well, yeah, I mean, one of the things that interest me,

which maybe is a bit of a niche interest of mine, is the way the novel plays with ideas about psychology and psychiatry in the 1940s and criminal psychiatry as well and how the scene in Room 101, to a large extent, mimics electroconvulsive therapy, which is something that was coming to the fore in the 1940s. And I think that there is a very strong theme in this book about questions about mind control and technology

which are not just happening in a kind of dystopian future but which all well things might be happening now and which actually many psychiatrists were worried about this is the era of the lobotomy and of the electroconvulsive therapy and David touched on it earlier this idea that Winston's taken into room 101 to be made sane that was of a piece with the idea

that was current at the time that criminality might just be down to bad wiring in the brain and if you sort of zapped it with enough electricity you could make people good and you could change their personalities and their actions. And that's, I think that's a very strong kind of contemporary theme within

the novel but one that's also I think quite current. I think we are increasingly worried not so much about being lobotomized by the powers that be but that other kinds of technologies might have profound impacts on the way we live our lives.

lives, you know, in the way our brains might become melded in some way with some kind of technological other in a way that certainly to all well would be a complete disaster. So, yeah, I mean, again, perhaps a bit of a niche theme, but I think that's quite an interesting sort of sub-theme of the novel. Yes. I'm sure that's right. And I love the way that we've managed to talk about the last third of the book, because lots of people talk about the first book and not much after that. But I think talking about the end of the book, the other thing, of course, that we haven't mentioned is the appendix on Newspeak at the end. And that is one way that there might be some hope in the book,

in that that's written clearly at a later date. It's written in normal English. And it focuses all all world's worries about the strange things that can be done to language and the way it can be abused and the way that can abuse thought. But it seems to be from a society that's got beyond the whole world of 1984. Now, I don't think that means we can say,

oh, it's okay, it's all over. But it does at least give the possibility that there's a consciousness that knows about this and hasn't been trapped by it. It also kind of fractures the whole structure of the novel in a way as it unpicks the novel because it's written from the point of view of somebody who's read the novel and how have they managed to do that?

Who was writing the novel in that case? How is it turned up in somebody's archive? How seriously, it's really interesting as a piece of writing. You know, like Julia works in the fiction department, you know, where they have great kaleidoscopes that create plots. So it's a very literary novel in a way. And what is it? It's a satire.

A novel machine, isn't it? Yeah, she works on a normal machine. I know, the girl from the patient department. Yeah, and I think even things like the narrative voice is really interesting. In some respects, it's a fairly conventional resource by this point, the third person perspective or free and direct discourse, where the narrative voice is shaped by the consciousness of the central figures. But in a novel where nothing is your own except a few cubic centimetres inside your skull,

and we're not even sure of that, There's a kind of creepiness to the way that the narrative voice knows stuff about the characters and refuses to tell us stuff about the characters so it creates this kind of paranoia in the reader, I think. And it shows how a fairly simple novelistic device becomes quite weird and wonderful

in a book of this kind. Yeah, I really like the idea that we as readers we're kind of intruding into Winston's thoughts as well. We are sort of being the bad guys in that way. That's really interesting because of course Winston's always a play that O'Brien. knows his thoughts or might have implanted them in a way. So they have this strangely telepathic relationship, you know, from the start.

And O'Brien says, we've been watching you for seven years, which is one of the mysteries of the book. Why is Winston so important that they spend all their effort on him? It's not at all clear, unless he is the last man, as it were, the last one with a vestige of humanity. Unless they just say that to everybody. Maybe he's not that important, but they want him to think he is. You know, that's all part of the paranoia.

I mean, all of these questions, it's such a sort of slippery book in some ways, and Orwell's writing often is like this. He often has these sort of strange narrators that are watching him as Orwell, who's also a kind of character and so on. And I think one of the things that's really important about 1984 is that it proves, you know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that literature can do things that other kinds of writing can't do. In one way. Do things that other kinds of discourse can do.

Because it can be ambiguous, it can be troubling, it can get inside your head, it can make you feel things and make you understand things in a different way, in an almost instinctive way, that after 1984 has been written, no one can ever say that there's no point writing a novel about politics because Allwell's nailed it. And it's also really important that the kind of notion of the aesthetic is so important in this book. Of course, there's the experience of reading you've said how visceral it is, how everything smells, nearly everyone is ugly,

and there is this recoil from this world on an aesthetic level. But there's also this kind of belief in the aesthetic level. But there's also this kind of belief in the aesthetic. aesthetic embodied by the coral paperweight in a way. That's a kind of symbol of what art can do. Because in this world, everything has been reduced to instrumental value. The only value, that intrinsic value might say, is power. That's the only end in itself. But the coral is glorious because absolutely useless. It's founded in an antique shop. Exactly. And this piece of junk is one of the most valuable things in it, largely because it serves no purpose. And that's a traditional way,

that the aesthetic has been talked about and it's mimicked by the thrush that he hears in his dream and after Julia and him make love the thrush is singing for itself and for nobody else and that sense of being of a good that's entirely sufficient to itself

is what the aesthetic itself embodies and it's a way out of a brutally instrumentalist world where the only value is power in itself and he holds onto it for dear life but in the end at the moment of his arrest it gets smashed and he sees the little piece of coral that was magnified by the glass paperweight fall on the floor and be crushed and he says how small it always was how small

there's something terribly poignant about that moment sort of going completely against our own rules but how relevant do you think it is to today I think one thing is so wonderful is the way it keeps being found relevant in different ways for me I think the surveillance stuff I mean the telescreen which is ubiquitous which both transmits and receives and constantly watches you And of course now, the powers that computer technology have given both states and companies is, you know, the thought police wouldn't have dreamed of having that kind of power. I think that's interesting, though.

One of the things that he didn't predict, I suppose, is the growth of surveillance capitalism. It's very much a totalitarian state in operation there. And, you know, Big Brother may still be watching us in the form of the state, but it's also Google and Amazon, and that's not something or will necessarily. necessarily predicted. I think also the whole kind of worry about a post-truth society makes this book still really, really relevant. A post-truth society makes this really, really relevant. And I think that phrase of his, freedom is the freedom to say two plus two is equal to four. If that is granted, all else follows. That's a really interesting definition of freedom, but also a kind of maddeningly

ambiguous one, because on one level you could say, is this the freedom to say two and two is equal four is the important thing and truth can look after itself or is it really really important to society that we respect the truth of those sums and that gives you very different kind of arguments about the importance of freedom of speech on the one hand or truth on the other because of course that the freedom of speech can completely undermine truth as we see today can I just raise for something that we've not talked about very much and it's slightly different and that is Winston's backstory particularly about his family so he's someone haunted by memories of his family and of his mother and he thinks he's killed her. And then there's a

very weird scene late on. When he's in the Ministry of Love, he's about to be tortured and a drunk woman comes in and vomits all over him and says, I might be your mother. And he thinks, oh yes, she might be. He doesn't reject it. So there's something which all is working through, this incredibly strong feeling that he has about the maternal and that his greed, Winston's greed somehow for chocolate, is what killed his mother. And that's

a thread that runs through the book, I think. He's lost contact with his father, of course, as well. Yes, he's just completely absent. But then he idealises Big Brother and O'Brien, these older men, that somehow he kind of loves them. Well, you've certainly given

it a good seeing to her. Thank you very much. Here's the producer. Here's our great Simon Tillotson. Would anyone like tea or coffee? Tea. Tea, please. Yeah, pretty, thank you. Thank you very much.

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