Beyond nineteen eighty-four

SIXTEEN YEARS HAVE raced beyond 1984 projected by George Orwell way back in 1949 in his chilling classic as the year when there would be a total enslavement of the human mind with an unredeemable destruction by the mythical Big Brother of its powers to think and decide for itself. The ``rediscovery'' by the Times Literary Supplement that the choice of 1984 as the title for his masterpiece by Orwell was inspired by his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy who had written the poem, End of the Century 1984, could also suggest that this lady could have been in his mind for his portrayal of its Julia with whom Winston Smith, the tragic hero of the novel as the last man who dared to think for himself, was in love. The novel ends with the final reduction of Winston Smith and Julia - both of whom were forced to betray each other - to a state of unquestioning mindlessness and from whom there could be no longer any threat to the rulers of an empire surviving on fear.

The revulsion Orwell had felt for the Stalinist tyranny imposed on Russia and later on Eastern Europe after the Second World War was bursting out in his Nineteen Eighty-Four which he was writing like one possessed. It should be recalled that Orwell whose real name was Eric Blair found British imperialism quite revolting and for this reason he threw up his job in the Imperial Police Service in Burma (Myanmar). But he could not but rebel as much against Communism as it was manifesting itself in Stalinist Russia. If his fears that the hopes for the survival of freedom in an era of expanding totalitarianism were very slim had come true, the world would have sunk into a new Dark Age which would have snuffed out its Winston Smiths and Julias. The decades of dictatorship which the world had to endure were projecting Orwell as a prophet of doom who could not foresee that the totalitarian regimes would collapse in the mid-Eighties with an incredible suddenness. There was unnerving manifestation of Orwell's sense of doom in the very first sentence of Nineteen Eighty-Four which begins with the clock striking thirteen for pushing the mind to a subliminal state in which it would be receptive to the vile suggestiveness of Orwell's phantasmagoria.

Nineteen Eighty-Four arrived as a stunning projection of ``Utopia in Reverse'' and as a warning that it could not be taken for granted that Time would always be headed only one way towards democracy and freedom. Orwell had to create Newspeak as an altogether new language to serve the needs of the very limited thought and speech in a world reduced to implicit subservience. While his imagination threw up a scenario of horror and slavery, Aldous Huxley dreamed up a future of illusory happiness in his Brave New World from which the inclinations to think for oneself and to be free were skilfully erased from everyone's mind without making anyone conscious of what was happening to them and without feeling hurt in the least. However, unlike Orwell, Huxley's message that the human longing for freedom would not remain stifled forever came out when the American Indian in his novel stirred up a short-lived rebellion in which the gainers were again the ruling elite who returned the rebels to ``happiness'' by filling the air with the restoratives required for handling such emergencies. The obverse of this scenario in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is the total destruction of the vestiges of dignity and pride in Winston Smith and Julia by terror.

The turn of events has not been as Orwell and Huxley might have conjured up in wholly different ways. However, the huge nuclear stockpile and the terrorists who hold governments to ransom remain just as menacing as what the two writers were worried about. The Cold War which was then raging could have become flaming hot any moment instead of cooling away as it happily did.

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Section  : Opinion
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