1984 Flashcards
Language
Opposing pre-conceived notions of language and human connection as dynamically separate, Orwell highlights language’s power as shaping the nature of individual experience. He invites responders to consider this didactic through the everyman-figure of Winston Smith, a worker of the Ministry of Truth adjacent to and facilitating the Party’s ‘continuous altercation to media that might conceivably hold political or ideological significance’, who likens the mutability of history under the Party’s totalitarian rule to a ‘palimpest’, effectively establishing for responders a Post-Structuralist lens of language as a weapon through historical negationism that both references Orwell’s post-Stalinist context and establishes Winston as the principal narrator we witness the impact of the Party’s manipulation of language through. His diary entries are primitive — “Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed…” Winston’s simplistic diction and primitive syntax reflecting the impacts on intellectual thought that Oceania’s totalitarian control of language exerts over its citizens, his ingenuous tone when discussing films with violent subject matter additionally symbolising empathy and human connection extinguished by the totalitarian regimes Orwell satirically exaggerates to critique. As Winston encounters Julia and develops a relationship with her, achieving a perceived rebellion against the Party’s control of speech and thought, his modality and usage of language as expressed in his entries transforms proficiently, authenticating for responders a direct correlative link of language and the human experience. Events are recounted emotionally in the imperative: “It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations,” a contrasting shift from the monosyllabic expression of before. Outlining the importance of language to individual experience, Orwell synthesizes these experiences into a collective aggregate to depict language’s potential to distort human connection. Contextualising Winston’s experience as one of the collective population under the Party’s authoritarian rule, their nationalistic slogans “WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” invoke oxymoronic irony to communicate the Party’s manipulation of semantics in dismantling language; these slogans persuading the collective of Oceania, these linguistic tactics act to pressure the citizens into questioning their own reality. This is reinforced through the Two Minute Hate’s utilisation of propaganda to synthesize experience into a collective aggregate, degrading the voice of collective sentience to “opening and shutting like that of a landed fish”. This imagery is later empathized further by Orwell to responders through one individual’s action of having “picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen”, the dictionary as a symbol for the incapacitation of language accomplished by the Party through oppressive pressure on individual thought. This visceral imagery of the Two Minute Hate as one of the Party’s principal actions paralleling their conscious falsification of freedom through language imparts responders with key understanding regarding the dynamic of language in shaping their lived and perceived collective human experience, and challenges them to evaluate the influence of language over shaping sociopolitical contexts both over individual and collective experience.
Surveillance
Contrastingly, Orwell in “1984” utilises technology as an effective tool for Big Brother to use in his oppression of society. The development of cameras and telescreens for the purpose of ubiquitous surveillance reinforces the subjugation of citizens, forcing them to regulate not only how they behave but also how and what they feel, believe and think. Mind control, as a tool for manipulation and maintaining control, renders conformity inevitable in futile circumstances – Orwell’s milieu reflects this idea, alluding to the brainwashing of citizens in Stalinist Russia, inculcated via state controlled education and propaganda controlling “wandering thoughts in the eye of the telescreen”. Orwell personifies the omniscient presence of the telescreen to provide the enduring image of an autocratic regime that dehumanises the individuals for self-benefit and maintenance of power. Furthermore, technology is also used to control the information to which citizens have access, as reflected in the statement of inevitable control “Every record has been destroyed or falsified…” This didactic concern is highlighted when O’Brien, the embodiment of Totalitarian leadership, casts a severe “dislocation of the mind” upon Winston the ‘everyman’ to destroy his intellectual threat to the Party’s supremacy. O’Brien’s use of doublethink and Newspeak as tools of emotive language to ultimately manipulate and metamorphose Winston’s ideologies, demonstrates Orwell’s satire of Stalin’s ‘New Man’ propaganda used to “squeeze you empty and then fill you with ourselves”. O’Brien masterfully acknowledges Winston’s views, justifies them with Party logic and redirects ideas to the ultimate purpose of maintaining power and control throughout Oceania. Through this, Orwell communicates to the audience about the force of government to control anything in the society. Hence, through exploring the intertextual perspectives of both texts, we understand the composer’s fear of technology and its use to control an individual.
Rebellion and Memory
Resistance and rebellion arise due to discontent and dissatisfaction with one’s reality; their rights, their freedoms and their distant memories of more prosperous times. Orwell’s ‘1984’, elucidates the intrinsic characteristic of humanity that provokes one to question the nature of their world and the distribution of power and control within it, even if this attempt is accepted and recognised as futile. Orwell’s anti-hero Winston knowingly accepts that his life is doomed from the moment he opens his diary and marks its pages; ‘the decisive act’. Every trait considered human is stripped from the citizens of Oceania; their humanity, their family, their dignity, their sexual instinct and their individual will to live. This is replaced by the all-encompassing fear and love of Big-Brother, elucidating the mass extent of infiltration, control and suppression of any possible rebellion. Orwell depicts Winston’s sombre psychological state; he feels ‘lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster’ and hence his only potential resistance is his own internal contemplation. Orwell depicts motifs in his novel that serve as reminders of a time brighter than Winston’s present reality, elucidating the extent to which knowledge has been concealed and withheld. These motifs occur in Winston’s frequent dreams of the ‘Golden Country’, the glass paperweight and the image of the ‘St Clements Church’, which ironically is utilised as a concealed party surveillance device. Winston attempts to intellectually engage with his love interest Julia, however she is purely interested in fulfilling her own sexual pleasures in resistance to the party. Orwell frightfully illustrates a world where the totalitarian regime even orchestrates it’s own resistance, as another guise through which to ensnare ‘thought criminals’ and maintain ultimate control. The novel concludes pessimistically, with Winston indefinitely awaiting a bullet that shall end his life; having been destroyed physically and mentally. Winston occupies his remaining days sitting in the foreshadowed ‘Chestnut Tree Café’, drinking ‘Victory Gin’, practising ‘doublethink’ and believing that ‘2+2=5’ because the Party says it does; ‘He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.’ Orwell highlights any attempt at resistance and rebellion devoid of purpose from the beginning. His didactic, hopeless vision serves as a haunting warning of the capacities of totalitarian rulerships that suppress the individual. Orwell’s primary concern was reaching a global audience with a strong political message of democratic socialism. Both texts complement each other in conveying themes of power and control in a highly-technologized society however they starkly differ in form, time of composition and the overriding tone with which their messages are conveyed.
