Critics Quotes Flashcards
Isaac Deutscher
disillusionment with socialism
“Nineteen Eighty-Four… is a document of dark disillusionment, not only with Stalinism, but with every other form and shade of socialism”
Robert Conquest
Orwell and socialism
“Orwell in fact seems to have wanted socialism on condition that it would not be run by socialists”
Raymond Williams
political disillusionment
“The voice of political disillusion, or the inevitable failure of revolution and of socialism”
Krishnan Kumar
the Soviet myth
“It was as a committed socialist that Orwell most felt the need to expose ‘the Soviet myth’”
Isaac Deutscher
pessimism in 1984
“[Orwell] increasingly viewed reality through the dark glasses of a quasi-mystical pessimism”
George Woodcock
O’Brien representing all men in power
O’Brien is “a caricature, a monstrosity . . .[Orwell] is putting in an extreme and monstrous form the pretensions of all men of power”
Christopher Hitchens
significance of women in Orwell’s work
“men in Orwell’s fiction are utterly incapable of happiness without women”
Frederic Warburg, his publisher
the frightening nature of 1984
“This is amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read”
George Woodcock
1984 being reflective of the society in which it was written
“a satire on the world of 1948”
Julian Symons, a friend of Orwell’s
1984 being familiar to original readers
“about a world familiar to anybody who lived in Britain during the war that began in 1939”
Tom Hopkinson
1984 being reflective of the society in which it was written
“Orwell has imagined nothing new . . His world of 1984 is the wartime world of 1944 but dirtier and more cruel”
Philip Rahv
1984 being reflective of the society in which it was written and still applying today
“If it inspires dread above all, that is precisely because its materials are taken from the real world as we know it”
Bernard Crick
1984 as a warning
“[Nineteen Eighty-Four] is a warning, not a prophecy, a cry of ‘danger’, not ‘despair’”
Weiss
Winston being complicit in the regime
“Those who see Winston as a victim rather than a complicit participant in Oceania’s totalitarianism forget the delight he takes in his job”
Bossche
the ignorance of the masses
“The large mass of common people does not find in themselves the need to think independently, to question or to investigate what they have been taught”
Bossche
Winston being alone in his rebellion
“In Winston’s struggle for emancipation he stands alone”
Conheenyl
1984 acts as a warning against apathy and passivneness
“It highlights the importance of resisting mass control and oppression”
Lockhurst
the signififance of sex as rebellion
“It explores the resistant potential of desire and sexuality”
Topham
destruction of language
“Language is degraded to such a state that it only serves the government”
Derry
the power of language
“Orwell himself noticed the malleability of human ideals through language”
Kika
destruction of family relationships
“In 1984, children are essentially used to break up the family unit”
Asimov
the three ways of maintaining enternal tyranny
Orwell presents three ways of maintaining an eternal tyranny: the immortality of Big Brother, the presence of someone or something to hate, and the rewriting of history
Orwell
totalitarianism as a theocracy
The “totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy” involving God-like worship of a leader
Kristoffer Rissanen
entire lack of free will, the Party has been aware of Winston since the beginning
Believes that Winston’s willingness to rebel had been planted in him BY the party the whole time
Jean-Claude Michéa
Winston’s defeat
“1984 is apparently the story of a failure”
Phelan
1984 showing us that totalitarianism is possible, acts as a warning
“Orwell’s great achievement…. was to convince us that O’Brien was, indeed, possible”
Jem Berkes
power of language
“Language becomes a method of mind control with the ultimate goal being the destruction of will and imagination”
Orwell
truth and reality is what the regime deems it to be
“Two and two could make 5 if the Fuhrer wished it”
Krishan Kumar
Orwell’s views on language
“The perversion and diminution of language was, in Orwell’s eyes, perhaps the most heinous and unforgivable aspect of the contemporary trahison des clercs”
Earl Ingersoll
Winston being alone
“[Winston’s] radical isolation and his anxiety that no one else shares his ‘humanness’”
Earl Ingersoll
sexuality
“Big Brother channels it into worship of power”
Earl Ingersoll
Winston and Offred
“Winston and Offred are both defined through their efforts to affirm a subjective ‘truth’ as a legacy for future generations to whom they look for validation of their noble struggles to survive as humans”
Daniel Bell
destruction of community
“A human society stripped of the last shreds of community”
James Schellenberg
lack of hope
“This Big Brother society is too well-constructed to break apart in the face of one man’s resistance”
E M Forster
Big Brother as a representation of men in power
“Big Brother also lurks behind Churchill and any leader whom propaganda utilises or invents”
John Atkins
Winston as weak
“He was a weak creature who was born to be victimised”
Beatrix Campbell
oppression of women
“Women are akin to the proletarian man in Orwell’s work”
Kennedy
the argument that sex is not actually rebellious
“It is the Party that politicises all private life, and anyone who willingly allows political motives to drive his sexuality is already doing the Party’s work for it”
Kennedy
Winston’s rebellion being superficial
“Unlike his mother, he was incapable of making a protective gesture for Julia… So we can perhaps regard Winston’s dreams of rebellion against Big Brother as nothing more than a greedy child’s attempts to have more chocolate”
Kennedy
lack of hope due to Winston’s weakness
“He plots with the inconsistency of a child and because of his inadequacy we are supposed to believe in the strength of the Party”
George Orwell
opposition to totalitarianism
”every line of serious work i have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism”
George Orwell
Orwell cannot and does not avoid writing politically, he writes to expose and highlight certain issues
“my starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice”
“i write because there is some lie that i want to expose, some fact to which i want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing”
George Orwell
the book is not an attack on socialism, it is an attack on abuse of ideology
“Nineteen Eighty-Four is not intended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labour Party”
it is “a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable, and which have already been partly realised in communism and fascism”
George Orwell
a prediction of the future
“i do not believe that the kind of society i describe necessarily will arrive, but i believe that something resembling it could arrive”
George Orwell
(1984 functions as a warning to demonstrate that no one is exempt from totalitarianism and it needs to be fought against)
”totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere”
“the scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere”
Will Howell
Orwell’s understanding of power and authority
“Orwell was a master in observing the operations of power”
his writings on his time spent in Burma as a policeman and his life in boarding school “reminds readers not just of the authoritarian world he grew up in… but of his first hand experience in it as a subject”
Orwell understood “the very heart of how authority functions… through elaborate demonstrations of total control (often with a violent outcome) or through the subtle day to day manipulation of the masses… much of Nineteen Eighty Four is preoccupied with highlighting this”
Douglas Kellner
the danger of interpreting the novel as an attack on socialism
“because Nineteen Eighty-Four is such a powerful attack on state communism, there is a danger that it can be used by rightists to identify socialism with totalitarianism”
Douglas Kellner
1984 is an attack on Stalinism and the idea of worshipping a higher power
“Nineteen Eighty Four can be read as an attack on a quite specific social formation: Stalinism”
Stephen Spender
abuse of ideology
“1984 is a political novel in which politics has been completely purged of current assumptions such as that the left is good and the right bad”
“we are confronted with a world in which any side can use politics as an excuse for plunging the world in evil”
“Big Brother is really anti-Christ…. the tragedy of Orwell’s novel is that man — Big Brother — turns himself into God, but there is no God”
