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Book_cover_1984.jpg A centennial printing of Nineteen Eighty-Four Nineteen Eighty-Four (sometimes 1984) is a darkly satirical political novel by George Orwell. The story takes place in a nightmarish dystopia, in which an omnipresent State enforces perfect conformity among members of a totalitarian Party through indoctrination, propaganda, fear, and ruthless punishment. The novel introduced the concepts of the ever-present, all-seeing Big Brother, the notorious Room 101, the ubiquitous thought police, and the bureaucrats' and politicians' language Newspeak. It is widely considered Orwell's most famous work and is the inspiration of the word “Orwellian”.
History of the novelFirst published on June 8, 1949, the bulk of the novel was written on the island of Jura,_Scotland in 1948, although Orwell had been writing small parts of it since 1945. The book begins on April 4th, 1984 (the first entry in Winston Smith's diary) at 1.00 pm ("It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen..."). It is divided into three sections: Part One deals with the world of 1984, Part Two deals with Winston's forbidden sexual relationship with Julia, and his eagerness to rebel against The Party, and Part Three deals with Winston's capture and torture by O'Brien. Orwell had originally chosen to call it 1980, but as the writing dragged on due to the advance of his tuberculosis, Orwell changed it to 1982 and then to 1984. There are competing theories regarding the meaning of the title. It is widely thought that Orwell simply switched the last two digits of the year in which he wrote it (1948), but it may also have been an allusion to the centenary of the Fabian Society, a socialist organization founded in 1884. Alternatively, it may refer to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel, in which the power of a political movement reaches its height in 1984, or to G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill, also set in that year. A fifth possiblity is that it refers to a poem his wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, had written called End of the Century, 1984. The truth may be a combination of the above, as Orwell was the master of double, and even triple, meanings. Along with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the first and most cited characterizations of a realistic dystopia to have appeared in English literature. The book has been translated into many languages. Orwell acknowledged the influence on his novel of Yevgeny Zamyatin's Russian language We, completed in 1921. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been used to the point of cliché in discussions of privacy issues. The term "Orwellian" has come to describe actions or organisations that are thought to be reminiscent of the society depicted in the novel.
The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four The world described in Nineteen Eighty-Four contains striking and deliberate parallels with the Stalinist Soviet Union, notably the themes of a betrayed revolution – which Orwell famously dealt with in Animal Farm – the subordination of individuals to "the Party", and the extensive and institutional use of propaganda, especially as it influenced the main character of the book, Winston Smith. The Ministries of OceaniaOceania's four ministries are housed in huge pyramidal structures displaying the three slogans of the party (see below) on their sides.
Orwell's inspirationTo understand why Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, one has only to look at his less famous writings: most significantly, Homage to Catalonia does a lot to explain his distrust of totalitarianism and the betrayal of revolutions; Coming Up For Air, at points, celebrates the individual freedom that is lost in Nineteen Eighty-Four; and his essay Why I Write explains clearly that all the "serious work" he had written since the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism". (Why I Write (http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/whywrite.html)) However, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four also reflects various aspects of the social and political life of both the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Orwell is reported to have said that the book described what he saw as the actual situation in the United Kingdom in 1948, where rationing was still in place, and the British Empire was dissolving at the same time as newspapers were reporting its triumphs. At the time Orwell had also been working for the overseas service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (B.B.C.) which may help to explain his account of the Ministry of Truth. Parody of the 1941 "Four Freedoms"The structure of the government in the novel is in part a parody of the famous 1941 U.S. State of the Union speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In that speech before the assembled Congress, the president outlined Four Freedoms: "The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world." George Orwell appears to have taken this and used it, along with his own experiences at the B.B.C., to create his four key ministries. The PartyIn his novel Orwell created a world in which citizens have no right to a personal life or to personal thought. Leisure and other activities are controlled through a system of strict mores. Sexual pleasure is discouraged; sex is retained only for the purpose of reproduction.  Big Brother: in reality, this menacing figure is the B.B.C. design department's Roy Oxley. The mysterious head of government is the omniscient, omnipotent, beloved Big Brother, or "B.B.", usually displayed on posters with the slogan "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU". His political opponent is the hated Emmanuel Goldstein, a Party member who had been in league with Big Brother and The Party during the revolution. Goldstein is said to be a major part of the Brotherhood, a vast underground anti-Party fellowship. The reader never truly finds out whether the Brotherhood exists or not, but the implication is that Goldstein is either entirely fictitious or was eliminated long ago. The three slogans of the Party, on display everywhere, are:
Each of these is of course either contradictory or the opposite of what we normally believe, and in 1984 the world is in a state of constant war, no one is free, and everyone is ignorant. Through their constant repetition, the terms become meaningless, and the slogans become axiomatic. This type of misuse of language, and the deliberate self-deception with which the citizens are encouraged to accept it, is called doublethink. One essential consequence of doublethink is that The Party can rewrite history with impunity, for "The Party is never wrong". Political geography in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four The world is controlled by three functionally similar authoritarian superstates engaged in perpetual war with each other: Oceania (ideology: Ingsoc (English Socialism)), Eurasia (ideology: Neo-Bolshevism), and Eastasia (ideology: Death Worship or Obliteration of the Self). In terms of the political map of the late 1940s when the book was written, Oceania covers the areas of the British Empire (or the Commonwealth), the American continent, and Australia; thus most of the current First World countries are part of Oceania. Eastasia corresponds to China, Tibet (now occupied by China), Japan, Korea, and India. Eurasia corresponds to the Soviet Union and Continental Europe. That the United Kingdom is in Oceania rather than in Eurasia is commented upon in the book as an historical anomaly. Goldstein's book explains that the ideologies of the three states are basically the same, but it is imperative to keep the public ignorant of that. The population is led to believe that the other two ideologies are detestable. London, the novel's setting, is the capital of the Oceanian province of Airstrip One, the renamed Great Britain and Ireland. NewspeakNewspeak, the "official language" of Oceania, is extraordinary in that its vocabulary decreases every year; the state of Oceania sees no purpose in maintaining a complex language, and so Newspeak is a language dedicated to the "destruction of words". As the character Syme puts it:
The true goal of Newspeak is to take away the ability to conceptualise revolution adequately, or even to dissent, by removing words that could be used to that end. Since the thought police had yet to develop a method of reading people's minds to catch dissent, Newspeak was created. (This concept has been examined (and widely discounted) in linguistics: see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.) TechnologyThe world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is first and foremost a political, not a technological, dystopia. The technological level of the society in the novel is mostly crude and less advanced than in the real 1980s. Apart from the telescreens and speech-recognizing typewriters, it is no more advanced than in wartime Britain. Living standards are low and declining, with rationing and unpalatable ersatz products; in that regard, Orwell's vision is diametrically opposed to the technologically advanced hedonism of Brave New World. None of the three blocs has much genuine interest in technological progress, since it could destabilise their grip on power. Nuclear weapons, in particular, are avoided in the perpetual war, since its whole point is to be indecisive. The technologies employed are obsolete and perhaps deliberately wasteful. This stagnation is related to what is perhaps the most frightening aspect of the novel: for all their brutality, the regimes are not going to burn themselves out in strategically significant conquests or technological arms races. Rather, they have reached a stable equilibrium which could last for ever. Mass media coverageMoviesNineteen Eighty-Four has been made into a cinema film twice – in 1956 and in 1984 – and has twice been adapted for television by the B.B.C., in 1954 and 1965. The 1984 cinematic film 1984 is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the novel, and was critically acclaimed. It is notable for containing Richard Burton's last performance. Recordings1984 (for the love of big brother) is the title of an album by the Eurythmics which was originally released in November 1984 on Virgin vinyl V1984 (Virgin CD CDV 1984) in the UK, and RCA vinyl ABL1-5349 (RCA CD PCD1-5371) in the USA. It contained the following tracks:
RadioNineteen Eighty-Four was first broadcast as programme number 55 on August 27, 1949 at 9.00p.m. as a one-hour production over the N.B.C. radio network as part of the N.B.C. University Theater, which adapted the world's great novels for broadcast. Another broadcast on the N.B.C. radio network was made by the Theater Guild on Sunday April 26, 1953 for the United States Steel Hour. See alsoLiterature:
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