UTOPIAN NIGHTMARE
BELL, DANIEL
WRITERS and WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION Utopian Nightmare NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR By George Orwell. Haramrt, Brace and Company. 314 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by DANIEL MLL WHEN THOMAS MORE...
...In the end, Winston wants to obey O'Brien, and that is the point of no return...
...Ingesoc's Newspeak is designed to express the life of Oceania in its most fitting way and to make all other modes of thought impossible...
...it may be a secret shame or a secret longing...
...The secret of the inner party is that for the first time in, human history, it has mastered the usage of pure power...
...And out of his primal dread Winston, to save his life, betrays Julia and his "self...
...Reviewed by DANIEL MLL WHEN THOMAS MORE IN ISIS described an imaginary island, he called it Utopia, which in Greek means...
...he corrects past records when the present fails to bear out party predictions, expunges the names of men who have been "vaporized," and writes articles in Newspeak, the official language of ;*t<atjiu (which has not displaced the vernacular but is used for all documents...
...No general idea...
...All groups, however, are capable of hate, which is constantly whipped up either by the spectacle of mass hangings In the public square or by the image of Emanuel Goldstein, the goatee-bearded betrayer of the revolution...
...THE SHRINKING GAP between imagination and reality is what heightens one's sense of fear inWeading Orwell...
...They can't bear you to feel like that...
...It is that which a man fears more than any other thing in the world...
...No single device...
...Literally, "nowhere...
...the larger group, in the Outer Party, are not always capable of such nuances and rarely master the full technique...
...Without that persistent double image we are lost...
...And Dr...
...Yet we cannot live the primitive martyrdom demanded by Kierkegaard, or the withdrawal from the times contemplated by Schelling or the nihilistic despair of their twentieth century existentialist succesors...
...One last horror still remains, which is no less hightening for being metaphysical than real...
...All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour...
...THE SEED OF DOUBT is present in Winston Smith, nevertheless...
...What makes it a shuddering, sickening, gripping spectacle is the remorseless piling on of detail upon detail, like a fingernail drawn ceaselessly across a blackboard, of a human society stripped of the last shreds of community, .where even the sexual act is a cold, distasteful, jerky moment of copulation, performed because artificial methods are not yet sufficiently perfect to reproduce the species, and where fear and anxiety are the daily staple of life— not as in the concentration camps a dull and inured fear, but under the corrosive stimuli of hate, a high-tension, twitching exhaustion from which dreams and even sleep offer no escape...
...Smith's tasks are central to the state, for the party slogan is: "Who controls the past, controls the future, and who controls the present, controls the past...
...and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything...
...18 THIS OUR WORLD-TO-BE...
...Orwell Is writing a morality play which preaches the absolute truth that man is an end in himself...
...What are the safeguards and the checks...
...now...
...At best wc can live in paradox...
...Participation...
...And in that submission, the small flickering flame of self-consciousness, the ability of detachment which distinguishes men from other animals becomes extinguished...
...In that helplessness and out of that fear arises a surging emotion he calls love...
...Consequently our need is of aoaw * empirical judgments that can sU»u- witfc some certainty the .consequences of aa action...
...He is now an associate editor of Fortune...
...The week Orwell's novel was published the Sunday Times reported a rival to newspeak: "model English," a new universal language "with sentences having one word order and ntf idioms, with words having one meaning, one pronunciation, one spelling and one form and with letters having one sound and one shape...
...The fear created by the threats of Goldstein is overcome only by Big Brother, whose kindly black-mustachioed face appears on the screens to efface the ranting, threatening Goldstein...
...But whilt we may live always in quest of nasi judgment, we do exist in the here aaj...
...One has to live consciously and self-consciously, in the involvement and in the alienation, in the loyalty and in the questioning, in the love and in the critical appraisal...
...The "inner man," the secret voice of "self," still holds true, but that is not safe either...
...Winston breaks and submit*—and what is the guarantee that we all may not similarly submit when the shadow engulfs us...
...They want you to be bursting with energy all the time...
...It does so through words like artsem (artificial insemination), Minitrue and Afinipao: (the ministry of peace), and in its most subtle form in words like crimestop (halting one's expression just be- , fore it becomes dangerous) and the most basic concept of Newspeak, doublethink (the ability to accept two contradictory expressions at the same time as true...
...Once the secret of pure power is learned, Orwell suggests, the human being becomes completely malleable...
...Oceania controls its populace through telescreen, which brings voice and video images into a room but also allows those at the station controls to peer into the room at the same time...
...Ingsoc life is dingy, but if drabness were the only constituent element of Orwell's museum of horror, the novel and even Ingsoc life would be bearable...
...Whether it is a primal urge of curiosity or an accident of fate is never entirely clear...
...At a signal the door between cage and face is dropped, leaving the rats free to leap...
...It varies from indiviudal to individual...
...And Anally, that any social action has to be tested pragmatically (in Dewey's use of the word) by itiminimal infringement on the carefully defined set of values which stakes out man as the measure of man's things...
...Intelligent citizen, ship...
...Is this Socialism...
...But other than our protestations of sincerity and intentions of decency, what concrete dikes are we erecting against the rising flood-tide of horror...
...Ultimately Winston submits because he feels helpless before O'Brien...
...Nineteen Eighty-Foxtr pictures life thirty years- hence under Ingsoc (English Socialism), a unit of Oceania, one of three super-states in a permanent war for world hegemony...
...Yet Factory Management ana Maintenance recently reported the development of Vericom, a television scanning device which allows a plant manager to watch his workroom and see who is shirking and who is working...
...He not only confesses but finally comes to love the party and Big Brother...
...It may be a way of dying or a form at abasement...
...Is, for example, the action of the British Labor government in creating a wage freeze the imposition of controls whose consequence is the acceleration of power concentration and the total state...
...Are not these irreversible steps, and hence, the danger that we are being warned against...
...A University of Washington sociologist who saw the need for a law-abiding language devised it...
...What is it...
...Are these enough when power is at stake...
...Professor Harold Lass well, in his book Poicer and Persnotaity, has proposed a National Personal Assessment Board, a democratic elite of skill, to devise and administer personality tests that would weed out those obsessed with power...
...for Orwell, actually, is not writing a tract on politics but a treatise on human nature...
...In a chapter unmatched in recent literature for its unrelenting description of inquisition and torture, Winston betrays Julia and himself...
...IN THE LITANY OF DESPAIR, however, we still have not reached the point of no return...
...MWETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR is the •'tory of Winston Smith, a member of the outer Party, and his downfall which started at the moment doubt first crossed his mind...
...Such a program runs the danger possibly of being colorless and unappealing for those who- seek a forthright reproach to the spirits taunting them with foreboding images of their fate...
...The second, the recognition of an ancient insight, restated in moderrs times by Tillich, Buber and other re-l ligious humanists, that the human condition is limited because the ego is a form of power and that every human relationship, particularly the most in* timate, inflicts, pain and tension, upon each other...
...Only members .of the Inner Party are fully capable of doublethink...
...Or is the creation of a central intelligence agency in the U. S. —voted recently by Congress—with the power to plant agents in every voluntary association in the country, including trade unions, another step toward that end...
...C. S. Bluemel, a psychiatrist, in his War, Politics and Insanity would limit the suffrage right to university graduates who had majored in the social sciences and who had been certified as free of personality disorders by the faculty At this point, sanity itself teeters on the balance,'the obsessive fear arises and as the prophet Micah concludes, in Morton Wishengrad's fable of the Thief and the Hangman, "when society plays the hangman, who is the hangman's hangman...
...Daniel Bell was formerly managing editor of The New Leader and an instructor in social science at the University of Chicago...
...The seed burgeons when he meets Julia, whose sex urge is strong enough to break the bounds of puritanism ordained by the party...
...Apparently there is nothing too extreme (either technically or psychologically) for the mind to contrive out of fantasy, that is not already present today...
...In the end, however, Winston is betrayed by O'Brien, who in reality is one of the heads of thoughtpol...
...Smith works in Mmitrue, the Ministry of Truth...
...At first the "outer man" in Winston submits because he cannot hold out against the ingenious and fiendish pain devices that cause him to "confess...
...This document, presumably the most forthright statement of Orwell's own credo, is a projection of James Burnham's Managerial Revolution...
...In the case of Winston Smith, it was a fear of rats...
...With her simple instincts, Julia understands the party's motivations most clearly: "When you make love you're using up energy...
...Winston's eyes are opened to the techniques of manipulation and the party's purposes by O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party...
...The prole*, eighty-five percent of the population, are incapable of any thought...
...Tradition...
...His torturers fitted over his face a cagelike mask in which were two scabrous rats...
...O'Brien gives Winston a copy of Goldstein's "book," which reveals the secret history of the party...
...exposure to it, however, is what he cannot face and must deny...
...Many will protest that Orwell has written an effective picture of totalitarianism, but not democratic Socialism...
...Perhaps the first, halting step is the admission that there are no definite answers and a radical suspicion of any such claims...
...Between the executioner and the victim, Camus once wrote, is the most intimate bond...
...What then is the answer...
...One has to live in the world, and accept it m all its frightening implications...
...Democratic awareness...
...The frightening aspect of George Orwell's imaginary world is that it is somewhere — in and around us...
...In a slip of the tongue, in a glance and in a dream it betrays Winston and he is brought face to face with the ultimate of torture—the most, dreaded thing in the world and perhaps the secret of all "confessions...
Vol. 32 • June 1949 • No. 26
