1984For the love of Big Brother...
Imagine three fourteen-year-old girls and a fifty-one-year-old man in a cinema.

My dad, my two best friends and me, and we're watching sex.

Five years later, imagine two nineteen-year-old boys, two girls - one nineteen and one fourteen - and a fifty-five-year-old man sitting in front of the TV in a posh modern detached house.

My two best friends, their kid sister and dad and me, and we're watching sex.

Parents and children - isn't that what 1984 is really all about?

These are the two times I saw the film of 1984. In fact I wasn't able to watch it all the way through the second time because Ian's dad declared it ‘wasn't suitable viewing' for kid sister Lucy and turned the set off. ‘Bastard', I thought. But I didn't tell him that my dad had not only allowed me to go to the film when it first came out, but had insisted on it because he believed 1984 was the most important book ever written. Fourteen years on and I'm beginning to think I agree with him.

The trouble with music is that you have to use words to describe it. There have been attempts to convey thoughts, ideas or feelings about music through music, but they are rarely successful. Fiction doesn't have quite the same problem; critics use words to express views on other words. One of the things that is so extraordinary about 1984 is that it is a fiction which encapsulates all the literary criticisms under the sun: throw out Eagleton, Barthes, Kristeva and Derrida. In true Newspeak paring-down style, George Orwell is all you need.

Current literary preoccupations with memory and history, from Waterland to Behind the Scenes at the Museum, appear frivolous and unimaginative in comparison. The media's self-obsession, our dependency on soap operas, the Lottery, cities where adults are afraid to walk after 9pm for fear of getting cut up by kids, all of this should be Oldspeak rather than the stuff of today's News headlines, because Orwell saw it all in 1948. He even predicted the idiocies of Euro-centrism:

"You telling me you ain't got a pint mug in the ’ole bleeding boozer?"
"And what in hell's name is a pint?" said the barman ... "Litre and half litre, that's all we serve."

We may carry on teaching this book to our children, but we will never learn.

What I can't decide is whether the relationship between Julia and Winston is the book's one flaw; or if like everything else it was engineered to appear so. It never seems in doubt that Winston will betray Julia (that he will want her to face the rats' mask in his stead) because there is never the sense that he loves her. He loves what she stands for, he loves her in relation to himself, but he does not love her. From first to last, the person in the book that Winston really loves and really wants to be loved by is O'Brien. From the opening page, all he does is for the love of Big Brother.

And then I can't decide whether this is vaguely (or even overtly) misogynistic, or simply an insight into the way men love, or more likely still an exploration of the way both men and women love each other. This is why some people get married, because they know that in Room 101 they too would betray their lover, and they hope that vowing the opposite in public will act as some kind of protection. Not getting married is an acknowledgement of betrayal.

If you have children, betrayal becomes more complicated. Betray your lover and you in part betray the child you share with them, and by extension you part betray yourself. This is probably why lovers who live together for years suddenly decide to get married when they want to have children. It is also probably why Orwell has Winston betray Julia and not a child of his own. Orwell recognizes that the bond between parent and child can be of an altogether more complex nature. In prison, Winston meets his neighbour Parsons who recounts with pride how his daughter denounced him to the Thought Police. But Parsons would not have denounced his daughter, which is why the Party is seeking to promote artificial insemination and break the bond between parent and child. This is why if there is hope it rests in the Proles, because the Proles will remain parents.

The last thing I'm not sure of, is whether there is any hope at the end of 1984. It seems to me that those final pages deny us anything. The one thing we can all be sure of is that we're going to die, and the one thing Winston knows in prison is that he will at some point be shot in the back of the neck. But he isn't. He doesn't die and we're denied even that strange comfort. The message seems unambiguous: don't take life easy, take it hard - take it very hard - in fact, take it doubleplushard, because only then will we see with the clarity to be able to say that two plus two equals four.



©Rachel Lynch, August 1998



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