Transcript Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell
Nineteen-eighty four
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The author
The context of Nineteen Eighty-Four:
Historical events reflected in the novel
Humanity’s threat to civilisation
Structure of the novel
Style
Themes and Issues
Characters
Tragedy or not?
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Born Eric Blair 1903, died George Orwell
1949.
Classical education at Eton - won
scholarship
Worked as a Colonial Officer in Burma –
resigned 1927
◦ he hated authority
◦ he hated being unjust
‘I knew I had a facility with words and a power of
facing unpleasant facts.’ The hanging.
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Orwell discovers that the internal and
international politics behind The Spanish Civil
War are far more complicated that he first
perceived. He wrote of history before this
war.
A certain degree of truthfulness was possible
so long as it was admitted that a fact may be
true even if you don't like it.
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Recently another newspaper published
photographs of the dangling corpses of Germans
hanged by the Russians in Kharkov, and carefully
informed its readers that these executions had
been filmed and that the public would shortly be
able to witness them at the new theatres. (Were
children admitted, I wonder?)
There is a saying of Nietzche which I have quoted
before, but which is worth quoting again:
He who fights too long against dragons becomes a
dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the
abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.
(As I please Tribune 1944)
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Many critics accuse Nineteen Eighty-Four for
being sado-masochistic.
Such a view comically denies the enormity of
the evil that Orwell was exposed to in his life.
Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects the experience
of the political life of the first fifty years of
the twentieth century.
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What is your first reaction when you hear
that droning, zooming noise? Inevitably it is
a hope that the noise won't stop. You want
to hear the bomb pass safely overhead and
die away into the distance before the engine
cuts out. In other words, you are hoping it
will fall on somebody else. So also when
you dodge a shell or an ordinary bomb -but in that case you have only about five
seconds to take cover and no time to
speculate on the bottomless selfishness of
the human being.
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The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is based
upon two totalitarian dictatorships, Soviet
Russia and Nazi Germany.
The world of Ingsoc bears strong
resemblances to the Soviet Union, but much
of the detail of the life comes from Germany.
The totalitarian state was based on
boundless dynamism. Totalitarian society
was a fully mobilized society, a society
constantly moving toward some
goal……Paradoxically, the totalitarian state
never reached its ultimate goal. However, it
gave the illusion of doing so. As soon as
one goal was reached, it was replaced by
another.
(The history guide. The age of totalitarianism
Stalin and Hitler.)
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The theories of Karl Marx were more than
fifty years old when Lenin and the Bolsheviks
seized power in October 1917. The response
of people around the world was one of hope,
that this was the beginning of an
International workers’ movement that would
bring Communism into existence.
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The reality was that Stalin rose to power,
instituted a police state, developed a cult of
personality around himself, and purged
millions of people whom he thought might
stand in his way. His capacity for cruelty was
unprecedented in human history
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And in order, while doing so, to shield their
puny group from exposure and destruction,
they simulated loyalty to the Party, fawned
upon it, eulogized it, cringed before it more
and more, while in reality continuing their
underhand subversive activities against the
workers and peasants. (Soviet textbook 1935)
www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1
936purges.html
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EVER since I have been scrutinizing political events,
I have taken a tremendous interest in propagandist
activity. I saw that the Socialist-Marxist
organizations mastered and applied this
instrument with astounding skill. And I soon
realized that the correct use of propaganda is a
true art which has remained practically unknown to
the bourgeois parties.
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Volume One - A Reckoning
Chapter VI: War Propaganda
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After 1933, the rallies were held in the first
half of September under the label of
("National Day of the (Nazi)Party of the
German People"), which was meant to
symbolize the solidarity between the
German people and the Nazi Party. This
point was further emphasized by the yearly
growing number of participants, which
finally reached over half a million from all
sections of the party, the army and the
state.
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We do not intend to use the radio only for
our partisan purposes. We want room for
entertainment, popular arts, games, jokes
and music. But everything should have a
relationship to our day. Everything should
include the theme of our great
reconstructive work, or at least not stand in
its way. Above all it is necessary to clearly
centralize all radio activities, to place
spiritual tasks ahead of technical ones, to
introduce the leadership principle, to
provide a clear worldview, and to present
this worldview in flexible ways.
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How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did
not look about you, to believe that the
physical type set up by the Party as an ideal, tall muscular youths and deep bosomed
maidens, blond haired, vital, sunburnt,
carefree –existed and even predominated
Nineteen Eighty-Four page 63.
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"My teaching is hard. Weakness has to be
knocked out of them. In my Ordensburgen
a youth will grow up before which the world
will shrink back. A violently active
dominating, intrepid, brutal youth - that is
what I am after". Youth must be all those
things. It must be indifferent to pain. There
must be no weakness or tenderness in it. I
want to see once more in its eyes the gleam
of pride and independence of the beast of
prey. "I will have no intellectual training.
Knowledge is ruin to my young men.
(Herman Rauschning Hitler speaks 1939)
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.
co.uk/GERyouth.htm
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‘There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of
the processes of life…….always there will be
the intoxication of power….
Nineteen Eighty-Four page 280.
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In the schools it is not the teacher, but the pupils,
who exercise authority. Party functionaries train
their children to be spies and agent provocateurs.
The youth organizations, particularly the Hitler
Youth, have been accorded powers of control which
enable every boy and girl to exercise authority
backed up by threats. Children have been
deliberately taken away from parents who refused
to acknowledge their belief in National Socialism.
The refusal of parents to "allow their children to
join the youth organization" is regarded as an
adequate reason for taking the children away.
(School teacher letter to a friend 1938)
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/
GERyouth.htm
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Published in 1930 , Civilization and Its
Discontents
Adolf Hitler's 1933 rise to power by
democratic majority in Germany made Freud
a personal historical witness to the
phenomenon that he had previously
attempted to account for in psychoanalytic
terms in his writings.
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[But] men are not gentle creatures who want
to be loved, and who at the most can
defend themselves if they are attacked; they
are, on the contrary, creatures among
whose instinctual endowments must be
reckoned a powerful share of
aggressiveness. Freud.
Always …..there will be the thrill of victory,
the sensation of trampling on an enemy
who is helpless. (O’Brien Nineteen EightyFour pp.280)
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"I am beginning to comprehend," he wrote, "some
of the reasons for Hitler's astounding success.
Borrowing a chapter from the Roman [Catholic]
church, he is restoring pageantry and color and
mysticism to the drab lives of 20th Century
Germans. This morning's opening meeting...was
more than a gorgeous show, it also had something
of the mysticism and religious fervor of an Easter
or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral. The
hall was a sea of brightly colored flags. Even
Hitler's arrival was made dramatic. The band
stopped playing. There was a hush over the thirty
thousand people packed in the hall. Then the band
struck up the Badenweiler March...Hitler appeared
in the back of the auditorium and followed by his
aides, Göring, Goebbels, Hess, Himmler and the
others, he slowly strode down the long center aisle
while thirty thousand hands were raised in salute."
The History Place
http://www.historyplace.com/wo
rldwar2/triumph/tr-will.htm
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"In a church …the same illusion holds good of
there being a head - in the Catholic Church,
Christ; in an army its commander-in-chief who loves all the individuals in the group with
equal love. Everything depends on this
illusion; if it were dropped, then both Church
and army would dissolve..."
www.freud.org.uk/religion8.html
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To Shirer, the intoxicating atmosphere inside
the hall was such that “…every word dropped
by Hitler seemed like an inspired word from
on high. Man's - or at least the German's critical faculty is swept away at such
moments, and every lie pronounced is
accepted as high truth itself.”
The History Place
http://www.historyplace.com/wo
rldwar2/triumph/tr-will.htm
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A novel that is also an essay
Important for students to know that
Winston’s experience is typical of what
happens to people in Ingsoc.
Winston’s journey to the Ministry of Love is
inevitable from the time he picks up the
diary.
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Ingsoc a society which :
Has no history
Which completely ignores the value of the
individual
Where the capacity to use language for
personal expression is under attack
Where everyone controls what they are
thinking
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Anne Frank keeps a diary to explore what she
feels and reflect on what she knows.
She also keeps it as a way of comforting
herself.
This activity is difficult for Winston because
the activity of diary writing becomes
impossible. No privacy exists.
‘Big Brother is watching you.’
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Remembers his mother.
His mother’s suffering.
His adult awareness of his mother’s suffering.
His mother’s loyalties.
Impossibility of feeling sorrow.
Julia and he make love because it is a political
act
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Syme ‘venemously orthodox.’
Ability of Syme’s brain to disengage from
reality, to think without feeling.
Parsons pathetic, ignorant, manipulated.
The nightmare of his children.
People’s capacity to ignore present
suffering.
Duckspeaker in the midst of noise.
Bad food, crowded lifts
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The attack on privacy
The attack on sex.
Destruction of history.
Value of memory.
An appreciation of the past.
Fallibility of the human mind.
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Winston.
Buys diary to communicate with future.
Regimented life.
‘You had to live, did live, from habit that became
instinct – in the assumption that every sound you
made was overheard and, except in darkness, every
movement scrutinised.’
Outraged by demands party makes on people’s
intellects.
Outraged by party’s attempt to destroy sexual
instinct.
Relationship with Julia allows him to feel human.
Capable of recalling and thinking.
‘These fragments have I shorn against my ruin,’
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Julia not intellectual as is Winston
Resourceful, spontaneous, guiltless.
Julia natural, but has not thought to the
degree Winston has. Falls asleep as Winston
reads Goldstein.
Does not care if the party invented
aeroplanes or not
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Contrast between O’Brien’s burly physique
and elegant manners.
His manner draws Winston to him.
An indication of Winston’s despair.
When torturing, he adopts different personas.
Freud.
Perfect at doublethink.
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The attempt to recover the past frees
Winston from the oppression of the present.
The Glass is an image of the beauty of the
human mind and imagination,
Leisure, quietness, peace, things of the
past.
Torture plays on the human mind’s need to
avoid pain.
The logic of Winston is defeated by torture
not by superior thought.
Orwell aware that human greatness and
dignity can be destroyed.