Brian Aldiss - Collected Essays

Orwell’s deployment of the philosophical entanglements inherent in words and phrases is masterly. He was early in life fascinated by G. K. Chesterton’s unparalleled talent for paradox. 1984 may owe something to Chesterton’s future-fantasy, The Napoleon of Notting Hill; it certainly extends its paradoxes. One example must suffice. When Smith asks O’Brien if Big Brother exists ‘in the same way as I exist’, O’Brien answers immediately, ‘You do not exist’. Here the paradox is that no paradox exists, for, in Newspeak terms, Smith has become an unperson and indeed does not exist.

Nor is it too fanciful to imagine that Orwell believed that his novel would falsify the future. Certainly, that seems to have been one of its effects. Fear is a great hypnotizer, and some people are prepared to believe that we live in an actual Orwellian vision of the future, in that world whose image is a boot stamping on a human face forever. In a literal sense, of course, this is totally untrue. We still live in a world worth defending. War and peace are still distinguishable states of mind. (And in 1984 at least one atomic bomb has been dropped on Airstrip One; that has not happened in our real world.)

The West may, like decadent Byzantium apeing the manners of its besiegers, ultimately betray itself from within to the enemy without. But we still live in a community where diverse opinion is tolerated, where individual salvation may be found, where TV sets have an Off button, and where we are not subject to that prevailing Chestertonian paradox which subjugates Orwell’s proles: ‘Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.’

To see 1984 as a nest of paradoxes is not to denigrate its power. Indeed, it may be in part to admit that to attempt to chronicle the future using the past tense is itself a paradox, one committed unwittingly every time a science fiction writer puts pen to paper. But 1984 is a more humorous novel than is generally acknowledged, though admittedly the humour is decidedly noir. In that respect, it bears a resemblance to Franz Kafka’s work, about which learned commentators have rightly expended much serious thought. (Learned commentators are correct in regarding humour as subversive.) Yet when Kafka read extracts from Der Prozess to Max Brod and friends, they all laughed heartily, and Kafka often could not continue for tears of laughter. But Kafka and Orwell both acknowledged Dickens among their masters of grim humour.

To Orwell’s own paradoxes, time has added another. For many years during the Cold War, Orwell’s phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’ was popular. It referred, of course, to all those TV cameras which were never switched off, keeping the population of Airstrip One under surveillance.

But as social life became nastier, rougher, during the 1980s, as the murder count rose in New York, London and elsewhere, the public in their malls and supermarkets began to beg for more cameras to be installed everywhere. They begged for more surveillance. They wanted to be watched. In an age when we no longer believe in the attention of an omnipresent God, even the cold eye of the camera is welcome.

When I first became interested in Orwell’s play with paradox and mirror image, I conceived the idea that the plot of 1984 is much like that of an A. E. van Vogt science-fantasy novel, in which one man alone has a vision of the truth, sets out to overturn the world, and finally manages to do so (‘Asylum’ is one such example). Orwell took a great interest in trash literature. This interest manifests itself in 1984 in the passages where Smith, as part of his work, invents a story about a fictitious character called Comrade Ogilvy. ‘At the age of three, Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a submachine gun, and a model helicopter … At nineteen, he had designed a hand-grenade which … at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst …’ This clearly is a kind of science fiction story at whose absurdity we are meant to laugh.

In pursuit of the van Vogt connection, I once took the opportunity of asking Orwell’s widow, Sonia, if Orwell had read much pulp science fiction (it existed at that period only in pulp magazine form). Had he ever read any A. E. van Vogt, with plots centering on worldwide conspiracy?

Her answers, like so many answers life gives us, were enigmatic. She thought he had read some science fiction. She did not know the name of van Vogt.

About H. G. Wells Orwell was much better informed. He expressed his delight more than once in Wells’s scientific romances, even going so far as to claim that ‘thinking people who were born about the beginning of the century are in some sense Wells’s own creation’. But he disagreed strongly with Wells as political sooth-sayer, and in particular with Wells’s views concerning a world state, of which he said, ‘Much of what Wells has argued and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany’.

Shortly after World War I, Wells rebuked Winston Churchill for speaking of the Bolsheviks as if they were a different order of being. Orwell argued that Churchill was more realistic and that he was right and Wells wrong. With totalitarianism, a new order of men had come into the world, perverting science for their own ends. 1984 is the history of that new order. O’Brien and the Party members are Orwell’s ghoulish mirror image of Wells’s Samurai in A Modern Utopia, while at the same time representing the new totalitarianism rising to threaten the post-war world. The debt to Wells is unavoidable; he was the man who had created the future as a forum for debate on present ends and means at the turn of the century.

We can now see the answer to our question. Was Orwell trying to predict the future or was he using the notion of the future as a mirror for his present? Of course the answer is ambiguous. Most of the novel mirrors the past (‘ “The past is more important”, agreed O’Brien gravely’), including the tradition of constructing utopias, but this is built about a core of futurism, that core in which Orwell conjures up the spectre of England under a totalitarian regime, a regime in which science is at the service of a new brutality, and in which the world is locked into a kind of dreadful unity through the war that is peace. The future and its polemics are given reality by the employment of the furniture of the past.

As with many novels, 1984 mirrors the author’s own life and the books to which he is indebted. What is different about 1984 is that it utilizes the most powerful lever available to science fiction; it places the events it depicts ahead of us, and so to be yet experienced, instead of behind us in the past, and so safely out of the way.

In Orwell’s world, the very word ‘freedom’ has been banished. Whereas in our world, words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are bandied about in everyday use on all sides. But has freedom in fact been banished for the fictitious inhabitants of Airstrip One? In order to maintain a boot stamping on the human face forever, the owner of the boot must suffer as well as the owner of the face. The price of loss of freedom is eternal vigilance.

There are few rewards for the Party faithful except power. Power is seen as an end in itself. The real, undeclared aim of the Party is, we are told, to remove all the pleasure from the sexual act. This startling but negative aim, which Orwell does not consistently pursue, reflects the negativity of power; it is doubtful whether Big Brother actually exists, while higher up officials like O’Brien are merely inquisitors with some new, some ancient, tortures at their command. Orwell can imagine rats but not Stalin.