by George Orwell
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(This read was in celebration of Banned Books Week)
This is no underestimated, underground book. 1984, upon its release in 1949, changed pop culture. It added such phrases as "doublethink" and "Big Brother's watching you" into the lexicon. The notion of paranoia, of a government having control over everything from the media to how people are exposed to it, rings true for today. Especially in North Korea, where a totalitarian society, a living Oceania, currently reigns over its people.
The abridged version of the plot goes like so: Winston Smith, the protagonist, is an employee for the Ministry of Truth. His job is to make sure all the media materials of Oceania (basically a conglomeration of the UK and the US) match with the current facts. You see, he changes the past in order to make it appear that Big Brother is always correct, even when Oceania is battling Eurasia one day and tackling Eastasia the next morning. No longer enjoying the job or even the world in general, Smith decides to do something about it. He begins a journal, one that he found in the black market. This leads to a chance encounter with a young woman named Julia, which then leads to many liaisons. For those familiar with such stories, you can probably guess where this is heading...
The plot is taut and ridiculously original. The staggering amount of detail that it took to create such a world must've taken a lot of Orwell's thinking power. But this is also a testament to the writer himself. For someone to take the effort to create a new language (Newspeak) and go through the trouble to even define most of the new words is amazing. That is one of 1984's many spellbinding abilities.
The most amazing thing about the story would have to be its writing. The readers are sucked into a horrific journey, along with Smith, to get a better understanding of how Ingsco (the ideological system in the novel) works. We are treated to excerpts from a book Smith consults at one point (which, altogether, takes up about ten-twelve pages of the novel), a day-by-day analysis of what it's like to be a citizen of Oceania. Every day, surrounded by propaganda on TVs only the highest of the high are allowed to turn off once in a while, TVs that watch you just as you watch them.
The irony is:
Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve.
1984 by George Orwell, page 74
What makes 1984 an effective book is that it is genuinely scary. I've read many horror novels, but no novel chilled me more than this book. One was the destruction of language. While the story goes on, Smith meets the man who is putting the touches to the tenth (!) edition of the Newspeak Dictionary:
Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well.
[...]
Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good', what sense is there in having a whole string of words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still.[...]
In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words- in reality, only one word.
all above from 1984 by George Orwell, page 51
"Plusgood"? Sounds like something a child would say, right? Something I realized is that Newspeak is not new in the least, it's almost infantilization of the language! Not only that, but by eliminating all the synonyms and antonyms eliminates originality. That means, if someone like me were thrown into such a world, I would be shot on sight for having an original thought.
Not scared yet? Okay, how about "doublethink"? Here's what it means:
[It] means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.
1984 by George Orwell, page 214
How in the world do you do that? It's like believing hot chocolate is both hot and cold! If I had to "doublethink" everything, let me just say my head would explode ala Scanners.
With the wake of Internet censorship laws being debated in Congress, we are reminded again that a world like Oceania in the United States is possible. But again, North Korea could be the reminder. If anything, 1984 is the warning that if we don't watch ourselves, we all (i.e. the world) could be worshipping a Big Brother figure and the world would be divided up into three regions before breakfast-time.
~
COPYRIGHT NOTE: all bold quotes are from the novel and were written by the author himself. Those words are not my own.
ETA: And just like that, this book has snuck its way into my heart, becoming one of my all-time favorites.
As for the Fahrenheit 451 comparison I made a while ago, it was unfair. Both books focus on the nature of censorship in different ways. Orwell takes a more broad approach by developing a world around the idea, while Bradbury focuses on the idea itself.
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