Winston Smith’s rebellion in “1984” implies the struggle for instinctual freedom against the conformity of totalitarian state. Orwell’s Winston Smith is the last Adam, reenacting the myth of the Fall, following his Eve into disobedience against God. (Beauchamp, p. 293) Thus, the misfortunes of Winston, Orwell’s anti-hero reveal the political system of the ruling state of Oceania in 1984. (Malcolm Thorp, 4)
Winston’s downfall in light of his adamant stance on individualism and his opposition to the Party’s totalitarian thirst for power – the quest for self-determination
Winston’s mid-life identity crisis leads him to question the wisdom of, and to develop hatred for Big Brother, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” He begins his rebellion against the state by triggering ideas of his own which the all-pervasive Thought Police cannot penetrate. “His amateurish dabbling into treason, as well as his illicit affair with the Anti-sex league deviant”, Julia, are carefully spied by the Thought Police. Through his ordeal of arrest, Winston faces the reality. After enduring the horrors of psychological rehabilitation, including an experience in the infamous Room 101, Winston emerges as an “actor” who in the end loves Big Brother. (Thorp, 5)
The party in control of Oceania is named Ingsoc, abbreviated from its predecessor, English socialism. Ingsoc, however does not adhere to any ideology, its purpose being to manipulate on behalf of the managerial elite within the state. Before his revolt, Winston Smith was a typical member of this group. Employed in the Ministry of Truth, he operated a Memory Hole, a device that obliterates unpleasant facts contrary to party propaganda of the moment.
On the surface, at least, the methods of terrors Ingsoc employs are typical of totalitarian regimes (Meyers in Throp p.5) such as purges or “terroristic” instruments: rockets, hidden microphones that detected the clandestine love affair between Julia and Winston. In addition, Ingsoc appeals to methods of mass psychological manipulation: “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”, informational system control as the Party does not allow individuals to keep records of their past, a refined language of Newspeak, which the Party has introduced to replace English, loyalty to the political entity, fact that Winston proves in the end when he fails loving Julia “if they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal” (Orwell, 57), resistance and revolution that continue to overthrow the existing British social order.
Winston differs from the biblical archetype, “when falling from Paradise” in being tempted into erotic rebellion. In his furtively kept journal he has written “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER”. He falls into overt rebellion only when he is in love with Julia. In this respect, the biblical myth and the novel’s mythos are the same: it is an Eve who lures Adam to sign against God. (Beauchamp, p.295) Julia and Winston’s love is politically subversive “Their embrace had been a battle, their climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act” (Orwell, 105). Thus they are arrested by the Thought Police to extinguish their love.
In the long, “excruciating torture sessions, O’Brien systematically undercuts and refutes every belief Winston held”, he actually beats him and “brainwashes away every trace of human dignity, until Winston is left with only one vestige of his humanity”, his love for Julia. (Beauchamp, p.298)
In Room 101, O’Brien explains “is the worst thing in the world”, each man’s innermost fear, “in your case the worst thing in the world happens to be rats” (Orwell, p.233). The threat of having his face devoured by the squealing rats sends Winston into sheer panic. “Do it to Julia!Not to me. (Orwell, p.236)” Winston psychologically terrorized by a brutally totalitarianism, is reduced to an emotionless entity: creaming for Julia’s death to save his own life.
The State’s total victory is made evident when “rehabilitated” and released from prison, Winston encounters Julia and feels toward her an induced antipathy. “This loss of love leaves Winston emptied of personality, malleable, defenseless against the state whose purpose O’Brien had explained , was to tear the human mind to pieces and put it together in a shape of the State’s own choosing” (Beauchamp, p.298). With Winston their success is complete: “He gazed up the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the side of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother “(Orwell, 245)
The supervision goes beyond the human limits :Winston’s secret phobia- rats- is discovered by the intricate spy network that seems not only to analyze outward behavior but also is able to probe into the inward depths of the psyche. Similarly, the speck of dust that Winston places on his diary in order to determine if the Police have searched in his personal belongings is carefully placed back on the book by the Thought Police, “leaving the impression that perhaps nothing of importance goes unnoticed”. (Throp 6) “Reality”, it is emphasized “is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else” (George Orwell, “1984” NY: The New American Library, 1961, p. 205 in Throp p.6)
Orwell has embodied in the conditioned hysteria of love for Big Brother, Freud’s theory of “eroticism displaced”(Beauchamp, p.294). In the DailyTwo-Minute Hate (The Oceanic equivalent of prayer), the telescreens project the image of Goldstein, against whom the increasingly frenzied faithful hurl their hatred. Then “drawing a sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother.. full of Power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it filled the screen.. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself over the chair in front of her. With a tremendous murmur that sounded like “My savior!”, she extended her arms to the screen” (George Orwell, “1984”, p.17).
Winston’s anxiety is triggered by self-doubts associated with his endeavors to revolt. A feeling of uncertainty always gnaws at him; “Is he really on the right side? After all, the Party might be right”. (Throp 7) Thus, the rebellion of the individual against the State, in “1984” is presented as a struggle for instinctual freedom against the enforced conformity of an omniscient, omnipotent political entity. (Beauchamp, p. 293) “The topography of Oceania is well enough known that I need not dwell on it: the telescreens, Big Brother’s electronic eyes that are always “watching you”. The phenomena of newspeak and doublethink and blackwhite, the ubiquitous slogans proclaiming war to be peace and freedom slavery. Nor need I stress the dystopian nature of Orwell’s vision of utopia at dead end, all its perverted values terroristic ally enforced by the Ministry of Love”. (George in Beauchamp, p.294 )
This dystopian novel warns against a totalitarian system and sets up the existence of utopia: “a world where Eros is reserved for the State alone, where Adam will have no Eve, where Eden will be inescapable, where the Fall will be as unimaginable as freedom. Utopia’s dawning will signal an end to man’s disobedience, and paradise, alas will be regained”. (Beauchamp, 298)
The rise of messianic regimes that pretend to lend credence to fears “to have found a way to establish the rule of justice on earth”, the essential promise of utopianism is visibly portrayed in “1984” and it leads to Winston becoming part of the Party’s faceless collective, denying his identity: the acquired past and the love for Julia. In the description of totalitarianism’s goal to impose on men “a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic proportions” – parallels that of the dystopian writers (Arendt in Beauchamp, 298). “The terrifying thing about modern dictatorships is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen” (Arendt in Beauchamp, 298)
Even if Winston does not seek to overthrow the government that depleted the population of humanity, authentic language: English and personal history, but he pursues to create his “past” out of objects, senses as well as his own “present or future”.
History- present and past; History equals memory/ “All history was a palimpsest”: The porosity of past and present
In the novel “1984”, not only personal relations are frowned upon, but even the establishment of one’s individual identity is impossible in this political context due to the Party doctrine that “controls the past.. controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”. (Orwell, “1984’, p.32) “In a man’s mind the past is constantly present in memory, the future in expectation. In the split second the constitutes “the present”, the concrete reality is recollection of the past and anticipation of the future. As Dilthey put it, :the present as such can never be experienced. At a given moment a man embraces both past and future in his consciousness” (Trygve R Tholfsen in Thorp p.7)
Individual interpretations of truth are heresies, according to the Party, “the truth” must be approved by the political entity . “A Party member is required to have not only right opinions, but the right instincts” (Orwell, “1984”, 174)
“Winston’s mind contains memories that not even the Party can eradicate”. Nevertheless, “The Party denies Winston any information that would enable him to corroborate his memory” (Thorp, p.7). “Indeed the mutability of the past is at the very basis of mind control in 1984” (Thorp, p.7). The party manages the access to the past for two reasons. As already mentioned, by handling the past, the Party insures that “the individual has no standard of comparison, no method of judging the authenticity of human experience” (Orwell, “1984” 32-33) But the overriding reason is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party: “It is not merely the speeches, statistics and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change of doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one’s mind, or even one’s policy, is confession of weakness” (Orwell, “1984”, 175)
Winston can remember that he was born in 1944 or 1945. As he attempts to reconstruct historical episodes that have transpired during his life, he recalls an air raid dropped on Colchester. He vividly remembers being crowded into a tube station with his mother and younger sister. “A grief-stricken, drunken old man (…)had repeatedly sobbed ”We didn’t ought to av’ trusted ‘em. (..) I said so all along” (Orwell, 1984, 31) At this crucial point, his memory fails. This incident is followed by a war, the Great Purges of the late 1950s and early 1960s and for the first time he hears of Big Brother. But beyond these vague recollections”everything melted into a mist” (Orwell, 32) Winston is a man without a perspective on his own life, and this becomes the source of his identity crisis.
Basically, he suffers from amnesia: “He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable” (Orwell, 25) “Winston attempts to alleviate his anxiety through piecing together fleeting memories and inner feelings in a diary he has illegally purchased” (Thorp, 8). When he attempts to write, his creative impulses are stymied. “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind and if the mind itself is controllable- what then?” (Orwell, 69)
In “1984” Orwell defines the extent to which Ingsoc wields authority. According to Inner Party theoretician O’Brien, power has become an absolute end in itself: “We are not interested in the good of others, we are interested solely in power” (Orwell, 217). Contrary to O’Brien assertion, the Party cannot create human nature (men, he asserts, are “infinitely malleable”), for men do not always act in uniform patterns, hence they never have a “nature” that can be so manipulated.
Another issue related to the human element in politics is revealed in Orwell’s discussion of the “Proles” who constitute the remaining eighty-five percent of the population, living in the grey slums of London, and even if they are aware of the degeneracy of the past two decades, they have been bought off with pornography, machine-made salacious novels, rigged lotteries, and the humdrum routine (Orwell, 129). Thus, terror does not extend into the prole sections of London. As Winston comes to realize: “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious” (Orwell,p 61)
For other model builders, Orwell’s novel is seen as an insightful expose of the drabness of life in the socialist state, with its combination of public affluence and private squalor” (James McNamara and Dennis J O’Keeffe in Thorp p.9)
Conclusion
All in all, in this novel the terror is achieved not only through smashing faces but also through creating intellectual disorientation. Much of Orwell’s success in 1984 lies in his creating plausible description of how totalitarianism can obliterate the individuality and turn him into an automaton. Winston’s major decisions can be perceived so, as attempts to mark his identity. When he purchases a diary and begins recording his idea, he endeavors to create memory and history, but he ends renouncing to “himself” for the Party’s advantage.
Bibliography
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