ABSTRACT
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rich text, but in this year, when the
title on the book and the date on the calendar finally coincide, the book has been discussed so fully and from so many angles that one wonders, at this late date, whether there is much more that can be said about it. I believe there is;
Nineteen Eighty-Four is not exhausted yet. Certainly, there are aspects of the book which have been very fully debated, though not resolved: the nature of its
politics and its satire; is it primarily an attack on Stalinism in particular, or totalitarianism in general? Does it represent Orwell's disillusionment with the
British Labour Party, or a continuing commitment to democratic socialism? All
these are interesting questions which I shall pass by. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a kind of utopia; or more precisely, a 'dystopia',
showing not an ideal future society but a nightmarish one. English literature has been rich in works, from Thomas More's Utopia onwards, which present
imagined societies, whether attractive or horrific. The late nineteenth century
saw many such books. There were Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Edward
Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, and in America, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. William Morris replied to Bellamy in News from Nowhere, and in the last years of the century H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine and The Sleeper Awakes. And when Orwell was beginning his career as a writer, in
1932, Aldous Huxley published one of the most celebrated of all dystopias, Brave New World. The book of this kind which most directly influenced
Orwell, though, was by a Russian, Evgeny Zamyatin's We; he read this in a
French translation in 1946 and wrote an appreciative review of it. Seen as an
example of the dystopian genre, or even a kind of science fiction, Nineteen
Eighty-Four has a distinguished ancestry. All such works, one can say, are at least as much about the age in which they were written as about the remote futures they purport to describe. They form palimpsests in which the present is
frequently visible through the imagined forms of the future. Thus, in Wells's early dystopias the styles and preoccupations of the fin de siecle are apparent, while even such a work of bold technological speculation as Brave New World seems to me to reflect much of the quality of life of England in the early 1930s. Zamyatin's We, written in a present which is now very remote from us-Russia in 1920 - suggests the political excitements of the Russian Revolution, and the
aesthetic excitements generated by Constructivism, particularly in the description of the spaceship called the Integral. Nevertheless, all these novels are set well in the future; no less than 800,000 years ahead in the case of Wells's The Time Machine. In The Sleeper Awakes he reduced the time to a couple of centuries; Zamyatin and Huxley set their futures several hundred
years on.
