Devarshi Modi

Research Scholar, School of Languages, Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, India

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Abstract:

This paper mainly focuses on aspect of Totalitarianism Objective Reality in Nineteen Eighty- four by Orwell. Orwell has been considered as one of the prominent novelists of the twentieth century. His novels are a powerful satire on the political and social hypocrisies. By the quality of his writing, he has achieved international fame and recognition. From the very beginning of his life Orwell wanted to become a writer and in college, he even published periodicals. Here in this novel Orwell tries to present power in terms of totalitarianism. As power has been one of his most projected problems through all his works.

Keywords: Totalitarianism, Power, Politics, Objective Reality

Introduction:

Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair. In 1945, Orwell published the first of the two books for which he is generally known, i.e., Animal Farm. It is a dystopian novel, cast in the form of an animal world. The obvious subject of the satire is Soviet Russia, but more generally it has to do with totalitarianism of any kind. The success of the book in Great Britain and the United States gave Orwell an income he had never before enjoyed. The book met with immediate and far-reaching public success, especially as it was so topical.

Nineteen Eighty Four was published in the year 1948. This novel has been considered as one of the best novels of the modern age. The world of ‘1984’ is not a new world, but the war-time world of 1944. The writer imagines that by 1984 everyone is to become a coward, a spy or a betrayer. He also believes that money and lust for power will dominate the society of1984. The purpose of the novel is, undoubtedly, very remarkable. Arthur Koestler, writes,

Animal Farm and 1984 are Orwell’s last works. No parable was written since Gulliver’s Travels equal in profundity and mordent satire to Animal Farm, no fantasy since Kafka’s In the Penal Settlement equal in logical horror to 1984. I believe that future historians of literature will regard Orwell as a kind of missing link between Kafka and Swift. For, to quote (Cyril)Connolly again, it may well be true that ‘it is closing time in the gardens of the West, and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair. (4)

The novel's title was intended to convey to readers in 1949 that the narrative represented a plausible scenario for the not-too-distant future: if totalitarianism were not resisted, the title said, some form of the society detailed in the book could materialize in only 35 years. Winston Smith, the book's main character, works as a government servant. He revolts against the totalitarian system under which he works. He is provided with a job of rewriting of history to suit the shift of party policy. But he seldom agreed with the policy of the party especially, its slogans, ‘War is Peace’ ,‘Freedom is Slavery’ and ‘Ignorance is Strength’, usually strike his mind.

Looking to the major works of Orwell one thing is very clear that he is one of the leading novelists of the twentieth century. His novels express a powerful satire on the political and social hypocrisies. As a writer he deals with modern themes of politics and social problems. He is mainly concerned with the squalor and dirt, poverty, and loss of individuality. Through his works he reflects the hopes and fears of a whole generation. He was of the firm opinion that mankind can very easily be led astray by false ideals and pretensions. His whole career shows him to be mad, constantly at odds with the social and political order of his day, a writer who felt that he must not only entertain and enlighten but change society. The purpose of his writing was to present social problems with a view to bring positive changes in the social sphere. A. A. Khan and Qamar Talat write,

George Orwell is one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. As a novelist, his aim is to make a deep study of human society in all complex institutional interactions. Any interaction between two competent ideals or ideologies is likely to breed mutual disaffection, hatred, and violence. In the twentieth century we have a strong conflict between capitalism and socialism, which led to innumerable eruptions of violence and loss of human values. Orwell’s principal concern as a writer is, with the welfare of mankind. The way he presented the colossal impediment in this path reflects his personality which is the total outcome of heterogeneous cultures in which he lived. The cultural atrocities amongst which Orwell lived are not at all far distant in time, even we are existing in the same kind of time and cultural soil in which Orwell struggled”. (52-53)

Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism is a political concept where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible. Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through rule by one leader and an all-encompassing propaganda campaign, which is disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that is often marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of speech, mass surveillance and widespread use of terror. A distinctive feature of totalitarian governments is an, according to Robert Conquest, "elaborate ideology, a set of ideas that gives meaning and direction to the whole society"(249)

A totalitarian regime attempts to control virtually all aspects of social life, including the economy, education, art, science, private life and morals of citizens. Richard Pipes writes,

"The officially proclaimed ideology penetrates into the deepest reaches of societal structure and the totalitarian government seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens".

 It also mobilizes the whole population in pursuit of its goals.   

Carl Joachim Friedrich writes that "A totalist ideology, a party reinforced by secret police, and monopoly control of industrial mass society."

These are the three features of totalitarian regimes that distinguish them from other autocracies. Totalitarian governments aren't extremely old. They have only come into being in the twentieth century, although dictatorships have been present for much longer. Therefore, dictatorships are not necessarily a totalitarian one (on a side note, not all totalitarian governments are dictatorships either). Totalitarian governments can be communist, fascist, monarchial, dictatorial, even democratic. The ideology is unimportant, because totalitarian governments are considered totalitarian only if certain characteristics are to be observed in them.

Totalitarianism in 1984 by George Orwell:

A Graphic Picture of a Totalitarian State: For a long time, Orwell had felt the fear that the world would fall apart into two or three superstates, each holding the atomic bomb, and that within each state there would be a new authoritarianism, what he came to call “oligarchical collectivism”. This is exactly the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a world ruled according to a rigid code by Big Brother and party who do not permit the least freedom of any kind of the people. Orwell in this book has succeeded, to a striking degree, in rendering the essential quality of this totalitarianism and in giving us a graphic picture of the way in which power is ruthlessly exercised. The novel evokes the tone of life in a totalitarian society, taking Oceania as an extreme example, one that might or might not actually exist, but which throws much light on the nature of the political system that do exist.

The Power – Structure in Oceania:

Oceania is governed by a system called Ingsoc (English Socialism), and Orwell has described in detail the doctrines and the structure of this system. At the summit of the pyramid stands Big Brother, the mythical personification of state power, whose identity and even existence are in doubt. Below him comes the Inner Party, the brains of the whole organism, who controls the Outer Party or the functional class. The remaining eighty-five per cent of the population are known as the “proles”: they enjoy no political or social rights, and are relegated to the status of animals. The party has three slogans which run as follows:

                                       “War is Peace”

                                      “Freedom is Slavery”;

                                      “Ignorance is Strength” (Orwell o7)

The entire apparatus of the government is divided among four ministries-the Ministry of Truth (concerned with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts), the Ministry of Peace (which is concerned with war), the Ministry of Love(which maintains law and order), and the ministry of Plenty (which is responsible for economic affairs) .

The “Brotherhood”:

There is supposed to be an underground movement aiming at the overthrow of the government and the party. This movement has been given the name of “Brotherhood”, and its leader is believed to be a Jew by the name of Emmanuel Goldstein. Whether the Brotherhood exists and whether it is actually led by Goldstein are also matters about which there is no certainty. There is a daily programme called the “Two Minutes Hate” which aims at arousing in the people feeling of disgust and abhorrence for the brotherhood and its leader.

A Close Watch Kept by the Thought Police:

One of the instruments by means of which the government exercises control over the population is an organization called the Thought Police which keeps a watch not only over the movements and activities of the people but seeks also to probe their minds and to know what they are thinking. Every building, every apartment, every house, every room is fitted with what is known as the telescreen, a kind of two-way television which can receive and transmit simultaneously. The telescreen is also used for purposes of propaganda. The country is always at war, either with Eurasia or Eastasia. The telescreen keeps giving the latest news about the war situation. They also keep announcing the progress of the three –year plans aimed at increasing the output of commodities in the country. There is shortage of everything. Things like razor blades and boot polish are always in short supply, while genuine coffee and sugar are not at all available. People have no privacy of any kind, and Thought Police maintains a close vigilance with helicopters flying close to the windows to pry into the life of the people. The government is trying to control the minds of the people, as it says, “Thought crime does not entail death: thought crime IS death.” (27)

Newspeak as the means of Thought Control:

The totalitarian government in Oceania aims at complete thought-control. It also aims at controlling the past fully. In this respect namely thought control and control over the past –the vividness of Orwell’s description is remarkable. At one level, thought control is exercised by the two-way television set. At another level the government is introducing new language called Newspeak. The chief object of Newspeak is to cut down the vocabulary to the barest minimum so that the expression of heretical ideas becomes impossible. Syme, the colleague of Winston warns him that; “The revolution will be complete, when the language is perfect” (Orwell,55)

The object of Newspeak is in other words, to restrict the range of thinking. The end-objective of the member of the Inner Party who control Oceania is expressed in the Newspeak word “doublethink” which means:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing than to be contradictory and believing in both of them: to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and, above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. (Orwell, 132)

Doublethink, an Instrument of State policy:

Another aspect of the totalitarianism regime of Oceania is “doublethink”. “Doublethink” means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential purpose of the party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. Double think means telling deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, forgetting any fact that has become inconvenient, denying the existence of objective reality, and yet taking into account the reality which one denies. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able to arrest the course of history. History is arrested by continuously altering it. In fact, there is no past –only an account of the present in which the party is always right. The slogan is: “Who control the present, control the past”.

Torture and Vaporization:

Another aspect of totalitarianism regime is the torture and vaporization in the novel Nineteen- Eighty four. The punishment for all those who deviate from the party code in any way is torture of various degrees and kinds, and ultimately death. Sometimes an individual who is suspected by the Thought police of any deviation simply disappears. That is what happened to Winston’s mother and father. That is what happens also to a man called Syme who was working on a new edition of Newspeak dictionary. When an individual disappears in this way, he is said to have been “vaporized”. Three individuals- Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were subjected to unspeakable tortures, then released from prison, and finally “vaporized”. Winston himself undergoes indescribable torture and though afterwards released, will meet the same fate as those three men. There is also the case of a poet by the name of Ampleforth who is tortured in Room 101, his only fault being that he had allowed the word “God” to remain in one of the poems of Kipling, when the word “God” is taboo in Oceania. John Rodden writes;

For all practical purposes, that probability is sufficient to convince us at the novel’s end that the Ministry of Love and Room 101 must contain some utterly inconceivable and inhumane means of mental torture and control. (164)

Conclusion:

The ideal totalitarian society, the most severe depiction of a contemporary government with ultimate authority, is presented by Orwell in 1984. The novel's title was intended to convey to its readers in 1949 that the scenario depicted in the book represented a plausible scenario for the foreseeable future: if totalitarianism were not resisted, the title implied that some variation of the world described in the book could become a reality in just 35 years. In Orwell's depiction of a society, the government closely watches and regulates every aspect of daily life to the point that it is illegal even to have a disloyal thought. Winston Smith, a timidly rebellious character, begins the story by attempting to push the boundaries of the Party's authority.

• Physical control
• Control of information and history
• Psychological Manipulation

Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four still continues to fascinate readers even though the dark picture painted by the author in this book has not taken shape in real life. Totalitarianism is one of the main idea in this novel, as presented by George Orwell.

References:

Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Oxford University Press, 1990. P. 249.,Web.

John, Rodden. How Do Stories Convince Us? Note Towards A Rhetoric of Narrative.2008. P. 164.

Khan, A A, Qamar, Talat. Preface, Layers of Violence the Novels of George Orwell. Delhi:  Adhyayan Pub. & Distributors,  2009.

Koestler, Arthur. Observer, 29 January 1950. Web.

Kolakowski, Leszek. Totalitarianism and the virtue of the Literature. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. P.122-36.

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty Four. Delhi: K.R.J. Book International,2006.

Radu, Cinpoes. Nationalism and Identity in Romania: A History of Extreme Politics from the Birth of the State to EU Accession. P.70. Web.