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1984 by George Orwell - a discussion of Part 2

#161: Aug. - Oct. 2018 (Fiction)
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Robert Tulip

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Re: 1984 by George Orwell - a discussion of Part 2

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Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled light and shade, stepping out into pools of gold wherever the boughs parted. Under the trees to the left of him the ground was misty with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss one’s skin. It was the second of May. From somewhere deeper in the heart of the wood came the droning of ring doves. He was a bit early.


The opening of Chapter 2 in Part 2 of 1984 shows Orwell at his most lyrical and evocative, painting an idyll of bliss, as Winston and Julia meet for their secret rendezvous.

The lengths the lovers take to conceal their meeting reflect their extreme justified paranoia of a world where Big Brother is watching you, with the absurd danger of concealed microphones. This theme of the surveillance society, evolving from Bentham’s panopticon to make the whole world a jail, includes arbitrary official questioning of travellers, but luckily Winston and Julia evade such unwelcome attention. On the train, proles freely explain their interest in obtaining black market butter, a thoughtcrime inconceivable for a Party member.

The tension of their meeting reflects Winston’s extreme state of anxiety, produced by the totalitarian context. He hears Julia walk up behind him and his first assumption is that he will be arrested. She parts the bushes to lead him on to the secret place, like the Batmobile entering the bat cave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5xt2z07ebk

This beautiful paradise, this grassy knoll shut in by tall saplings, has an air of unreality, a sense that this love is impossible and cannot last. After they kiss, with Winston feeling incredulity and pride, he explains his fear that she was in the Thought Police, which Julia takes as a tribute to the excellence of her disguise. Her black-market chocolate stirs powerful troubling memories. As they discuss the need to conform to be safe, she tells Winston she could see he was against the Party.

Standing in the shade of hazel bushes, the sunlight filtering through innumerable leaves, Winston has a shock of recognition, his dream of the Golden Country. A thrush pours forth a torrent of song before them, making obeisance to the sun. As they make love in the hidden grove, Julia flings away her overalls in a gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.

Winston’s sense that animal instinct is the force that will tear the Party to pieces leads him to see their embrace as a political act. When a pair of overalls symbolises civilization, representing the themes of austerity, production, conformity and shapelessness, 1984 draws us into the vast trauma of human life in the mid twentieth century. The confused puritanical ideologies and incompatible messianic visions of political progress have inevitably clashed in the great wars from which the world is still recoiling today.

Orwell himself observed this trauma at first hand, seeing British colonialism in Burma as a policeman’s son, studying with England’s social elite at the aristocratic Eton College, demanding a sense of reality through his studies of the down and out in Paris and London and the suffering of the poor on the road to Wigan pier, and most definitively, seeing the incoherence of progressive ideology as he fought with the Trotskyites in the Spanish Civil War, documented in his Homage to Catalonia.

Orwell’s greatest novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, are cautionary fables of the hypocrisy of communism. Yet they both retain a sense that communist ideals could be worthwhile if only some way of approaching them could be found that was compatible with human culture, without the appalling Procrustean twists. The awful incompatibility between totalizing Stalinist autocracy and human values generates the trauma of 1984, seen most vividly in this chapter in the great relief felt from a brief escape from the suffocating grip of the anonymous mass society of the modern world.
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DWill

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Re: 1984 by George Orwell - a discussion of Part 2

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Robert Tulip wrote: The awful incompatibility between totalizing Stalinist autocracy and human values generates the trauma of 1984, seen most vividly in this chapter in the great relief felt from a brief escape from the suffocating grip of the anonymous mass society of the modern world.
From another viewpoint, Winton would welcome anonymous mass society, probably. What a luxury, to be unregarded, even if suffering from anomie.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: 1984 by George Orwell - a discussion of Part 2

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DWill wrote:From another viewpoint, Winston would welcome anonymous mass society, probably. What a luxury, to be unregarded, even if suffering from anomie.
Anonymity is an ambiguous concept. 1984 is a highly existential work, a plea against how the conformism of mass society destroys any sense of individual personality, freedom and authenticity. So paradoxically the public duckspeak of conformism is anonymous, lacking any individual difference and seeking validity solely in being the same as everyone else.

In existentialist philosophy, one way to explore the meaning of anonymity is looking at Heidegger’s moral challenge to this concept in Being and Time. His unitary vision of human existence defines authentic being in terms of state of mind, understanding and language, as explicit psychological tools enabling openness to truth. The corresponding inauthentic modes of being are characteristic of forfeiture to the anonymous mass, seen in the Orwellian duckspeak habits of ambiguity, superficial curiosity and gossip.

Winston would welcome privacy, but I am not sure that anonymity is the same thing. The right to be invisible has emerged in modern liberal society as a reaction against totalitarian intrusion, but this involves the pathological sense that everything we say and do can be ignored by the dominant society, a syndrome with its own mental health problems of social isolation and fragmentation.

As you note, the anomie of modernity is a hazard. I would add that the absence of meaning arising from a generalised lack of belonging to any group is a converse risk to the stifling conformism of 1984.
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Re: 1984 by George Orwell - a discussion of Part 2

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Robert Tulip wrote:Winston would welcome privacy, but I am not sure that anonymity is the same thing. The right to be invisible has emerged in modern liberal society as a reaction against totalitarian intrusion, but this involves the pathological sense that everything we say and do can be ignored by the dominant society, a syndrome with its own mental health problems of social isolation and fragmentation.
This strikes me as important. In smaller groups, the hunter-gatherer band, for example, each can have his or her own individuality without fearing that demands of large-scale coordination will force the person to conform. But the individuality is naturally somewhat humble, and there is no X Factor facsimile of celebrity to escape to. People still, in small-scale society, seek to conform out of a desire to belong, even to contribute, not out of a flight from authenticity.

The cultural split in America (and apparently, to some extent, in France and other places as well) seems to reflect this modern tension between the urban anonymity as a rejection of "duckspeak" conformity and the rural satisfaction with humble individuality. I would even go so far as to say the rural sense of crisis is partly due to the clash between the world they are presented with in entertainment, which seems to claim that the world "out there" is exciting, vs. the world they actually inhabit.
Robert Tulip wrote:As you note, the anomie of modernity is a hazard. I would add that the absence of meaning arising from a generalised lack of belonging to any group is a converse risk to the stifling conformism of 1984.
This is the hypothesis about "thick" society being promoted by David Brooks. Meaning, direction, context for interpreting values, all can be provided by common enterprise within a group that a person actually looks at and listens to.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: 1984 by George Orwell - a discussion of Part 2

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“We are the dead”, said Winston in Chapter 3, explaining to Julia that a decision to turn against the Party was fatal.

This line is from the great World War One poem In Flanders Fields. Readers in Orwell’s day saw the allusion, and its rebuke. The poem continues ‘To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep.’ Orwell wrote 1984 precisely to describe this break of faith with the spirit of honour in the modern tendencies toward the 1984 nightmare.

Their second meeting is in a ruined church in a region devastated by a nuclear bomb. The secrecy of arranging it involves short clandestine intermittent conversations in the street, stopped whenever Party officials appear. Their only kiss before the secret meeting is enabled by the mayhem of a rocket attack.

Their conversation in the church about sex is illuminating, suggestive of Freud’s theory of sublimation. Winston realises Julia had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism, involving prevention of personal autonomy outside the Party’s control, and the effort to build hysteria which could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. Nationalism is simply sex gone sour. Winston describes his wife Katharine as a frigid automaton whom he wanted to murder.

Their conversation continues, with Julia expressing faith in individual freedom, even while seeing the inevitability that the Thought Police would catch her and kill her. In her heart, she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. Winston’s view, perhaps sotto voce, is that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse. We are the dead.
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Re: 1984 by George Orwell - a discussion of Part 2

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“Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing.”
The extreme deliberate irony of this statement by Mr Charrington, who runs the small old shop where Winston bought the paperweight, is that the entirety of 1984 is about the systematic abolition of privacy. The value of privacy is generally regarded in the dystopia as negative, a worthless obsolete concept to be obliterated, shunned and regarded with dread and suspicion. Now in Chapter 4 Winston is arranging his private affair here with Julia. A conscious suicidal gratuitous folly impossible to conceal, and yet they proceed.

This chapter then presents a simple image that has stuck with me as a defining picture of the book: “Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies’ diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto.”

However, I had misremembered the song she sang. It is doggerel written by a machine, whereas I thought it was Oranges and Lemons. That vaporised rhyme comes up later in the chapter, as the star-crossed lovers reminisce about lemons and Julia’s vanished grandfather who taught her the song.

Renting the room will lead to the cellars of the Ministry of Love, a predestined horror preceding death as surely as 99 comes before 100. A first planted omen, as 100 comes before 101. And yet their mad love drives them on, indifferent and defiant to their fate.

The irony continues. Winston wonders vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. The idea that something so simple could become a forbidden transgression, together with their supper of coffee, sugar, bread and jam, continues the core theme that totalitarian trauma terrorises people into becoming automata, collapsing expectations into gibbering submission.

Orwell proceeds to plant several more clues in this chapter, Winston’s extreme fear of rats, and Julia’s comment that the picture has bugs behind it.
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Re: 1984 by George Orwell - a discussion of Part 2

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One of the many ways the story achieves the status of literature, and not just extreme social commentary, is the aching evocation of the fact that we are all dead, in a sense reminiscent of Winston's observation. We snatch whatever pleasure or meaning we can from life, often in spite of the requirements of duty and the community.

A totalitarian system sucks the humanity out of everyone, most especially the Masters of the Universe who cannot help but pursue power, at the expense of every bit of fellow-feeling with others. Defiant assertion of the power of reason must be stamped out as empire must stamp out rebellion. Is it just me, or is Gorbachev a kind of living proof that Orwell had it wrong, and that humanity persisted after all? As Sting sang poignantly, "The Russians love their children too."
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Re: 1984 by George Orwell - a discussion of Part 2

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Chapter 5 opens with the unpersoning of Syme, ascertained by Winston checking a list of chess club members being one person shorter. Orwell is reflecting on the psychological terror of the Stalin purges, where Russian citizens were hauled to the Lubyanka in the dead of night, and woe betide anyone who asks why.

Bulgakov refers to this problem in The Master and Margarita, explaining how severely traumatising it can be for friends and family when someone disappears and there is no way to get any information, and what opportunities for corruption are presented by peremptory liquidation.

Winston had wondered earlier in the book what would happen to Syme in view of his venomous orthodox manner, which seemed cover for a heretical mind. Syme worked on the Newspeak dictionary, and had explained to Winston - over their lunch of vomit stew - his delight at the destruction of words. His enthusiasm had led Winston to conclude with sudden deep conviction that Syme will be vaporized. “He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.”

Lacking the abject unconscious doglike loyal stupidity of a person who quacks like a duck, Syme appears as a threat, writing his own death warrant through the display of critical intelligence. Now it has happened and Syme never existed at all. This is the story of the Old Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution, who were systematically murdered by Stalin for this very reason, an excessively intellectual communist orthodoxy, when the Party demanded blind obedience.

The preparations for Hate Week involve a great intensity of useless activity, with Parsons the moron taking charge at Victory Mansions. No one remarks on the sound of bombs falling in the distance.

Winston and Julia continue their love affair in the upper room, in constant battle against bugs. Their hiding place, their secret rendezvous, their inviolate pocket of the past, creates a sense of bliss for Winston as it appears the monolithic intrusion of the state can be countered, despite the palpable fact of impending death. With despairing sensuality like lost souls, Winston and Julia maintain the illusion of safety in their sanctuary, knowing there is no escape from the all-seeing eye of Sauron.

Where Winston has a concern for the value of facts, Julia is more like the good Russian communists of the 1930s, too young to remember the revolution, able to overtly swim in the emotion of faith in Stalin, while secretly assuming everyone shares her intense cynicism and assumption the Party was invincible. Like a 911 truther, Julia assumes the rocket bombs that fall every day on London are fired by Oceania to keep people frightened, a thought that had never occurred to Winston.

It frightens Winston to hear that Julia believed Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia, not Eastasia, since for him such major political questions were of some importance. For her, all such questions are matters of sham and lies, and therefore of no interest. Winston concludes that Julia is only a rebel from the waist down.

The abolition of the past continues every minute, in an endless present where the Party is always right. Knowing when to cheer and boo is all one needs, as such simplicity enables acceptance of the most flagrant violations of reality.
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Re: 1984 by George Orwell - a discussion of Part 2

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Robert Tulip wrote: Orwell is reflecting on the psychological terror of the Stalin purges, where Russian citizens were hauled to the Lubyanka in the dead of night, and woe betide anyone who asks why.
At some point terror is its own enemy. As fire exhausts its natural home by turning everything from its own original function into fuel, terror turns the rich environment of human interaction into a single-dimensional process of domination.

Domination must turn every thought into either a servant of domination processes or a subject to be dominated. The nature of domination resists the genuine purpose of thought and the evaluation of purpose, known to Christians as "soul." The philosophers realized long ago that the master becomes a slave to mastery.
Robert Tulip wrote:Winston had wondered earlier in the book what would happen to Syme in view of his venomous orthodox manner, which seemed cover for a heretical mind. Syme worked on the Newspeak dictionary, and had explained to Winston - over their lunch of vomit stew - his delight at the destruction of words. His enthusiasm had led Winston to conclude with sudden deep conviction that Syme will be vaporized. “He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.”
I think your reading of Syme's zeal as "cover for a heretical mind" is too shallow. Syme isn't a heretic, but he is a loose cannon. Like Savonarola, the excess zeal of the true believer becomes a threat to those using the ideology, and those types get cut down for the same reason as any other threat to power. They will of course be declared heretics if a trial is seen as necessary, but that is for show.
Robert Tulip wrote:Lacking the abject unconscious doglike loyal stupidity of a person who quacks like a duck, Syme appears as a threat, writing his own death warrant through the display of critical intelligence.
Like Dear Leader, they subject all thought to the needs of their own power. If you can't declare that there might be three fingers held up but there might be four, or that global warming is just a hoax, then you are fit only for the guillotine. We see the same mentality in Netanyahu, in Khomeini, in Putin, in Sheldon Adelson, in Rupert Murdoch, and in Richard Mellon Scaife.
Robert Tulip wrote:Their hiding place, their secret rendezvous, their inviolate pocket of the past, creates a sense of bliss for Winston as it appears the monolithic intrusion of the state can be countered, despite the palpable fact of impending death. With despairing sensuality like lost souls, Winston and Julia maintain the illusion of safety in their sanctuary, knowing there is no escape from the all-seeing eye of Sauron.
Today it appears that what we cannot escape from is the march of science. It failed to kill us all with nuclear weapons, but its arsenal has far more waiting. Humanity has plenty of wish for violence and domination, and science is happy to provide the means. Selling guns to both sides, as they used to call it.

Can science tolerate soul? It remains an open question.
Robert Tulip wrote: able to overtly swim in the emotion of faith in Stalin, while secretly assuming everyone shares her intense cynicism and assumption the Party was invincible. Like a 911 truther, Julia assumes the rocket bombs that fall every day on London are fired by Oceania to keep people frightened, a thought that had never occurred to Winston.
Thanks for that observation. It rolled by me without my notice.

It occurs to me that Winston Smith is a victim of his own vulnerability to the appeal of truth. The Inner Party is determined to find the root of such vulnerability and stamp it out. In a similar way, all ideologies tend to search out the human vulnerabilities which resist their domination. No sympathy for immigrants - they are cockroaches. No leaving primitive islanders in their ignorance and natural ecological balance. No balking corporate profit for the sake of the humans who get in the way.

We are learning, in progressive Christianity, that our vulnerabilities are what create bonds between people. If we didn't need other people, we would not love them.
Robert Tulip wrote: Winston concludes that Julia is only a rebel from the waist down.
The "gilets jaunes" in France are showing that rebellion has its own organic process, and thought may have very little to do with it. The Greeks had a goddess of Discord.
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