Notes and References

Notes and References Unless otherwise cited, the following texts by Orwell have been used: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1968). Abbr. CEo Nineteen Eighty-Four, ed. Bernard Crick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). INTRODUCTION ORWELL AND ENGLISH SOCIALISM 1. Burmese Days, p. 69. References to this text and to The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, and The Lion and the Unicorn are taken from the Seeker & Warburg Uniform Edition. 2. The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 173--4 and 182. 3. Ibid., p. 214. 4. Bernard Crick, Socialist Values and Time, Fabian Tract 495 (London, 1984). 5. The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 162-3. 6. Homage to Catalonia, pp. 26-7 and 69-70. 7. The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 67. 8. 'My Country Right or Left', in CE, I, 539-40. This essay was originally published in the Penguin Folios of New Writing (Autumn 1940), of which whole sections were re-used in The Lion and the Unicorn; see pp. 87-8 for example. 9. The Lion and the Unicorn, pp. 28-9. 10. Ibid., pp. 73--4. 11. Ibid., pp. 85--6. A fuller discussion of The Lion and the Unicorn can be found in this author's introduction to the Penguin edition of 1982. 12. As he did in addressing an American audience in 'Britain's Struggle for Survival', Commentary (New York, October 1948), then a left-wing journal. Orwell's own title was 'The Labour Government After Three Years'. This is another of those annoying omissions from the Collected Essays which create in the last volume the illusion that he 'went off' socialist writing while composing Nineteen Eighty-Four. 13. 'Toward European Unity', CE, IV, 370-5. 14. CE, III, 118-9. 15. The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 49. Elsewhere he speaks about the danger of 'oligarchical collectivism'. 16. 'Why I Write', CE, I, 6. 17. 'The Prevention of Literature', CE, IV, 60. 18. 'Writers and Leviathan', CE, IV, 412. 19. 'What Is Socialism?', Manchester Evening News, 31 January 1946; a particularly bad omission from the CEo For a discussion of this issue see this author's George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 621. 20. CE, III, 64. 188 Notes and References 189 PART ONE: NINETEEN-EIGHTY FOUR 1. GEORGE ORWELL'S NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR: THE FUTURE THAT BECOMES THE PAST 1. Compare, for example, the effect of the devil in 'The Devil in the Belfry', in Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems (New York: Modern Library, 1938). 2. Samuel L. Macey, Clocks and the Cosmos: Time in Western Life and Thought (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980), pp. 187-92. 3. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), pp. 177-80, passim; Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Viking Press, 1972), closing paragraphs and passim. 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1965), pp. 91, 48, and Chapter VIII, 'On the Imagin- ation, or Esemplastic Power'. 5. There are even more complex dreams. After telling us that 'The conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist: Winston is next involved in 'A vast luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening . It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight but the surface of the glass was the dome of the sky .... The dream had also been comprehended by - indeed, in some sense it had consisted in - a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again thirty years later by the Jewish woman ... trying to shelter the boy from the bullets' (pp. 27, 13~1, 134). If Winston dreams of his whole life 'like a landscape on a summer evening', it may be worth noting that the only months mentioned in the year 1984 are April through August with the pointed exception of July. Julia - which means 'youthful one' - is the feminine form of Julius for whom July is named. 6. The title date of 1984 might well derive from a reversal of the last two digits of the date of writing in 1948. Since we learn on more than one occasion that the Party proposes to hold back the final version of Newspeak until 2050, it would seem that Orwell has presumed that the more normal period of a century must elapse until all human memory of what was occurring at the time of publication would be entirely eliminated by Ingsoc (pp. 44-6, 243, 251). 2. FROM HISTORY TO PSYCHOLOGICAL GROTESQUE: THE POLITICS OF SADO-MASOCHISM IN NINTEEN EIGHTY- FOUR References to frequently cited texts, unless otherwise noted, are to the following editions: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), vols I-IV; abbreviated in notes as CE. 190 Notes and References Nineteen Eighty-Four, ed. Bernard Crick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); cited as Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1. Isaac Deutscher, '''1984'' - The Mysticism of Cruelty', Russia in Transition (New York: Coward McCann, 1957), pp. 230-45. 2. Paul Roazen argues convincingly that despite Orwell's reservations about psychoanalytic theory there is a surprising resemblance between some aspects of his thought and Freud's: 'Orwell, Freud, and Nineteen Eighty-Four', Virginia Quarterly Review, LIV (1978),677-95. Other psychological critics tend to use the insights of depth psychology without distinguishing clearly between Orwell's intentions and the unconscious content of the novel. The most comprehensive interpretation of Orwell as novelist is Richard I. Smyer's Primal Dream and Primal Crime (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1979). Smyer establishes a broad affinity between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Freud's metapsychology, especially Civilisation and Its Discontents, but leaves open the question of how the novel's politics are related to its psychological content. Gorman Beauchamp provides a similar interpretation: 'Of Man's Last Disobedience: Zamyatin's We and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four', Comparative Literature Studies, x (1973), 285-301. Gerald Fiderer sees all of Orwell's fiction as the projection of an unconscious sado-masochism; thus Winston's revolt is unconsciously hypocritical and doomed to ignoble failure: 'Masochism as Literary Strategy: Orwell's Psychological Novels', Literature and Psychology, xx (1970), 3-21. Marcus Smith attributes the positive force in the novel entirely to Winston's unconscious: 'The Wall of Blackness: A Psycho- logical Approach to Nineteen Eighty-Four', Modern Fiction Studies, XIV (1968-9), 423-33. A recent feminist critique by Daphne Patai - 'Gamesmanship and Androcentrism in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four', PMLA, XCVII (1982), 856-70 - uses games theory to analyse the interaction between Winston and O'Brien. Patai argues that Winston entirely shares O'Brien's values from the start, and that Orwell himself is compromised by them. 3. Further references to the essays will be given in brackets in the text. 4. James Connors finds some distortions in the direction of Nineteen Eighty-Four in Orwell's interpretation of We: 'Zamyatin's We and the Genesis of Nineteen Eighty-Four', Modern Fiction Studies, XXI (1975),107- 24. Connors argues in detail against the view that Orwell closely followed Zamyatin's novel. 5. Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 403. Crick demonstrates that Orwell's political position remained substantially unchanged from The Lion and the Unicorn to the end of his life. 6. See especially The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), Chapter 12, p. 164 and pp. 185--8, and two essays concerning H. G. Wells: 'Prophecies of Fascism' (CE, 11,45-9) and 'Wells, Hitler and the World State' (CE, II, 166-72). 7. 'Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling ... of Notes and References 191 love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter ... .' (Nineteen Eighty- Four, p. 380). Further references to the novel will be given in the text. 8. The parts of Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon, 1965) most relevant to O'Brien's lectures to Winston are the section on 'Authoritarianism' in 'Mechanisms of Escape' (Chapter 5, pp. 163- 201) and 'Psychology of Nazism' (Chapter 6, pp. 231-64). 9. Orwell presented the proles as a satire on the British working class's passivity and lack of interest in politics, noted in The Road to Wigan Pier, but also as a repository of human values and source of potential revolt. I suggest that they fail in the latter respect because Orwell made them so masochistic in contrast to the aggression of the Party. The alternation between submission and domination is projected into the social structure of the future world. 10. The name 'Oceania' may contain a pun on Freud's diagnosis, at the beginning of Civilisation and Its Discontents, of the 'oceanic' sense of oneness with the world as a memory of the infant's assimilation of the outside world into the ego. 11. In the new final chapter added to his book on Orwell (Orwell, London: Fontana, 1984), Raymond Williams notes the anti-historical quality of Goldstein's book (pp. 111-14). Williams seems to feel that the perversities of 'the book' are related to confusions in Orwell's politics; I assume that Orwell was quite deliberately making 'the book' a part of the nightmare as well as a description of it. 12. This image links O'Brien to German fascism. In The Lion and the Unicorn Orwell comments on the 'vision' evoked by the goose-step: 'A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance .

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