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| 1984 by George Orwell |
Today, The Grandma is resting at home. She has decided to reread one of her favourite novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four written by George Orwell, a person who she admires.
The Grandma has read all the novels published by Orwell and she loves Homage to Catalonia, especially, because it is an homage to her country. The novel talks about the cruel events of the Spanish Civil War, an event of the recent past that seems very recent.
However, The Grandma has chosen Nineteen Eighty-Four because it was published on a day like today in 1949 and she believes that rereading this novels is the best homage to George Orwell and his works.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English writer George Orwell published in June 1949, whose themes center on the risks of government overreach, totalitarianism and repressive regimentation of all persons and behaviors within society.
The novel is set in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda.
In the novel, Great Britain Airstrip One has become a province of a superstate named Oceania, which is ruled by the Party, who employ the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking.
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| 1984, the film |
The Party's leader is Big Brother, who enjoys an intense cult of personality, even though he may not even exist.
The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith, is a rank-and-file Party member. Smith is an outwardly diligent and skillful worker, but he secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion against Big Brother. Smith rebels by entering a forbidden relationship with coworker Julia.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a classic literary novel in the genres of political fiction and dystopian science fiction. Many of its terms and concepts, such as Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Room 101, telescreen, 2+2=5, and memory hole, have entered into common usage since its publication in 1949.
Nineteen Eighty-Four also popularised the adjective Orwellian, which connotes things such as official deception, secret surveillance, brazenly misleading terminology, and manipulation of recorded history by a totalitarian or authoritarian state, as described by the author.
More information: BBC
In 2005, the novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. It was awarded a place on both lists of the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, reaching #13 on the editors' list and #6 on the readers' list. In 2003, the novel was listed at #8 on The Big Read survey done by the BBC.
Orwell encapsulate[d] the thesis at the heart of his unforgiving novel in 1944, the implications of dividing the world up into zones of influence, which had been conjured by the Tehran Conference. Three years later, he wrote most of it on the Scottish island of Jura from 1947 to 1948 despite being seriously ill with tuberculosis.
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| George Orwell |
On 4 December 1948, he sent the final manuscript to the publisher Secker and Warburg, and Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949. By 1989, it had been translated into 65 languages, more than any other novel in English until then.
The title of the novel, its themes, the Newspeak language and the author's surname are often invoked against control and intrusion by the state, and the adjective Orwellian describes a totalitarian dystopia that is characterised by government control and subjugation of the people.
Orwell's invented language, Newspeak, satirises hypocrisy and evasion by the state: the Ministry of Love (Miniluv) oversees torture and brainwashing, the Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty) oversees shortage and rationing, the Ministry of Peace (Minipax) oversees war and atrocity and the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue) oversees propaganda and historical revisionism.
The Last Man in Europe was an early title for the novel, but in a letter dated 22 October 1948 to his publisher Fredric Warburg, eight months before publication, Orwell wrote about hesitating between that title and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Warburg suggested choosing the latter, a more commercial choice for the main title.
More information: Independent
In his 1978 novel 1985, English author Anthony Burgess suggests that Orwell, disillusioned by the onset of the Cold War (1945–91), intended to call the book 1948. The introduction to the Penguin Books Modern Classics edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four reports that Orwell originally set the novel in 1980 but that he later shifted the date to 1982 and then to 1984.
The introduction to the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt edition of Animal Farm and 1984 (2003) reports that the title 1984 was chosen simply as an inversion of the year 1948, the year in which it was being completed, and that the date was meant to give an immediacy and urgency to the menace of totalitarian rule.
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| The Grandma homages George Orwell |
Throughout its publication history, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been either banned or legally challenged, as subversive or ideologically corrupting, like the dystopian novels We (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, Darkness at Noon (1940) by Arthur Koestler, Kallocain (1940) by Karin Boye and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury.
Some writers consider the Russian dystopian novel We by Zamyatin to have influenced Nineteen Eighty-Four, and that the novel bears significant similarities in its plot and characters to Darkness at Noon, written years before by Koestler, who was a personal friend of Orwell.
In London, the capital city of Airstrip One, Oceania's four government ministries are in pyramids 300 m high, the façades of which display the Party's three slogans. The ministries' names are the opposite (doublethink) of their true functions: The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.
More information: The Guardian
The society of Airstrip One and, according to The Book, almost the whole world, lives in poverty: hunger, disease and filth are the norms. Ruined cities and towns are common: the consequence of the civil war, the atomic wars and the purportedly enemy, but possibly false flag, rockets. Social decay and wrecked buildings surround Winston; aside from the ministerial pyramids, little of London was rebuilt. Members of the Outer Party consume synthetic foodstuffs and poor-quality luxuries such as oily gin and loosely-packed cigarettes, distributed under the Victory brand.
A major theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four is censorship, especially in the Ministry of Truth, where photographs are modified and public archives rewritten to rid them of unpersons, persons who are erased from history by the Party. On the telescreens, figures for all types of production are grossly exaggerated or simply invented to indicate an ever-growing economy, when the reality is the opposite.
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| 1984, the film |
During World War II, Orwell believed that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war. The question being Would it end via Fascist coup d'état from above or via Socialist revolution from below? Later, he admitted that events proved him wrong: What really matters is that I fell into the trap of assuming that 'the war and the revolution are inseparable'.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) share themes of the betrayed revolution, the person's subordination to the collective, rigorously enforced class distinctions (Inner Party, Outer Party, Proles), the cult of personality, concentration camps, Thought Police, compulsory regimented daily exercise, and youth leagues.
When it was first published, Nineteen Eighty-Four received critical acclaim. V. S. Pritchett, reviewing the novel for the New Statesman stated: I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down.
P. H. Newby, reviewing Nineteen Eighty-Four for The Listener magazine, described it as the most arresting political novel written by an Englishman since Rex Warner's The Aerodrome.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was also praised by Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster and Harold Nicolson. On the other hand, Edward Shanks, reviewing Nineteen Eighty-Four for The Sunday Times, was dismissive; Shanks claimed Nineteen Eighty-Four breaks all records for gloomy vaticination.
C. S. Lewis was also critical of the novel, claiming that the relationship of Julia and Winston, and especially the Party's view on sex, lacked credibility, and that the setting was odious rather than tragic.
Being in a minority, even in a minority of one,
did not make you mad.
There was truth and there was untruth,
and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world,
you were not mad.
George Orwell, 1984
1984 novel
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