Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he would write, “The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.” The totalitarian society in that novel attempts to dominate and wither away private and personal life, so independence of thought, the pursuit of privacy, desire, passion, and pleasure are dangerous acts of resistance. And desire is subjective, personal, unpredictable, corruptible, but not entirely controllable, either by individuals or their societies. Desire and its fulfillment are not happiness, when happiness means a steady-state emotion, a placated heart and mind; they are closer to joy, which erupts and subsides unpredictably and can appear amid danger and difficulty. Permanence—the idea of stabilizing something, which is usually predicated on controlling a lot of other things—is part of what he objects to. He also objects to the gutting of privacy. A society seeking to reinvent human nature wants to reach down into every psyche and rearrange it. Bread can be managed by authoritarian regimes, but roses are something individuals must be free to find for themselves, discovered and cultivated rather than prescribed. “We know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,” Orwell declares at the end of “The Prevention of Literature,” and the roses in “bread and roses” mean a kind of freedom that flourishes with privacy and independence. His version of socialism doesn’t involve captivity. He writes, “The real object...

Beauty is not only formal, and it lies not only in the superficial qualities that are appealing to the eye or ear; it lies in patterns of meaning, in invocations of values, and in connection to the life the reader is living and the world she wants to see. A dancer’s gesture may be beautiful because it is a precisely executed move by a highly skilled artist-athlete, but even a gracefully executed kick of a child is ugly. The meaning subverts the form, and elegance of form is always capable of being corrupted by what meaning it delivers. “The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up,” Orwell wrote in his critique of the painter Salvador Dalí. “If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.” Form cannot be separated from function. And the beauty—or the hideousness—can be in meaning, impact, implications, rather than appearance.

Another crucial aspect of any regime of lies is the unequal distribution of the privacy that protects our thoughts and actions. The powerful become unaccountable because their actions are concealed and misrepresented, while ordinary people are deprived of privacy through surveillance and encouraged to inform on one another to the authorities. Such betrayals violate not only literal privacy but loyalty to private relationships over the state.

Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Charting

In his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature,” Orwell writes that lies are “integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.” To have total power is to have power over truth and fact and history and to reach for it over dreams and thoughts and emotions. He continues, “From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. . . . Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”