Classics and the Western Canon discussion
Orwell, Animal Farm & 1984
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Week 5 — Part 2, Chapt. 3 - 8
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One question I have is the importance of the old print of the church and the fragments of nursery rhymes that are still remembered. There is an ominous quality to the end of the rhyme about St Clements that makes me wonder.
Susan wrote: "One question I have is the importance of the old print of the church and the fragments of nursery rhymes that are still remembered. There is an ominous quality to the end of the rhyme about St Clem..."It is difficult to take,
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head,as a sign of good things to come.
David wrote: ". It is difficult to take,Here comes a chopper to chop off your head,
as a sign of good things to come..."
Truth.
Another angle is this seems to be all that is left of organized religion. At least, I don’t remember another reference to a church. Could just be my aging memory though. Does anyone else?
Speaking of that old print, back in Part One, Chapter VII, Mr. Charrington states,“The frame’s fixed to the wall,” said the old man, “but I could unscrew it for you, I dare say.”Then in Part Two, Chapter IV, Julia says,
“I bet that picture’s got bugs behind it,” said Julia. “I’ll take it down and give it a good clean some day."These two remakrs regarding the print in the bedroom make me uncomfortable.
1. Why is it screwed to the wall instead of being hung by a wire on a nail like most pictures?
2. Was the term, "bug" used in reference to listening devices when Orwell wrote this?
Edited to add: "equip with a concealed microphone," 1949, earlier "equip with an alarm system," 1919, underworld slang, probably a reference to bug (n.1). Bug (n.) "concealed microphone" is from 1946. Related: Bugged; bugging.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/bug
David wrote: "Speaking of that old print, back in Part One, Chapter VII, Mr. Charrington states,“The frame’s fixed to the wall,” said the old man, “but I could unscrew it for you, I dare say.”
Then in Part Tw..."
Apparently, it isn’t the cleanest spot — there’s a reference to Winston and Julia sprinkling the room with black market pepper to keep the insects at bay. And, of course, there’s that appearance by a rat.
Susan wrote: "Apparently, it isn’t the cleanest spot. . ."The conditions of their hookup spots are not very sanitary. During their meeting in the church tower we get these details of the less than ideal conditions,
It was a blazing afternoon. The air in the little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung. They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered floor,and
They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her closer against him. Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung.Why give us these non-hygenic details? Is it a demonstration of how far they are willing or have to go in order to be together under the Party's rule, or does it underscore the Party's perspective on sex that unless it is for producing children, sex is a dirty filthy act performed in dirty filthy places?
David wrote: "Susan wrote: "Apparently, it isn’t the cleanest spot. . ."The conditions of their hookup spots are not very sanitary. During their meeting in the church tower we get these details of the less tha..."
I think the dirty places where they often meet are a demonstration of how far Winston and Julia are willing to go to be together. The general poverty and sterility of their world contrast with the happiness they have found together, but a happiness Orwell carefully keeps realistic and limited. The settings descriptions frequently center on odors, nasty and more rarely nice as in the scene where Julia brings and makes black market coffee for them.
Susan wrote: "Another angle is this seems to be all that is left of organized religion. At least, I don’t remember another reference to a church."Good catch. There’s a subtle reference in Part One, Chapter VII, in the section on the relative moral freedom of the proles:
“In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished; divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free.’”In Animal Farm, Orwell addresses through Moses the crow, who tells the animals stories about Sugarcandy Mountain, a heaven-like afterlife. Under Farmer Jones, Moses was "kept", i.e., he was fed without having to do any work and served a clear role in pacifying many of the animals. He disappears during the revolution but is eventually welcomed back by the pigs once they grudgingly realize how useful his message is for keeping the animals docile.
In contrast, the Party in 1984 seems to found a way around the need for religion as a tool. For Party members, it is prohibited. For the proles, the regime doesn’t bother suppressing it because they have so thoroughly reshaped reality in such a way that the proles, and the inner and outer party members to a large extent, naturally find religion unnecessary. The greater population seems to be convinced the terrible conditions they live under are actually the best conditions and do not need to look to an afterlife for relief.
In Animal Farm, religion is used as a tool. In 1984, it is banned for the Party members and circumvented by a strictly controlled reality for the Proles. Big Brother clearly does not want any rivals for their people's allegiance, including spiritual ones.
In 1984, the Party slogan, Proles and animals are freeprompts further comparison with Animal Farm. In Animal Farm, the animals do revolt, even if the revolution is ultimately co-opted by the pigs. In 1984, Winston places hope in the proles revolting, but this hope collapses after his discussion with the old prole and under the paradox:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.Why are the animals capable of initiating revolution, while the proles in 1984 seem permanently inert politically?
Susan wrote: "In “1984,” Orwell constructs both a political society and a version of the English language that reflects that society. Do you find the world and language of “1984” believable? If so, how?"I can't imagine a more difficult task for an author than to depict a world in which people are willing to discard their own experiences and their own memories and accept an alternate reality as fact. People like this seem less than human somehow (and maybe it's why the proles seems more human to me than the party members.)
I wonder if that's why Orwell sometimes dwells on the topic of history and how the party rewrites it on a continual basis, because the notion becomes more believable with repetition. I guess it's a sort of gaslighting maybe? Not to cast aspersion on writers of fiction, but what they write is by its nature untrue and they do ask us to accept "alternate facts" as reality while we are in their world. Representing a fiction as truth, over and over again. is how falsehoods become normalized. I suppose this is something that writers and propagandists have in common, strangely enough.
Thomas wrote: "I can't imagine a more difficult task for an author than to depict a world in which people are willing to discard their own experiences and their own memories and accept an alternate reality as fact.."I think the task is made much less difficult with so many real-life examples.
Soviet Union – Stalin’s Erasure of Political Enemies
Stalin's regime systematically altered photographs, deleted names, and rewrote textbooks to remove purged individuals (e.g., Trotsky). The falsification was so complete that people began to doubt their own memories and was the main inspiration for Orwell's "MiniTruth".
United States – The “Lost Cause” Narrative
Post–Civil War Southern culture reframed the Confederacy as a noble and heroic fight for states rights, downplaying slavery and altering public memory through textbooks, monuments, and cultural mythmaking.
China – The Erasure of the Tiananmen Square Massacre
The 1989 crackdown is not mentioned in schools, scrubbed from the internet, and unknown to many younger citizens. The government’s silence has reshaped historical memory within a single generation.
North Korea – Fabricated Kim Dynasty Histories
The Kim family is credited with miraculous feats—controlling the weather, never needing to defecate, etc.—and school curricula are rewritten to deify them. Citizens are taught false histories under pain of death for dissent.
United States – Christian Nationalism and the Myth of a Christian Founding
Movements within American Christian Nationalism assert that the U.S. was founded explicitly as a Christian nation. This interpretation overlooks the secularism of the Constitution, selectively quotes the Founders, and attempts to reshape historical understanding to serve present-day ideological goals.
Since that last example took me there, is there not a strong case to be made for the epistemic control as it has been exercised by religion?Like the Party in 1984, organized religion has historically exercised powerful epistemic control in dictating what counts as truth, reshaping history by altering, packaging, and interpreting scripture; punishing dissenters through means ranging from social exclusion, to discrimination, to full-blown inquisitions. Members often must accept unverifiable or contradictory claims, whether as literal truths or, in more flexible traditions, as metaphors conveniently insulated from scrutiny, discouraging critical inquiry in favor of unquestioning faith, much like doublespeak. What makes it especially effective is that many adherents come to internalize its teachings so thoroughly that they believe they are acting from their own conscience, not under the influence of institutional authority. This mirrors 1984’s population that polices itself because it no longer recognizes where its beliefs came from.
David wrote: "I think the task is made much less difficult with so many real-life examples.Soviet Union – Stalin’s Erasure of Political Enemies
Stalin's regime systematically altered photographs, deleted names, and rewrote..."
I can understand how historical truths can be warped and changed over a long period of time for people without access to the evidence, but denying one's own personal experience is another thing. Even the simple experience of everyday reality would lead one to question Kim Jung Un's golf claims.
Otherwise it's a case of convincing someone that their reality is not actually real. This is a hard one to pull off (and why it sounds to me like gaslighting.) Winston knows the truth but is silent about it because he is afraid of punishment. This part is quite believable.
How people interpret their own experience is another matter, and I think this is where organized religion comes in. But it's not just religion, it's organized philosophy, and even science when the facts are subject to interpretation. I can plausibly believe that the sun revolves around the earth, or that the earth revolves around the sun, but I can't plausibly believe that the sun does not rise and set. That seems to be what the Party does though: it denies party members the reality of their own lived experience. Obviously it's a story, but do I find it credible? Not really.
Thomas wrote: "That seems to be what the Party does though: it denies party members the reality of their own lived experience. "Is the Party asking people to deny what they see, or to Reinterpret it?
We already do this in real life: We feel like we’re standing still, but we know the Earth is spinning. We see the sun rise and set, but we know it is an illusion due to the Earth's rotation. Optical illusions look a certain way, but we know they deceive the eye. Our ancestors felt the world was flat, but evidence corrected that; yet despite that there are still groups of people who hold to a flat Earth theory. And many people believe a man died and rose three days later, despite all human experience to the contrary, often citing that very contradiction as evidence of a miracle.
In each case, lived experience misleads us until a deeper framework replaces it.
So here are the questions:
If our own experience can be wrong, even in familiar, ways, how far could a powerful regime go in reshaping how people interpret their experience?
More to the point, is the Party truly forcing people to deny their senses, or is it building a system where language, authority, and fear gradually erode trust in those senses, until belief becomes irrelevant because truth itself has lost all meaning?
And what about those like Julia, who already do not care what’s true, as long as they can live around the system?
David wrote: "Thomas wrote: "That seems to be what the Party does though: it denies party members the reality of their own lived experience. "Is the Party asking people to deny what they see, or to Reinterpret..."
I was thinking of this passage in Part 1 ch 7:
He picked up the children's history book and looked the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you -- something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy...
I think the point is that the Party wants to erase all sense of individuality, and in order to do this there can be only one reality that all individuals experience and agree upon, and that reality is whatever the party says it is.
Thomas wrote: "I think the point is that the Party wants to erase all sense of individuality"That sounds right so far. No individuals, only the Party and the Party's solipsism through epistemological control and ontological authority. It becomes a little more clear If we just break down the party motto a little.
Who controls the present controls the past; who controls the past controls the future.Epistemological Control
Those who control the present shape knowledge of the past, or what is collectively known.
Ontological Authority
and those who shape the past define the reality of the future, or what is collectively believed.
I understand the effects this has on Winston. but what about Julia and those that do not care much for such philosophy; simply "misbehaving" without any ideological motivation?
I have to admit that Orwell's characterization of Julia at this point seems a little sexist to me. Her rebellion against the Party is mostly, or maybe entirely, sensual, and there isn't much else to her. It looks to me like Orwell has cast Winston as the mind (or soul) and Julia as the body in order to show how the party controls these aspects of party members' lives. The proles are able to think whatever they want because they don't matter, and it occurs to me that maybe Orwell feels the same way about Julia -- it doesn't matter what she thinks. It feels like he has given Julia a diminished character, and I wonder why.
Thomas wrote: "Her rebellion against the Party is mostly, or maybe entirely, sensual, and there isn't much else to her..."Julia is a very flat character and I think in some ways symbolic or allegorical as you are starting to suggest. I'm not yet clear on whether this works or not, but there are a few things that make me associate her with an otherness and make her function perhaps as an Eve figure that draws Winston (Adam) away from the established order in a Fall.
* exoticized dark hair
* sexualization (imagined nude as early as Part 1, Chapter 3, and wearing the sash associated with chastity)
* association with the outdoors and an escape from the city and the surveillance state
* their sexual union starts them on the path to acquiring new, forbidden knowledge
If we read this as Eden and the Fall then we would anticipate a potential Redemption later in the story.
We could also look at Julia through a pastoral genre lens. In the pastoral, characters, often lovers, escape to an idyllic locus amoenus or nature setting. They also often yearn for a mythical, past "golden age"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age) when things were pure and simple. In that same outdoor scene, they are in a wooded area next to a clearing where they can hear a stream. Julia warns they shouldn't risk surveillance in the clearing and Winston comments "It's the Golden Country--almost."
The reference to the Golden Country was first made in Part 1, Chapter 3, when he dreams of his mother and sister from 30 years earlier. This scene from his dream is immediately followed by the image of Julia nude.
Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country...
---
The girl with the dark hair was coming toward him across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside.
By the way, there is a recent novel that tells the story from Julia's perspective - Julia. Some of the negative reviews it has disuade me. Has anyone read it?
Michael wrote: "By the way, there is a recent novel that tells the story from Julia's perspective - *Julia*. Some of the negative reviews have dissuaded me. Has anyone read it?"I am still on the fence about reading Julia by Sandra Newman, largely because of the mixed reviews. I did listen to a sample of the audiobook, though, and in it, we learn that Syme refers to Winston as, "Old Misery", a nickname I thought underscores the importance of Julia as a foil to Winston in nearly every way.
Winston is older and fixated on memory and meaning. He clings to pre-Party recollections, fragments of a world erased, and pours his intellectual energy into resisting the Party’s rewriting of reality and is miserable because of it far more than the physical conditions in which he must live.
Julia, by contrast, was born into the Party. She represents a younger generation, one that has no meaningful memory of a world before Big Brother and sees no deep ideological need to recover it.
And when he told her that airplanes had been in existence before he was born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had invented airplanes?At first glance, this seems to cast Julia as shallow or indifferent, and certainly she lacks Winston’s philosophical struggle. But I now wonder if that’s the wrong lens to view her through. Her rebellion, which Winston admires is precicely because it is the flip side of his own, practical, embodied, and instinctual. Where Winston resists through tortured analysis and abstract truth, Julia resists by carving out private joy and small, defiant pleasures. She sees through the Party’s lies enough to misbehave strategically without Winston's burden of believing rebellion must be part of some ideological revolution.
In that sense, Julia’s resistance is no less valid, it is simply different. Winston rebels out of loyalty to a remembered or imagined past, clinging to how things must have been. Julia, on the other hand, rebels against how things are.
Additionally , the battle between Big Brother and the people it controls is like a kind of psychological arms race. At first, the regime’s power lies in its ability to enforce epistemological control and ontological authority requiring older individuals like Winston to believe two contradictory things at once. This inner conflict destabilizes him, forcing him into philosophical crisis. But then Julia’s generation comes along, conditioned to absorb the doublespeak the lies without distress by not challenging them intellectually, but instead, take them in stride and continue to misbehave. In that way, her generation has evolved new tactics under the regime’s pressure.
Here is a passage from an essay by Bertrand Russell that evokes the spirit of "Old Misery" in our own time; someone burdened by memory, like Winston, yet increasingly surrounded by a world more like Julia’s, where the past has faded and adaptation takes its place.Only those who remember the world before 1914 can adequately realize how much has already been lost. In that happy age, one could travel without a passport, everywhere except in Russia. One could freely express any political opinion, except in Russia. Press censorship was unknown, except in Russia. Any white man could emigrate freely to any part of the world. The limitations of freedom in Czarist Russia were regarded with horror throughout the rest of the civilized world, and the power of the Russian Secret Police was regarded as an abomination. Russia is still worse than the Western world, not because the Western world has preserved its liberties, but because, while it has been losing them, Russia has marched farther in the direction of tyranny than any Czar ever thought of going.Here Russell is to Winston, the one who remembers what has been lost, as we are to Julia, the younger generation.
Russell, Bertrand. Portraits from Memory: And Other Essays (Routledge Classics) (Symptoms of Orwell's 1984). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.
Now Imagine if this essay and all similar records were tossed into a memory hole. We who never directly experienced these liberties of the past would be forced to navigate the present without the burden of nostalgia. In this way, his words reflect the same generational divide Orwell portrays: the disoriented anguish of those who remember, and the pragmatic defiance of those who do not.
The entire essay can be found here: https://archive.org/details/symptomso...
David wrote: "Here is a passage from an essay by Bertrand Russell that evokes the spirit of "Old Misery" in our own time; someone burdened by memory, like Winston, yet increasingly surrounded by a world more lik..."Thanks for the essay, David. I find these references to be, unfortunately, rather prescient:
There have been purges of the Civil Service carried out without any of the business of Congressional Committees. The Home Office, which controls immigration, is profoundly illiberal except when public opinion can be mobilized against it.
I have found among many liberal-minded people a belief that all is well so long as the law courts decide rightly when a case comes before them. This is entirely unrealistic.
One of the worst things resulting from the modern increase of the powers of the authorities is the suppression of truth and the spread of falsehood by means of public agencies.
There is no longer, even among those who think themselves more or less liberal, a belief that it is a good thing to study all sides of a question. The purging of United States libraries in Europe and of school libraries in America, is designed to prevent people from knowing more than one side of a question.
This applies more particularly to education. Even mildly liberal opinions expose an educator nowadays in some important countries to the risk of losing his job and being unable to find any other. The consequence is that children grow up in ignorance of many things that it is vitally important they should know, and that bigotry and obscurantism have a perilous measure of popular support.
Does the fact the essay was commissioned in 1956 make any difference? Maybe it indicates perpetual problems that we swing back and forth on instead of a terminal one-way trending of issues ending in an authoritarian state like Orwell warns us of in 1984?
David wrote: "Does the fact the essay was commissioned in 1956 make any difference? Maybe it indicates perpetual problems that we swing back and forth on instead of a terminal one-way issues ending in an authori..."It does make a difference, and it's encouraging to know that authoritarianism is not inevitable. Perhaps what we're living through now is like the Red Scare and ultimately it will be discredited and studied by historians a few decades hence. On the other hand, something like 1984 is even more possible today than it was in Orwell's time considering the technology now available. AI presents a particularly terrifying problem if it were deployed by an authoritarian government to keep the citizens in line.
Thomas wrote: "David wrote: "AI presents a particularly terrifying problem if it were deployed by an authoritarian government to keep the citizens in line..."Yes, but it is also an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of everyday people. We have non-technical people and sometimes teenagers creating tools to help communities or causes that would have been prohibitively difficult or costly just a couple of years ago.
Some may say that the concentration of functionality in the hands of a few big players is a problem. It is, but we also have different nations creating and releasing models like DeepSeek as open-source. There are a lot of open-source models that aren't too far behind the big players. It is quickly becoming a commodity.
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In “1984,” Orwell constructs both a political society and a version of the English language that reflects that society. Do you find the world and language of “1984” believable? If so, how?
Did your impressions of Winston and Julia change in this week’s reading? Has the society they live in influenced their characters as well as their behavior?