Week 7 — Part 3, Chapters 2-6 and Appendix

[Susan]

Here are a couple possible starting points for our discussion.

In these last brutal chapters, Winston’s thoughts and being are forcibly molded to meet the requirements of the Party, including his eventual betrayal of Julia. The last step of the process doesn’t take place until the final chapter of the book. What did you think of the Party’s methods and Winston’s intense dialogue with O’Brian? Were you persuaded by the end of the book?

“The Principles of Newspeak” appendix provides background on the official language of Oceania which is not yet fully adopted. Newspeak is intended to control speakers’ thoughts by making certain thoughts impossible within the confines of the language. Do you agree with the premise that language can work that way? Are there any “real world” similarities with the terminology of contemporary advertising or politics or ?

Thoughts on the book as a whole? Any favorite quotations?

[David]

Winston's treatment seems to be a combination of severe gaslighting, moral inversion,

“You did it!” sobbed Winston. “You reduced me to this state.”
“No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it."

and some pretty nasty physical abuse leading to a final state of Stockholm syndrome, trauma bonding, and internalized authoritarianism.

Winston’s sense of himself has been so thoroughly broken down that loving Big Brother has becomes his emotionally available relief. Running along with the cheering crowd in his mind demonstrates a need to belong, to be safe, and to mean something again.

[Susan]

David wrote: "Winston's treatment seems to be a combination of severe gaslighting, moral inversion,
“You did it!” sobbed Winston. “You reduced me to this state.”
“No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it."
and ..."

Good summary. And there was also something that sounded like electro-shock. I found the last section of the book disturbing reading in its violence and brutality. It also made me wonder about the nature of Winston’s relationship with O’Brian, who ultimately seems to be more important to Winston than Julia.

[Susan]

And I couldn’t help wondering if ultimately Winston and his attachment to the past didn’t end up betraying Julia. If they had stuck to rare meetings in the rural places she knew, would they ever have been caught? And if they had just slept together in the antique shop and never approached O’Brian, would the party have just monitored the situation but taken no action? I don’t think there are any answers to this in the text but since their attraction to each other is based in rebellion against the party, it was never going to end well.

[Michael]

Susan wrote: " And there was also something that sounded like electro-shock..."

It reminded me of A Clockwork Orange and its own flavor of dystopian deviants requiring reform

[David]

I think he was doomed before he ever meet Julia. O'Brien tells Winston they had him under surveillance for seven years.

This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again, generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible—and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston.

[David]

This passage makes me think they did some sort of brain surgery or something lobotomy-like to Julia,

Her face was sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple. . .

[David]

Here are some discussion questions too reflect on the ideas, symbols, and dilemmas raised in 1984.

1. Explain how Newspeak functions to limit thought. What implications does this have for the relationship between language and reality?

2. Discuss the paradox of Winston’s rebellion. Was he ever truly free? What does his failure say about the nature of resistance under totalitarianism?

3. Analyze the role of memory in the novel. Why is the past such a threat to the Party, and how does it manipulate it to maintain power?

4. Why does Orwell include Goldstein’s book within the novel? What truths does it reveal, and why does Orwell let O’Brien be its source?

5. Evaluate the Party’s slogan: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Explain how each operate in the society of 1984.

6. Explore the significance of Room 101. Why must the torture be tailored to each individual’s worst fear, and why does it work?

7. Compare and contrast Winston and Julia’s views on rebellion. What does each want from their relationship, and how does this difference matter?

8. Interpret the function of Big Brother as both a symbol and a practical mechanism of control. Why is it important that his existence is ambiguous?

9. What does Orwell suggest about truth in a society where facts can be changed retroactively? Can objective truth exist in 1984?

10. Reflect on the final line: “He loved Big Brother.” What does this reveal about the success of the Party’s control? Is there any hope left?

[David]

Winston is faced with the paradox:

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

Since the Party would promptly consign all copies of 1984 to the memory hole, reading it can be considered an act of rebellion.

Therefore, you have rebelled simply by reading 1984. Have you broken the paradox? Are you conscious of anything you were not conscious of before?

[Thomas]

Susan wrote: "Were you persuaded by the end of the book?..."

By the end of the book, Winston and Julia are zombies who serve no practical purpose for the Party. If anything, they have become burdens on society. It would make more sense, logically, if they were simply disposed of. It doesn't appear that they are even made examples of -- they are just lobotomized and returned to society.

The Party is strangely inhuman, and inhumane, in that it apparently doesn't need productive and thinking individuals, but without some level of function I don't see how it could survive in competition with other societies. How could it win a war? (Assuming the continual war is real.) So in that sense I'm not persuaded, but I understand Orwell is making a point. A perfectly fascist society requires unthinking submission, but there is an inherent weakness in this type of society that Orwell doesn't acknowledge.

[Thomas]

Michael wrote: "Susan wrote: " And there was also something that sounded like electro-shock..."

It reminded me of A Clockwork Orange and its own flavor of dystopian deviants requiring reform"

Both the brutality and the purpose of the torture are very similar in Clockwork Orange, and Burgess was influenced greatly by Orwell. He even wrote a sequel of sorts (fan fiction?) called 1985. I haven't read it but now my interest is piqued.

[Thomas]

David wrote: "9. What does Orwell suggest about truth in a society where facts can be changed retroactively? Can objective truth exist in 1984?"

One of the most relevant concepts for me, at least as it relates to our present age, is doublethink. Stephen Colbert came up with the notion of "truthiness" as a joke for his late night show, and Kellyanne Conway came up with "alternative facts," and both describe the truth as an elastic thing. They're not quite the same thing as doublethink, but they both imply that there is no objective truth. Facts like 2+2=4 are flexible and subject to revision. I think the scepticism about science that we are experiencing now springs from the same kind of doubt about an objective reality.

[Susan]

I saw this quote yesterday on Twitter/X, and it seemed to sum up the party of ‘1984’ as well as the party of one of Orwell’s models, Soviet Russia:

"We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[David]

I could not resist comparing 1984 with The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, (see our discussion here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...) Hannah starts with the biological facts of birth and death and extends their significance to the human condtion with new terms:
1. Natality is not just being born, but entails the human capacity to initiate, to start something new, to act. Everyone is born, but not everyone begins something new in the world. Nataility is manefestation of freedom.
2. Mortality is not just dying, it is the awareness that life is finite, which gives urgency, purpose, and the desire for legacy. Mortality underlies why we build, preserve, and remember.

Furthermore Arendt defines three fundamental human activities:
1. Labor are those basic activities that keep us alive and keeps the species going.
2. Work creates durable things: tools, institutions, and artifacts that give the world stability.
3. Action is how we individuals appear among others (plurality), speak, and initiate change. It is the most political of all human activities and the one most closely tied to natality.

The Party in 1984 is the literary embodiment of Arendt’s warning. It destroys the conditions of human freedom by targeting natality at its roots:
1. Labor is reduced to bare survival. Citizens work not to live meaningfully, but to avoid punishment.
2. Work is co-opted by the state to produce lies, rewrite history, fake statistics, and slogans, in a perpetual wartime economy of scarcity.
3. Action Namely politics, is made impossible. Speaking freely in the public realm (plurality), remembering accurately, or loving sincerely are all treated as crimes. Individual initiative is crushed before it can begin to be shared.

According to Arendt the source of our freedom comes from our natality. Therefore, the Party must metaphorically kill every newborn like a modern-day King Herod trying to kill all the infants to stop one from becoming a new king.
1. Rather than symbols of renewal, children in 1984 are trained to betray. They are turned into spies and informants, loyal not to their families but to the Party.
2. Thoughtcrime is an infanticide of the mind. Winston’s diary, his love for Julia, his declaration that, 2 + 2 = 4, are attempts to give birth to a free thought, an authentic self. The Thought Police don’t just punish rebellion; they prevent it from going beyond the individual.
3. The Party’s tools: Newspeak, memory holes, and doublethink, and revised history are all used to ensure that even if a person begins to think or speak freely, the words and the context are no longer available.

Fortunately,(view spoiler)[

The most heartening message of The Human Condition is its reminder of human natality and the miracle of beginning. . . Arendt argues that faith and hope in human affairs come from the fact that new people are continually coming into the world, each of them unique, each capable of new initiatives that may interrupt or divert the chains of events set in motion by previous actions. She speaks of action as “the one miracle-working faculty of man”, pointing out that in human affairs it is actually quite reasonable to expect the unexpected, and that new beginnings cannot be ruled out even when society seems locked in stagnation or set on an inexorable course. Since the book’s publication, her observations on the unpredictability of politics have been strikingly confirmed, not least by the collapse of communism. The revolutions of 1989 were notably Arendtian, illustrating her account of how power can spring up as if from nowhere when people begin to “act in concert,” and can ebb away unexpectedly from apparently powerful regimes.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition: Second Edition (p. 1). The University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

(hide spoiler)]

[Janet]

I came away with questions about the appendix — the principles of newspeak. Why did Orwell feel the need to include it? Why did he write it in the past tense, almost to suggest that time has past from story’s end to the time when appendix was added? ? Or did he include the essay in order to more firmly establish his worldbuilding? Or… what?

[Thomas]

Great question, Janet. The appendix is puzzling, but at least we know from the past tense that somehow Big Brother has failed. And I think the suggestion is that it failed because Newspeak failed. It turns out to be impossible to limit language in such a way that it controls a free imagination, and as long as there is imagination there will be thoughtcrime. There will always be a Winston Smith, and probably a lot of them, because human imagination is irrepressible.

[Michael]

I watched a review that suggested the whole point of the novel was to create a way to give us the Newspeak appendix. The reviewer did say she was like overstating things, but she was impressed with what it had to say about how language and ideology work together.