Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss
Читать онлайн книгу.
to that prevailing Chestertonian paradox which subjugates Orwell’s proles: ‘Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.’
To see 1984 as a nest of paradoxes is not to denigrate its power. Indeed, it may be in part to admit that to attempt to chronicle the future using the past tense is itself a paradox, one committed unwittingly every time a science fiction writer puts pen to paper. But 1984 is a more humorous novel than is generally acknowledged, though admittedly the humour is decidedly noir. In that respect, it bears a resemblance to Franz Kafka’s work, about which learned commentators have rightly expended much serious thought. (Learned commentators are correct in regarding humour as subversive.) Yet when Kafka read extracts from Der Prozess to Max Brod and friends, they all laughed heartily, and Kafka often could not continue for tears of laughter. But Kafka and Orwell both acknowledged Dickens among their masters of grim humour.
To Orwell’s own paradoxes, time has added another. For many years during the Cold War, Orwell’s phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’ was popular. It referred, of course, to all those TV cameras which were never switched off, keeping the population of Airstrip One under surveillance.
But as social life became nastier, rougher, during the 1980s, as the murder count rose in New York, London and elsewhere, the public in their malls and supermarkets began to beg for more cameras to be installed everywhere. They begged for more surveillance. They wanted to be watched. In an age when we no longer believe in the attention of an omnipresent God, even the cold eye of the camera is welcome.
When I first became interested in Orwell’s play with paradox and mirror image, I conceived the idea that the plot of 1984 is much like that of an A. E. van Vogt science-fantasy novel, in which one man alone has a vision of the truth, sets out to overturn the world, and finally manages to do so (‘Asylum’ is one such example). Orwell took a great interest in trash literature. This interest manifests itself in 1984 in the passages where Smith, as part of his work, invents a story about a fictitious character called Comrade Ogilvy. ‘At the age of three, Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a submachine gun, and a model helicopter … At nineteen, he had designed a hand-grenade which … at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst …’ This clearly is a kind of science fiction story at whose absurdity we are meant to laugh.
In pursuit of the van Vogt connection, I once took the opportunity of asking Orwell’s widow, Sonia, if Orwell had read much pulp science fiction (it existed at that period only in pulp magazine form). Had he ever read any A. E. van Vogt, with plots centering on worldwide conspiracy?
Her answers, like so many answers life gives us, were enigmatic. She thought he had read some science fiction. She did not know the name of van Vogt.
About H. G. Wells Orwell was much better informed. He expressed his delight more than once in Wells’s scientific romances, even going so far as to claim that ‘thinking people who were born about the beginning of the century are in some sense Wells’s own creation’. But he disagreed strongly with Wells as political sooth-sayer, and in particular with Wells’s views concerning a world state, of which he said, ‘Much of what Wells has argued and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany’.
Shortly after World War I, Wells rebuked Winston Churchill for speaking of the Bolsheviks as if they were a different order of being. Orwell argued that Churchill was more realistic and that he was right and Wells wrong. With totalitarianism, a new order of men had come into the world, perverting science for their own ends. 1984 is the history of that new order. O’Brien and the Party members are Orwell’s ghoulish mirror image of Wells’s Samurai in A Modern Utopia, while at the same time representing the new totalitarianism rising to threaten the post-war world. The debt to Wells is unavoidable; he was the man who had created the future as a forum for debate on present ends and means at the turn of the century.
We can now see the answer to our question. Was Orwell trying to predict the future or was he using the notion of the future as a mirror for his present? Of course the answer is ambiguous. Most of the novel mirrors the past (‘ “The past is more important”, agreed O’Brien gravely’), including the tradition of constructing utopias, but this is built about a core of futurism, that core in which Orwell conjures up the spectre of England under a totalitarian regime, a regime in which science is at the service of a new brutality, and in which the world is locked into a kind of dreadful unity through the war that is peace. The future and its polemics are given reality by the employment of the furniture of the past.
As with many novels, 1984 mirrors the author’s own life and the books to which he is indebted. What is different about 1984 is that it utilizes the most powerful lever available to science fiction; it places the events it depicts ahead of us, and so to be yet experienced, instead of behind us in the past, and so safely out of the way.
In Orwell’s world, the very word ‘freedom’ has been banished. Whereas in our world, words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are bandied about in everyday use on all sides. But has freedom in fact been banished for the fictitious inhabitants of Airstrip One? In order to maintain a boot stamping on the human face forever, the owner of the boot must suffer as well as the owner of the face. The price of loss of freedom is eternal vigilance.
There are few rewards for the Party faithful except power. Power is seen as an end in itself. The real, undeclared aim of the Party is, we are told, to remove all the pleasure from the sexual act. This startling but negative aim, which Orwell does not consistently pursue, reflects the negativity of power; it is doubtful whether Big Brother actually exists, while higher up officials like O’Brien are merely inquisitors with some new, some ancient, tortures at their command. Orwell can imagine rats but not Stalin.
Power, like money, is useless in itself. There has to be something to spend it on. It is true that ‘purges and vaporizations’ are a part of the mechanism of the Party’s regime of government, but this is scarcely enough to satisfy a Party member. Puritanism is all they get. Orwell himself was possibly dissatisfied with this arrangement. When Smith gets to O’Brien’s flat, we see that it is not as austere as all that. There is wallpaper on the walls, the floors are carpeted, the telescreen can be switched off, the butler pours wine from a decanter, and there are good cigarettes in a silver box. Not sybaritic, exactly; more the sort of thing to which typical Old Etonians (Orwell was an untypical example) could be said to be accustomed.
Even in these elegant surroundings, O’Brien is discovered still working. The proles he helps to oppress enjoy greater freedom.
For the proles in their seedy bits of decaying London there are trashy newspapers, astrology, films ‘oozing with sex’, pornography, rubbishy novels, booze, sport and gambling. These are all in plentiful supply. Orwell shows his traditional mixture of despisal and envy of the working classes; Smith’s attitude is very much that of Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, written thirteen years earlier. Gordon ‘wanted to sink down, down into the muck where the money does not rule’. The proles are free from worries, only the proles have double beds, and no one cares if there are bed bugs. Smith manages to reach that place mentioned longingly by Gordon: ‘down, down, into some dreadful sub-world that as yet he could only imagine’. Orwell did finally imagine it, in his most extraordinary novel, and that repeated ‘down, down’ shows how far the journey was.
One can see how George Orwell enjoyed writing 1984 for its own sake. I believe the prophetic element to be only part of its attraction, and in any case the prophecy was apotropaic, intended to warn. Thus, the more it succeeded in conveying its warning, the less likely was its picture of the future to become reality. Its success is that it fails to paint a true portrait of the true 1984. However grim we may hold our 1984 to be, it is not Orwell’s grimness. We perhaps owe Orwell some gratitude that his widely influential 1984 is not our 1984.
Some commentators have claimed as a weakness the fact that the dialectic of the novel is all with the Party, with O’Brien, with the Thought Police, and that nothing positive is offered by the way of opposition. Such comments show a misreading of the book. In the long line of utopianists, Orwell has an honourable place.
H.