the hell of 1984 :: essays research papers

The Hell of 19 Eighty-Four.). Did Orwell realise quite what he had done in Nineteen Eighty-Four? His post-publication glosses on its meaning intermit either blankness or bad faith even about its contemporaneous political implications. He insisted, for example, that his recent novel was NOT intended as an besiege on Socialism or on the British Labour company (of which I am a supporter).(1) He may well not have intended it but that is what it can reasonably be taken to be. Warburg saw this immediately he had read the manuscript, and predicted that Nineteen Eighty-Four was cost a cool million votes to the Conservative party(2) the literary editor of the change surface Standard sarcastically prescribed it as "required reading" for Labour Party M.P.s,(3) and, in the US, the Washington branch of the John Birch Society adopted "1984" as the last four digits of its telephone number.(4) Moreover, Churchill had made the inseparably interwoven relation between socialist economy and totalitarianism a plank in his 1945 election campaign(5) (and was not the jockstrap of Nineteen Eighty-Four called Winston?). If, ten years earlier, an Orwell had written a futuristic fantasy in which Big Brother had had Hitlers features rather than Stalins, would not the Left, whatever the writers proclaimed political sympathies, have welcomed it as showing how capitalism, by its really nature, led to totalitarian fascism?With Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is particularly necessary to trust the floor and not the teller, but even this has its pitfalls. Interpretations of the novel already exist which blatantly ignore the intentions of the author by reinterpreting its manifest content without any writ large justification. But all existing interpretations of Nineteen Eighty-Four are inadequate in one regard or another. For many years Nineteen Eighty-Four served as a sort of an ideological super-weapon in the stone-cold War,(6) was used along with Animal Farm as propaga nda in the westerly occupied zones of Germany, which it was feared ... might be invaded by Soviet troops,(7) and was later to a fault made use of by West Germany as warning . . . about what a future under Stalin might be like.(8) There is much in the novel, of course, which allowed it to be interpreted as an attack on Soviet communism and its allegedly aggressive intentions. Nonetheless, such an interpretation does not quite check up on Ingsoc has been established in Oceania by internal revolution and not by military invasion or external pressure. The model is Trotsky rather than Stalin.