I can't stop thinking about the ways in which 1984, a book all about how language can shape your ability to resist, to rebel, has given us the language to described dystopias and also by its own logic, imprisoned us in a very specific vision and a very specific set of fears.

I've been reading 1984 and whilst there are many insightful elements, I am not enjoying the very distinct feeling that it is also validating all the fears of certain conservative voices in our society.

Winston gets very angry at the fact that an attractive woman over a decade younger than him is wearing a sash that means she's not interested in sex with him? And his inner monologue casts this as yet another emblem of oppression.

And obviously I'm not endorsing state sanctioned Anti-Sex Leagues but I'm not sure the thing wrong with them should be expressed via a middle aged man being angry he feels like he isn't allowed to perv on a young woman?

And obviously I'm very aware that 1984 is written in the late 40s and reflects a very specific set of fears and warnings. And it's not that there aren't grains of truth within. Just I'm also too aware that these warnings have more than one meaning.

Also, it is interesting to me how we misremember 1984? That ppl describe all seeing surveillance state as that when in the book, only Party members (less than 20% of the population) are spied on and monitored. Only they have to use newspeak. The proles are "beneath suspicion."

Which comes back to my wry amusement at the idea that Orwell writes a setting where the most dangerous type of person, the most suspicious thus the most observed, most scrutinised and oppressed is set up to be middling level civil servants.

Julia as this manic pixie dream girl who just isn't like the other girls (she likes sex and hates women) is really quite.... something. The whole sequence where Winston confesses that he could have murdered his wife and Julia is like YEAH YOU SHOULD HAVE, is not endearing.

1984 frames neologisms as bad because they disrupt natural speech, they chain up your thoughts and Winston is told that he should stop thinking in old speech and translating his articles but actually think in newspeak.

But back in the real world, not all new words are bad?

Sometimes we create new words because the existing language doesn't have words to express what we want? That if we do live in a world of newspeak, is the path to rebellion not to create more new words, better words, ones that reflect our reality? Instead of a return to the old?

1984 has a reactionary streak and I would say time and subsequent readings have only amplified that. We can see it in the complaints that mushroom up every time a new word is added to the dictionary or when old people complain about how this or that word was okay in the old days.

Winston constantly talks of a past he cannot remember but his gut assured him is real. And there's a lot that is compelling about his existential crisis, that desire for a truth and craving for a better time, but he only knows to look for it in the past.

This isn't to say 1984 isn't a dystopia or that it's irrelevant but details like the old man complaining about how PINTS don't exist anymore and all beer is served in litres, or how farthings no longer exist.... it is all too reminiscent of brexiteers complaining about the EU?

And you can say to me, that's not Orwell's intention to validate the fears of ppl who think not having pints in pubs is oppression? Or that the children are all radicalised to hate their parents. Or that the government is breaking down traditional families for their own gain.

Just that.... I can't read this book in a vacuum? A good friend of mine keeps being recommended 1984 by their vocally transphobic, pro-Brexit colleague, presumably because this colleague believes it would enlighten my friend to the state of the UK today.

This obviously doesn't magically make the government within 1984 actually benevolent? I'm not trying to argue that they're the secret good guys. It's more that the examples& perspective, details used to illustrate the dystopia, specifics of the fears are surprisingly reactionary.

Also, its really rather quaint how Orwell thinks one needs a whole actual government department full of civil servants obsessed with accuracy and consistency, all furiously rewriting the record to create believable lies. It is nice to think consistency matters.

Which I suppose brings me to the thing I think I actually disagree with, the idea that doublethink is an artificial state of mind that needs to be trained and induced into humans. That we are consistent beings who would otherwise be allergic to contradictions.

Or that this sort of doublethink, this ability to believe contradictory things is unique to English Socialism. It's.... well, it is everywhere. The enemy is both overwhelmingly strong and fundamentally weak, to paraphrase Umberto Eco.

The sequence where the enemy just changes mid-hate week speech and everyone just accepts it was pretty spectacular, defs one of the most striking images of the book for me.

The party's use of Hate in general rings very true to me but it does lose a little bite when the setting is also explicitly without racism (beyond hating the country they are currently at war with) and that privilege isn't hereditary. That it's not about blood, just party.

Or to put it another way, a friend of mine noted that when they were taught 1984 in this nice middle class school, they didn't have to discuss any form of real world marginalisation, such as race, culture group, religion or sexuality as targets and tools of hate.

And perhaps that again why 1984 can so easily sustain these conservative, reactionary readings, because it imagines the Ultimate Dystopia as without these trappings. Winston can see himself as the most oppressed and most scrutinised.

I also understand on paper that there is allegorical power to focus on just on axis of oppression (here being class, obvs) in a text, but it plays out uncomfortably for me. Especially since obviously there's some low key sexism and antisemitism simmering in the narration.

Also! Winston's declaration of how the Party has made the private political, that the most revolutionary act is human connection is really interesting, even resonant, but I'm dubious that there was ever a time when the private wasn't political.

Or rather it's a huge mark of privilege for your private to not have been political. The phantom past is... not real.

Also it is rather soured as a sentiment since it is exemplified in the text as a married man who hates his wife having sex with a woman 10-15 years his junior.

I get the idea of this radical act of love and human connection in a world that denies its importance? It's very powerful.

But it just feels skeevy that he cannot stop calling her body YOUTHFUL whilst harping on about how old he feels & then side note, he hates his frigid wife.

But yeah the idea that it is THE PARTY that made it so, that there was a past where the private wasn't political, that who you loved could be of no consequence, that feels... well, again it's the use of a rhetorical past to believe things can be different. The point of comparison

The past and the denial of the past features heavily in Winston's interrogation. The idea that the past has an independent existence outside of malleable memory opens up some fascinating feelings of horror, but I keep coming back to the things Winston is asked to believe.

Or to put it another way, the nature of the things he's asked to deny (2+2=4, how many fingers are being held up, etc) are rooted in the sort of "common sense" beliefs that have more in common with flat earthers saying the earth is flat in their observabled reality?

It is possible to read the brainwashing as the state pushing on Winston a belief of climate change denial, or like, any number anti-science stances. But the tenor of it.... well, rattling in the back of my mind is the recommendation from my friend's transphobic colleague.

Winston doesn't believe in a system of knowledge creation where people pool their observations to see big patterns. He doesn't put stock in the lived experiences of other people and their insight when it differs from his. He lives in a world where he is completely alone.

Only his own mind can be trusted and only the observations of his own eyes. His own memory. Which is why his common sense-y view of the world sits uncomfortably with me. He is asked to deny that four fingers are being held up.

It's not that I think the Party are the Good Guys or anything, but that the thing Winston is arguing for feels.... it just TASTES more like wankers on the Internet complaining that "common sense" understandings of gender they learnt as children are being contradicted?

The feelings of existential horror and isolation (both very effective) come with their strange sense of importance. He is alone in being the last "sane" man, but he is also important and even heroic as the last. The horror feels.... targeted. You are special.

Perhaps it is the statement that the proletariat get treated better in prison and get the nicer jobs. Or that the reminder that they're beneath suspicion. Winston is set up as being uniquely dangerous, uniquely tortured, uniquely brainwashed. He's not dehumanised in a crowd.

He's not treated as chattel and forgotten. His torture is special, calibrated especially to hurt him, his tormentors are not so much callous as focused and intent on changing his mind.

He also has that intense relationship and these long arguments with his torturer... it reassures him of his importance? the narrative sets up this feeling that they NEED him to believe. That to not believe is itself the heart and soul of defiance and resistance.

I'm not saying no horrifying totalitarian state ever (or current) wants to be loved and utterly believed. Nor do I think that this has nothing to offer as commentary, but there's that edge of interpretation and what it has come to mean?