So we're in the Senate House of the University of London. This is an enormous 1930s tower
that dominates the landscape that it's over, and Orwell was interested in it, his first
wife Eileen worked here, and in the Second World War it was the headquarters of the Ministry
of Information, which controlled the press, propaganda and censorship. So in many ways
very much like the Ministry of Truth in the novel. And he would see this building every
day, and it stands proud above its landscape. And of course that landscape in the 1940s
after the end of the war was a pretty rotten one. It was full of bombed buildings, it was
full of poverty, it was a world of a country almost bankrupt, and Orwell would look around
at this sort of devastation around him, and that feeds in so much to what the novel looks
like. It's a world of deprivation, of rationing, of stench. That's the world that Orwell wants
to draw, and it's one that partly is a fantasy world, but it also draws very heavily on the
reality of London in the 1940s.
So Winston works for the Ministry of Truth, and what he has to do is revise the past.
If a political change has taken place, all the old newspapers are sent to Winston and
he has to re-write the past so it will fit neatly with whatever the truths of the present
are. And the process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to
books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, soundtracks, cartoons, photographs,
to every kind of literature or documentation, which might conceivably hold any political
or ideological significance.
Julia also is a writer too, she works in the fiction department, but she’s an engineer.
Fiction is written not by people but by machines, and she’s the engineer who works on the
fiction writing machines. And so the whole novel in a way is troubled by the relationship
between truth and fiction, whether there can be a true kind of fiction, or whether fiction
will always substitute for truth, and Winston is always trying to keep to a sense that there
might be a real truth there, but his work is one that destroys truth.
So it's also a novel about novel writing, so Winston in one way doesn't seem a very
important figure, but in another way he is, and in some ways he's a novelist himself,
a bit like Orwell. So what he specialises in is inventing things, inventing the past,
re-writing the past. And when we read about Winston's work, we get a sense of how important
writing is to the whole story.
Fundamentally all the feelings in the book seem to be contradictory. When he first thinks
about Julia, the girl that he'll fall in love with, he hates her, he wants to shoot her
full of arrows like St. Sebastian, he says, or cosh her with a rubber truncheon. It's
like love and hate are inseparable in this book. And that's true also about Winston's
feelings about O'Brien, who will torture him at the end of the book, he also sort of loves
him. It's also true of his feelings politically on a bigger scale about Big Brother. At the
very end of the novel Winston says that he loves Big Brother, but for much of the book
he also hates him as well, or moves between the two, or finds the two inseparable, hatred
and love. And indeed the political slogans of the state in which he lives, of Oceania,
are themselves radically contradictory, war is peace, these two things completely contradict
each other, and yet somehow they're the truth of that society. So it's a novel that's full
of people feeling deeply ambivalent. He feels ambivalent about his mother, about his memory,
about the Party, about almost everybody that he meets, in which there's the most intense
loathing and disgust on the one hand, but also abject submission or passionate attachment
on the other.
So this is a world in which the Party wants to control everything, but above all they
want to control time, so Winston's life is full of memories, of fragments of memory,
he's always trying to recover things from the past. And once he meets Julia, he's full
of desire, of hope for another possibility, another kind of life, but the Party wants
to destroy that and make him live as it makes everyone live, in a kind of perpetual present
tense, in which there can be no thought of a possible alternative, either in the future
or in the past.
So time is at the centre of political struggle in the book. So Winston spends a lot of time
trying to find out what the world of the past was like, he likes objects from the past,
like the beautiful book that he finds at the beginning, or the glass paperweight that seems
to be like a fragment of a world that's been lost. He even goes down to talk to the proles
and he tries to find from an old man what the world was actually like before the Party
dominated it. And of course, gradually as the novel goes on, he's gradually reduced
to the continuous present tense, his memory and his desire are both eliminated into what
becomes then the image that in a way the novel leaves us with, of the boot stamping on a
face forever, a continuous present tense of oppression and pain.
So Orwell is very bothered in the book about fact and about truth, and trying to work out
what could be factually true, and it comes to be a difference about whether two plus
two makes four, or what he's forced to believe, that two and two makes five. But in that concern
with objectivity and truth, in fact the novel is full of strange states of consciousness,
it's full of dreams, it's full of memories or partial memories, it's full of strange
states that Winston gets taken to when he's tortured, of a simultaneous consciousness
and unconsciousness of things. And that's what, in a way what a dream is like, you're
aware of it but somehow you're not sure of it, its status, is it real or not? And in
fact some of the dreams turn out to be prophetic in this book.
What the Party wants to do, is to change the way that people think, so that it's impossible
to have a critical thought, so that they invent a whole language, which is called Newspeak,
in which certain kinds of, particularly critical thinking, are impossible. And it's full of
these strange words, whose plan eventually is to destroy critical thought completely,
so that people can't conceive of a world outside of the one that they're in. And gradually
you see, as Winston dements almost, towards the end of the book, his ability to think
critically becomes impossible. He gets completely colonised by modes of thought and modes of
language that don't allow him to envisage any possibility, other than the truth the
Party tells him.
So this is a novel that from its title, 1984, marks itself historically, but it's very interesting
to see how much readings of it have changed over the years. So in the 1950s, for example,
it was very much read as a Cold War text, a critique of the Soviet Union and praise
in a way of a Capitalist free enterprise system. Now, I think that doesn't work really as a
reading. Oceania is in fact an American place, it's mainly America plus the United Kingdom,
which has now become Airstrip One. They use dollars, Britain is subordinate to the United
States, which has become another one of these great terrifying global empires. So the readings
of the book change radically I think over time; it looks different in the Vietnam War,
it looks different after Guantanamo Bay, it looks different almost on any major political
occasion.
But it also looks different because of the technological changes there have been. So
in Orwell and his writing, there's almost no television, there have been some early
experiments in the 1930s, but the idea of a two way flat screen in your every room in
the house in which you could communicate in both directions, well, that looked like fantasy
then, but now looks much more realistic in the digital age. And the idea that you could
keep revising things, the past could be eliminated and quickly revised, turned into something
utterly different from what it was before, which is what Winston's job is, now too seems
a much more real possibility in the Internet age.
1984 is clearly a novel that's deeply concerned with politics and the wider society, but also
within in it there's a very deeply important love story between Winston and Julia, but
it's a very strange one. And indeed the whole novel's relationship to sexuality is often
a perversely strange one. So that we know that Winston's first marriage was an unhappy
one, that his wife called having sex, "Our duty to the Party." And his relationship with
Julia too is very different, that she just sends him a note out of the blue saying, I
love you. But his thoughts about her before then have been very violent ones, he wants
to cosh her with a runner truncheon. He says to her when he first, when they first speak,
that he wanted to rape her and then kill her. So sexuality and violence seem deeply linked
in the book. In one way it's a world of freedom, of escape, that's what he loves about Julia,
that what Winston loves about Julia is that she has a sexual freedom that he's never seen
elsewhere and that the Party doesn't approve of. But still at the same time it often seems
deeply misogynistic, his relationship to women in the book, and in the end it almost seems
less important than his relationship with O'Brien. So it's a very strange novel in terms
of the way in which perversity and freedom and eroticism are complexly bound together.
But it's not just Winston who has a strange relationship to sexuality, it's also the Party
does too, the Party wants to eliminate it, so that Julia for example is a member of the
Junior Anti Sex League and wears the red sash. And it's that the Party doesn't want to eliminate
love but it wants to eliminate eroticism, that somehow there's something within sexuality
that seems unbounded and free. And you can see in that, Orwell resembling a writer like
D H Lawrence in the sense that somewhere in sexual freedom there can be something that
can stand against any kind of totalitarian power. So Winston at one point says to Julia,
"You're only a rebel from the waist down," so in one way he's implying a limitation there,
but also admiration for what can resist, something that goes very deep within the self that the
Party wants to control.
Okay, so this is a rare survival. So, very few of George Orwell's manuscripts survive.
Some of the manuscripts of 1984 does, and then a few things like this. So this is a
notebook from 1943, so the novel comes out in '49, so you can see him already thinking
about this book.
So you can see that he's beginning almost with general ideas, so he says, "The general
layout as follows, part one, build up of, a, the system of organised lying in which
society is founded." He doesn't begin with character, he doesn't begin with plot but
he begins with the abstract ideas. And then, b, the way in which this is done, falsification
of records, etc. It might almost be a political tract or a pamphlet of the sort that he's
been writing so far. But then it moves to the much more subjective, the nightmare feeling
caused by the disappearance of objective truth, and this is something that is so deep in the
whole novel, where is it that you can find truth? Is it in memory, is it in records,
and if they're not reliable where else might it exist? Leadership, leader worship, etc.,
it says here, if you scroll in, leader worship. And then finally at the end of the list, the
loneliness of the writer, his feeling of being the last man. So, the last man in Europe is
one of the possible titles of the book and it comes from Mary Shelley, her book, the
Last Man, Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein, and the sense that he's uniquely different,
the last person with a kind of humane memory of what the past was like.