Orwell’s 1984

Throughout my reading of 1984 I couldn’t help but remember what the real 1984 had been like. It was so completely, diametrically opposed to Orwell’s terrifying vision. In 1984 the novel, the populace is maintained on the brink of poverty and want, their lives dedicated whether they want it or not, to upholding the ideology of a totalitarian state that has systematically removed all trace of truth, love and beauty from its culture. In 1984 the reality, the western world was gearing up to a new generation of greed, of delicious excessive consumption and ostentatious wealth. It was all about fun and freedom and shopping and entertainment.  Every time Winston Smith cast a fearful glance at his telescreen, I couldn’t help but overlay its stream of propaganda with a series of hits by Prince and Madonna. The ugly utilitarian overalls that the characters in the book wear, tied at the waist by a piece of string, were replaced in my imagination by the power dressing suits of Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci. In 1984 everyone, apart from the ruling few, is imprisoned in their own life, refused all possibility of personal choice. In 1984, the religion of personal entitlement was just beginning to take off.

Only one part of the novel’s vision came true: the ability for technology to be used as a form of constant vigilance over individual lives (although that wasn’t quite in place until the 90s). The internet, mobile phones, credit cards, satellite navigation, all these are ways in which we are open to continuous monitoring, without our really thinking too much about it. Technology had the genius insight of coupling up with consumerism and our desire to be cool, in communication and distracted from the tedious business of living. Given that Orwell wrote 1984 in 1949, when he was dying of consumption and Britain (at least) was crumbling under the debts of a war it was supposed to have won, it’s probably not surprising that he didn’t take account of how important it would be to people to have fun and to base their self-esteem in what they possessed. Instead Orwell was seriously concerned that Communism would become the dominant political ideology and that it would have fearful consequences. Orwell himself favoured democratic socialism, but having fought in the Spanish Civil War, he disliked what happened to potentially decent principles when they were in the hands of totalitarian thinkers.

And so the novel 1984 was born. It follows the fortunes of Winston Smith, malnourished, discontent and silently, fearfully rebellious. He lives in a society that aims at no less than complete possession of his thoughts and emotions, demanding full and submissive loyalty to the party run by Big Brother, a cipher for total governmental control. The world has been split up into three large countries – Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, all of whom remain in constant, steady warfare, partly as a way of consuming all the goods that the countries over-produce (over-consumption being something Orwell could not envisage) and partly as a way of keeping the citizens in that state of instinctual patriotism that hatred of an external enemy produces. Hatred is in fact the key to this fearsome society as the only emotion actively encouraged. Every day sees the three-minute hate, in which the telescreens show images of Goldstein, the purported leader of the revolutionaries and people are encouraged to scream abuse and throw things. Individuals are set against each other by a culture of tale telling; children are taught to inform on their parents, marriage is an arranged affair that holds husband and wife in an uneasy trustless bond, and the workplace is rife with difficulty. The government pursues a policy of historical revisionism, altering all documents belonging to the past that do not correlate to the present, and is attempting to bring in a language, Newspeak, that will be so reduced as to foreclose the possibility of thinking otherwise to party dogma. There is no privacy at all, as even the countryside is bugged; life plays out against a backdrop of constant monitoring, so that Winston knows he dare not risk even a change in expression that might indicate to Big Brother the rebellious desires that swill around inside him and leave him continually menaced by the possibility of a visit from the dreaded Thought Police.

But of course, Winston cannot help but give in to his hopes for an undercover uprising, and when he meets Julia, a young woman yearning for the experience of sensuality and pleasure, he begins an affair with her that will lead him into disaster. So you may have gathered that this is not a cheery read. In fact, it’s like everything terrible you could possibly imagine, squished up together and injected with lethal negativity. And then again it is a powerful, disturbing and important book. One that shows us in no uncertain terms how dangerous it is for thought to become inflexible and domineering, how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. At the same time, it pays tribute to the strength within the individual mind for independent thought, and how hard it is to break human beings of their autonomy, their free spirit, their capacity for love and kindness. And it suggests that we are also capable of the ruthlessness required to preclude these essential things to other people, that the very desire for control is fraught with inhumane and dangerous impulses.

It was very intriguing to read this book, and then read Franzen’s Freedom directly afterwards.  1984 struck me as being all about the monstrous overdevelopment of the superego. Let me explain: Freud suggested the mind is split into three domains – the superego, the voice of internalized authority, the id, repository of our drives and desires, and the ego, the embattled voice of reason trying to negotiate between what we want and what we know we ought to do. In 1984 authority is abusive – this might be best demonstrated by the analogy of an abusive parent, controlling its child’s every move, invading its thoughts and refusing it any privacy, threatening it with terrible annihilating punishments if it doesn’t do what it is told. The Party is a bad parent, attempting to control its citizens by making them control themselves out of terror.  When we read about Winston struggling to rebel, we see that he does not live sufficiently in fear of his own superego; he does not control himself the way others (in authority) need him to, and that has to be fixed (horrifically).

In Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, the situation is reversed – it is, if you like, the natural conclusion to the era of consumer power and autonomy that the real 1984 ushered in. In Franzen’s world, the id is out of control. People refuse all possibility of restraint, making their individual desires and whims the most important impulses they possess. They all have the right to mess up their lives if they want to, Franzen states on a couple of occasions, regardless of the health of the planet or the happiness of other people, on the grounds that individual desire must not be checked. Personal entitlement has grown out of hand and is exerting the same bullying and destructive force as the abusive authority in 1984. In both books, then, the freedom that seems to matter the most is the ability to say ‘no’ and be heard; to stand up to the bullies, either in the form of dictatorial authority or our own excessive desires, and to find a middle ground that is an honorable battlefield against all forms of mindless compliance.

Franzen’s Freedom

This is a sneaky post I shouldn’t really be writing – I should be doing useful things in preparation for the start of term. But then this is a book I bought on impulse on the weekend, having heard such diversity of opinion over it that I could not resist. I’d never read Jonathan Franzen before, but he feels quintessentially American to me; he’s similar to so many American novelists, his troubled teens sounding like Tom Wolfe’s in I Am Charlotte Simmonds, his implosive marriages like Richard Yates’, his disaffected males like Don DeLillo’s, his snarky-witty tone a cross between David Foster Wallace and Philip Roth, and perhaps most of all he reminds me of Michael Chabon, without the literary flourishes. I don’t know about the stand-out artist of his generation, but he’s certainly a representative writer from smack bang in the middle of it.

Unsurprisingly, then, he takes his subject as contemporary America and the lives of the comfortably-situated middle classes. Freedom focuses on a family, Patty and Walter Berglund, who are politically correct, environmentally-aware, friendly, wholesome types, and their two outwardly admirable children, Jessica and Joey. Although in fact the image belies a much messier, darker reality shot through with disaffection and frustration. Assuming multiple narrative perspectives, Franzen deconstructs the family, following it through meltdown. If this sounds gloomy, it isn’t really; in its way, it is quite funny, even if the humour seems to encourage us to laugh at the characters rather than with them. But it is also very explanatory, very sharp, at times a tad preachy, and fierce in its politics.

To enter the narrative is to become caught up in a highly particular voice, eloquent and intelligent but emotionally cold, and one of the problems with this voice is that it is used across all the multiple perspectives, even though they include a supposedly autobiographical account (written in the third person!) and a great deal of free indirect style. In consequence, two things: the narrative is blanketingly homogenous, despite inhabiting a series of very different mentalities, and it is difficult to judge the characters. They all flow seamlessly out of Franzen’s voice, with no insertion of narrative distance – so is the intention to promote their ideology or to undermine it? It’s very unclear. I’m not saying that’s a problem, just that it’s unclear.

The emotional coldness is very interesting. When I think of the books I’ve read recently – Sarah Water’s The Night Watch, which will rip the beating heart from your body without the tiniest shred of sentimentality involved, Austen’s Emma with its pervasive, profound compassion, Orwell’s 1984 with its nightmarish darkness, it becomes all the clearer how far away Franzen stays from the murky depths and the scintillating highs of his characters’ experience. Take for instance the character of Patty Berglund, whose autobiographical account, written as I mentioned in a gender-neutral third person, makes up a fair chunk of the narrative. Something terrible happens to Patty in her adolescence, compounding a problematic childhood as the relatively stupid, sporty one in a family of eccentric creative types. This is the toxic root to her behavioural problems, but Franzen doesn’t want to get involved in what it really means for a woman to suffer terrifically low self-esteem. The emotional punch of anxiety, anguish, passion, possessiveness, these are irrelevant to the narrator. Patty’s story is flattened out, the incident forgotten, her ‘crimes’ no worse than any woman might commit in a dissatisfactory marriage and yet she is viewed with a jaundiced eye. Patty’s a messy person, but who isn’t? Without a vital emotional aura surrounding Patty’s story, it’s hard to know what to make of it, whether we should condemn or sympathise.

There are two possibilities here. One is that Franzen just can’t write women and I fear that banal explanation may be justified. The competitive rivalry between Patty’s husband Walter and his best friend, Richard Katz, is invested with much more authenticity and detail, far more beautifully and realistically described than Patty’s more dramatic experiences. And the narrative is dominated by the masculine imagination – evidenced by the preoccupations with politics and music. These are the jealously guarded province of the male writer – I have yet to see a woman write a political novel that is well received, or indeed to write about music in a technical or judgmental way, discussing what constitutes good taste. So I definitely get the hoo-hah that arose over the glowing reviews, as this is very much a book written by a boy. The emotions Franzen will do include competitiveness, ambition, pride, and the endless jostling for position of the would-be alpha male, all very testosterone-based.

The other possibility is more interesting. I’ve said before that this is a homogenous narrative, and it extends to the characters themselves. I’m intrigued by how much they all watch and police each other, ready and waiting to condemn any deviation from a certain ideal of personality. For instance, look at the way that transgression in this novel is such a timid and bloodless affair. The main agent for the dark side is Richard Katz, Walter’s best friend and resolutely non-mainstream musician. Katz doesn’t treat women well (surprise), takes drugs, can’t settle down and his punishment for all this is to record, by mistake, an album that’s a huge hit. To show the world what for, he returns to making roofing decks and (continues) being an insolent son of a bitch. Well, that’s truly awful, isn’t it? There seems so little possibility for the characters to be… different. Truly, madly, deeply different, radically different. They are all locked inside themselves and frustrated by the other characters in any attempt to break out. Is this what the combination of the cult of the individual and liberal humanism has brought us to? An ideology of normalization, in which everyone belonging to this particular class must conform themselves to a straitjacket of identity, permanently optimistic, achieving, attractive, do-gooding? It’s no wonder if altering an economy based on growth seems impossible – growing oneself, wanting more, wanting better, is one of the few desires that the characters are actually permitted.

So for me, the emotional coldness may on this reading be a kind of social commentary on the reduced range of emotions that this layer of American society allows itself; that Franzen’s vision of his culture, however unwittingly, shows people who long to change but cannot truly embrace a different way of being, because the longing to be ‘normal’ is too strong. In that case the freedom of the title is an ironic one. The characters cling to their idea of freedom but do not know how to live, do not know what to do with themselves, unsurprisingly when their existential range is so small. I’ve only once reviewed a book halfway through reading it (Lolita) and that didn’t go too well, so I’ll have to eat my words if something surprising happens in the next 200 pages. But that’s the view so far.