In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [60]
At the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, there’s a section that owes much to Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s the account of a symposium held several hundred years in the future, in which the repressive government described in the novel is now merely a subject for academic analysis. The parallels with Orwell’s essay on Newspeak should be evident.
Orwell has been an inspiration to generations of writers in another important respect—his insistence on the clear and exact use of language. “Prose like a windowpane,” he said, opting for plainsong rather than ornament. Euphemisms and skewed terminology should not obscure the truth. “Acceptable mega-deaths” rather than “millions of rotting corpses,” but hey, it’s not us who’re dead; “untidiness” instead of “massive destruction”—this is the beginning of Newspeak. Fancy verbiage is what confuses Boxer the horse and underpins the chantings of the sheep. To insist on what is, in the face of ideological spin, popular consensus, and official denial: Orwell knew this takes honesty, and a lot of guts. The position of odd man out is always an uneasy one, but the moment we look around and find that there are no longer any odd men among our public voices is the moment of most danger—because that’s when we’ll be in lockstep, ready for the Three Minutes’ Hate.
The twentieth century could be seen as a race between two versions of man-made Hell—the jackbooted state totalitarianism of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the hedonistic ersatz paradise of Brave New World, where absolutely everything is a consumer good and human beings are engineered to be happy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed for a time that Brave New World had won—from henceforth, state control would be minimal, and all we’d have to do was go shopping and smile a lot, and wallow in pleasures, popping a pill or two when depression set in.
But with the notorious 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in 2001, all that changed. Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once—open markets, closed minds—because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance. The torturer’s dreaded Room 101 has been with us for millennia. The dungeons of Rome, the Inquisition, the Star Chamber, the Bastille, the proceedings of General Pinochet and of the junta in Argentina—all have depended on secrecy and on the abuse of power. Lots of countries have had their versions of it—their ways of silencing troublesome dissent. Democracies have traditionally defined themselves by, among other things, openness and the rule of law. But now it seems that we in the West are tacitly legitimizing the methods of the darker human past, upgraded technologically and sanctified to our own uses, of course. For the sake of freedom, freedom must be renounced. To move us toward the improved world—the utopia we’re promised—dystopia must first hold sway. It’s a concept worthy of doublethink. It’s also, in its ordering of events, strangely Marxist. First the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which lots of heads must roll; then the pie-in-the-sky classless society, which oddly enough never materializes. Instead we just get pigs with whips.
What would George Orwell have to say about it? I often ask myself.
Quite a lot.
Ten Ways of Looking at
The Island of Doctor Moreau
by H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau is one of those books that, once read, is rarely forgotten. Jorge Luis Borges called it an “atrocious miracle” and made large claims for it. Speaking of Wells’s early tales—The Island of Doctor Moreau among them—he said, “I think they will be incorporated,