History, Language, and 1984

History, Language, and 1984

When the government can control everything, who can control the true history of the world? That’s one of the many questions brought up by George Orwell’s novel 1984, in which the reader follows an average man in a not so average situation. Winston Smith lives in a fantasy world that most western readers wouldn’t think to be real, his life, his job, and the concept of Big Brother are at the center of the story. His job is to alter newspaper articles to match the current history of the storyline, but in the end the history is being rewritten with alternative facts. When the government can control everything, they can also control the flow of information even when the information is false. Through the story we’re introduced to the concept that history is something that existed for a certain time before the new world order took over. There is nothing beyond a certain time period because the past existed but the moment Big Brother took over everything else could be rewritten to align with thoughts and beliefs of the current regime. How does 1984 measure to the views of Fascism or is the government within the story a different kind of world order? Through the history of the story, the fascist thinkers of the twentieth century, and the language of the people of the book, it can be determined what kind of government is truly ruling within the pages of the classic novel.

How history measures within the timeline of Orwell’s classic novel is as a job for the main character, he’s not a historian, he’s a writer of fiction in his own ways. Winston understands that there was a world history in the years before Big Brother, he remembers events and specific things, such as countries and details of events,

“Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remember huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.” (Orwell, 28)

What 1984 does very well in creating this history and changing it throughout the novel is that in changing the world you must alter its own perception of time. Dates are unknown to the characters, they don’t understand dates, but they understand hours, they don’t know how many years it has been because the timeline of the story bleeds into one another. In Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, Spengler’s writes that “It is, and has always been, a matter of knowledge that the expression-form of world-history are limited in number, and that eras, epochs, situations, persons are ever repeating themselves true to type.” (4) For Orwell’s novel these eras no longer exist, only order and complete control exists, other than that nothing else matters. The histories of the novel are warped and changed, nothing is consistent with a person’s memory because the government actively destroys the evidence of the past. “History is that form which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.” (Spengler, 8) The story is more about the imagination of the people and the reactions then it is about the truth of the world and what is truly wrong with how they’re living.

            The work of destroying history also destroys the truth of the world and the story solidifies that what a person knows and what they are told are two different things. History is always evolving in our lives, new discoveries are made that reshape the history of the world, it changes constantly to tell the whole story versus what is taught to us growing up. Spengler writes that “No doubt we feel world-history, experience it, and believe that it is to be read just as a map is read. But, even to-day, it is only forms of it that we know and not the form of it, which is the mirror-image of our own inner life.” (15-16) In the context of 1984 history as a whole is formed in two ways, the personal history of the narrator and the history of the world, neither is congruent to one another. Memories will always disprove a lie if you remember it well enough.

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.” (Orwell, 31)

When the character of the story understands that their job is to create a lie it becomes apparent that they have an understanding of how wrong what they’re doing is. Yet they do nothing to change it because going against a regime can end in death. Doing anything against the regime will end in death, or at least that’s the persona in which the regime within the story deals with those who go against their teachings. “More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some cases they might not even be dead. Perhaps thirty people personally known to Winston, not counting his parents, had disappeared at one time or another.” (Orwell, 39) The truth of a person’s words, or their histories can be classified as an offense within the story, especially when it doesn’t match what the governing body wants the people to know is true.

            Another part in which history plays a role within the story comes from the language used in 1984, Orwell develops a new language which is essentially a dumbed down version of the English language. By destroying words and bringing language down from what it had evolved into the government has more control over what is said, and how the people are able to use it. Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century offers an interesting look in how language plays a part in history. Snyder writes that “Churchill said that history would be kind to him, because he intended to write it himself. Yet in his vast histories and memoirs, he presented his own decisions as self-evident, and credited the British people and Britain’s allies. Today what Churchill did seems normal, and right. But at the time he had to stand out.” (56) Using Winston Churchill as an example of how language can be used to alter history, Snyder is displaying that how a person uses language can alter the perception in which the world sees them, Churchill used his words and his actions to determine how he was viewed by the public.

            How language plays a role in the overall story is in how it changes and evolves. Orwell created a new language in which is being developed within the story, newspeak is a simplified language in which everything is essentially dumbed down to simple phrases to the point where words that have been around for decades no longer exist,

“'We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.'” (Orwell 44-45)

 With every new literation of the language the history of the world is altered and changed to fit what the government wants to use to further their power on the world within the story. In reality language is a fundamental part of our lives, it evolves with time adding new words with new meanings. Where would William Shakespeare be if he hadn’t had the chance to create new words within his text? How would Shakespeare sound like in newspeak without words like addiction, eventful, or inaudible? What would they be in newspeak if the words within the language of 1984 is simplified to the point where one word is given different literation’s in order to change the words that have been given to the world throughout history.

“'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well -- better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word.” (Orwell 45)

Is this really the language we would evolve to if a government had the necessity to have complete control over what is said. Without the history of words language would cease to exist as a form of expression, what we same would feel like drabble and everyday nonsense, books wouldn’t have the same meaning and speeches wouldn’t inspire the masses. This is how Orwell demonstrates that the world of 1984 is a totalitarian government in which the people have no control over their own basic human rights. They follow small spans of hate in order to release pent up aggression, but they don’t actually commit crimes unless they’re thought crimes that go against the teachings of Big Brother. Children can turn in their parents for having a single thought against the regime, love is a crime, marriage is just a means to reproduce and even then the women are inseminated so the act of sex doesn’t exist.

            Language is a fundamental part of our everyday life without it where would we be as a species, how would things be classified, animals, actions, or even simple everyday tasks. Books would be obsolete, the past would no longer exist if we cannot express ourselves. Snyder wrote in his book that we should “Be kind to our language… Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.” (59) In a world without language this wouldn’t make sense, but in our world these are motivation to keep Orwell’s fictional reality from becoming our personal hell. Books are called building blocks, with them a reader can travel towards new worlds, go on adventures, see the history of the world from the eyes of others. It’s the knowledge of a moment in time that will give a read perspective on what they’re living in their daily lives.

Is 1984 a Fascist regime? Or was it just trying to display what the world would become if Fascism became something else? Totalitarianism is essentially a government with total control over the people, during the time in which 1984 was written the thoughts of such a government overtaking the world was a real fear for the people living in the time. Hitler’s reign in Germany as well as most of Europe, drove fear into the eyes of many, as a world where only the Aryan’s would be the one true race. Umberto Eco’s “UR-Fascism” explains the deference’s between regimes, and how they differ from Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Eco writes

“Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete political program. Nazism had a theory of racism and of the Aryan chosen people, a precise notion of degenerate art, entartete Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and of the Ubermensch, Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan, while Stalkin’s Diamat (The official version of Soviet Marxism) was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes. Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology... Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric” (3)

Today the word Fascism has become one in which people think of Nazi’s and totalitarian governments, but there are differences in the doctrine of Hitler and Mussolini. Whereas “Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” (Eco 3-4) The Church existed in Mussolini’s Italy where religion didn’t play a key role in Nazism other than as a tool in order to bring in new members. Within 1984 churches or ministries are used as government agencies, they aren’t used places of worship but as places of fear. Going to the Ministry of Love is a good as being guilty of a crime that is normal in behavior for the world today, there is no love in that ministry there’s only law and absolute order.

            Why would all of this be important in a time where these kinds of governments aren’t the norm in the world? Snyder wrote that “History does not repeat, but it does instruct.” (9) and that “History can familiarize, and it can warn.” (11) By reading a book like 1984, and studying the period of time in which is occurs the read would be able to see into a world that had been a probability at the time. They can familiarize themselves in the similarities between those times and the modern world. Mussolini wrote in The Doctrine of Fascism that “Fascism is an historical conception in which man could not be what he is without being a factor in the spiritual process to which he contributes, either in the family sphere or in the social sphere, in the nation or in history in general to which all nations contribute. Hence is derived the great importance of tradition in the records, language, customs and rules of human society. Man without a part in history is nothing.” He wasn’t seeking the destruction of the history of the world, what Mussolini’s Fascism contained was a frustrated middle class that wanted change. 1984 was a thought out novel incorporating the global political climate of its time and using it as a plot device, Mussolini’s doctrine wasn’t thought out after years of consideration, it was a rushed piece in which gave the people more freedom than a totalitarian government would have.

            1984 is a novel with a government that has complete control over the lives of the population, they watch the people through their televisions which are always on and facing them at all times. In the modern sense it makes a person think of what can be done with the current technology in order to watch our daily habits. The history inside of the novel, and how it’s changed constantly reflects how unverified news sources use alternative facts to drive public opinion one way or another. The novel itself is fiction but can also serve as a warning towards the people of the world that sometimes a government can have too much control.

“Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations -- that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.” (Orwell 65-66)

In the current political climate, these words ring true when someone can become president on what was created by fake news. Who can prove them wrong when there’s more fake news than real news, where you don’t know which is real when the relevant sources are overshadowed by the ones which feel content in creating a world without truth. Would we be able to stop this from happening in our own time, without language or the knowledge our history? Or would fear of retribution keep us from remembering our history? This is essentially the questions being asked by George Orwell in 1984, the real way to stop it in the end is with our words, both those from the past and those from our present, in order for us to keep the future from becoming something unrecognizable.

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