1984: history, politics

[jbor]

on 30/4/03 4:01 AM, Paul Nightingale wrote:

> So to point out that 85% of the people in 1984 are proles is simply to
> point out that Orwell begins with a (fictional) situation in which class
> differences have been eradicated or, as I put it earlier, masked. The
> other 15% of course are the meritocratic elite.
> 

I don't think this identification of "the Party" as a meritocracy (either as
described by Daniel Bell or J.S. Mill) is at all accurate. Neither the
"beetle men" nor Winston or Julia, nor characters like Parsons or even
O'Brien, fit that mold in the slightest. The four Ministries form a
lumbering bureaucracy: the model is Stalinism. Members of the Outer Party
are as marginalised and effectively as powerless as the proles.

And class differences haven't been eradicated in Oceania at all, although in
real terms the proles do seem to have a better time of it than Winston & co!

All that said, I don't see any real nostalgia for the "capitalists" in their
stove-pipe hats either. The furtive memories and glimpses of pre-Revolution
times paints this group as more of an aristocratic rather than a political
elite: Lords and landowners rather than MPs.

There are some interesting details which I'm noticing again this time
through. In Victory Square "there was a statue of a man on horseback who was
supposed to represent Oliver Cromwell" (Part 2, Ch. 1), who is thus
apparently one of the enduring idols of Big Brother's Ingsoc.

The depiction of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, the three "original leaders
of the Revolution" Winston saw once in the mid-60s at the Chestnut Tree Café
(part 1 Ch. 7), suggests that something more positive was once a
possibility, before B.B. seized control.

And I can't help but see Winston's faith in the proles as deriving from
Orwell rather than from the character himself. When Winston first sees the
prole woman hanging out the nappies and singing the lyrics churned out by
the versificator, her voice and singing is described as "powerful": "she
sang so tunefully  as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant
sound." But the interesting detail is in the initial description of her:

    The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court
    below a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar ... (Part 2, Ch. 4)

The simile here can't be Winston's. It's quite intriguing.

best