From The Archive: The Clocks Striking Thirteen

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

The Clocks Striking Thirteen - 25/03/05

At first, I thought this was just the typical 1984 piece - missing what I see as the most important and interesting things about the novel - but towards the end he begins to touch upon some of the reasons why 1984 tops my list of the most important books of the 20^th century.

The article finishes with this:

Yet, beneath the surface, Orwell's imagination seized on something more radically true, and which increasingly we can see all around us. The futurology of 1984 is less important than its understanding of a malign tendency in certain strains of government, namely an intolerance of difference, variety and privacy. The misuse of Parliament in order to criminalise hunting (of only certain kinds, of course), and the steady, irrational, vindictiveness shown by the government towards private schools, should remind us that, notwithstanding our material prosperity, we are not so far from 1984 as we might like to think. The object of power is power, says O' Brien. Beneath all the solemn nonsense of pledge cards and targets, this too is the watchword of that sanctimonious relative of Ingsoc, New Labour.

I do think there is a certain amount of validity in the Ingsoc / New Laborg comparison. But I don't think it is an especially New Laborg condition. Orwell, along with others like Koestler, identified this authoritarian aspect of the left back in the thirties. Although being more sympathetic - in general - to the left rather than the right, I have never really felt that comfortable with socialism, and it is mainly because of this - often rather puritanical - authoritarianism. It is - I suppose - rather ironic that the New Laborg have dropped socialism, but held onto its authoritarian aspects. Of course, as they say, it is all done in the very best interest of the people, but I can't help feeling nervous about it.

Another aspect - related to this authoritarianism - is that infamous rallying-cry of the right Political Correctness, or, to give it it's full title Political Correctness Gone Mad! This too appears in 1984, in the concept of Thoughtcrime. As the recent Summers case in America and the British law against incitement to religious hatred shows, it is becoming increasingly difficult to speak out on matters that that liberal orthodoxy has deemed beyond the pale. To hold and express - even in private - views regarded as politically incorrect is enough to get people dismissed from their jobs.

Another quote:

But in the West, aside from some isolated palpable hits, 1984 must have quickly seemed unrelated to at least the surface of life. Orwell's description of "proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally" is still on the mark:

Here were produced rubbishy newspapers, containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.

Well, manufactured pop acts, along with trash TV like Pop Idol and all its equally inane siblings is the first thing to come to mind here. There are, also, such things as ghost-written Celebrity autobiographies and novels, seemingly endless quantities of lowest-possible-denominator TV. In fact, all the detritus that has turned pop culture into junk culture. A dreary mindless 'entertainment' that is as bad for the mind as junk food is for the body.

And his snippet of mathematically-ignorant proletarian conversation on the lottery – "Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!" – is wickedly accurate.

There are the parallels between the Camelot lottery and this, as well as all the other fascinations: astrology, mediums, alternative medicines and therapies and other headlong flights from the rational and empirical.

I don't think, either, that it is too much of a stretch of the imagination to see parallels between so-called Reality television - Big Brother indeed - and the show trials in the novel. These programmes always seem to produce a baddie for the totally-mashed couch potatoes who make up the audiences for this drivel to demonise in their tabloid-led two minute hate.

The constant war against Eurasia or Eastasia also has contemporary echoes. I remember saying to someone around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union that America - if not the West as a whole - would need to find itself another enemy as soon as possible.

Luckily, central casting was able to come up with the almost perfect Goldstein-esque villain in Osma Bin Laden. If had not already existed, then it would have - eventually - become necessary to invent him (who is to say that some of his more… demonic… aspects are not invention?)

The future belonged to the proles? Does it? Did Orwell himself still believe it? At the end of the novel, does Winston? Is it a cry of hope and possibility, or of desperation, or of despair?

After all, the working class never did live up to what the middle-class socialists expected of it.