"Nineteen Eighty-Four is news that has stayed news."

Peter Marks reflects on the 75th anniversary of Orwell's novel

First published 8th June 1949 (Secker and Warburg)

“You had to live—did from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.”

Those words were first published 75 years ago this weekend in George Orwell’s classic, Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the greatest and certainly the most quoted political novels of the last century. Phrases, concepts and images from a book published before the coronation of Elizabeth II have entered and stayed in the public imagination and its speech. “Big Brother is Watching You”, The Thought Police and “doublethink”, the adulteration of history and the dangers of mass surveillance are referenced by politicians, journalists and members of the public. This is true even for those who have not read the book but have picked up its signals in the cultural ether.

Brand recognition explains why a popular reality television show where contestants compete to stay under surveillance is called Big Brother. But those darker elements of the novel, from government monitoring and attempts to manipulate reality, the control of language and to the use of mass hatred as a political tool, speak to far more worrying potentials and realities. Nineteen Eighty-Four even spawned an adjective to describe such circumstances, “Orwellian”, a label so powerful that opposing political wings deploy it to label developments they most fear and abhor.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is news that has stayed news. It rose up the bestseller lists in 2013, for example, in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelation of massive and secret surveillance by American agencies on citizens and governments around the world. To ward off intense global criticism, Barack Obama admitted that “you can complain about Big Brother” but that his government had got the balance right. This statement was viewed sceptically by many, but the fact that the American President invoked a novel published more than a decade before he was born spoke to its enduring power. Back in 2004 a leading surveillance scholar declared that “looking at the discourse of surveillance and technology over the past fifty years, it is difficult to overestimate” the impact the novel had had “on the public and academic imaginations.”

And not merely in terms of surveillance. In 2017, Nineteen Eighty-Four again climbed to the top of bestseller lists in the United States after Donald Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway described the lies of Trump spokesman Sean Spicer as “alternative facts”. The echoes of that disturbing phrase, which might have been drawn from the novel itself, still have the capacity to trouble. Nor is the novel’s influence restricted to the West. A recent BBC article highlighted the George Orwell Library in Putin’s Russia, a plucky if probably doomed attempt to keep the ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four alive in a country whose manipulation of reality within and beyond its borders has worrying implications in the lead up the American elections. A recent conference paper I attended in Slovenia featured a photograph from the ongoing conflict in Gaza of ‘1984’ sprayed on a bare wall, a sign of what the protester presumably felt was an Orwellian reality.

Historically, meanwhile, illegally printed editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four have been part of resistance to totalitarian regimes. When such regimes fall—or are in a state of hopeful transition to a more liberal condition, as in Gorbachev’s USSR in the 1980s or Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s Myanmar in the 2010s)—publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four is trumpeted as a sign of that country’s move to increasing intellectual and social freedoms. Some of these regimes, Russia and Myanmar among them, do return to authoritarianism, but that is a failure of the nation, not of the book.

It is possible to argue that the world of state monitoring evoked by Orwell in 1949 has now been superseded by surveillance capitalism, where we and our data are scrutinized 24/7 by companies rather than by the state. In the contemporary world, notions of privacy have changed to the point where they seem almost irrelevant, and people happily curate and promote their lives on social media, monitor themselves with health apps, and trace their whereabouts and those of others on Google Maps. As Shoshana Zuboff warned in her 2017 bestseller Surveillance Capitalism, contemporary surveillance is so integrated into our economic, personal and social lives, and is seemingly so convenient and benign, that we are willing accomplices in our own monitoring. The danger she sees is that contemporary monitoring not only tracks our behaviour but consciously works to modify it for the profit of tech giants like Google, Apple and Facebook.

“Orwell’s novel still provides a strong… depiction of a potential surveillance state most of us would want to avoid.”

All this is true, but it is also the case that the type of state surveillance depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four had not gone away. We and our data are scrutinized 24/7 by companies as well as by the state. Indeed, surveillance generally has been massively enhanced through advances in technology, crises such as 9/11, and the public’s willingness to trade security and privacy for convenience. Orwell’s novel still provides a strong and engaging depiction of a potential surveillance state most of us would want to avoid. It is for that reason that one of Britain’s leading civil rights groups calls itself “Big Brother Watch”, its slogan being “Reclaiming Privacy. Defending Freedom”. These aims suggest something broader than simply monitoring surveillance, and Nineteen Eighty-Four itself has a wider scope, dealing with the manipulation of facts and history, the grim and endless cynicism of superpower politics, how programmed mass hysteria and the control desire can be used for political purposes, and the treachery and power lust of the intellectuals who run the Inner Party, so that O’Brien can tell Winston Smith that the future “is a boot stamping on a human face forever”.

O’Brien has been proved wrong, of course, at least for most of us in Oceania (which included the US, the UK and Australia). This raises the question of the prediction that seems encoded in the novel’s title. Orwell toyed with the idea of calling it The Last Man in Europe, a title which would have aroused none of the increasing excitement and discussion Nineteen Eighty-Four generated in the years leading up to the iconic year of 1984.  One small tech company who took advantage of that excitement was Apple. In a year that coincided with the Olympics in Los Angeles, an Apple ad depicted a young female athlete running into a room full of mindless Party drones watching a Party official ranting on a massive screen. The plucky, individualistic athlete (meant to represent Apple) hurls a sledgehammer that destroys the screen and its messenger (meant to represent the monolithic IBM).

When the real world in 1984 proved to be very different from the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, some critics sniped that the prophecy and the reality were fundamentally at odds. Orwell, they reckoned, was wrong. In fact, of course, and except for an American edition, the correct title was rendered not as a year, but in words. Why might this difference matter? Winston writes the year “1984” in his diary (although he is uncertain of the actual year), so it is not a question of getting the year wrong. But the words Nineteen Eighty-Four suggest a state of affairs rather than a particular historical moment. When we compare our current world to Orwell’s scenario, we do not think of Maggie Thatcher and bad haircuts. Nineteen Eighty-Four has escaped ‘1984’.

Does the year itself matters? Many people claim that because Orwell was writing the novel in 1948 he simply reversed the last two numbers, perhaps to suggest some significant connection between his actual world and the imagined world he fabricated. But the manuscript of the book undermines this claim. Orwell originally typed the year Winston struggles to recall as “1980”. Over this, presumably later (given that Orwell wrote it in ink) he crossed out “1980” and replaced it with “1982”. He then (possibly later still) crossed out “1982” and, again in ink, wrote “1984”. Why the change? We do not know, but clearly the manuscript disposes of the ‘reversal of numbers’ theory. It also critically weakens the argument that Orwell chose 1984 in memory of his first wife, Eileen, who wrote a poem titled “End of the Century: 1984”, published in 1934. At first glance, this seems a startling coincidence, and some have argued that Orwell might have been inspired by aspects of the poem. But the manuscript shows that what would eventually be one of the most famous years in English Literature was only Orwell’s third choice. Had he called the finished novel Nineteen Eighty (his first choice of year) let alone 1980 or The Last Man in Europe, no one would suggest that Eileen’s poem was in the front of his mind when he wrote the novel. If there is a trace of the poem in the novel begun a decade later, it is exceedingly slight.

Clearly though, dates do matter, and the 75^th anniversary of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s publication marks something to recognise and celebrate, exemplifying great literature’s continuing capacity to provoke and instruct, and in the case of this novel especially, to inspire independent thought and action.

Peter Marks is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Sydney, where he taught for 25 years. He previously taught at the University of Hull and completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Marks is particularly interested in the work of George Orwell; in relationships between literature and cinema, and between literature and politics; in literary periodical culture; in the essay form; in utopias, and in surveillance, particularly as depicted in literature and cinema. He is currently the Orwell Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London.

---

Nineteen Eighty-Four at 75: what’s on this month

This Saturday marks the 75th anniversary of George Orwell’s seminal novel - and “call to thought and action” - Nineteen Eighty-Four. We’ve prepared a brief guide to the celebrations taking place this month, and how you can get involved.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, writing is the ultimate act of subversion. The Orwell Foundation is a registered charity which exists to nurture and support the writers and reporters who share Orwell’s values, both those working now and in the next generation. All this month, we’re encouraging supporters to help us introduce more young people to the power of creative and critical writing by making a donation of £2 + £2 (that is, £5), £19.84, £198.40 - or any amount of your choosing.

---

By becoming a Friend today, you can support our work through a regular donation, while accessing exclusive benefits - including two free tickets to Orwell Festival events and a copy of The Orwell Prize anthology. Join from £60 p.a. ($60 overseas). Monthly options and concessions available!

---