1985 Read Free Page A

A. Richards and C. K. Ogden, which aimed to reduce English to a vocabulary of no more than 850 words, for the benefit of overseas students who were learning English. The poet William Empson (a friend and BBC colleague of Orwell’s) recalled that one of his Chinese students of Basic English had mistranslated ‘out of sight, out of mind’ as ‘invisible, insane’. It was a utopian project, and no less doomed to fail than any other utopia, but Orwell’s overwhelming instinct was to resist the impoverishment of language. As he writes in ‘Politics and the English Language’: ‘When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases –
bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder
– one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy.’Readers of
A Clockwork Orange
will not be slow to notice that there are teenage gang-members in 1985 who speak an invented language based on Hindi. This is a kind of self-referential joke, and it never amounts to anything more substantial than a joke, but it is more difficult to know what to make of the underground university, in which young people secretly teach themselves Latin and Ancient Greek. Perhaps it is an example of Burgess revealing himself as a former schoolmaster, indulging in a piece of hopeless utopianism. His pedagogic urge was slow to fade.
    One fixed point in all of Burgess’s writing about the future is his conviction that the Soviet Union would continue to be a major force in world politics for at least 200 years. In fairness to Burgess, there were few political commentators in 1978 who were far-sighted enough to see that the Berlin Wall would fall just eleven years later, and many on the Left (including academic Marxists and prominent trade unionists) were looking forward to the adoption, through revolutionary change if necessary, of Soviet-style politics in Britain. But often Burgess’s writing about the future simply leaves us feeling that he should have got a more effective crystal ball. It is hard to take him entirely seriously when he says (in his 1984 essay on Orwell) that New Age religious cults represent a more serious threat to the future of British democracy than political terrorism. By 1984 he had already written about the danger of cults in
Earthly Powers
(1980) and
The End of the World News
(1982).
    Despite the loudness of some of its thinking and feeling about ideologies, Burgess’s book is redeemed by its close reading of Orwell, and by the inventive ways in which Burgess manages to dramatize his critical material, such as when he sets up a dialogue between a (semiautobiographical?) ‘Old Man’ and his interviewer.
1985
is not a work of which Orwell could have been expected to approve, but it succeeds in its aim of setting out an alternative dystopia by drawing on the political tensions which dominated the time of its writing. It is a document which speaks very eloquently about contemporary fears and anxieties, and its value is bound to increase as time passes.
    Â 
    2 + 2 = 5
    a notice put up in Moscow during the first Five Year Plan, indicating the possibility of getting the job done in four years, if workers put their backs into it

Part One

1984

Catechism
    When did the twentieth-century nightmare begin?
    In 1945, when, for many people, it seemed to have ended.
    How did it begin?
    With the first use of atomic bombs, developed with urgency to finish speedily a war that had gone on too long. But with the end of the conflict between the fascist States and the free world (which was not all free, because a great part of it was totalitarian), the stage was cleared for the enactment of the basic encounter of the century. The communist powers faced the capitalist powers, and both sides had unlimited nuclear weapons.
    So that –?
    So that what had been