1984

Distopía escrita por George Orwell en los años cuarenta del siglo XX, 1984 ha marcado nuestra concepción, nuestra comprensión de lo que es un totalitarismo. Y no solo el soviético estalinista al que alude de manera más obvia con ese Gran Hermano con bigote cuya mirada en los carteles parece seguirte, sino también a otros totalitarismos más sutiles, vigentes, que afectan íntimamente nuestra esfera privada.

Para quien piense que es una exageración que nuestra sociedad también esté, al menos en parte, retratada en esa novela, le traigo una anécdota de lo más ilustrativa: hace unos años Amazon, por problemas con la editorial de varios de los libros de Orwell, eliminó de todos los dispositivos Kindle, a distancia, precisamente 1984 y Rebelión en la Granja. Y lo hizo sin necesidad de entrar casa por casa, sin necesidad de quemar papel. Fue cuestión de que un tipo en un edificio lejano apretara un botón. Uno de los pilares del universo de la novela, uno de los fundamentos de la ideología Ingsoc, es la “mutabilidad del pasado”, la capacidad del sistema para borrar todos los registros de los hechos y falsificarlos para que todo sea acorde al presente que le conviene al régimen. Desde esta perspectiva, ¿no nos debería inquietar que cada vez confiemos más en buscadores como Google para consultar cualquier duda de los hechos que queramos conocer, hasta tal punto que la pérdida de memoria es generalizada? Y pronto no solo será ir a una web para mirar cómo acabó tal o cual hecho histórico. Cuando seamos viejos el relato de quienes fuimos lo contarán los registros que dejamos en las redes. Registros que, en realidad, no nos pertenecen a nosotros sino a las grandes empresas que a fin de cuentas nos gobiernan. Entraremos en Facebook para rememorar nuestro propio pasado, y Facebook nos “ayudará” a reinterpretarlo.

Y luego está otro aspecto todavía más sutil, muy bien tratado en la novela. Narra el proceso mediante el que la represión doblega la voluntad de una persona, llegando a entrar en la esfera íntima de su mente, allí donde al comienzo de la novela el protagonista pensaba que era intrínsecamente libre e invulnerable.

Y por el camino explica procesos psicológicos que cualquiera puede observar en dinámicas enfermizas de nuestro día a día, como el doblepensar. Y lo hace con buena literatura, con mucho mayor alcance que si Orwell hubiera escrito un erudito ensayo de diez mil páginas. En el libro dice, por ejemplo:

“… la facultad de creer que lo negro es blanco, más aún, de saber que lo negro es blanco y olvidar que alguna vez se creyó lo contrario.”

“Decir mentiras a la vez que se cree sinceramente en ellas, olvidar todo hecho que no convenga recordar, y luego, cuando vuelva a ser necesario, sacarlo del olvido solo por el tiempo que convenga, negar la existencia de la realidad objetiva sin dejar ni por un momento de saber que existe esa realidad que se niega…”

Me atrevería a afirmar que 1984 influyó toda la crítica a nuestra cultura de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Desde la psicología a la filosofía o la sociología. Menciona el panóptico, el modelo planteado por Foucault treinta años después, con una elegancia y una sencillez aterradora. Y que conste que no es un clásico solo por su contenido “social”. Es una obra bellamente escrita, con momentos llenos de significado, poesía y humanidad. Una novela muy bien planteada de principio a fin, lectura necesaria a la que se debe volver con la madurez, cuando uno está en situación de entender mejor el alcance de la Policía del Pensamiento, su poder, y su verdadera intención.

In [b:Amusing Ourselves to Death|74034|Amusing Ourselves to Death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business|Neil Postman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1568871230l/74034.SY75.jpg|2337731] (1985), media theorist Neil Postman reflects on the influence of television on public discourse. ‘We were keeping our eye on 1984’, he writes, warning the West not to lose itself in fear of a dystopia according to George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), based on a system of information control and surveillance: in the end, Postman argues, a ‘show business society’ is more likely to lead to a dystopia according to Aldous Huxley’s [b:Brave New World|3180338|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1551151249l/3180338.SY75.jpg|3204877] (1932), based on contentment and ignorance.

There is, however, an objection to the comparison. It struck me how much 1984 is actually related to Orwell’s earlier work [b:Animal Farm|56730514|Animal Farm|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1611001402l/56730514.SY75.jpg|2207778]. Especially the passages on propaganda and the rewriting of history made me realise that the novel is primarily a critique of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. Orwell’s choice to set his story in London triggers the mind, but I still missed a cultural-historical context. Orwell does not ask how or why; therefore, it remains questionable whether 1984 should be read as an ominous prophecy. Unlike Huxley’s novel, I wouldn’t label it ‘science-fiction’ either. Orwell stayed pretty close to the state of art, referring at most to an extensive network of surveillance cameras and microphones.

Whatever of this, the novel is an absolute 5-star read. Orwell’s atmosphere is so grim and sinister that the reader instinctively knows that Big Brother is watching. There are several ‘details’ that emphasise the creepiness of the totalitarian system, such as the ‘shrinking’ language Newspeak and the segregation between proletarians and party members, who are both free and imprisoned in different manners. I could reread this book many times without getting bored.

For some reason Eric Blair, who was a good journalist, thought he should turn his hand to fiction. 1984 is downstream of Zamyatin's We and most of Franz Kafka's output, and it's probably the latter that is the more interesting comparison, because many people miss the general pointlessness of 1984's scenario. Presumably the Party is only interested in keeping itself in power - thus its disinterest towards the working class, dismissed as 'proles' (for 'proletariat') and who seem to just be getting on with life in a 1930s mill-town kind of way (there is surely a place for the Four Yorkshiremen version of this novel). As a result mind games are played with anyone who might challenge the system - which is probably, in fact the point. The point is not to break dissenters, like Winston Smith, but to recruit them. To bring them onside - hence the last line of the book which is unlike the film adaptation's ending. It's even possible to  surmise that Winston is being specifically targeted - which surmise is worthy of a John Le Carre novel.

What's also interesting, and may derive from HG Wells' treatment of this same subject, is what 1984 does with language. Both Wells and Blair were interested in 'Basic English,' an attempt to streamline the English language for better communication - a kind of Esperanto without having to actually invent any new words. And both writers realised fairly soon that its powers, while great, could be used to control thought. Newspeak - basically Basic English - does some very interesting things with language (this is where Blair diverges from the fiction that he still wasn't very good at, and gets onto something that actually interests him). It has the goal of actually reducing the number of words - which may be no bad thing: Toki Pona, devised by Sonja Lang in around 2000, has somewhere over 120 words, although it produces a lot of new meanings by compounding - my usual example is that 'tomo' means a house. 'tawa' means to travel, so 'tomo tawa' is a vehicle. I don't see why you can't have vocabulary reduction as a goal - except that most writers are writers, so they like using language, and are unlikely to think it's a good thing. I've seen it postulated that the ultimate goal of Newspeak would be to reduce language to one word (in one of my stories the 'language minimalist' Bob Cherry suggests that this word would be 'c**t'). I've also postulated an in-universe conlang (supposedly devised by a speaker of my conlang Na-Hena) called Bnug, which devises a new vocabulary in which almost everything relates to work, obedience, or punishment.

Ironically Newspeak seems to be as expressive as Oldspeak i.e. standard English. Esperanto founder LL Zamenhof (I think it was him) points out that while languages are known for certain features - English's rich vocabulary, French's elegance, Italian's musicality - these are really only features when spoken by their native speakers. It is possible to speak English with a small vocab, French clumsily and Italian clunkily. Newspeak's goals may seem to fail but in appearing to fail, in developing a new language of control, it succeeds.