Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four, translated by Dong Leshan, Liaoning Education Press, March 1998
At last I’ve finished this book.
Let me say it plainly: personally, I find it not as good as Brave New World, and I even think it is less interesting than Orwell’s Animal Farm. Of course, it is still a good book.
I don’t know much about literary criticism; perhaps Orwell’s writing is better than Huxley’s, but I’m not very sensitive to that. In any case, both books are very well written. Some people say Orwell writes in a more “human-centered” way, with a deeper insight into human nature. Huxley, they say, is too cold. In a sense that is true: Huxley focuses on expressing ideas, and the characters he writes are not very real or vivid, especially figures like the “Director,” who is entirely a “mouthpiece,” using his voice mostly to express the author’s line of thought. These characters and the plot have a feeling of being “specially arranged.” But in Nineteen Eighty-Four, those perverse personalities built around “2 + 2 = 5” are not all that real either; human nature is distorted so exaggeratedly that it feels “artificial.” The long passage “excerpted” when the book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism is discussed in the middle of the novel also feels stiff and unnatural as a book-within-a-book device. Brave New World, after all, uses a complete and fluent narrative to express its ideas. And, for example, O’Brien’s logic is simply impossible to understand. Take the question raised in the book: “Since we are going to destroy you utterly, so that what you say or do will no longer matter in any way—why, then, do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first?” Although the book offers an explanation, that explanation reads no differently from the explanation of a psychopath and does not seem at all reasonable. Torture for the sake of terror, terror for the sake of torture, totalitarianism for the sake of totalitarianism—is this something a person who is not psychologically twisted can easily accept? If it is “perverse,” then it cannot be “normal”; it is hard to expect such a perverse regime to maintain long-term stability.
“Artificial” is only a matter of detail. The biggest difference lies in the two authors’ “design” of future society. Personally, I think Huxley’s “design” is more “reasonable” and has greater real-world warning value.
First of all, the biggest problem is that, compared with Brave New World, another dystopian work, the world described in Nineteen Eighty-Four is not frightening enough. The reason I am actually saying it is not frightening enough is precisely that that world is too “terrifying,” too “perverse.” Excessive terror and perversity, on the one hand, make it seem insufficiently real; on the other hand, they prevent that society from being truly “hopeless.” In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is deception, violence, fear, hunger, and repression everywhere. Some things are hard to make anything other than “bad” under any value system whatsoever, such as deception and hunger. History can indeed be rewritten, and if no one remembers the truth anymore, then when there is no way to verify it, false is true and true is false; history really is such a thing. But the person carrying out the rewriting is in fact deceiving others during the act of rewriting, and he knows that he is deceiving. Since one is actively rewriting the truth, at least some people must be conscious liars. Yet in the most terrifying society there are no conscious liars; lies carried out unconsciously are what are truly terrifying. And as long as there is still someone who knows the fraud for what it is, there is that kind of “hope” — among those who know they are fabricating things, there will always be someone who may one day have a pang of conscience, someone who will want to expose the lie. Although resistance is usually hard to become a force of any scale, and the terroristic ruler has powerful coercive strength to ensure that resistance is controlled in time, in such a society we still have reason to “hope”: there will surely be resisters. For the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty is also an intrinsic demand of human reason; human thinking does not like self-contradiction. Even if “Newspeak” is used to restrict thought, as long as there is language, human beings can think; as long as there is thought, they will inwardly reject contradiction. 2 + 2 cannot both equal 4 and not equal 4; however language is altered, it is hard to overturn these most basic intuitions. Even in animals, certain basic things still hold. So we can expect that those who participate in deception—even if not every one of them, at least some of them—may feel ashamed of what they are doing. Everyone has a sense of right and wrong; for human action to attain some kind of certainty in thought, there must be the concept of “right,” and along with it, necessarily, the concept of “wrong.” In short, as long as some people actively engage in fabrication, there will surely be people who become conscious of how shameful the “fake” is; there will surely be people who want to resist, and that society will contain “hope.” What is more, the society of Nineteen Eighty-Four is also full of bodily pain, hunger, spiritual fear, and the repression of desire, and so on. “Food and sex,” as animal instincts, are not things that can be easily eliminated; if they are forcibly suppressed, the heavier the suppression, the stronger the resistance it may provoke. Thus that terrifying society must conceal factors of resistance, and once such resistance erupts successfully, it will be irreversible.
Perhaps totalitarian society is built with such stubbornness, and the force of domination is so solidly entrenched that one could exaggerate it however much one likes, so that any resistance seems powerless; yet it still has “hope.” For social development is like a chaotic system, whose stability can never be absolute. Even the most ideal and beautiful utopian system may be overthrown. Like a chaos effect, a tiny force of resistance may unexpectedly trigger a successful great revolution, and even the most stable society may fall into turmoil. When I speak of a society’s “stability” and “instability,” I do not mean whether or not turmoil can occur, but whether the system itself is stable. Take, for example, China’s ancient bureaucratic system (let us call it that for the moment. From any angle, China’s ancient system should not be called “feudalism”; that is a serious misunderstanding caused by mechanically copying Western history. China’s bureaucratic system was also not “totalitarian”; if one looks at its mature form in the Tang and Song periods, its structure was extraordinarily complex, the imperial power was constrained in many ways, and perhaps it was more like a kind of “theocracy”…) — it was highly stable. Although turmoil occurred from time to time, and those in power were from time to time overthrown, as the saying goes, “long division must unite, long unity must divide”; after turmoil and reorganization, the new government that emerged was often still a continuation of the old regime. By contrast, social forms built upon “madness,” relying on constant fabrication and on violating human nature and natural laws, are unstable. A stable social system is like a roly-poly toy: however much it “wobbles,” it always returns to its original place; an unstable social system is like a skyscraper: no matter how indestructible and immovable it may appear, once it truly wobbles even the slightest bit, its collapse is an inevitable trend, and after the collapse it will be hard to return “spontaneously” to its original state. I find it hard to believe that once a regime like that in Nineteen Eighty-Four is overthrown, a nearly identical regime could be built again, just as the fall of fascism, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cultural Revolution are irreversible processes. Times of turmoil are the freest times for thought. Once those unstable regimes held together by “sentimentality,” “coercion,” or “deception” are overthrown—so long as it is not a palace coup—there will surely be a period of “turmoil,” a chaotic transitional period. And as the saying goes, heroes emerge in troubled times; it is precisely in troubled times that people’s thinking is most active and most free. Surely someone will reflect on the mad age of the past, and once people realize how absurd that age was, it will be hard for them to accept the emergence of an equally new regime. People may even support a new kind of madness that stands at the opposite extreme from the original system, but in any case, that old madness is not a steady state.
Of course, what kind of society is “reasonable” and what is “mad” has no clear boundary. Yet in any case, if we admit that there is at least a little something “reasonable” in this world, then forcing people not to acknowledge that “2 + 2 = 4” must surely be “madness.” This is probably a kind of exaggerated writing technique on the author’s part, satirically magnifying real-world things like “calling a stag a horse,” but sometimes excessive exaggeration can seem very unreasonable. Although we can see the shadow of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the former Soviet Union and in China’s Cultural Revolution, these cases precisely show that “hypocrisy” probably would be exposed before it could persist to such an exaggerated degree, and once exposed, that terrifying age would collapse irretrievably and with a crash. A society like Nineteen Eighty-Four, so mad that people are psychologically distorted and bodily starving, yet still able to exist stably, sounds like a miracle.
What is truly terrifying is not material poverty or bodily pain, but spiritual emptiness. Suffering is not the most frightening thing; wherever there is suffering, there is “hope.” More frightening still is when there is simply no “suffering,” when people no longer feel pain, as in Brave New World.
The world of Brave New World is opposite to that of Nineteen Eighty-Four in many respects: for example, Nineteen Eighty-Four is “ascetic,” whereas Brave New World is “hedonistic.” “Asceticism” is repression, and repression leads to resistance; hedonism, however, brings overflow and release, leaving only emptiness in the end. It is more frightening to make people submit with drugs than to make them submit with torture. Which is the more serious problem in modern society? — it is not excessive asceticism, but excessive hedonism. The development of capitalist society is driven by human greed; this has become one of capitalism’s basic principles. The rejection of ethics and tradition, and the release of material desire, are a trend in contemporary social development. In addition, the unreflective worship of “technology” is also a major problem in contemporary society. Nineteen Eighty-Four satirizes “totalitarianism,” but only in the political sphere; it depicts the possibility of a terrifying future regime, and that regime is so perverse that it feels as if its emergence could only be an accident, while it does not reflect any broader tendency in contemporary social development. Perhaps the Soviet Union is an example with a tendency toward Nineteen Eighty-Four; yet we should see that the Soviet Union was one case, and China another. The later political conditions of the Soviet Union and China were not caused solely by socialist thought, but were more closely related to the original cultural traditions of Russia and China. Needless to say, revolution would be difficult to succeed in Western Europe and North America; even if it did succeed, it would be hard for it to develop into a uniform form. Orwell’s Eurasia, Oceania, and Eastasia are too simple; the actual situation would not be so ideal. A balanced state is not so easy to maintain, and only if, as Orwell describes, those three countries can continuously and tacitly maintain a balance of power can so-called “war is peace” be effective. And this long-term maintenance of balance, however one looks at it, seems like a miracle, as though Orwell deliberately arranged these three countries in order to make the world he designed reach equilibrium. And once the number of great powers is two, or four or more, or if the balance among them is not so even, the equilibrium Orwell arranged can no longer be achieved. In short, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is both unstable and unrealistic. As satire on “totalitarianism,” Nineteen Eighty-Four does not offer much that is new beyond Animal Farm. Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts quite a lot in terms of technology, torture, and a perverse “philosophy,” whereas the regime in Animal Farm does not need telescreens, does not need torture, and has no long stretches of incomprehensible philosophy. Perhaps these things make Nineteen Eighty-Four more terrifying? But they also make the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four seem even more perverse, and less realistic than Animal Farm.
By comparison, the world of Brave New World is more realistic. First of all, it is a stable society: there is no suffering, no cruelty, no terror, no hunger in this society. Nor is there self-contradiction—the rulers and the masses believe in the same things (perhaps the Director is an exception, but the role of the Director seems more like something Huxley deliberately arranged), and there is no rewriting of history—they merely forget history, abandon history, and do not need to rewrite it at all. Orwell describes the world as one in which half the people cannot even wear shoes, a world full of hunger, where even sexual intercourse between husband and wife is restricted… He thinks these are bad things. Yet although these are indeed bad, suffering is precisely where hope lies. No matter how much the masses are fooled, no matter how much they are deceived, food, clothing, shelter, and sex are always irreducible basic human needs. If even the most basic needs cannot be met, then however much thought is restricted, resistance will always be stirred. And as long as “turmoil” appears, it means society may yet have a turning point. A worse world, however, is one without suffering, one full of “happiness,” where the masses are intoxicated by indulgence and entertainment, and only a few lovers of wisdom will seek resistance because of spiritual emptiness, while those who are too lazy to reflect will sink into decline. People sunk into this “beautiful” world will be unwilling to accept a poor, suffering, ugly world full of uncertainty. If revolution were to occur in this world (would it?) then what? People would still long for that prosperous, stable world without hunger or suffering; the world always tends to return to its original stable state. Moreover, “Brave New World” is the result of society continuously “advancing,” unlike “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” which contains many so-called “retreats,” for example, “many practices long ago abandoned … are once again widely in use.” Since there is “retreat,” there is reason to expect that it may well turn back again, and in the end move forward once more. And a world like Brave New World gives one a sense of “despair” — as if such a world were the “end point” of human civilization, the final result of ceaseless progress. Once all classical culture has been forgotten, there is nothing left to save this world from decline; the last hope may be only humanity’s eternal fear of “death,” which no advanced society can abolish. Only where fear exists can there be resistance; only where fear exists can there be “hope.”
In addition, Orwell’s entire attention is concentrated on “politics.” But Huxley’s satire goes far beyond politics, far beyond “totalitarianism.” It also profoundly satirizes contemporary people’s values and the blindness of modern technology. Although it was written earlier than Nineteen Eighty-Four, today it has greater real-world significance. In technological terms, Huxley’s imagination about the development of technology is richer and more reasonable. In general, once the political satire is stripped away, Nineteen Eighty-Four becomes very thin indeed.
Of course, although I admire Brave New World and Animal Farm more, on the whole Nineteen Eighty-Four is still very wonderful and well worth reading. Its shortcomings are only shortcomings by comparison with Brave New World.
September 20, 2006
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- Gu
September 21, 2006 09:46:03
Actually, as for the terrifying nature of mad systems, there is no need to read a novel; just looking at historical records about campaigns such as the suppression of counterrevolutionaries, the Rectification Movement, the Cultural Revolution, and the like is enough to make one feel warned. Nineteen Eighty-Four foresaw and exaggeratedly portrayed this real-world madness. But the effect of literary technique varies from person to person; for many people, perhaps the more exaggerated it is, the more it can strike a chord, whereas for me personally, depictions that are exaggerated to the point of seeming unreal are less shocking than real cases. The lessons to be drawn from actual madness are already profound enough. In addition, after Reform and Opening Up, the world situation changed, and the urgent threat was no longer “totalitarianism” (to some extent thanks to the U.S. as a counterbalance). And with globalization unfolding, accompanied by the rise of media culture (things Orwell could not have foreseen in his time), many new problems emerged. The political fervor that was once high among the masses in Orwell’s era had long since faded; the masses were no longer so easily “fanatical.” The opposite problem, rather, was “indifference.” Orwell himself, as a socialist, deeply detested the distortion and abuse of socialism by certain people as nothing more than a slogan, and thus used his pen to satirize those who, under the banner of socialism and the proletariat, moved toward totalitarianism. But times have changed; socialism as a slogan is no longer merely distorted and abused, but has instead had its reputation thoroughly ruined. The “slogans” more often distorted and abused now are concepts like “science,” “democracy,” and “freedom.” In short, the “dangers” Orwell warned about will never lose their significance, but they are no longer the foremost problem of our era. The situation now is that even if someone wanted to use the banner of socialism to engage in totalitarianism, they would not be able to make much of a stir, because socialism has long since lost the appeal it had in Orwell’s day, and the public’s political passion is likewise worlds apart. These factors mean that whatever way one looks at it, the warning significance of Nineteen Eighty-Four today is much weaker than it was in 1948; yet the problems implied by Brave New World have not faded with these decades—on the contrary, they feel increasingly severe. This is the main reason why I place Brave New World above it,
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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