Nineteen Eighty-Four

The test is subtractive, and the spine passes it. Everything in the book bends to Room 101: the diary is the first crime, the coral paperweight and the room above Charrington’s shop are the bait, O’Brien’s flat is the trap, and each is required by the end it serves. The rhymes are planted to be called in: “Oranges and lemons” gives Charrington’s shop its last line, and “the place where there is no darkness”, dreamt in Part One, is the lit cell of the Ministry of Love. Even the Goldstein extracts are required, since O’Brien will say he helped to write the book: the tract becomes evidence that the Party knows the truth about itself and holds it in doublethink. What holds the axis below 9.0 is exposition in excess of need. The extracts run long and restate what Part One has shown, and Part One’s tour of the Ministry, the canteen and the slogans explains more than the drama asks. Perhaps a tenth could go; the cost lies in the length of these passages, not in their presence.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a total power does not want obedience but the mind, and it takes the mind by taking the past and the words in which the past could be thought. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The book does not leave this as a slogan; it enacts it. Winston rewrites old paragraphs of the Times; the photograph of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford is held and dropped into the memory hole; the enemy is changed in the middle of a speech and the crowd follows; O’Brien’s four fingers are to be seen as five; Syme’s Newspeak is made “to narrow the range of thought”. And it discloses what the breaking of a person is: not death, but the betrayal of the one love that was the self’s last reserve, “Do it to Julia!” The history after the book has borne the disclosure out. Held off the top because the deepest claim, that “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake”, is asserted by O’Brien rather than found in the action, and Julia, the private life the book defends, is drawn thinly.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Elevation is mostly dreadful, and it comes late. The heights: the Two Minutes Hate, in which Winston’s hatred swings loose from its object; the arrest in the room above the shop, when a voice behind the picture says “You are the dead” and the paperweight is smashed on the hearthstone; O’Brien’s fingers, four or five; the boot “stamping on a human face”; the cage of rats; the last scene in the Chestnut Tree, with the gin, the tear and the victory bulletin. The warm heights are few and exact: the thrush singing in the Golden Country, the prole woman at her washing line singing a song composed by a machine. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is frequency. The plain register keeps elevation rare in the first half, the long expository passages of Part One and the Goldstein tract run level for many pages, and the height of the book is gathered into its last third.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Myth built, and it carries the plot. Big Brother is a god by absence, seen only on posters and screens and perhaps not existing at all. O’Brien is priest, confessor, inquisitor and father, and Winston loves him. The Golden Country is Eden, entered with a woman and lost through a gift of knowledge, Goldstein’s book. Room 101 is a hell made for each soul out of its own “worst thing in the world”. The end is a conversion and a communion, the soul saved into the god it denied: “He loved Big Brother.” The particular stays particular: a varicose ulcer, Victory Gin, a coral paperweight, a stew of grey meat. The proof that the myth is built and not borrowed is that it has passed into common speech and is used there as myth is used: Big Brother, Room 101 and the Thought Police name things in the world. Held off the top because the figures can harden into allegory, and Julia, the Eve, bears little of the structure.

Score: 9.4 / 10

The inheritance is plain and close: Zamyatin’s We, which supplies the frame of a diarist in a total state, a rebel woman, a love affair against the law and a cure; Huxley; Swift; Koestler’s Darkness at Noon for the interrogation. The turn is made in three places, and each is a departure from the masters the book draws on. The future is made shabby and present: the London of 1948, its rationing, bomb sites and razor blades, not a glass city. The regime is stripped of any claim to happiness, against Huxley and Zamyatin both: power is its only end. And language is made the instrument of rule, with an appendix to prove it. The hero is denied even martyrdom. The stake was real: a man of the left, dying, writing a book the right would take up. Held below the top because the instrument is the realist novel with an essay inset, a proven path, and the debt to We is heavy in the plot itself.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The narration never leaves Winston, so the book knows only what a citizen of Oceania can know: whether the Brotherhood exists, whether Big Brother lives and what year it is are never settled, and the reader is deceived exactly as Winston is, by Charrington and by O’Brien. The surveillance is the form. Told from outside, the book would be a report on a state; told from inside one skull, it is the experience of being watched and then entered. The three parts move from the mind alone, to the mind with one other, to the mind taken; and the last sentence, “He loved Big Brother.”, is the narration’s own close third person turned into the Party’s language, the interior abolished from within. Held off the top because the Goldstein tract is a container set inside the novel, an essay the form carries rather than one it requires to be shaped this way.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over seventy-seven years, and the return has been long and divided. Isaac Deutscher’s “1984: The Mysticism of Cruelty” (1955) argued against the book’s despair; Raymond Williams’s Orwell (1971) and Bernard Crick’s annotated edition (1984) followed; Richard Rorty’s chapter on Orwell and cruelty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) read O’Brien as the book’s centre; Thomas Pynchon’s foreword to the centennial edition (2003) pressed the Appendix’s past tense as a sign that the regime did not last. The questions stay open: whether the Appendix is hope; whether Goldstein’s book is true or the Party’s own; whether the proles are hope or condescension; whether the target is Stalinism, the West, or power as such. Each answer has been argued against the others, and none has closed the book. Held below the top because the argument is clear at the first reading, and a share of the yield is the book’s use as a political instrument rather than new depth found in it.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The field is the English novel of the twentieth century, and within it the political novel and the dystopia, which this book made one of the century’s central forms. The intrinsic force: it reorganised what the political novel could do, joining the novel of the private life to an analysis of total power and of language, and denying its hero even martyrdom. Its instrument is the conventional novel, and We had made much of the frame before it; that holds the force below the reach and the axis off the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a reach as wide as any English novel of its century. Its words entered the language and the languages of politics: Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, unperson, Room 101, and the adjective “Orwellian”. Later dystopias, from Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) onward, write in its shadow, and the political essay and the journalism of the century took its vocabulary.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Survival is weighed over seventy-seven years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole as Orwell finished it, the Appendix with it, and nothing that makes the work is lost. Presence: the widest a book of its age can show. It has been in print without break since 1949, is translated into most written languages and taught in schools across the English-speaking world and beyond, was filmed for BBC television in 1954 and by Michael Radford in 1984, and is read again at each turn of political deceit. Fabric: its surface is the rationed London of 1948, and it has outlived the year of its title without becoming a period piece. The widest presence lifts the axis above what seventy-seven years alone would show, and no further: a survival of decades does not stand level with a survival of millennia.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Judged on Orwell’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the plain sentence and the exact physical fact. The first sentence sets the measure: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” An ordinary clause, then the one wrong number. The texture of deprivation is exact and continuous: the gin with its oily smell, the lift that never works, the grime of the canteen, the varicose ulcer above Winston’s ankle. The construction is sure: motifs planted in Part One are called in during Part Three, the rhyme, the dream of darkness, the rat, the chestnut tree; and the interrogations by O’Brien are dialogue that is argument and torture at once. Charged: exposition by tract and by lecture; Julia and the minor figures drawn in outline; prose that is clear rather than load-bearing at the level of the sentence across long stretches; and a middle in Part Two whose love scenes are flat.

Score: 8.6 / 10

One law governs the whole: power seeks the mind, and every private thing is either its enemy or its bait. Take the two most distant elements, the Golden Country with its thrush and the cage of rats in Room 101. They obey the same law. The thrush sings unwatched, as Winston believes, in the one place outside the Party’s sight; the rats are the Party’s proof that there is no such place, that “the few cubic centimetres inside your skull” can be found and entered. The law holds across the range: Parsons, denounced by his own child; the paperweight, a world in glass, smashed at the arrest; the enemy changed in the middle of a speech in Hate Week; the diary and the love affair, each turned from refuge to evidence. The proles stand outside the law in the book’s own terms: “Proles and animals are free.” Charged: the Appendix’s past tense sits at an angle to the law of permanence the novel asserts, and the book leaves undecided whether that is breach or design.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Many orders, held through one apparatus. The state, with its four ministries and its three classes of Inner Party, Outer Party and proles. History, as the thing the state rewrites daily. Language, as an order of reality in its own right, with a grammar. Consciousness: Winston’s memory, his dreams, his guilt for his mother and sister. The family: the Parsons children, the marriage to Katharine, the lost mother. Sex, as rebellion and as a force the Party channels into hatred. Labour: the Records Department, the novel-writing machines of the Fiction Department, the prole quarter. War and geography: three superstates in permanent war. The sacred, as a counterfeit, in O’Brien’s theology of power. They are integrated, not listed: each order is shown as an object of the Party’s grip. What holds the axis lower is that everything is seen through that one apparatus: the natural order appears only in the Golden Country, and the human world outside the Party is thin.

Score: 8.6 / 10