The making of ‘1984’ － Book Review by Lev Mendes NYT June 12, 2019 書評１９８４
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s “1984” By Dorian Lynskey
Shortly after the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump and his counselor’s invocation of “alternative facts,” anxious readers, bracing themselves for the worst, propelled George Orwell’s “1984” back to the top of the best-seller lists. Published in 1949, under the shadow of Hitler and Stalin, the novel projects nightmare vision of a future in which truth has been eclipsed. Its inventive vocabulary of power and deception － Big Brother, Hate Week, Newspeak, doublethink, the Thought Police － clearly resonated with the despair of presentday Americans. As does the very term “Orwellian,” used increasingly to describe any number of troubling developments: from Trump’s habitual lying to toxic politicization of the news media; from the expansion of campus speech codes to Silicon Valley’s hijacking of our data and attention (the citizens of “1984” are monitored continuously by “telescreens”).
Orwell’s novel is the subject of Dorian Lynskey’s wide-ranging and sharply written new study, “The Ministry of Truth.” Lynskey, a British journalist and music critic, believes that “1984” － one of the 20th century’s most examined artifacts － is actually “more known about than truly known” and sets out to reground it in Orwell’s personal and literary development. This is just as well, since Orwell, ever suspicious of armchair intellectualism, made a practice of writing from experience, to the point of plunging himself into the crises of his day.
In 1936, he joined a coalition of leftwing forces opposing Franco in Spain. Intending to fight fascism, Orwell discovered its diabolical twin, Soviet communism, and became, in Lynskey’s words, acutely aware of how “political expediency corrupts moral integrity, language and truth itself.” He left Spain a committed anti-communist － lifelong adversary of Stalin’s defenders － and spent World War II back home in England. In 1946, he moved to the island of Jura, where, at the age of 45, he completed “1984” shortly before succumbing to tuberculosis.
Lynskey focuses much of his book on the origins and the afterlife of “1984.” He devotes several early chapters to the rise of utopian and dystopian fiction, told through compressed portraits of figures like H.G. Wells (who “loomed over Orwell’s childhood like a planet”) and Yevgeny Zamyatin, the author of “We” － a sort of precursor to “1984.” And he documents the various responses to the novel, which was a sensation from its first publication.
“1984” has inspired writers, artists and other creative types, from Margaret Atwood to David Bowie to Steve Jobs, whose commercial introducing Apple’s Macintosh computer famously paid homage to the novel. Its political fate, however, has been somewhat cloudier. What Orwell observed of Dickens, that he is “one of those writers who are well worth stealing,” has proved no less true of Orwell. Socialists, libertarians, liberals and conservatives have vied to remake him in their image and claim his authority. Orwell’s contested legacy may be rooted partly in his self-divisions. He was a socialist intellectual who hated socialists and intellectuals; an alienated soul who “lionized the common man,” as Lynskey puts it. Still, the filial (and often proprietary) attachment that Orwell’s work tends to evoke in his admirers points to something else: the morally urgent yet highly companionable nature of his writing, which can leave one with the feeling of having been directly addressed by a mind worthy of emulation.
Lynskey largely refrains from participating in the quarrel over Orwell’s and his novel’s true teachings and rightful heirs. If anything, “The Ministry of Truth” can seem too remote at times from its subject matter. For a “biography” of “1984,” it contains surprisingly little sustained discussion of the work itself, mostly referring to it in brief, though insightful, asides that are dispersed throughout. There could have been more in-depth analysis of the dynamics of power in Orwell’s totalitarian state, whose leaders, we are told, are the first to have dispensed with even the pretense of serving humanity. (They pursue power as an end in itself, not as a means to some alleged ideological goal, and exercise it by inflicting pain on others.)
Nor does Lynskey illuminate the literacy or intellectual qualities that Orwell’s novel from its many predecessors and descendants in the dystopian genre. In short, while we learn a great deal about the evolution and influence of “1984” as a cultural phenomenon, we sometimes lose sight, in the thick of Lynskey’s historicizing, of its intrinsic virtues － of what makes it distinctive and account for its terror and fascination in the first place.
Lynskey is surely right, however, to note that the meaning of Orwell’s novel has shifted over the decades along with the preoccupations of its readers; and that in our low, dishonest moment, it is “most of all a defense of truth.” Reflecting back on the Spanish Civil War and the falsification of its record, Orwell worried that the “very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” Yet he never seems to have resigned himself completely to hopelessness.
Winston Smith, the doomed protagonist of “1984,” inhabits a world in which individuality has been made almost obsolete, history is daily rewritten, and reality is fabricated according to the whims of the state. Winston attempts, despairingly and bravely, to rediscover what life was like before the rise of Big Brother. He is shocked that his lover, Julia, is indifferent to the state’s assault on truth － the unreality of the present is all she has known and all she believes ever was or will be. Her complacency is the counterpart to Winston’s energizing despair. In this way, “1984” elevates despair into a sort of necessary condition of truth-seeking. It is here if nowhere else, Orwell suggests, that hope for humanity may lie.
Lynskey largely refrains from participating in the quarrel over Orwell’s and his novel’s true teachings and rightful heirs. If anything, “The Ministry of Truth” can seem too remote at times from its subject matter. For a “biography” of “1984,” it contains surprisingly little sustained discussion of the work itself, mostly referring to it in brief, though insightful, asides that are dispersed throughout. There could have been more in-depth analysis of the dynamics of power in Orwell’s totalitarian state, whose leaders, we are told, are the first to have dispensed with even the pretense of serving humanity. (They pursue power as an end in itself, not as a means to some alleged ideological goal, and exercise it by inflicting pain on others.)
Nor does Lynskey illuminate the literacy or intellectual qualities that Orwell’s novel from its many predecessors and descendants in the dystopian genre. In short, while we learn a great deal about the evolution and influence of “1984” as a cultural phenomenon, we sometimes lose sight, in the thick of Lynskey’s historicizing, of its intrinsic virtues － of what makes it distinctive and account for its terror and fascination in the first place.
Lynskey is surely right, however, to note that the meaning of Orwell’s novel has shifted over the decades along with the preoccupations of its readers; and that in our low, dishonest moment, it is “most of all a defense of truth.” Reflecting back on the Spanish Civil War and the falsification of its record, Orwell worried that the “very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” Yet he never seems to have resigned himself completely to hopelessness.
Winston Smith, the doomed protagonist of “1984,” inhabits a world in which individuality has been made almost obsolete, history is daily rewritten, and reality is fabricated according to the whims of the state. Winston attempts, despairingly and bravely, to rediscover what life was like before the rise of Big Brother. He is shocked that his lover, Julia, is indifferent to the state’s assault on truth － the unreality of the present is all she has known and all she believes ever was or will be. Her complacency is the counterpart to Winston’s energizing despair. In this way, “1984” elevates despair into a sort of necessary condition of truth-seeking. It is here if nowhere else, Orwell suggests, that hope for humanity may lie.
