The Moral Experience of the Self. An Exploration of Selfhood in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Moral Experience of the Self

An Exploration of Selfhood in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Bas Mentink

Student number: 0374881

University of Amsterdam

Master Thesis English Literature and Culture

Supervisor: Dr Rudolph Glitz

table of contents

Introduction

3

Note on Narrative Style and Perspective

7

1. Charles Taylor’s Philosophy of Selfhood

9

2. Perception and reality

13

2.1. Orwell, Reality, and the Intellectuals

14

2.2. Manifestations of Selfhood through Perception

17

3. Memory and Time

24

3.1. Memory, History and the Narrative Self

24

3.2. The Self in Rebellion

29

4. The Others

33

4.1. Awareness of Self through Evaluating Others

34

4.2. Intensification of Self

40

Conclusion

41

Introduction

In their discussions of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Erika Gottlieb (Conundrum 175, 177 and Dystopian 10), Donald Gutierez (284-308), Richard Rorty (178), James A. Tyner (149), and Lilian Feder (392-409) either use the terms “selfhood”, “the self” or both. All of them do so to designate something they regard as central to the novel’s main conflict -the protagonist Winston Smith’s struggle against the all-pervading powers of Big Brother’s totalitarian regime. And, although it is clear that they intend to refer to the sort of entity which is exposed to the threat of Big Brother’s control, none of these critics explicitly define selfhood.

To me the most interesting of these accounts is provided by Lilian Feder. Closely

communicating with Orwell’s text, her well-written article offers a range of insights into the specific instruments and tactics by which the Party of Big Brother seeks to gain control over Winston’s psychological and bodily processes. At the same time Feder convincingly explains how these processes respond to this effort. Feder thus perceives a tug-of-war over selfhood between the

individual and the state, which she describes as “a struggle over conscious and unconscious processes between a solitary man and the united forces of international oppression”. “The major conflict of the novel, Feder thus concludes, “revolves around selfhood”.

In my view, the central conflict of the book indeed revolves around selfhood. But this I only realized fully after becoming acquainted with the philosophy of Charles Taylor, whose concept of selfhood I will use to indicate how we might complement Feder’s ideas on the role which this rather elusive notion plays in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The fact that I think Feder’s ideas need to be

complemented stems from my belief that her (implied) conception of the self is rather

underdetermined. Her account creates the impression that she equates the self with what she calls “the psychological and biological processes of selfhood -perception and cognition, the ego and superego, memory and dream, sexual and aggressive drives”(394). Thereby her analysis fails to acknowledge certain aspects and dimensions which I believe cannot be omitted in a full picture of selfhood. And

this failure, I believe, leads her to adopt a too limited view. While I thus agree with her main conclusions, I believe that these conclusions do not always pertain to the phenomenon of selfhood. Rather, the “processes of selfhood” as Feder describes them, amount to the basic factors determining what it is to be human; and this is not the same as being a self. Her apparent confusion of the two might explain her view that

Orwell does not develop traditional fictional characters; Winston Smith is a prototype of man deliberately being remade by political and technological forces (395).

I do not see how such a view would allow us to get beyond a schematic description of selfhood. Not that I think that Feder’s idea of selfhood must be schematic; the above should have made clear that I consider her analysis of great value to an understanding of the novel’s central conflict. But her perception of Winston As I also said in my introduction indeed seems to determine Feder’s -rather implicitly featuring -conception of selfhood. To my mind the dynamic, reciprocal process she describes between the totalitarian tactics of oppression and the protagonist’s responses is principally an examination of what any human being could undergo. Of course, her analysis touches on topics which are of crucial significance to selfhood. What I think should feature most prominently in an analysis of selfhood is not what makes Winston human but rather what distinguishes him from other human beings. For a complete picture of selfhood we need to come up with an account of Winston’s self that describes him as unique individual with its own idiosyncratic experience of the world and his own being.

Feder perceives the struggle of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s protagonist as an attempt to grasp the “intrinsic connection” of selfhood with language and truth, arguably the two most prominent concerns in Orwell’s attack on totalitarianism, and suggests that in this way the book can be regarded as a “prophetic illumination” of two “deeply related” cultural problems of our present time. The first of these problems is the “steady extinction of elegance and precision in language and consequent poverty of expression in speech and imaginative writing”; the second is the “estrangement of currently fashionable literary criticism, particularly deconstruction, from the reality that literature incorporates and recreates”(393).

With these two issues in mind she pits Orwell -both by virtue of Nineteen Eighty-Four and of his other writings -against the most familiar names associated with postmodern theory and criticism: Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and their American disciples. “[N]o contemporary critic has demonstrated as effectively

as have Orwell’s predictions”, she claims, “the dangers of any programmatic effort to divorce language of its referential function, and to reread history as the dehumanized product of a social system reinterpreted to fit a particular philosophical, psychological, and inevitably political point of view (393-394).

There is indeed reason enough to regard Nineteen Eighty-Four as a “prophetic illumination” of postmodern ideas. It also seems more than pertinent to treat the novel as a defence of traditional

conceptions of language, reality, selfhood against those who sought to criticize them. However, with regard to the issue of selfhood Feder’s account appears incomplete. Her determination to set up the novel in opposition to postmodern scepticism causes her to present selfhood as anchored in fixed, universal human functions with scientific status. Her approach to the issue of selfhood in Nineteen Eighty-Four thus seems to have been influenced by urgency to establish some sort of objectification or reification of selfhood. The following passage, which reiterates Feder’s main argument, further reveals how this sort of approach could be problematic when it comes to selfhood.

The representative figure of Winston portrays the resilience of biological and psychological individuality reasserting its demands against organized suppression and denial, against even the advanced technology of torture. As Orwell views human beings of the future, even those reared in a society calculated to destroy the self continue to resist the psychic compromises necessary for minimal survival. The processes of the self continue, forbidden and unbidden.

Feder’s description of Smith as “representative figure” may be explained by the prominence she gives to psychological and biological factors in selfhood. Winston exemplifies an individual person’s coping with extreme forms of totalitarian aggression and intrusion which is decidedly human in the sense that it stems from universal human components: the body and the mind. He “represents”, “stands for” humankind, the individual, or even the self, and due to Orwell’s craft as a writer the reader is convincingly made to experience the protagonist’s plight. What I mean to show in this thesis however is that Nineteen Eighty-Four conveys a picture of selfhood that transcends its conception as something which can fully be explained by the workings of psycho- and physiological functions.

Feder thus making a valuable contribution to our understanding of the dynamic of power and resistance as it can be perceived in Nineteen Eighty-Four. providing a picture of the various ways in which the novel presents the self as both the focal point of totalitarian aggression and as the individual’s most important means of resistance to this aggression, Feder’s emphasis on the ‘biological and psychological

processes of the self’, leave us with a rather narrow picture of the self. In the first place, it neglects the importance of conscious reflection and contemplation, those functions which are indispensable to our understanding of human agency and which, as will become clear, are key factors in the development of the story. Second, Feder mainly describes how these biological and psychological processes work in terms of their malleability and resilience to totalitarianism as they would, not only for Winston Smith, but for the human individual in general; because of this, Feder’s examination of the protagonist’s responses to totalitarian influence fails to provide us with a full picture selfhood we could associate with the character Winston Smith.

Her analysis thus mainly deals with what produces selfhood, but it leaves underdetermined what selfhood consists in. In order to see what selfhood really means in Nineteen Eighty-Four, we need another type of description to supplement Feder’s description of the physiological and psychological determinants of selfhood, and come up with an explanation of the indeed very central conflict over selfhood in terms that inform us about the reflexive aspect of selfhood, i.e. what selfhood means to Winston Smith, how other characters experience selfhood, and what this means to the novel’s general concept of selfhood.

This thesis aims to prove that a study of selfhood in Nineteen Eighty-Four must lead to a more comprehensive picture of self than that suggested by Feder, one which approaches selfhood from another angle and describes and extends the frameworks of Feder’s discussion by including notions such as rationality, agency, meaning, morality and narrativity. I recognize the importance of bio- and psychological dimensions in a discussion of the self-concept in Nineteen Eighty-Four. I feel however, that a proper picture of the notion of selfhood in the novel can be attained if the discussion of such processes in relation to what I consider even more essential to the self: self-conscious, critical, rational dimension. It is after all in this dimension that the reflexivity of the self manifests itself; here the self is aware of itself; here it enters into dialogue with itself to think critically, reach decisions and orient itself ethically. As far as agency is key to the self, it is this dimension that should be given primacy.

In chapter 1 I discuss how Winston’s perceptions of external reality convey evaluative judgements which point to a certain picture of selfhood. In chapter 2 I examine the significance of memory to the protagonist’s sense of self. In chapter 3 I explore the ways in which other people contribute to the development of Winston’s sense of self. Before embarking on the novel however the reader should have

some knowledge of Charles Taylor’s philosophy of the self. Therefore I have summarized his main ideas in a short chapter preceding my analysis of the novel. The very first thing I need to do however is say

something about the distinct style in which the protagonist’s experience is rendered.

A Note On Narrative Style and Perspective

In my introduction I mentioned that my analysis of the issues relating to the Winston Smith’s sense of self relies on a particular style of narration which is pervasive throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not that the entire story is narrated in this way; as Fowler rightly claims Nineteen Eighty-Four displays “a great diversity of stylistic techniques” (qtd in Carpentier 181-182). A major part of the story however is narrated in a way which seems strongly coloured by the protagonist’s point opinions and emotions that it seems to leave no space for a third-person perspective. The definition of “free indirect style” as the Oxford

Dictionary seems rather too limited. The most prominent narrative style in the text transcends “A manner of presenting the thoughts or utterances of a fictional character as if from that character's point of view”, although we do find this in the novel as well. It is not just his own thoughts or utterances that bear the marks of Winston’s viewpoint. Nineteen Eighty-Four at times presents the entire physical and social environment as mediated through Winston’s perspective.

The narrative technique employed by Orwell is rather a rigorous implementation of the focalisation-technique. According to the definition of Gérard Genette this comes down to the centring of the narrative “on the inner life of just one character”(qtd in Carpentier 182). This indeed seems an appropriate designation of the narrative technique I mean to discuss, although it needs to be noted that the narrative voice has a way of slipping in and out of the protagonist’s perspective. It is nonetheless executed consistently, which is no doubt one of the crucial factors to determine the novel’s engaging quality. The effect of Orwell’s use of the focalisation technique is that the reader is more strongly drawn into the main character’s point of view. Of course this applies to many other successful works of literature as well, but the specific style employed in this book seem uniquely appropriate to one of Orwell’s main purposes in writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in the way that he wrote it: to impart a sense of what it is like to live in a totalitarian state.

By extension, focalisation enables readers to learn a great deal about the selfhood of the character Winston Smith, more than they would if Orwell had chosen for a more ‘neutral’ narrating style. Also it agrees well with the phenomenological conception of selfhood promoted by Charles Taylor, which also entails the private perspective of the person, and thus of “what it is like” to be a self. Taylor thus seeks to base his picture of a person’s identity at least for an important part on how that person conceives of his or her identity: “the self is party constituted by its self-interpretations” (34). This self-interpretation, it will be discussed in more detail, proceeds through a definition of “the way things have significance for me” (34). By virtue of this last element, we can analyse the thoughts and emotions of Winston Smith through the examination of separate words, sentences, and longer passages that would otherwise count as mere description.

Roger Fowler perceives several other narrative techniques which he gathers under the name “mind style”. This includes the “[s]tream of consciousness and interior monologue, association of ideas, the objective correlative, the vocabulary of emotion and reflection, [. . .] and a special way of interweaving the narrator’s and the character’s thoughts known aptly as the ‘dual voice’ or, more technically, ‘free indirect discourse’” (qtd in Carpentier 182). It may be noted here that Fowler uses a different definition than the one I quoted above, on which, I think, agrees better with the narrative styles used in Nineteen Eighty-Four. My reason for mentioning these other descriptions of style is that each contribute in their own way to the reader’s sense of being enveloped by the perspective of the protagonist.

To my idea Nineteen Eighty-Four exploits the enveloping capacity of literature to the greatest possible extent. This is mainly due to the way in which the narrating style represents the experience of selfhood under totalitarian rule. The privateness of Winston’s perspective is increased by the

subversiveness of this privacy. The fact that the very things that make Winston the person that he is are forbidden and need to stay hidden to save him from the most sever kinds of punishment, turns the enveloping perspective into a protective shelter.

1. Charles Taylor’s Concept of Selfhood

In my introduction I stated that the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four conveys selfhood as an experience. I also said that this experience can be regarded as moral, and that Charles Taylor’s philosophy offers a way to illuminate in what way it can be regarded as such. Generally speaking, I will use Taylor’s ideas to help me show how the perceptions, thoughts, and words of the protagonist reflect a moral

disposition which is inherently connected to his sense of self. This chapter aims to introduce these ideas and to briefly indicate in what way they will be connected to the text of the novel in the chapters that follow.

Taylor, along with Alisdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricouer, belongs to the best-known representatives of the so-called “narrative” approach to selfhood (Schechtman, 395). The idea that the human beings understand themselves through narrative, which will be further explained below, is only one element of the elaborate and sophisticated theory of selfhood expounded in his book Sources of the Self. The work comprises both Taylor’s own philosophical interpretation of selfhood and an extensive investigation of the evolution of the modern conception of selfhood since Plato. In the first part of the book it becomes clear how Taylor judges the conceptions put forth by pioneering theorists on the self, such as John Locke and David Hume, but also of the influential contemporary philosopher Derek Parfit, whose arguments “draw on examples inaugurated by Locke”. Taylor objects to their conceptions of selfhood in a fundamental sense. Locke, and by extension for Hume and Parfit, so Taylor observes, define the self “in neutral terms”. About Locke’s version of selfhood in particular, Taylor says that its “only constitutive property is self-awareness”. For Taylor selfhood cannot be defined in this neutral way. It has to be defined in relation to what is

important to the person related.

Selfhood and Morality

One sense in which Taylor’s philosophy of the self can be used, as we will later see, to illuminate the notion of selfhood in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the fact that it regards selfhood as necessarily tied up with morality. Selfhood and “the good”, Taylor asserts, “are inextricably intertwined”. Taylor however makes it clear from the first page that he intends to speak about morality in a broader sense than the term is often

taken to denote. Much contemporary philosophy, he claims, has given a narrow focus to morality, one which would render many of the connections in his work incomprehensible.

This moral philosophy has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life; and it has no conceptual place left for a notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance or, as Iris Murdoch portrayed it in her work, as the privileged focus of attention or will (3).

Three types of morality

One of the things Taylor is thus trying to achieve in his long and complicated work is to expand the range of what may be designated as moral. In this way he arrives at the “three axis of moral thinking”. The first axis, branded as the most familiar understanding of morality, is primarily concerned with respect for and obligation to others; the second axis deals with what it means to lead a full life; the third, relates to questions pertaining to notions of personal dignity. As we will see all three axes stand in some kind of relation to the notion of selfhood in Nineteen Eighty-Four and their respective implications will be discussed in more concrete terms at various stages in this thesis.

Qualitative distinctions and inescapable frameworks

Our moral reactions will thus fall into these three categories. These reactions, Taylor claims, are two-sided. On the one hand they are almost instinctual, “gut” feelings; on the other, if articulated, they will reveal some sort of claim which had up till then rested implicitly in these instinctual reactions. The claims that can be identified in our moral reactions he calls “qualitative distinctions”. These qualitative distinctions, are instances of “strong evaluation”, a crucial concept in Taylor’s philosophy of the self. Strong evaluation involves

discriminations of right or wrong better or worse, higher or lower, which are not rendered valid by our own desires, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which these can be judged (4).

Taylor believes that when individuals experience “some goods as inherently more valuable than others they are responding to their sense that the good is valuable independent of their choice of it”. The fact that he does so, Ruth Abbey argues, poses a challenge to subjectivism.

Together these qualitative distinctions form our moral ‘framework’, which should be understood as the background picture of our moral judgements, intuitions, and reactions. Taylor strongly emphasizes that such frameworks, also identified as ‘horizons’, are an absolute necessity to selfhood, stating that

living within such strongly qualified horizons is constitutive of human agency, that stepping outside these limits would be tantamount to stepping outside what we would recognize as integral, that is, undamaged human personhood (27).

If we had to do without such frameworks, Taylor argues, we would no longer be able to understand the our feelings, thoughts and actions, because we would lack recourse to anything that could lend them

significance. Consequently, we would no longer be able to act on them rationally, since we would lack the frame or horizon “within which I can try to determine case by case [….] what ought to be done (27)”.

Because frameworks consist of qualitative distinctions -discriminations which express our commitments and identifications -the notion of identity in Taylor’s philosophy is necessarily linked to a person’s moral stance:

To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand (27).

This aspect of ‘knowing’, of awareness is what lifts Taylor’s philosophy of the self above many others. This is not to say that other philosophies of the self do not include some notion of reflexivity; on the contrary. What I mean is that Taylor conceives selfhood as involving not only an awareness that one is a self, but also an awareness of what kind of self one is, of knowing who one is. In my view, this agrees more fully with the definition of selfhood I referred to in my introduction.

Taylor makes it clear that articulating the frameworks is important, because it is this which allows us to make sense of our moral reactions. For this reason, tracing the particular framework that underlies the moral judgements, intuitions, and reactions of especially Winston Smith, is a key component of my analysis of selfhood in the novel. This aspect of articulation, of finding a means of expression for one’s responses, suggest a commonality with Feder’s view of how the protagonist struggles to give expression to his identity

Smith uses the language of memory, dream, instinct, and emotion to create a frame of reference for his perceptions. As in his initial act of writing his own slogan, he continues to rely on the limited physical and psychological means available to him, including the internalization of his society's instruments of repression- denial, subterfuge, lying- to maintain the lens of selfhood (Feder, 409).

It is interesting to look closer at the assertion that Smith attempts to create such a frame (which implies that he had no recourse to one before), because, according to Taylor, not having such a frame of reference amounts to “stepping outside […] integral […] undamaged human personhood (27)”. A person ‘free’ of any framework would be compromised in his agency and fall prey to an identity crisis. This raises the question of how Feder views the status of Smith’s selfhood before he comes to rebel against Big Brother and after, and if she believes that Smith can actually be said to suffer from an identity crisis in the before-phase. Although this is a matter that needs to be discussed at a later stage, I will say that an evaluation of Smith’s selfhood through Taylor’s eyes will not likely confirm the diagnosis of an identity crisis. Even under the extreme Oceanian circumstances Smith cannot, so I will try to show in more detail, be reduced to Taylor’s definition of someone suffering from this condition:

Such a person wouldn’t know where he stood on issues of fundamental importance, would have no orientation in these issues whatever, wouldn’t be able to answer for himself on them (31).

The first part of Taylor’s book (not just the chapter entitled ‘inescapable frameworks’) strongly urges the claim that frameworks are indispensable to any human being, and that we would have to imagine a “deeply disturbed”(31) person to see what it would mean to lack such a framework.

Moral space

I need to pause at this point to focus on the word ‘orientation’, with which the notion of a framework is equated. The term ‘orientation’ has a key significance in Taylor’s approach to selfhood, because he uses it to set up an analogy between physical space and a ‘moral space’, and this analogy serves him to advance the thought that selfhood is always connected to morality. The analogy is meant to illustrate that we find ourselves in an environment which confronts us with moral questions in quite the same way as we live in a spatial environment which confronts us with spatial demands. Just as orientating ourselves in physical space is not a thing we could refrain from doing if we wanted to, orientating ourselves in moral space is also unavoidable. Orientation in a space of questions about the good is essential.

This thesis principally uses the narrative concept of self in relation to the themes of memory and time.

The idea that selfhood is narrative offers a good way of speaking about identity as a phenomenological experience, because it stresses the importance of the meaning and intelligibility of experience to the possessor of selfhood. In order to make sense of our lives, as mentioned above, we need some kind of orientation to the good. And because we see ourselves as situated vis-a vis that good we tend to think of our lives as an “unfolding story”. Seeing our lives this way -as a narrative which unfurls in the direction of the perceived good or does not -is a necessary condition for having an identity. It shows how selfhood is always somehow related to both the past and to the future.

In order to have a sense of who we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going (47).

2. Perception and Reality

This chapter is about the significance of perception and reality to, what I called, ‘the experience of selfhood’. Before I begin I would like to clarify my usage of these terms. In the case of ‘perception’ this seems necessary to me, because in ordinary usage it is used in distinctive ways. Here I primarily intend it to denote “the way that you notice things with your senses of sight, hearing, etc”(Longman). By the words “ the way that you notice things” we already understand that, apart from the purely physiological aspect of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting, perception also entails a degree of apprehension. By ‘external reality’, to which I sometimes refer to as ‘the outside world’, ‘empirical reality’, etc., I mean the things and people that exist in the environment around outside the mind of the individual, the world in its material aspect, as perceived through the senses by a human observer -Winston Smith in this case.

Section 2.1. primarily aims to provide background information to explain the meaning of the connected notions of perception and reality in the broader context of Orwell’s writing. The concern for reality and its proper representation in language he expresses in his essays can, I believe, about the way in which the physical environment is rendered in the text and how it can serve to provide with

information about the self. I will highlight the main concerns which determined the focus of his journalistic and essayistic work, aiming to add to an understanding of how these concerns translate into the way in which the protagonist’s perception of the external world is rendered in the book. Some aspects of his non-literary work might thus provide the key to grasping the specifics of the moral framework connected to Winston Smith’s sense of self. The first thing I would like to do is look at some elements of Orwell’s style and how his effort to create this particular style hangs together with a moral stance.

In section 2.2 I will focus on the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four itself. First I will briefly discuss Feder’s observations on the topic of perception and compare these to my own reading of the text. In doing so I intend to explain how the protagonist’s perception of the outside world reflects a normative, morally determined apprehension. From this apprehension, or evaluation, I will try to infer some aspects of the kind of moral framework which crucially defines the selfhood in the context of Taylor’s philosophy. It will become clear that the moral framework thus emerging will bear clear traces of the information discussed in section 2.1.

2.1.

Orwell, reality, and the intellectuals

An obvious characteristic of Orwell’s writing is its concreteness, its close and precise adherence to observable fact. According to Erika Gottlieb the writing style in the novels Down and Out in Paris and

London, The road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia is in that respect very similar to that in his

non-fiction works. She observes that Orwell’s earlier non-fiction generally conveys “a documentary, often journalistic sense of naturalism”. Gottlieb emphasizes however that Orwell’s writing technique is

characterized by its combination of “an extremely sharp focus on the close observation of the environment and the revealing nuances of the individual’s psychological response”(Conundrum 49). His strong attention for the physical and the detailed, concrete, referential writing technique which results from it thus do not entail writing which is devoid of human evaluation. Typically, passages in Orwell’s work which at first glance might seem neutral and factual actually presuppose a type of evaluation which can usually be

described to the protagonist, but it often also unmistakably echoes the author’s voice as expressed his ideas in his essays and journalism.

In order to get a good idea of the meaning of perception and reality in the novel, it seems a good idea to have a look at Orwell’s sensitivity to the physical environment in a somewhat broader context. A good point to start is his 1946 essay “Why I write” (CEJL, vI 22-30) in which Orwell offers a list of his reasons for becoming a writer. And although this essay does not particularly deal with writing style or specifically emphasize factuality, it does indicate a perspective from which we can see more clearly what these things meant to Orwell, and by extension, how they might relate to Nineteen Eighty-Four. In “Why I write” Orwell describes his awakening as a political writer, especially as resulting from his personal experiences in Spain during the years of the Civil War and the just-ended Hitler-era. He posits his

authorship in direct opposition to the totalitarian form of government, whereby he seems to declare himself as an essentially political writer:

[e]very line of serious that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it (28)”.

In the same essay Orwell states that his writing has always been powerfully motivated by aesthetic purpose as well. If we think of Irving Howe’s description of Orwell’s writing in Nineteen Eighty-Four we might find this hard to believe. But even the “gritty, hammering factuality” (Howe 194) which is characteristic of many passages can be designated as aesthetic by virtue of its strong sensoriness. The following quote attests to Orwell’s attachment to the material.

I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us (28).

In my view the combination of descriptions of sensory experience One of the strengths of Nineteen

Eighty-Four, in my opinion, is that it is able to convey the aesthetic the and political at once. This explains

Orwell’s uniquely accomplished way of evoking, as Irving Howe puts it, “the tone of life in a totalitarian society” (197). The “tone of life” for Orwell is thus importantly rooted in physical experience. The first

sentences of the 1943 essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War”, for instance, attest to Orwell’s attachment to the world of the senses:

First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells and the surfaces of things. It is curious that more vividly than anything which came afterwards in the Spanish War I remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front -the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of wine, the trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic interlude among the resounding Spanish ones, Manual Gozalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch (v II, 286).

Although it should not be doubted that these physical details in themselves made a profound impact on Orwell’s mind and determined his style of writing to a great extent, his commitment to recording physical detail in “Looking Back”, as it did in other works of non-fiction as well as fiction, quite clearly serves an extra-literary goal. In the same essay on the Spanish Civil War he reproaches the typical Left-Wing intellectual for failing to appreciate what he called “the essential horror of war”(v II, 287) of which he himself had first-hand experience.

Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the frontline is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) But the laws of nature are not suspended for a “red” army than for a “white” one. A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just (V II, 287).

Here the criticism is directed at the majority of the British and American intellectuals who were unaware of physical reality of war at the time of the Spanish Civil War as much as they were now unaware of it during the Second World War. These intellectuals, Orwell claims, switched from a pro-war-attitude to an anti-war-attitude “not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage”(v II, 288). By explicitly bringing to their attention the sensations that truly make up the experience of war, Orwell reminds them of a reality that cannot be covered by unwarranted abstractions. To describe reality, which, as Orwell was supremely aware, is necessarily a perilous affair, one requires concrete referential terms, words that can be traced back to the things they are meant express. In this way Orwell’s emphasizing of the

importance of being awake to the real physical conditions inherent to the practice of war becomes an admonition to those who blinded themselves to such facts.

But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on the grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence (289). The extent to which the truth was being distorted around the time of the Spanish War and the indifference of those who knew about this distortion made Orwell fear that “objective truth is fading from this world (295)”. This fear, expressed in almost the exact same words is echoed by Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In a later chapter on memory and time this issue will again play a significant role. In the context of perception and reality I would like to emphasize that Orwell’s attachment to concrete reality manifests itself in Nineteen Eighty-|Four at least two ways. The text of the novel helps to remind its readers of the directness and inevitability external physical reality; by extension it forms a bulwark against mental dishonesty, lying and distortions of reality.

Orwell’s moral stance in many discussions can be understood as a commitment to the truthful representation of reality in opposition to those who sought to distort or conceal it. His deliberate effort to write in a precise, style, showing a high awareness of the material side of life, can be regarded as a result of this commitment. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, as we will see in the next section, Orwell’s concrete, referential writing can partly be explained by a moral, even political, purpose. At the same this style stems from a personal, ‘aesthetic’ preference for attractive prose, solid objects, and useless things. Interestingly, in the horror-world of Oceania these are just the kind of things that make the self subversive.

2.2.

Manifestations of selfhood through perception

In the previous section I associated Orwell’s style, in Nineteen Eighty-Four and in other works, with the importance he attaches to external reality and its truthful description in language. Lilian Feder lists perception as one of the processes of self which prove to be “the greatest challenge to the regime’s

authorized versions of reality” (394). Conversely, as Feder indicates, perception is one the self’s sole means to experience his life as authentic (395). How else then by using his senses (or, we shall later see, by his memory) might the protagonist still attempt to test the reality of what the world confronts him with? Living

in a state where the government “denied not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality” (qtd in Steinhoff 170) the individual’s personal relation to reality and the human capacity of perceiving this reality become highly precarious issues.

Feder connects the notions of perception and reality with language, which she describes as “the most basic instruments mediating between individual and psychological demands and the internalization of external nature and society (408). The “major battle” Feder claims, is that over two distinctive concepts of language: Oldspeak, the Oceanian term for traditional language which human beings have always used as a basic means of expression, and Newspeak, the Party’s invented language, created to “limit the range of consciousness” and thereby to limit the means of expression. Oldspeak is the most basic way for human beings to communicate “individual desire, perception, assimilation, and response”. Newspeak, however, is not meant to convey actual inner or outer reality. It is designed, being designed, to create “biological, psychological and physical reality” (408).

In my analysis the crucial importance of language to selfhood should also become apparent. Like Feder, I also deal with language as a mediator between the outside world and the inside world of the protagonist. My treatment of this relation, however, aims to elicit the protagonist’s experience of concrete things and empirically observable circumstances as an indication of Winston Smith’s particular,

idiosyncratic picture of selfhood. In direct relation to this I also want to make clear that this specific picture results from seeing selfhood as an experience, as a consistent way of perceiving the world through

Winston’s perspective. By the inclusion of Charles Taylor’s ideas of strong evaluation and moral frameworks I hope to make clear that this experience persistently advances a picture of the protagonist’s moral disposition, and that the specificity of this picture should urge us to reconsider the way in which Feder treats the notion of selfhood in the novel. I am talking in particular about Feder’s claim that

Winston Smith is a prototype of man deliberately being remade by political and technological forces, the state's evidence that not only culture but human biology and psychology are its antagonists and its conquests (395).

As I said in my introduction I do not agree with the view of the character of Winston Smith as merely a representative figure or a prototype of man. I say ‘merely’, because there is of course a way in which Smith can be regarded as such: He ‘represents’ certain qualities shared by the whole of humankind, and in his resistance to the Party can be regarded as the champion of certain values and the last remaining proponent

of human nature. But this concerns the satirical dimension of the novel, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, apart from being a satire, is also a work of psychological realism. It is by virtue of this latter dimension we as readers are allowed a rich view of the protagonist’s personality. Subsequently, we are also enabled to partake in the protagonist’s experience of selfhood. It is somewhat remarkable then that Feder, who focuses so strongly on the psychological side of the novel would describe Winston as a character to which “the reader does not respond as a multifaceted individual”(395).

The now following examination of the text of novel itself will hopefully convince the reader that quite opposite is the case, that Winston Smith is in fact as ‘multifaceted’ as a book character can be. I begin with an exploration of the way in which the external world is rendered, emphasizing the continuous involvement of the protagonist’s perception. As we take note of the descriptions of the external

environment in the state of Oceania we will be remined of Orwell’s characterisation of the circumstances of military life, the “essential horror of war”. A great deal of the “essential horror” in Nineteen Eighty-Four is surely also caused by material conditions. And the text does not postpone our introduction to these

conditions, as the imagery in the opening sentences provides us with a flash preview of life in Airstrip One:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him (5). With every page adding new details a depressing atmosphere of all-round squalor, neglect and discomfort is quickly established: the smells of boiled cabbage, pinkish-grey stew and sweat; skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades; the acidic taste of cheap gin. But the description of physical environment in

Nineteen Eighty-Four amounts to more than a convincing dystopian setting. Typically, descriptions of the

external world provide information about the protagonist’s point of view. In the first two chapters however the text does not work to at its full ‘focalising capacity’, but the narrative style already works to make the reader partake in Winston’s perspective. The words “cold” and “harsh” in the passage below can be seen as markers of the protagonist’s emotional responses to the world which he observes through a closed window in his flat. Notice also how the greyness of the overall scenery is contrasted with the posters displaying Big Brother’s face: It is a contrast that speaks of more than just a visual disparity.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh

blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and covering the single word INSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered (6).

The description of a sharp contrast between the colourless world and the imposing figure on the poster may be viewed as an indication of Winston’s normative evaluation. The juxtaposition of the phrases “no colour

in anything” except “in the posters that were plastered everywhere”[twice my italics], for instance, helps

this passage convey a sense of impropriety and inequality. The passage also works to impart the intrusiveness of Big Brother. His face gazing down from every “commanding corner”, is a first

manifestation of the ubiquity of Smith’s enemy, a first hint of the Smith’s ever-present feeling of being surrounded and imposed upon. The same goes for the police patrol into people’s windows, described as ‘snooping’, which suggest the nearness of a prowling presence.

We thus read the text through Winston’s normative outlook, or, in the opening chapters, at least through a narrative perspective sympathetic to this character’s experience. This already helps to suggest a sense of involvement in the protagonist’s predicament and conveys a notion of his personal attitude towards the world he perceives. To increase this feeling of involvement the text seems to invites us, at several points, to enter into Winston’s point of view in another way. By imagining how Big Brother’s “dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own” we are almost forced into his point of view. In such ways the text consistently draws the reader into Smith’s perspective, and thus manages to give us a view of the character’s inwardness.

I have just given an example of how the external world is mediated through the perspective of the protagonist Winston Smith, and I mentioned that this implies that descriptions of setting can contain clues that reveal this character’s attitude. In the now following I would like to look at some of these normative evaluations to see what we can learn about selfhood. The subjective experience of the protagonist in itself can already give us the beginning of a picture, but in order to get a full idea we need to be able to connect his preferences and aversions to a more general frame of reference, to the ‘spiritual background’ of

Winston’s reactions to the events and states of affairs in the world that forms a key part of Charles Taylor’s description of what a self is.

A good way to proceed is to look for perceptions which can be understood as moral reactions in Taylor’s broad conception of the word. These reactions should then be translated into “qualitative distinctions”, the kind of statements which contain a sense of the good. Because these in turn are

indispensable to an explanation of a person’s selfhood, it seems worthwhile to subject them to inspection. It may be good to remind ourselves here that Taylor regards qualitative distinctions as indicators of a morality that can be understood in different ways. It does not necessarily apply to norms specifying our duty to others, with what we ought to do out of a sense of obligation, but rather with norms that tell us how to be. In this way they are norms that refer to a specific conception of “the good life”. It is particularly this understanding of morality which is most significant in relation to our discussion of perception and reality in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In addition to the fact that Taylor’s view of morality encompasses a notion of the good life, I would also like to repeat another important point here. Taylor stresses that these so-called distinctions stand independent of our desires, inclinations and choices; they serve as standards by which these can be judged. It is good to be reminded of this before looking at the text, because confusing qualitative distinctions for personal tastes and distastes would be spurious. In order to see in what way certain inclinations and disinclinations relate to selfhood, we need to look at what can explain them. But let us first look at the text again and see if we can detect moral reactions from which we can infer qualitative distinctions. The following passage, taken from the scene that describes Smith’s lunch in the canteen of the Ministry of Truth, seems to oblige:

He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to (51).

It is clear that the situation described above sharply contradicts anyone’s idea of a full, dignified life. Winston’s sense however that “he had been cheated out of something that [he] had a right to” is

somewhat remarkable in view of the fact that he lacks any available standards of comparison. His sensitivity to the griminess and squalor can only be explained, so Winston himself is convinced, if in some way he had some notion of more befitting circumstances: “Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?” Whether it should be an ‘ancestral memory’ or merely a forgotten memory of the time before the Party came to power -as we shall see in the next chapter Winston’s memory often fails him -something informs him that this is not a dignified life. Rather than mere distaste, Winston’s feelings of outrage harbour a moral claim. This claim pertains to a standard of living which he thinks he is morally entitled to. In this way feelings of outrage at the life he is forced to endure can be regarded as qualitative distinctions.

In addition, Winston Smith’s position is impossibly acute. The situation he finds himself in is not a temporary matter, something he will only have to endure temporarily or something which he choses to endure in the name of a higher goal. There is no normal way out of this dreary state of existence. The cafeteria scene merely exemplifies a state endemic to the space to which his entire existence is confined. And, because he also has no memories of ever living under different conditions, he cannot consciously perceive his existence as reaching beyond these demeaning circumstances. This inescapability essentially distinguishes Smith responses from ordinary disapproval, because they automatically count as evaluations of his whole life, as qualifications of its general worth.

The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness (62).

But how can we relate this to a moral framework? Moral frameworks “provide the background, explicit or implicit, for our moral judgements”(26). And, I have just concluded that Winston’s disapproval of his living conditions contains a moral claim. Then to what kind of background can we attribute this claim? Possibly the ‘ancestral memory’ that he imagines might have inspired in him the recognition of the injustice of these conditions has been inherited from the culture in which he spent

his childhood. At any rate it must be a framework within which human dignity is predicated on certain standards of comfort and physical wellbeing.

The tone of resentment in Smith’s depressed musings and the mention of Smith’s “protest in his stomach and skin against the squalor of life” also agree well with Feder’s high appreciation of psychic and bodily processes of selfhood in the protagonist’s resistance to totalitarian power: “Bodily feelings that define needs and yearnings convey a sense of one's individual incorporation of inherited satisfactions and values (401)”. As I mentioned in my introduction, Feder does not spend much time explicating the significance of perception to selfhood, and she uses this particular quote to illustrate another matter, (namely the manifestation of dreams and memories in physiological impulses, themes to which I will turn later), but it seems likely that she would regard the passage as one of many indications that Smith’s resistance to Big Brother is crucially informed by the data provided by his sensory perception. His expression of resentment and his feelings of being cheated add this picture a deeper moral undertone. Not only is Smith dissatisfied, he also carries a grudge and feels he is entitled to something better.

As I remarked above the reader’s engagement in the story is importantly determined by Orwell’s consistent use of the free indirect style, which has a way of enveloping us in the subjective experience of characters. We become participants in Winston’s struggle. Looking at the world through his eyes, perceiving the environment as coloured and shaped by the evaluative terms that stem from Winston’s disgust and, as we now have seen, indignation, makes it possible to share in his highly particular life experience as he lives it, which offers us the insight we were looking for: the insight into Smith’s sense of self.

They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold onto that! The solid world exists. Its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre (67).

3. Memory and Time

Nineteen Eighty-Four features an analogy between the function of memory to the human person and the function of history to a civilization, which Orwell had already sought to work out in A

Clergyman’s Daughter as early as 1935. With this novel Nineteen Eighty-Four shares the implication

that “just as memory is necessary to the individual -making him what he is as a personality -so truthful history is necessary to a nation and to humanity”(Steinhoff 131). This chapter will look at the themes memory and history in conjunction, albeit with the primary focus on the life of the individual in order to draw conclusions about selfhood. This will lead to a discussion of the relation between memory, history and the self, which will also include the notion of truth which I have already addressed in the above.

But this chapter will not merely focus on selfhood in relation to the past. As will become clear in the following, particularly through my application of Charles Taylor’s notion of the narrative self, the development of selfhood is also importantly predicated on a person’s vision of the future. Before turning to Taylor I will first examine Feder’s article. I intend to unpack her analysis and to subject it to a critical examination. I thus use her article to highlight what I consider crucial to a good

understanding of selfhood while at the same time striving to complement her approach It will become clear that especially the narrative aspect of his version of selfhood lends itself well to an illumination of what memory and time mean to matters of selfhood in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

3.1.

memory, history, and the narrative self

Feder designates memory as “the most essential activity of selfhood”. Its significance to Winston is first made apparent when Feder focuses on the problems the protagonist is experiencing to remember his personal past. She refers to an early moment in the book, where Winston, “keeping his back turned to the telescreen”, is trying to recall whether the currently ubiquitous squalor and decay also applied to the London of his childhood. Feder points out that the wording ““to squeeze out”, seemingly inappropriate for the flow of memory” signifies “the inhibition of a biological process”(398-399).

Unfortunately, Feder fails to address a telling aspect about this particular quote which I consider important to selfhood. To my mind the passage from which Feder quotes should be looked at as a whole. In this way it becomes clear that it suggests an explanation for Winston’s inability to remember past states of affairs. The involvement of Taylor’s idea that identity relies on a person’s ability to grasp his life as a narrative may prove beneficial to this explanation when we consider the passage as a whole, especially the last two lines.

He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? […] But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible (7).

The last sentence tells us that Winston cannot make more of this particular part of his past than a collection of disconnected pictures. These pictures seem to be purely pictorial items, devoid of any meaning. The sentence associates this disconnectedness as a lack of integration into a background, the necessary setting to make his life’s story an intelligible and consistent whole. There is no context to these pictures, no story to endow them with significance. It is by looking at it from this perspective that we can see what Winston’s being “inhibited” entails about his selfhood. It prevents him from truly re-entering the world of his past thus also leads to an inability to perceive himself as part of an

unfolding story.

The passage thus illustrates Taylor’s conviction that grasping our life as a narrative is

necessary in order see it as a meaningful whole. If Winston is indeed incapable of doing so in general this would not be a small matter. As we have seen, for Taylor and other narrative theorists, meaning and intelligibility, crucially rely on one’s ability to relate to a certain good. This awareness lends the passage additional acuteness. It raises our awareness that his predicament is in fact utterly devastating. His failure to remember the environment he grew up in in itself a disturbing realization. How can Winston -when “nothing [has] remained of his childhood” except a few incomprehensible impressions – retain a notion of how he has become? And, then, as a consequence, how can he possibly form an

idea of who he is? Before drawing conclusions it seems advisable to further explore these issues. First of all, let us try to assess the seriousness of Winston’s memory problems.

We have just established that Winston’s memory issues are beyond the failure to remember things from the past that the average person will recognize, and that the above quoted passage attests to this. Reading the first three chapters one might conclude that it exemplifies the all but complete vanishing from Winston’s mind of the remembrance of things past. The first three chapters alone contain enough references to memory problems to suggest that we are dealing with an amnesiac. We continually witness his uncertainty regarding facts, events, people, and his own intentions: in what quarter the junk-shop was located “he did not remember”(9); […] he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984”(9); “he seemed to have forgotten what it was that he had originally wanted to say”(10); “and he was already uncertain whether it had happened”(18); “he did not remember his sister at all” (27). Especially worrying about Winston’s memory trouble is that it pertains as much to things of the distant past as to the things of yesterday.

Winston himself seems also well aware that that his general forgetfulness and inability to “think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood”(29), must bear relation to the absence of external sources of information. any sort of repository that might prevent the loss of public knowledge in Oceanian society. A large part of why he fails to remember his childhood and cannot hold on to ordinary facts, is that he lacks support for these facts in anything outside his own memory. Having no external sources of information means that you lack the means of verifying the details of a particular event or state of affairs, but the consequences of this absence are far more comprehensive. In addition to having no recourse to files that may help you to solidify your perspective of the world, it means that you will not even be able to acquire a more or less defined idea of your life to begin with, as Winston’s musings indicate:

It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late ’fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing (29).

Winston is supremely aware of what the Party is doing. He himself is involved in the continuous alteration of the past by profession: His job at the Ministry of Truth entails the routine task of destroying news items which conflict with the interests of the Party.

If one is cut off from the past as Winston is in Oceania, if one’s memory is not sustained by objective evidence, and one has no recourse to history, can one still preserve from the domination of the environment any part of oneself (Steinhoff 179)?

A remarkable example of the huge imposture undertaken by the Party in this respect is the way in which it reports on the international position of Big Brother’s empire, which is eternally at war with one of the other existing world powers, Eurasia and East Asia. The text repeatedly makes mention of the sudden shifts of alliance between Oceania and either Eurasia or East Asia, while ‘officially’ no such changes ever take place, since “no written record, and no spoken word ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one.”

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that

knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed –if all records told the same tale –then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it ().

The absurdity of these sudden alignment changes, which, the text relates, have occurred repeatedly during Winston’s lifetime, is most powerfully conveyed in a scene depicting the sixth day of Hate Week, a large-scale annual event organized to accommodate Oceania’s hatred of the collective enemy Eurasia, a manifestation for which the entire population has been straining itself to prepare for weeks on end.

On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns –after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd had got their hands on the two thousand war-criminal who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces –at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally (171).

The terrifying thing about the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that even the people involved in the preparations for this massive event instantly accept Oceania’s sudden change of affiliation. And not only do they accept the change without a second thought, they instantly forget that a change has even occurred. That such a thing is possible in Oceania cannot be understood without knowledge of the concept

“doublethink”, the Newspeak word for the previously mentioned term “reality control”. Doublethink is a psychic trick which every good Party member must be able to perform. It is “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”(171). Oceanians thus remember, that a minute ago, Eurasia was still their enemy, yet at the same time they believe that this was not the case, and, what is more, they believe that it never has been the case.

She points out that he not only has to contest with “the lying images but also with his own internalization of these images”. The principle Orwell invented to convey the mental process that enforces this belief -doublethink -is, according to Lilian Feder, “Orwell’s most important contribution to an understanding of the ways in which the individual mind resists and succumbs to political, social, and cultural oppression”(395-396). According to Feder it is one of the things which lifts Orwell’s analysis of totalitarianism above other descriptions. Orwell’s novel contributes to an understanding how the individual deals with deceit and manipulation, while Hannah Arendt, for instance, fails to capture these psychological implications.

When she deals with denial, it is as a political strategy. In other words, she does not consider the psychological effects of conditioning in denial: the complexity of individual reaction to political lying, to distortion and reconstruction of reality, to power identified only by shadowy images, or, on the other hand, to facts that belie propaganda, to dreams and emotions (397).

One of the effects of “conditioning in denial” exemplified by Winston Smith, in Feder’s eyes, is his repression of the awareness that his rebellion will lead to his downfall: “Denial operates in the dream censorship to prevent him from facing the specific outcome of his rebellion (400)”. Another effect, she claims is an “identification with the aggressor”. Feder suggests that the principle of doublethink functions in Winston’s mind to make him repress his awareness that O’Brien will eventually betray him, and in fact, that his whole decision to resist Big Brother is hopeless.

The truth in this case which Winston’s mind is trying to block out is still brought to his attention through the workings of the unconscious. “Consciously, and in more threatening ways unconsciously, he knows from the beginning that his effort is doomed (400)”.

Smith knows he cannot win, but he cannot yet let himself know, in fact, he delays knowing as long as possible, the particular way in which he is finally to be defeated, the ultimate torture that will result in his surrender of the last remnant of selfhood. He has unconsciously transformed denial into a shield, a protection against knowledge that would end his struggle before it has really begun (400).

3.2. Rebellion of The Self

Lilian Feder presents Winston’s situation as even more complicated. As I previously explained her analysis relies on the observation that a continuous battle is taking place for control of Winston’s “processes of self”. This battle involves, on the one hand, a consistent, systematic effort on the part of the oppressor; and on the other it involves the means of resistance to this effort in the form of

Winston’s ‘processes of self’. In the following I hope to shed light on the nature of this resistance by looking at its distinctive components and their mutual relations. The first of these components is writing, more specifically the act of recording thoughts and experiences in a diary, which Winston undertakes in the early stages of the novel.

Feder rightly attributes great importance to Winston’s diary-writing in regard to his relation to time. To maintain his sanity he critically depends on his ability to create an authentic version of his experience as embedded in time: “Facing his intellectual and emotional imprisonment, the difficulty of remembering and writing, he feels impelled to arrest the infection of his mental processes by

producing his own version of past and present events as a claim on the future” (401). She describes and interprets a dynamic reciprocity between the act of writing and remembrance and places a strong emphasis on the relation between the act of writing and the workings of the unconscious. She gives an interesting account of how supressed memories of Winston’s childhood find their way back into Winston’s conscious mind as a result of his writing spells, and suggests how these help Winston to realize his goals: