Did Margaret Atwood fundamentally misread Orwell's Appendix to 1984?

Cafe Society
1

I heard Atwood interviewed on KCRW’s The Business, talking about she came up with the “coda” for her book The Handmaid’s Tale. She based it on what I would consider an overly optimistic take on the Appendix of George Orwell’s 1984. Check out what she says about it at the 18:30 mark (spoilers for both *1984 *and The Handmaid’s Tale, obv.).

I thought she clearly misunderstood Orwell’s intent there, but in the only thread I could find about it on the SDMB, only the final post of the thread jibes with the way I interpreted it.

The crux of what I’d call the misunderstanding comes, I think, from the first few sentences:

I guess the first sentence implies to some people that Newspeak (and perhaps Oceania) *did *exist, but no longer do, at the time the author of the Appendix is writing. And then the implicit notion taken by the last sentence quoted above is something like “…but this never happened, because Ingsoc did not last until 2050.”

But my sense is that Orwell was simply continuing to write in the past tense, as he had used the entire novel (and which I suspect was considered the standard format at the time). And even if this was jarring to fit with an appendix which discussed various time periods, he was just bound and determined to force it. I would say one clue that Orwell was simply working within an overall past tense format, that was awkward to fit with the speculative aspect of this section, is the tortured grammar of this sentence: “When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed.” :eek: Okay then.

To the degree that Orwell was even imagining a narrator other than himself (and I’m not at all sure he was), I think such a narrator would have been situated in something like the late 1980s or maybe the 1990s. I base that on the closing sentences of the opening paragraph, as well as the earlier sentences quoted above:

So at the time setting of the Appendix, the Eleventh Edition has been finished (wasn’t this what Winston Smith’s acquaintance was working on, the one who loved to jabber on about it at lunchtime in the cafeteria?), yet that wasn’t the case yet in the year 1984. However, it is not yet as late as 2050, because it is phrased that full adoption “was expected” by that date. Therefore, all we really “know” from any of this is that within a relatively short time after the events of the novel, Ingsoc was still in charge of Oceania, and they expected to stay so indefinitely (including the year 2050). Whether that actually transpired (in-universe, of course) is beyond the scope of what is described. Right? Or am I way off?

Anyway, even if Orwell didn’t mean it this way at all, it’s interesting that it inspired Atwood to end her novel (currently arguably more influential than Orwell’s) with a sense of “future retrospective” optimism that she, perhaps wrongly, assumed her authorial forebear shared.

2

If I’m following your argument correctly, I agree. I don’t feel Orwell was trying to suggest that Ingsoc was going to collapse at some point after the events in the novel. He just used the past tense as a narrative choice.

My opinion is that Orwell was communicating the exact opposite message. He believed that once a society like Oceania it was self-perpetuating. The people within that society could not overthrow it. The only way to avoid living in Oceania was to prevent it from arising because once it existed it was too late. 1984 was a warning to readers in 1949 about a future they should work to avoid.

3

I think we’re on the same page. One point I hadn’t thought too much about, though, that was raised in the earlier thread by Bryan Ekers is that “what will eventually doom Oceania is that they’ll be unable to stave off the inevitable decay”. He cites this passage describing Winston Smith’s apartment building:

Since 1984 is only maybe thirty years removed from the revolution at that point, one does wonder when reading that if their infrastructure is only passable because of what was created before that point. If this trajectory continues, it could indeed be that they simply can’t maintain anything well enough to hold on to power or keep people fed at even a bare subsistence level. But that of course is a separate issue from what was meant by the Appendix’s past tense.

4

Absolutely. I thought that point was clear.

[QUOTE=George Orwell]
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
[/QUOTE]

A lot of sci-fi glosses over this problem. I like to call it the “Idiocracy” problem, because it is most acute in that movie, where the world is inhabited solely by complete morons, and yet they have high-tech toilet chairs, a universal UPC based virtual currency, and television with a million channels of pornography and “Ow My Balls”.

Regarding dystopian sci-fi, people just aren’t very productive when living under a brutal dictatorship. They might keep things going for a while with chewing gum and baling wire like the USSR, but the economy won’t be a well-oiled, humming machine, which means Big Brother will have a lot of broken ears and malfunctioning eyes, and nowhere near the resources to deal with all the inevitable dissent.

5

It’s kind of hard to imagine an analysis of the society of 1984 existing within the society of 1984, unless it was intended for the ruling class. Ideally, the underlings wouldn’t understand it (being written in non-Newspeak), and if they did, the government wouldn’t want to have the principles spoken of. so either Orwell intended the analysis to be for the Rulers, or it was by a post-1984 society. (Or, I suppose, it could be by someone living in a different country, looking in)If you don’t have one of those possibilities, the analysis wouldn’t even exist. Since he wanted to have it in there, it does exist, although it isn’t clear by which alternative.

Interestingly, in Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier he DOES imagine a post-1984 society in which his events take place, so evidently he took the interpretation (at least for his literary purposes) that it DID end. It also had to last a very short time, to fit his imagined timeline.

6

Wouldn’t North Korea be a much better example? I mean, in 1917 would you survey the world and say “of all the most powerful nations on Earth, Russia will be the one to get a satellite in space forty years from now, and a man in space four years later”? This is after being humbled by the Germans in WWI but then producing enough tanks to overwhelm the Wehrmacht a quarter-century later.

7

Well, the North Korean’s are not as stupid and backward as popular press likes to portray.

8

But that was Russia’s downfall. They tried to keep up with the Joneses but couldn’t afford it. While the US on the other hand had no problem having a space program and feeding its citizens, too.

Sure, any autocrat can free up money for one-off high tech vanity programs by looting his country and causing the economy to fail, presuming there are enough people to spread the burden around. But that’s not consistent with a fine-tuned, society-wide, technology-based surveillance and thought control program. Sort of like how the US can put a man on the moon, but finds it hard to provide healthcare for 330 million people on a continuing basis. They’re two entirely different kinds of expenses.

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Not during the height of the Space Race, their economy was doing well. The era opf stagnation began mostly in the 70’s and did not really hit home until the 1980’s.

10

Think of it like Goldstein’s book. O’Brien wrote it, and when he needs to remember that he wrote it, he does, and when he needs to forget that he wrote it, he does. Doublethink forgives a lot of sins.

Remember that Orwell postulated that the three oligarchies in the world of 1984 are too productive for the needs of the regimes, so they engage in border warfare essentially for the purpose of destroying surplus goods. Back home, ordinary infrastructure is deliberately allowed to decay to the point where people in the Outer Party are kept above starvation but in a constant state of just enough deprivation to occupy their daily lives with queueing and cadging, so they don’t have the time or the energy to think about bigger issues. Presumably the infrastructure of repression gets better maintenance. It sounds like a delicate balance, but the 1984 regimes also benefit from not having to compete with any more productive societies; there’s no promise of a better life anywhere else.

11

It’s interesting to note that Jack London’s dystopian novel “The Iron Heel” explicitly has a frame story of future historians writing about the bad old days.

12

You’re all thought criminals.

13

ORLY? I love his writing (“To Build a Fire” is one of my favorite short stories, and The Sea Wolf is one of my favorite novels). I need to check this out!

14

Project Gutenberg has it available for free in various formats. I’ve always wondered why this isn’t the book he is famous for.

15

Free–even better! Thanks.

16

Exactly. And I’m telling the telescreen right now that I didn’t read this thread. :wink:

17

I will explain to Friend Computer that I was merely reading this thread in order to document the subversive thought-crimes of you degenerate secret mutants.

18

By what measure? How did the standard of living in the USSR compare to the US, Germany or the UK in the mid to late 1960s?

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That’s not the relevant question, just as it is unfair to pose the same one about Cuba vs. the U.S. More like, how does Cuba look compared to the rest of the Caribbean, or how it looked before Castro? What was Russia’s standard of living in 1917 relative to the U.S., Germany, or the U.K.? And how did that relative position look in the 1960s?

20

It honestly had never occurred to me that the tense of the appendix could be interpreted to mean Oceania had fallen.

Of course, it could be. Or it could be that it’s written from the perspective of an English-speaking author in some part of the world that has resisted absorption into one of the three great empires. Or it could be that the Inner Party never abandons English. I think you could fanwank any number of explanations. I think it’s just how Orwell writes, and he is simply writing to the reader from the perspective that makes the most sense to explain Newspeak, which is after the language is pummeled into its more-or-less final version, the Eleventh Edition.

Something merits mentioning here: “1984” is a wonderful book but Orwell does make little errors here and there, and he isn’t exactly William Shakespeare, and is primarily interested in getting his point across. (The first error that jumps to mind is his saying Winston isn’t sure it’s 1984 - and within a chapter or two, we find out the tasks he’s assigned at work are all dated, including the year, so he really has no reason to doubt what year it is.) From Orwell’s perspective, the grammatical voice of the Appendix is just a convenience, I think, and not a narrative device.

Aside from the fact that this just fits Orwell, there is nothing at all optimistic about the book that suggests Oceania is going anywhere; the book is unrelentingly grim. Indeed, as it goes, you find out things are even worse than you thought they were; all hope is stamped out. In “The Handmaid’s Tale” there is bother literal hope (it’s possible to escape Gilead) and narrative hope (at the end Offred might or might not be saved; you don’t know.) There is NO hope in “1984.” There is nowhere to flee and the ending suggests no escape.