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

[Steve_MB]

@RickJay

(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.)

Given that the “tasks he’s assigned at work” consist of fabricating the records, why would the dates be any more reliable than the biography of Comrade Ogilvy?

[RickJay]

@Steve_MB

Given that the “tasks he’s assigned at work” consist of fabricating the records, why would the dates be any more reliable than the biography of Comrade Ogilvy?

Why would the Party bother lying about the year, though?

If they were going to change the year, you’d think they’d abandon the practice of dating from the time of Christ at all, and go to “years since the Revolution” or some such practice. I’m actually kind of surprised Orwell didn’t do that.

The precise line is:

[QUOTE=1984, Chapter One]

In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
[/QUOTE]

Orwell never explains this, though, and it seems a bit early for people to start forgetting what year it is. They know what time of year it is, since seasons still happen. Remember, too, that Winston is meant to me a relatively reliable narrator; he remembers what reality is, even when the Party changes it.

It’s not a big deal; my point is merely that Orwell did not carefully stitch together a perfect piece of speculative fiction. He does, however, capture the emotions and the feelings of it with a remarkable realism.

[SlackerInc]

@RickJay

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.

One wonders if Atwood would have written her ending the same way, if she had taken the same interpretation of 1984 that most of us have.

I do love the creepiness of not being sure exactly what year it is, but in addition to the problem you point out, the mandatory exercise class conducted over the telescreens is divided into age groups–which would not be possible without knowing what year it is. Unless the party has developed some new form of calendar, like happened in the French Revolution, but that is never even hinted at.

I agree that Orwell is no Shakespeare, but I do think his writing is impressive beyond the large ideas he plays with. The way he describes the taste of the “gin” Party members are given is more resonant than any description of a taste that I can think of.

He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese ricespirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful.

Then later in the novel, at a café that specialized in flavoring the gin:

As always, the gin made him shudder and even retch slightly. The stuff was horrible. The cloves and saccharine, themselves disgusting enough in their sickly way, could not disguise the flat oily smell…

[Little_Nemo]

@RickJay

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.

I think you’re missing the greater point. Winston Smith is told the year is 1984. But he knows he can’t be sure that it really is 1984. His experience in the Ministry of Truth makes him aware of how many of the things he’s told aren’t true.

@RickJay

Why would the Party bother lying about the year, though?

If they were going to change the year, you’d think they’d abandon the practice of dating from the time of Christ at all, and go to “years since the Revolution” or some such practice. I’m actually kind of surprised Orwell didn’t do that.

You could argue that the government intentionally told the public things like this just to demonstrate their power over society and to get people into the habit of ignoring the obvious contradictions that surrounded them.

But I think the more central point is that 1984 is a novel. Orwell wasn’t describing a real world. He was sending a message to the readers of his book; readers who lived in Britain not Airstrip One. By dating the book in 1984, he was telling them that this possible future was only a generation away. By showing that there were still remnants of the era prior to Big Brother, he was telling his readers how close this future was to their present.

[BigT]

You could always just read “was expected” as meaning that we now know that it won’t happen then. It could be earlier, could be later, or could never happen. The latter seems to contradict the book.

That said, I’m one of those people who hasn’t read the book, and only knows about it. I’m just going by what was quoted above. I don’t get why people would assume some sort of optimistic future when the book is clearly a warning.

[SlackerInc]

@BigT

I don’t get why people would assume some sort of optimistic future when the book is clearly a warning.

Well, Atwood herself clearly meant A Handmaid’s Tale as a warning, yet she pictures Gilead as having become a historical curiosity (even something people would reenact for fun) by a couple centuries later. So I don’t think those things are inherently contradictory, even though I do believe she misunderstood Orwell’s intent by using the past tense.