Thanks - ‘prescribed’ was the wrong word (and perhaps implies something Orwellian). Assigned is about right - it was on the book list for Year 10 [?], and I think its the teacher’s call as to which books the class did.
Absolutely - Orwell was extrapolating from the Stalinist system of 1948, that he’d had direct experience of during the Spanish Civil War, and imagined it as permanently self-perpetuating - “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”
And as for the prospects of democracy surviving, remember the end of Animal Farm, where the pig dictator has a jolly dinner with local farmers:
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The Labour government was busy getting NATO set up, to tie the USA and the UK (as well as the other Western Allies) into a permanent alliance.
PS “Assigned books” - in the UK (and I assume this is the case in Australia too), there are formal examinations at set points (in the UK at years 10/11 and 12/13) in one’s school career where the examination boards set the requirements. In English Literature there will be a Shakespeare, a Chaucer, and probably a choice of periods. The school will decide what to choose from their exam board’s list of options.
Seconded. An amazing book which too few have read.
I would imagine that the British class system was abolished much the same way the Tsarist system was in Russia. With lots of bullets.
Also IIRC we don’t really know how much time has passed between Oceana’s present and the last point in their history that matches history as we remember it (let’s say 1949 when the book was written). It’s highly likely that it has been “1984” by their calendar for the past 100 years or longer and INGSOC just keeps rewriting the past 30 years of history.
I don’t know if this is a dialectical weirdness, but I don’t think saying something was expected implies it later didn’t happen. I’m sure I have seen the construction ‘it was expected’ in literature to imply that something was expected with great certainty or inevitability; just as a way of describing what people in the described frame were anticipating or planning or whatever.
I mean, I have also seen 'It was expected… but…", which of course does explicity mean expectations were not met, but on its own, it does not imply divergence from expectation.
Here’s a non-literary example from a parliamentary document about tax judgments:
…Mrs Jones could not have been issued with a share without the agreement of her husband and when he agreed to that arrangement, it was expected that he would take a low salary and that substantial dividends would be distributed. That was the advice which they had received from the accountant. And that was what happened.
Remember that the novel postulates that an atomic war had taken place in the 1950s and that “some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America”. Liberal democracy presumably perished from the world at that time.
See, for me, that last sentence is very, very important. It overrides the implication otherwise inherent in saying something “was expected.” Leave it out, and I would read that statement as saying that it did not occur as expected.
I don’t think the implication you’re seeiing exists, at least not in the strong form you’re talking about, in British English.
As a narrative device, ‘it was expected’, coupled with ‘but…’ is of course common, but it’s also just a common way to describe an obligation or a social expectation or convention or something that was predicted or anticipated, which the story may or may not resolve, but to say that it always implies an expectation that did not come to pass, is simply incorrect. It doesn’t always mean that.
Thinking more about this, it does mean that the expectations were unmet, in cases where the reader already knows that to be the case.
For example if a document about WW2 says something like ‘in late 1939, it was expected that the war would be over within six months’, then it obviously does mean the expectation was incorrect, because its already common knowledge that it wasn’t over in six months. This usage is quite common and may be the reason or background for your interpretation.
However, in cases where the outcome of the expectation is either unstated, or unknown, perhaps because it’s fictional, it does not automatically imply anything more than an expectation.
Julia’s speech about betrayal really impacted me the first time I read it.
Paraphrased, it was that if they were caught by Big Brother they would be tortured until they gave up everyone they knew. That was inevitable. The only true betrayal would be if their feelings changed and they hated each other. And eventually (while being tortured) they both ask that the other be tortured in their place. And because they hate themselves for doing that they begin to hate the other person too.
Not in my schools (Catholic, 8 years primary school, 4 years high school, graduated late 60s). But my older brother was a science fiction fan, and I read his copies of 1984 and BNW at some point, perhaps when I was 13.
An episode of QI claimed that some large percentage (75%, perhaps) of people who say they’ve read the book actually haven’t.
Theodore Dalrymple (pen name of Anthony Daniels), “The Dystopian Imagination”, City Journal (Autumn 2001):
When I traveled in the communist world before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found that everyone I met who had read the book (clandestinely, of course) expressed immeasurable admiration for it and marveled that a man who had never set foot inside a communist country could not only describe the physical environment so well—the universal smell of cabbage, the grayness of the dilapidated buildings—but also its mental and moral atmosphere. It was almost as if the communist regimes had taken 1984 as a blueprint rather than as a warning.
What I meant by that is that North Korea today resembles what Oceania would probably be. Orwell was obviously basing the Oceanian regime on his dislike of Stalinism.
While Ingsoc is a pretty obvious derivative of Stalinism, from what I’ve read the living conditions in WWII England — particularly in regards to infrastructure, since non-war-related maintenance tended to be neglected — were only quantitatively removed from those in Airstrip One. The situation was particularly bad in the second and third years due to convoy losses, and the end of the war didn’t see the end of shortages: food rationing didn’t end completely until 1954.
IIRC, Orwell believed at one point that British democracy would not survive the war. I guess Oceania can be interpreted as the worst qualities of wartime government carrying on indefinitely.
Have you started reading BNW yet? I’m currently 2/3 done re-reading ‘1984’ out of curiosity from this thread, and I have an ebook copy of BNW reserved on hold from my online library. If you haven’t started yet and want to do a ‘BNW book club’, either in a separate thread or informal PMs, let me know!
Any reason we can’t do both?
No matter what you do, you’re ruined.
So I’m about 30% thru F451 and its not grabbing me so far. It transitions so abruptly between Montag at home, in the fire house and on calls that its not immediately obvious that the setting has changed. I’m reading the copy from the InternetArchive and its parsed so strangely that I sometimes wonder if sentences or full paragraphs are missing.
‘Indefinitely’ is the impression I get at the end of the book - the Party has plans, and the Party says stuff and does stuff, but it’s never completely clear how much of what they say is true, or how much of what they plan will happen; the people inside the ministry are also victims of the situation; they’re working on making the world into the way the Party says it should be (at least whatever version of that prevails at the current moment); they won’t succeed, if for no other reason than the plans keep changing, if indeed they were ever earnest; it’s hopeless for everyone; everyone is a victim; everyone is an oppressor; the Party will not fail, neither will it succeed, and I think the Party likes it that way; failure can just be redefined as success or vice versa.
Failure is Success, just like War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.