744
PARTISAN REVIEW
his theme.
N~neteen
Eighty-Four
chiefly appeals to us as a work of the
political imagination, and the appeal is exercised with gravity and power.
It
documents the crisis of socialism with greater finality than Koestler's
Darkness at Noon,
to which it will be inevitably compared, since it be–
longs, on one side of it, to the same genre, the melancholy mid-century
genre of lost illusions and Utopia betrayed.
While in Koestler's novel there are still lingering traces of nostalgia
for the Soviet Utopia, at least in its early heroic phase, and fleeting
tenderness for its protagonists, betrayers and betrayed-some are de–
picted as Promethean types wholly possessed by the revolutionary dogma
and annihilated by the consequences of their own excess, the
hubris
of
Bolshevism-in Orwell's narrative the further stage of terror that has
been reached no longer permits even the slightest sympathy for the revo–
lutionaries turned totalitarian. Here Utopia is presented, with the fearful
simplicity of a trauma, as the abyss into which the future falls. The tradi–
tional notion of Utopia as the future good is thus turned inside out, in–
verted-nullified.
It
is now sheer mockery to speak of its future. Far
more accurate it is to speak of its
unfuture.
(The addition of the negative
affix "un" is a favorite usage of Newspeak, the official language of
Ingsoc-English socialism-a language in which persons purged by the
Ministry of Love, i.e., the secret police, are invariably described as
unpersons.
The principles of Newspeak are masterfully analyzed by Or–
well in the appendix to his book. Newspeak is nothing less than a plot
against human consciousness, for its sole aim is so to reduce the range
of thought through the destruction of words as to make
Uthoughtcrime
literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express
it." )
The prospect of the future drawn in this novel can on no account
be taken as a phantasy.
If
it inspires dread above all, that is precisely
because its materials are taken from the real world as we know it, from
conditions now prevailing in the totalitarian nations, in particular the
Communist nations, and potentially among us too. Ingsoc, the system
established in Oceania, the totalitarian super-State that unites the Eng–
lish-speaking peoples, is substantially little more than an extension into
the near future of the present structure and policy of Stalinism, an
extension as ingenious as it is logical, predicated upon conditions of
permanent war and the development of the technical means of espionage
and surveillance to the point of the complete extinction of private life.
Big Brother, the supreme dictator of Oceania, is obviously modeled on
Stalin, both in his physical features and in his literary style ("a style at
once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions
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