746
PARTISAN REVIEW
The diagnosis of the totalitarian perversion of socialism that Orwell
makes in this book is far more remarkable than the prognosis it contains.
This is not to deny that the book is prophetic; but its importance is
mainly in its powerful engagement with the present. Through the inven–
tion of a society of which he can be imaginatively in full command, Or–
well is enabled all the more effectively to probe the consequences for
the human soul of the system of oligarchic collectivism-the system
al–
ready prevailing in a good part of the world, which millions of people
even this side of the Iron Curtain believe to be true-blue socialism and
which at this time constitutes the only formidable threat to free institu–
tions. Hence to read this novel simply as a flat prediction of what is
to come is to misread it. It is not a writ of fatalism to bind our wills.
Orwell makes no attempt to persuade us, for instance, that the English–
speaking nations will inevitably lose their freedom in spite of their vig–
orous democratic temper and libertarian traditions. "Wave of the future"
notions are alien to Orwell. His intention, rather, is to prod the Western
world into a more conscious and militant resistance to the totalitarian
virus to which it is now exposed.
As in
Darkness at Noon,
so in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
one of the
major themes is the psychology of capitulation. Winston Smith, the
hero of the novel, is shown arming himself with ideas against the Party
and defying it by forming a sexual relationship with Julia; but from the
first we know that he will not .escape the secret police, and after he is
caught we see
him
undergoing a dreadful metamorphosis which burns
out his human essence, leaving
him
a wreck who can go on living only
by becoming one of "them." The closing sentences of the story are the
most pitiful of all: "He had won a victory over himself. He loved Big
Brother." The meaning of the horror of the last section of the novel,
with its unbearable description of the torture of Smith by O'Brien, the
Ingsoc Commissar, lies in its disclosure of a truth that the West still
refuses to absorb. Hence the widespread mystifications produced by the
Moscow Trials ("Why did they confess?") and, more recently, by the
equally spectacular displays of confessional ardor in Russia's satellite
states (Cardinal Mindszenty and others). The truth is that the modern
totalitarians have devised a methodology of terror that enables them
to break human beings by getting inside them. They explode the human
character from within, exhibiting the pieces as the irrefutable proof
of their own might and virtue. Thus Winston Smith begins with the
notion that even if nothing else in the world was his own, still there
were a few cubic centimeters inside his skull that belonged to him alone.
But O'Brien, with his torture instruments and ruthless dialectic of power,
