DECENCY AND DEATH
517
cern. Death exempts him from his own habits as much as it does from
responsibility to others. Lifc being what it is in our world, the onset of
death is often the first taste a man gets of freedom. At last the imagina–
tion can come into its own, and as a man yields to it his emotions take
on a surprising depth and intensity. The cxtreme situation in which
OrwelI found himself as the rapid downhill course of tuberculosis
approached, enabled him for the first time to go from one extreme to
the other: from his own sickness to the world's. His imagination, set
free, was able to confirm the identity of the two extremes, turning
sickness into art.
The torture scenes in 1984 have been compared with The Legend
of the Grand Inquisitor. The comparison seems to me forced; a
better one, it applies to the novel as a whole, is with Ippolit's "Es–
sential Explanation" in
The Idiot.
The torturer O'Brien's words to
Winston Smith as he is re-educating him, "The objective of power is
power," are the equivalent, in what they reveal to Smith of a politics
stripped bare of morality, of Ippolit's nightmare of the monstrous in–
sect, representing the world of nature without God. That the ob–
jective of power is power may long have been obvious to some men,
but for the restrained writer who had muffled the terror and dis–
gust politics produced in him, who had held on to a socialist rationale
and let out his antipathies in an exaggerated idyll of the conservative
past-for him such words had a deeper meaning. They mark the end
of decency. Decency, meaning precisely the reserve of Orwell's own
character, the constitutional intolerance of the extreme course, has
failed him. Now he is dying. What good has this withholding done? He
turns, like Ippolit, against himself, with the cry, not of glad tears of
release, but of the jealousy of life, "I have been cheated!" And now
the decent man, Winston Smith, is unremittingly punished for the loss.
He is given neither an opportunity for redemption nor even the small
comfort of dying with his inner life intact. His end must be beyond the
last extreme, a species of pure diabolism: it is to the embrace of Big
Brother that OrwelI steers him, one of the most hideous moments of
revenge in literature.
It is beside the point to argue that this revenge is the Party's,
which will not allow its victims to die unrepentant, or that OrwelI was
merely following the "confessions" of the Stalinist trials. These argu–
ments are true, but it is also true that Winston (named, if uncon–
sciously, to honor his conservative principle) was too close to Orwell
for his torturer to be an entire stranger. So close a vengeance is always
taken on oneself.
