GORMAN BEAUCHAMP
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the prison of dates, and names and places, and let's let them discuss
really important momentous points in American history." Others have
found students today already liberated, to a remarkable degree, from
the prison of facts. Senator Bob Kerry, in the debate over a proposed
flag burning amendment, argued that a greater danger to America than
flag burning is "when
50
percent of our youth do not know what side
Hitler was on in the Second World War." A professor at the University
of Michigan reports, in an op-ed piece for
The New York Times,
the
result of a survey of junior and senior journalism students: "Fewer than
half could say when World War II began and ended." These examples
reflect wider-ranging and more systematic examinations of the contem–
porary state of student knowledge, which does not appear overly fact–
burdened: still, the spectacle of classes full of students who don't know
when World War II occurred or whose side Hitler was on discussing this
"really momentous turning point in American history" seems so quin–
tessentially postmodern. For was it not Michel Foucault, the icon of the
iconoclasts, who assured us: "There are no facts"?
AN EVEN EARLIER
pioneer in postmodernism's attitude toward fact–
toward objectivity, rationality, universality, all of which are denigrated, if
not denied-is Orwell's Comrade O'Brien in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The
crucial demonstration of the-truth-that-there-is-no-truth (other than the
Party's will) occurs in the long, painful agon-cum-torture-sessions con–
ducted in the headquarters of the Thought Police, the Ministry of Love,
between O'Brien, Orwell's Grand Inquisitorial figure, and Winston Smith,
the novel's fitfully rebellious protagonist. To destroy any sustaining faith
that Winston retains in an objective, suprasocial reality, beyond the reach
of even Oceania's pervasive totalitarianism to repeal, O'Brien must force
his victim to actually see five fingers when he holds up only four-or to
be unsure of what he actually sees, which comes to the same thing.
"How can I help it?" [Winston] blubbered. "How can I help see–
ing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
"Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they
are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try
harder."
Truth in Oceania is whatever the Party needs it to be, a variable cri–
terion. "You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the
