FORNICATING FOR FREEDOM:  SEXUAL SUBVERSION IN THE TOTALITARIAN STATE

Michael D. Amey

I’m back with yet another post on 1984.  In this post I’m focussing on a major recurring theme in dystopian fiction:  the power of sexual acts to liberate and enslave individuals. This theme is also evident, of course, in We, Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale.

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Controlling Sex, Controlling Citizens

1984 coverWhen we think of sex, many of us envision an activity that occurs fairly much the same way among people everywhere.  We generally do not imagine, unless we’re thinking very carefully about sex, that sex is somehow a culturally mediated activity.  Put more simply, we often think that sex is natural—stripped of culture and simply a response to biologic urges and hormones.  As various scholars have shown, however, this is a misconception.  In her essay, “The Traffic in Women:  Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”, Gayle Rubin uses an analogy to question the idea that sex is devoid of cultural content:

Hunger is hunger, but what counts as food is culturally determined and obtained.  Every society has some form of organized economic activity.  Sex is sex, but what counts as sex is equally culturally determined and obtained.  Every society also has a sex/gender system – a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention and satisfied in a conventional manner, no matter how bizarre some of the conventions may be. (538)

The point that Rubin is making is absolutely relevant to the depictions of sex that we have seen in 1984 and in We.  The sexual activities in both of these novels are sharply delineated into licit and illicit behavior, acceptable relationships and unacceptable relationships.  These divisions undoubtedly seem alien to many of you, and this partially because behind these divisions are not grounded on a simple distinction between the natural and the unnatural, but rather upon the will of society determining what citizens should “accept” as natural or unnatural.  In the case of these novels, the will of society is, in many respects, distinct from the will(s) of our own society.

But why, we might ask, do Zamyatin and Orwell spend time discussing sexual relationships, and why do the States in both of their novels place such a premium on controlling sexual behavior?  Part of the answer to this question can be found in another of Gayle Rubin’s essays, “Thinking Sex:  Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”.  She argues in the introduction to this essay that:

The time has come to think about sex.  To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine or nuclear annihilation.  But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality.  Contemporary conflicts over sexual values and erotic conduct have much in common with the religious disputes of earlier centuries.  They acquire immense symbolic weight.  Disputes over sexual behavior often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity.  Consequently, sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress.

            The realm of sexuality also has its own internal politics, inequities, and modes of oppression.  As with other aspects of human behavior, the concrete institutional forms of sexuality at any given time and place are products of human activity.  They are imbued with conflicts of interest and political maneuvering, both deliberate and incidental.  In that sense, sex is always political.  But there are also historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized.  In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated. (4-5)

Dystopian fiction, by nature of its fundamental character, tends to depict historical periods when sexuality is contested and sexual codes are redrawn to enhance the state’s control over individuals.  The amount of control that the One State exercises in We, for example, is evidenced by the Lex Sexualis: “Each number has a right to any other number, as to a sexual commodity” (Zamyatin 1972, 21).  This law functions on a two-fold level:  first, it serves as an express reminder to the citizens that they are commodities to be consumed both by each other and by the state, and secondly, it serves to remind them that in this absolute Communist society, the state owns everything, including bodies, reproduction and sexual enjoyment.

Lest we be too quick to criticize this control of sexuality in the One State, it might be wise to consider the control of sexuality in our own society.  First, while, in most states in the United States the traffic in sex is illegal, “sexiness” is a hot commodity that both sells all manner of goods and is itself sold in a wide array of forms.  The fact that sexuality and sexiness are marketed and consumed in our society is evidenced by pornography’s status as one of the largest online industries.  Perhaps the primary difference between us and the numbers of the One State is that while we and the citizens of the One State both agree, for the most part, that sex is a desirable commodity, the citizens of the One State, in accordance with their standards of equality, are unable to profit from the exchange of sexual favors.  By contrast, many Americans make a great deal of money from sexual activity.  What is interesting, however, is the fact that while many of the states legalize the sale of sexuality and sexiness in the form of pornography, most states have outlawed prostitution, thus denying, as it were, many women and some men the right to earn money by using and selling what is theirs—their bodies.  In a sense then, our government has determined who can profit from sex, perhaps to the detriment of the majority of sex workers, who work illegally.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, another effect of the Lex Sexualis is to end marriage and families.  This is desirable because it allows the state to create absolute bonds of loyalty with its citizenry.  No longer does a woman think about her husband, or a man think about his wife.  Instead they focus on the relationship with the state.  This substitution of the state for a loved one occurs in both We and 1984.  For example, as I noted in the previous post, the woman who works next to Winston is involved in “tracking down and deleting from the press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore never considered to have existed.  There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years ago” (42).  She can do this both because she has developed the capacity for doublethink and because her relationship to Oceania takes precedence over her relationship to her husband or any other individual.

The fact that the woman working next to Winston is single best suits the needs of the Party.  Her loyalty, however, is suspect because she may not have willingly chosen to be single.  By contrast, Comrade Ogilvy, represents the untainted devotion desired by the state because he “had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty” (47).  Yet surpassing even Ogilvy in his loyalty, is Winston’s estranged wife, Katharine, who has sex with Winston, but only as part of “our duty to the Party” (67).  Katharine, perhaps as a consequence of conditioning, perhaps through the will of doublethink, has invested the symbolism of sex, not with lust, certainly not with love, but with patriotism.  Her reconstruction of the meaning of sex is evidenced by how she experiences it:  “She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating, but submitting” (67).  This description of how she experiences sex significantly aligns, as we shall see, with the experiences of Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale.

In addition to having sex with Katharine, Winston also has sex with an older prole prostitute and with Julia.  These sexual encounters are distinctly different in nature.  For Winston, the prostitute represents nothing more than simple sexual release—I choose not to use the word “satisfaction” because it scarcely seems satisfactory.  This encounter is not particularly dangerous either, for, as Orwell explains,

Tacitly the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed.  Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless, and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class.  (65)

Furthermore, while the act of sleeping with a prostitute is certainly punishable in Oceania, it is generally not a capital offense.

Significantly, while debauchery is tolerated when it involves Proles, debauchery with Party members is punished much more severely.  Orwell goes on to clarify why the Party opposes relationships within the Party:

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control.  Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act.  Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it.…  The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party.  Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema.…  The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it.  (65-66)

Later Orwell, notes that the “sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account” (133). The Party’s success in distorting sex is evidenced both in Katharine’s submission during sex and in Winston’s revulsion with the sexual experience he has with the prostitute.  This revulsion prevents Winston from regularly frequenting prostitutes.  As a consequence, his own sexual desires remain constantly thwarted.  This sexual repression is “turned… to account” by creating “sexual privation [that] induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship” (133).  Orwell illustrates the relationship between frustrated sexuality and the attitudes of citizens by describing a Party rally in sexual terms:  the mob’s mood is like a “great orgasm […] quivering to its climax” (180).

While Winston’s sexual liaisons with the prostitute cannot be counted an act of rebellion—after all “the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution”—his relationship with Julia is, in his and her minds, an entirely different matter.  A number of differences seem to exist between the relationship Winston has with the prostitute and the one he has with Julia.  Unlike Winston’s low risk encounter with the prostitute, Julia’s and Winston’s liaison risks their freedom and their very lives.  This risk severs any ties they have to the Party and creates a situation where their loyalties, by necessity, are redirected towards each other.  For a comparable modern example, we might consider the relationships of homosexuals during much of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Because homosexuality was illegal in America and most European countries, homosexuals found themselves, by the very nature of their desires and activities, outside the law and, to a certain extent, alienated from society. Given these facts, we should expect that homosexuals, like Winston and Julia, would formulate ties that largely ignored the claims of their societies.  That social commentators are aware of the subversive nature of sexuality becomes apparent when one examines modern conservative commentators, like Maggie Gallagher, who argue that homosexuality threatens society by undermining the institution of marriage.  Marriage (and having children), in other words, becomes a “duty to society” in a way that is not dissimilar to Katharine’s conception of sex as doing one’s duty for the Party.  This permits those in power to cast the offenders as sexual traitors.

Winston’s relationship with Julia also differs from this relationship with the prostitute in that it permits them together to create a reality separate from the Party.  As Orwell explains, “the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control” (133).  By contrast, Winston’s furtive, and unsatisfactory sexual involvement with the prostitute merely confirms the control that the Party exercises over all aspects of life.

Winston’s sexual encounter with the prostitute also acts to dehumanize and degrade both the prostitute and Winston.  She, after all, is a shoddy, forbidden commodity for which he pays two dollars.  He is a desperate man who pays for something that has been Winston and Julialabeled perverted by his society.  By contrast, Orwell emphasizes the fact that Julia and Winston freely engage in sex.  To ensure that this is not a transaction, Winston specifically asks Julia if she enjoys sex, to which she responds, “I adore it” (126).  Her response stands in contrast to Katharine’s philosophy of sex as social duty and the prostitute’s philosophy of sex as commodity.  Julia is having sex in part simply because she enjoys sex.  This free exchange of sex helps humanize Julia and Winston and perhaps even ennobles them.

While their sexual encounter is a free one, it is not an uncontaminated one.  After all, as Orwell points out “you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays.  No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred” (126)  Beyond being about desire, then, their sexual activity becomes a denial of the Party’s power.  Winston’s revels in her sexuality because, “the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire:  …was the force that would tear the Party to pieces” (126).  As Orwell explains, “Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory.  It was a blow struck against the Party.  It was a political act”  (126).  In light of the Party’s determined effort at either wiping out or subverting the sexuality of the citizens of Oceania, it is indeed difficult to interpret this act as anything other than an assault on the Party’s control.

 

“FROM THE AGE OF UNIFORMITY, FROM THE AGE OF SOLITUDE”:  BEING ALONE BECAUSE OF THE CROWD

Michael D. Amey

Welcome to my second post on Orwell’s 1984.  In this post I’m going to focus on isolation, collectivism and surveillance.  These themes are essential aspects of a number of dystopian novels and movies, and are present in We, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Matrix, Feed and Jennifer Government, to name a few examples.

“Every Breathe You Take, Every Move You Make, Every Bond You Break, Every Step You Take, I’ll Be Watching You”

(Lyrics from “Every Breathe You Take” by the Police)

woman being watched advertisementMichel Foucault, the philosopher who provided us with the concept of the Panopticon, would have reveled in the abundant irony of a rock band called the Police singing the lyrics of “Every Breathe You Take”.  The song, apparently intended as a romantic gesture, chronicles the jealous, obsessive voyeurism of a jilted lover.  In a particularly revealing moment, the speaker in the song laments, “Oh, can’t you see, you belong to me”.

Implicit in the lyrics of this song is the relationship between an individual who is watched and the institution or individual doing the watching.  The ownership that the lovelorn singer claims is based on his ability to spy on the object of his love constantly, even as she does mundane things like breathe and walk.  This, in itself, however, is not enough to ensure his claim on her.  For him to own her, she must be aware of his vigilant gaze:  “oh, can’t you see, you belong to me”.  In other words, she must see him seeing her for the power of the gaze to be operative.  A similar approach to this use of the gaze as means of control and ownership is suggested in the lyrics of the traditional Christmas song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”.  The addressee, in this case a child, not a woman, is told:

He sees you when you’re sleeping.
He knows when you’re awake.
He knows if you’ve been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake!

Surely, if a child ever believed these lyrics, then he would assume that Santa had ownership over him in as much that nothing the child did would ever escape the gaze of Santa and all behavior could be subjected to rewards and punishments by Santa.  He would regulate his behavior to suit what he imagined Santa desired, and thus would, ironically NOT “be good for goodness sake”.  As with “Every Breathe You Take”, surveillance in “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” depends for its success on the fact that the child is aware that he is being watched.  If the child is unaware of Santa’s all pervasive gaze and ability to dole out rewards and punishments, then Santa’s power ceases to function.

George Orwell’s Oceania functions on a similar premise.  Party members are subjected to constant visual and auditory scrutiny via telescreens, listening devices and the spying eyes of neighbors, friends and family.  Significantly, these instruments of scrutiny do not function independently of each other; rather, they are merely hundreds of eyes and ears working for the face of the Party, Big Brother.

For the most part, there is nothing covert in this surveillance.  Just as the lyrics from “Every Breathe You Take” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” would suggest, surveillance, by itself, is not enough.  Instead, the citizens are kept constantly aware of the fact that they’re being watched.  They are informed by posters that “BIG BROTHER ISUncle Sam WATCHING YOU”.  The “YOU” at the end of the sentence is imperative, because the citizen is left with no doubt that he or she has been personally sought out as the object of attention.   Furthermore, the fact that each citizen is being constantly inspected is driven home by the ubiquity of the image of Big Brother.  Orwell illustrates this by describing Winston looking at a coin:

He took a twenty-five-cent piece out of his pocket.  There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother.  Even from the coin the eyes pursued you.  On coins, on stamps on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette pack—everywhere.  Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you.  Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape.  (27)

These images serve as a constant reminder of the fact that every aspect of life is under continuous scrutiny.

In discussions that I have led with students in classes on the wide sweeping surveillance powers granted the United States government by the Patriot Act, most students have seemed unconcerned by this potential invasion of privacy.  They remind me that if I’ve done nothing wrong, I have nothing to be afraid of.  Presumably it is only terrorists and evil-doers who need worry that the NSA might be eavesdropping.  Perhaps my students are right.  It is worth noting, though, that in Oceania, the citizens also, technically, have nothing to fear from the watchful eyes of Big Brother.  After all, Orwell, in discussing Winston’s use of a journal, notes that “This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws) ….” (6).  In theory, then, it is impossible for Winston to break the law.  Nevertheless, he is concerned because if he were “detected it was reasonably certain that [his use of the journal] would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp” (6).

Implicitly then, the abolition of the laws (in itself a paradoxical exercise of law) does not guarantee greater freedom for the citizens or the absence of crime and criminals.  Indeed, as Orwell makes clear when he describes show trials in Oceania, the absence of laws does not even prevent the exercise of a corrupt legal system.  Consequently, instead of reassuring the citizens that no crime can be committed because there are no laws to break, this “lawless” society creates the potential for anything and everything to be considered a crime.  The crime, however, which is fundamental to all crimes is Minority Reportthoughtcrime (19).  Some of you will remember from my earlier posts about We that in the One State freedom is believed to be root cause of all crime.  Orwell takes Zamyatin’s logic one step further by realizing that crime occurs because people think.  Machines are incapable of committing crimes specifically because they cannot think.  By contrast, all humans are, by the very fact that they are incapable of maintaining complete control of their thoughts, thoughtcriminals. This unfortunate flaw in human nature is revealed to Winston by the usually loyal Parsons.  He explains to Winston (for the benefit of the unseen watchers) that thoughtcrime is

insidious.  It can get a hold of you without your even knowing it.  Do you know how it got hold of me?  In my sleep!  Yes, that’s a fact.  There I was, working away, trying to do my bit—never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all.  And then I started talking in my sleep.  Do you know what they heard me saying?  […]  ’Down with Big Brother!’  Yes, I said that!  Said it over and over again, it seems.  (233)

 

The fact that Parsons, a man who diligently “tries to do his bit” is capable of thoughtcrime indicates that no one is innocent.

As I indicated earlier, part of the power of the surveillance in Oceania is linked to the fact that it is, for all intents and purposes, incessant.  In the first few pages Orwell informs us that:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously.  Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, could be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.  There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any moment.  How often, or on what system, the Though Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.  It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.  But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.  (3)

Of course, what Orwell describes matches the operation of Foucault’s Panopticon where surveillance is “visible and unverifiable”.  The broader consequence of this unverifiable but visible surveillance is that,

he who is subject to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles, he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault 203)

In other words, “You had to live—did live from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized” (3).

The guilt that rests on all citizens, even those, like Parsons, who truly strive to remain innocent, has its impact on ever aspect of how they lead their lives.  Early on, Orwell describes Winston moments before he takes the risky decision to write in his journal:  “He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen” (5).  The point that this description makes is that citizens like Winston “wear” expressions instead of having them.  This learned expression is a disguise meant to conceal the “illegal” activity going on in the mind of the citizen. This expression is, in particular, a means of keeping the one last possession available to the citizens of Oceania:  “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull” (27). Of course, the Party has taken steps to penetrate this last place of concealment.  Those watching are trained to spot any gesture or expression that might be indicative of thoughtcrime.  Thus, on a deeper level than Winston realizes, “in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one’s own body” (102-103).  The body becomes the traitor of the mind.

The unblinking gaze of Big Brother also has an impact on the larger community.  This gaze creates conformity among members, as illustrated by the group activities and even by the enforced exercises.  In spite of the fact that these group activities are compulsory—though this is never explicitly stated—the activities also become genuine.  Orwell explains that the “horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a  part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.  Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary” (14).  What this suggests, is that a process is in Lynchingplace of control that is initially coercive, but then becomes less coercive as the individual enacts the role assigned to him or her.  Thus, while Winston may initially be acting because he is aware of the judgmental gaze of others and Big Brother, he eventually ceases to act and embodies, instead, the desired behavior.  His conformity is tied to the well documented concept of mob mentality, an unthinking mentality that the Party fosters through emotional events like Hate Week and Two Minutes Hate.

The importance of collectivism to the functioning of Oceania is further illustrated by the fact that:

In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed.  It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreations; to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous.  There was a word for it in Newspeak:  ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. (82)

It is worth noting that the expectation of constant communal activities in Oceania bears a striking resemblance to how cults operate.  Time alone allows people to form independent opinions that are more than mere reactions to the emotions and opinions of other people.  Such independent opinions are dangerous to the cohesion of most groups.

Ironically, for all of the communal activities that citizens of Oceania participate in, each of them remains separated from each other, from citizens of the past and from citizens in the future.  Parsons, for example, has a wife and children, but this does not mean that he has a family.  After all, it is his own daughter who turns him in for saying, “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep.  (We should pause here to consider one of the dilemmas that faces Parson….   Because he was asleep, he doesn’t know what he was saying or if he was even saying anything at all.  His daughter may have made up the whole story and reported him for the excitement of the experience and the approval she would receive from her peers.  At the same time, he can’t doubt her claim because to doubt her claim would be illustrate his own disloyalty to Big Brother.  As Parson tells Winston, “You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?” (233).

The fact that families do not function according to traditional expectations is further highlighted by Winston’s reflections on his family life:

Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.  (30)

Indeed, this failure of the family is represented by one of Winston’s colleagues:

He knew that in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in, day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore never considered to have existed.  There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years ago. (42)

Replacing the traditional family structure is the relationship of the individual to the state.  For this reason, the Party wisely personifies itself as, appropriately enough, Big Brother.  Of course, although Big Brother is a term derived from a familial relationship, Big Brother is not a family member.  No one has a relationship with Big Brother, even though Winston believes, on the final page that Big Brother loves him and he loves Big Brother.

Winston’s reflections on tragedy highlight the fact that it is not merely the institution of the family that has broken down.  Love and friendship have also ceased to be meaningful.  The “friends” Winston has are clearly not friends; they barely deserve the term acquaintances.  Even his relationship with Julia, which is the most intimate relationship he has, is not one that ends his isolation.  While Julia cares for him, she does not understand him or share his desire to rebel for the sake of greater freedom.  The ultimate tragedy for these two characters is in the fact that having promised not to betray each other, they are unable to avoid the betrayal that their change in feelings for each other entails.

Lastly, we must note the irony involved in Winston’s greeting in his journal:

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:

            From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings! (28)

 

Winston, of course, cannot address the past both because the past is the past and because, in Oceania, the past doesn’t exist.  Furthermore, he can’t hope to address the future because the future will either be controlled by the Party, in which case Winston —as part of the undesired past—will be obliterated from history, or the future will be so different from Winston’s present that nobody will understand what he is describing.  Thus, he is cut off from both the past and the future and exists only in the terrible present.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel.  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Penguin Books, 1991

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DESTROYING THE PAST TO CREATE THE PRESENT:  IDEOLOGY AND TRUTH

Michael Amey

With this post I’m commencing a three part discussion of 1984.  This first post will briefly introduce you to George Orwell and to 1984, and will focus on the role of history in creating the present.  The concepts of epistemology, ideology and “Truth” will play a critical role in this first discussion.  The next post will focus on isolation, collectivism and surveillance.  The final post on 1984 will ask us to examine the role of sexuality as an instrument of power and control.

The Man Who Knew Big Brother

OrwellEric Blair, better known to most of us as George Orwell, wrote books and essays, many of which were social and political commentaries.  His two best known books, 1984 and Animal Farm, exemplify these social and political themes.

Orwell’s prescient depiction of totalitarianism in 1984 arose out of the historical conditions surrounding his life, as well as from his own store of personal experiences and ideas.  Orwell emphasized the value of understanding this background in his essay, “Why I Write” by noting:

“I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.”

Orwell was unquestionably shaped by the age in which he lived.  His earliest inspiration for the totalitarian regime represented by Big Brother may well have come as a consequence of serving with the Imperial Police Force in Burma and India.  As a member of the privileged English race, he witnessed first-hand the inhumanity of an oppressive regime and the injustice inherent in imperialism; themes which he touched upon in his novel, Burmese Days and in his essay, “A Hanging”.  His experiences working to expand and maintain imperialism, combined with the rise of totalitarianism in both Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union, provided him with a pessimistic view of authority.  He explained in “Why I Write” that,

First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc.

The real transformative moment, however, came for him, when, in 1936, he went to Spain to fight in the civil war against fascism.  That period in his life was the catalyst for his writing:

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.  (“Why I Write”)

 

Indeed, in reflecting on his motives for writing in general, Orwell produced two that are specifically relevant to the shape of 1984:

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.  (“Why I Write)

1984 is very clearly a text created with a political purpose.  Throughout the novel, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is keenly aware of the political nature of all acts, including, as I will discuss in the last post, the sexual act.  In this post, however, I will focus more on the combination of the historical impulse, the “desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity” and the relationship of this impulse to politics.   

In describing the writing process, Orwell explains that,

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.  (“Why I Write”)

In the case of 1984, the source of injustice that inspired Orwell was Stalin’s repressive Communist regime.  His critique of Stalinism was essential for two reasons.   First, while awareness of Stalin’s ruthless acts was infiltrating Western consciousness, many leftist intellectuals still either sympathized with or supported Stalinism.  As a leftist intellectual, Orwell saw the importance of separating the foundations of socialist idealism from the excesses of Stalinism. Secondly, in 1948, as Orwell was composing 1984, there was no reason to believe that the Soviet Union would lose the Cold War, or, for that matter, that the war would remain cold.  Orwell’s novel helped explain in this uncertain time why it was important that Stalinism not succeed.  1984 remains, however, a valuable book because while it is rooted in the rise of 20th century totalitarianism, it provides a critique of power that is not limited to one historical point in time.

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The Benefactor and Big Brother

As you read 1984, you may have started noticing similarities to We.  Orwell had read We and acknowledged his indebtedness to Zamyatin’s novel.  The following similarities are particularly worth noting:

  • At the beginning of 1984, Winston starts keeping a journal.  In We, D-503 keeps a journal.
  • Oceania, the nation in which Winston lives, is policed by the “Thought Police”.  In The One State, the police force are called the Guardians.  Both groups operate through surveillance and by gathering information from “concerned” citizens.
  • Oceania is governed by Big Brother, while The One State is governed by the Benefactor.  Both leaders are probably fictitious constructs meant to maintain the power structures of each society.  For a similar example, watch the role of Father in the movie Equilibrium.
  • The states in both novels carefully regulate and monitor sexual activity.  In 1984 citizens have to apply to a committee for permission to get married.  Sex is discouraged by the “Junior Anti-Sex League”.  The purpose of this control, in part, was “to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which [the Party] might not be able to control” (65).  In We, marriage has been outlawed for similar reasons, and the frequency of sexual activity is “scientifically determined”.
  • Both Winston and D-503 begin to actively resist their respective regimes in part because of the elicit affairs they have.
  • In 1984, the proles are predominantly excluded from the working of the Party.  In We, the Mephi, or those outside the Green Wall are excluded from The One State.
  • In 1984, Winston develops a deadly relationship with a government agent, O’Brien.  In We, D-503 develops a relationship with the Guardian, S.
  • In both states, control is extended to everyday activities.  Winston, for example, if forced, along with everyone else, to do calisthenics, while the number of time that D-503 chews his food is prescribed.
  • In 1984, Winston finds a place where he and Julia can meet in the Prole section of town.  This house, with its old furnishings, is like a museum of the past.  Similarly, D-503 meets with I-330 at the “Old House”, a museum from a previous time.
  • In We, D-503 comments on the absurdity of the human head and how it conceals ideas.  Likewise, Winston notes that “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull” (26).
  • Winston and D-503 are both eventually broken by the state and come to “love” their oppressors.

There are undoubted more similarities than these.  Feel free to post them as you find them!

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History and the Present

A critical component of the Party’s power structure is its ability to control the present by continually changing the past.  Significantly, the present has no enduring quality.  As we move through time, each second of now slips into the past.  The Party’s control of the past extends, as Winston explains, to the immediate past:  “Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? …  History has stopped.  Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right” (155).  It is unsurprising then that Julia, Winston’s young lover, cannot remember the fact that a mere four years ago Oceania was at war with Eastasia instead of Eurasia (154).  She, as a product of the Party, has been taught to forget the past and to engage in the “doublethink” that allows for two contradictory facts to both be true.

Furthermore, unlike the unreformed Winston, Julia sees no reason to worry about the fact that she can’t remember the past.  Her concerns are located in the present and in her immediate personal interests:  “she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life.  Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her” (153).

Given that her memory does not extend past four years, we have to even question how extensively she rebels against the teachings of the Party that touch upon her own life.  After all, imagining that she was forcibly separated from Winston, four years later, would she remember that she had ever been with him?   Early in her relationship she tells Winston that she has had sex “[hundreds] of times—well, scores of times, anyway” (125).  Is her uncertainty about her sexual activities a consequence of the numerous times she has had sex, her desire to impress Winston with her rebellious behavior, or, possibly, her actual inability to remember her own past?  Significantly, Orwell tells us nothing tangible about Julia’s past.  We are left to imagine the nature of her sexual relationships.  Were they all acts of rebellion?  Has she known other men like Winston?  It would seem that Winston might want to know the answer to this last question if only to locate other potential subversives, but he does not probe her vague statement of promiscuity.

As for Julia’s disregard for the past, this disregard is the logical consequence of the Party’s control.  In Oceania, “the past not only changed, but changed continuously” (79).  Any attempt to follow the oscillating changes of the past would lead to insanity.  As Winston comes to realize,

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.  They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.  By lack of understanding they remained sane.  (156)

Winston is, of course, partially wrong in suggesting that the Party has instituted an endless present.  The present, even more than the past, is unstable and open to reconstruction because it continually slides into the past.  Indeed, past, present and future are, from one perspective, concurrent events.  From this perspective, the Party Slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future:  who controls the present controls the past” (35), is absolutely correct.  Orwell provides the basic outline by which this control is exercised:  “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth” (75).  This control of time, through the efficient erasure of past thoughts and the forgetting of that erasure, guarantees a form of control over not merely time but all reality, or as the Party calls it “Reality Control”.  The paradox of reality control is explained, in part, by Winston’s realization:  “If both the past and the external world exist only in the Mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?” (80).

The possibility that the external world merely exists in the mind is one that cannot be completely ignored.  The philosopher Descartes realized that he could not trust any of his senses to correctly inform him about the external world.  Think of it this way—we usually take for granted that the things we see and feel are “real”.  Descartes, however, knew that he saw things in dreams, but he was sure that either the reality in what he called dreams or in what he waking must be false.  In his opinion, both the dream world and the waking world couldn’t mutually be real.  He also recognized that the use of drugs, say opium, could also change an individual’s perception of reality.  Simply put we receive conflicting messages from our senses.  Even when we are awake and not “hallucinating” our senses trick us into seeing things like mirages.  The problem was that while each of these states of reality appeared to be mutually exclusive, for a person undergoing a dream or a hallucination, the perceived reality seems as real or more real than what we typically consider reality.  Descartes also thought that it was possible that mathematics and logic, things which apparently don’t rely on senses but on reason, were tricks.  We assume, like Winston, that 2 + 2 = 4.  By contrast, Descartes points out that “We may think that mathematics is self-regulating and testable, but there might just be an invisible demon who continuously hypnotizes us into thinking that our mathematics is correct” (Robinson & Garratt, 46).  What this means is that essentially all of what we accept as “Truth” and “reality” is vulnerable and open to debate and negotiation.

There is a difference, of course, between Descartes’ dilemma and Orwell’s description of reality in 1984.  The primary difference is that where Descartes suspects his senses and believes that they could be inaccurate (they could also be, of course, entirely accurate), Winston knows for a certainty that the reality he lives in is a construct.  Descartes speculates that an “invisible demon” could be toying with his perceptions of logic and mathematics.  Winston, by contrast, knows that the Party is deliberately manipulating his logic.  He is aware that:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.  It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later:  the logic of their position demanded it.  Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.  The heresy of heresies was common sense. (80)

The suggestion that a control of the past also dictates a control of reality seems at first glance nonsensical.  How can the past control what we take to be real?  The only way to understand this is by returning to what we learned about Marxism in our last lecture.  Marx, as you will recall stated in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness.”  As I noted, Marx was arguing was that our society, including how our society produces and uses things, determines to a large extent how we view the world.  If our society could be restructured without our awareness of it, and then that restructuring erased from our minds, what we would “see” in the world, would differ radically from what we now see.

And, of course, such restructuring of society actually do occur.  Michel Foucault notes, for example, that prior to the 19th century, the word and the concept “homosexual” did not exist.  Of course there were men who had sex with men and women who had sex with women prior to the 19th century, but these individuals were not seen as belonging to a different category than any other individual.  Their sexual practices did not define their identities.  Because the concept of homosexual didn’t exist, it follows that the concept of the heterosexual also did not exist prior to the 19th century.  In our own society, however, we have these terms and we tend to define people by these terms.  Not only do we define our contemporaries by their sexual preferences, we assign those labels posthumously to individuals of the past.  Thus, a favorite pastime of some supporters of homosexuality has been to identify and “out” famous people, like Leonardo da Vinci, as homosexuals.  The problem with this approach to history is that it takes our world view and applies it indiscriminately to people who did not possess our mental framework.

As a final note, I want to return us again to the idea of “Truth” being vulnerable.  Most of us probably assume that reality and the “Truth” are fixed entities—that reality is what is real and that the “Truth” is what is true.  While it is possible that these exist, as Descartes makes clear, being certain about these forms of knowledge is impossible.  Added to that, our favourite philosopher, Michel Foucault, points out that reality and “Truth” will always be highly contested areas because of the fact that they serve to create power.  He goes on to state:

There is a battle ‘for truth’, or at least ‘around truth’—it being understood once again that by truth I do not mean ‘the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted’, but rather ‘the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true’, it being understood also that it’s not a matter of a battle ‘on behalf’ of the truth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political roles it plays. (132)

Winston is a phenomenal character precisely because he is aware of this battle.  Arguably, this makes him a far greater risk to the Party than Julia or, for that matter, most anyone else referenced in the novel.

Works Cited

Orwell, George.  1981.  1984: A Novel.

Orwell, George.  “Why I Write.”  http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw     Accessed 28 June 2017.

Foucault, Michel.  1980.  Power/Knowledge:  Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977.  ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshal, John Mepham and Kate Soper.  New York:  Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Robinson, Dave and Chris Garratt.  1999.  Introducing Descartes.  Cambridge:  Icon Books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Life Under the Bell Jar: Surveillance and the New World Order in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” II

From a distance we are instruments
Marching in a common band
Playing songs of home, playing songs of peace
They’re the songs of every man
God is watching us, God is watching us
God is watching us from a distance

– “From a Distance” as sung by Bette Midler

Welcome to my third post on dystopian literature.  In this post, we’re going to begin by examining the religious imagery in We.  A casual reader of Zamyatin’s We, might at first conclude that religious imagery and religious themes play a limited and insignificant role in the novel.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Indeed, while Zamyatin’s novel is set in a secular, post-revolutionary, rationalist society, much like the one envisioned by Soviet communists, religion remains a significant, apparently indestructible frame of reference for D-503 and the other citizens of the One State.  The survival of religious imagery in a state officially dedicated to reason and the elimination of the imagination is surprising, and can perhaps only be explained by either assuming that humans are endowed with an inherent sense of religious awe (the religion gene, if you will) or that the One State fosters a secular form of religion because faith in the state is necessary to the continuation of the state.

A Historical Case for the Existence of Secular Religions

We need to ask, is a secular religion even feasible?  While the term secular religion seems, at first glance, an oxymoron, further consideration of the history of communism as it was practiced in the Soviet Union suggests that there are a number of shared features between communism and traditional Christianity.  While Christians seek salvation from sin, Communists seek salvation from class warfare and social injustice.  Both Christians and Communists believe that history will eventually end.  Christians envision this end to history occurring when Christ comes to reclaim the earth and establish his kingdom.  Communists, following the writings of Marx, argue that after an intense class struggle, a new classless society will be formed.  Because class conflict, which Marxists consider the engine of history, will have stopped, history will also cease.  Christian and Communist leaders alike have frequently made the case that sacrifices and suffering now are necessary to the attainment of either the Kingdom of Heaven or the workers’ paradise.  Christians often speak of the unity of Christians, and Christian leaders frequently exhort their followers to act like brothers in Christ.  Communists believe in the unity of the workers, and of course, Karl Marx famously ended his Communist Manifesto with the phrase “Workers of the world unite”.  Just as some Christians venerate saints and decorate their homes with icons and statures, so, too, Soviet Communists venerated Lenin and Stalin and decorated their own homes with the pictures and statues of revolutionary heroes.  Pilgrims from both faiths frequently make visits to the tombs of their fallen leaders.  Both Christians and Communists have texts that they refer to for guidance and which they believe provides insight into future events:  the Bible for Christians and Das Kapital for Communists.  Communism, of course, is not the only secular movement to adapt and assimilate religious imagery.  Nazism, with its pomp and circumstance also contained major religious motifs.   For an example of this religious imagery in action, examine the picture of Hitler to the left.

Hitler as MessiahIn particular, note the “heavenly light” surrounding Hitler and the bird, possibly a dove or eagle, above him.  The bird is a common motif in Christian artwork, where it symbolizes the descent of the Holy Spirit.

Lest you should think that I only see how religious iconography is co-opted by anti-religious states to foster a secular state religion, let me share some personal examples of how religious imagery is used for better or worse to develop our American identity.

A couple of years ago I told my then Spanish flat-mate about “The Pledge of Allegiance”.  His eyes grew large as I described children in schools across America, hands on their hearts, facing the flag each morning, chanting in unison.  When I finished, he said, “So it’s like you have an entire army of small children.”  I explained to him that the function of “The Pledge of Allegiance” was not to turn little children into a miniature militia or “uber patriots”.  My response rings hollow even now.  What precisely did we mean when we said:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag

Of the United States of America

And to the Republic, for which it stands,

One nation, under God,

With liberty and justice for all.

Amen?

What exactly is entailed by this oath of “allegiance”?  In other words, what are we agreeing to?  More specifically, what are we promising about our attitudes and our behavior  in relationship to the flag and the nation?  Does such an oath bind us to support every war that our country engages in, even if we question the morality of that war?  What about that “one nation, under God” bit?  How can we be sure that our nation is under God?  Does this statement presume that we and our nation are more important to God than other people and other nations?  If so, why us instead of them?  Does our assertion that we belong to one nation mean that we’re going to all give up our differences, and act as one?  Are atheists, who don’t believe in God, part of this one nation?  Is an oath identifying a God they don’t believe in any way binding for atheists?  It has to be noted here that the phrase “one nation, under God” was added during the Cold War specifically to differentiate “God-fearing” Americans from the “ungodly” Communists.  What are we to make of the final ringing “With liberty and justice for all”?  Are we to assume that that “One nation, under God”, actually does provide “liberty and justice for all”?  It seems hardly likely in a nation where more black men are in prison than at college, and where competent women still hold substantially fewer powerful positions in society, and are paid less than their male counterparts.  What limits our ideal goal of liberty and justice for all?  Should we take an oath swearing to support a nation that is supposed to provide “liberty and justice for all”, but will never be able to achieve that Utopian ideal?  But of course, the Oath of Allegiance is not meant to be analyzed, any more that the unanimous elections held in the One State are meant to be analyzed.  Both are symbolic gestures that speak to our (unanalyzed) position as members of the community.  Both gestures indicate that the state is dependent upon, and yet more important than the individual.

An earlier memory from my childhood comes to mind.  My father, brother and I are in our car traveling across the US, listening to a Christian song.  The song begins by telling of a statue in New York harbor that represents freedom to the world.  The singer’s voice swells to proclaim, “I’m so proud to be called an American.  To be named with the brave and the free….”  The theme changes slightly.  There is a cross on a hill called Calvary.  The singer is proud to be known as a Christian, to be named with the redeemed.  What could be better, I ask you, than this fortunate combination of church and state?  Who could not be proud of being both an American and a Christian?  I was fifteen at the time and was uncritical of this particular equation of being Christian and American.

My identification with Christianity may have even been stronger than my identification with my nation, though they were so closely intertwined that it is difficult to separate them.  I remember quite clearly as a child singing and marching to a song that went:

I’m too young to

march in the infantry

ride in the cavalry

Shoot the artillery

I’m too young to

Fly over the enemy,

But I’m in the Lord’s army.

Yes, Sir!…

This song presents faith, one could argue, both in terms of a modern military and in terms of an unquestioning patriotism.  Similarly, this combination of faith, militarism and patriotism is evident in an email I received on the eve of the war with Iraq:

Subject: PRAY BEFORE IT STARTS A torch has been lit today to be passed along to your e-mail friends…asking them to pass it along….and along….and along. We can do something about the threat of war; both in Iraq and with terrorists. In the Old Testament, God’s armies were always led by the priests. When the waters parted in the Jordan, it was the priests’ feet which first hit the turbulent river. In the New Testament, Christians are also referred to as priests…all Christians. We must, therefore, go in first. As the possibility of war approaches with Hussein and Iraq, we are asking the priests to step in first…..ahead of our military. Let us be setting up camp for our soldiers’ entrance into the conflict. How? By prayer. Let us be sending in “prayer missiles,” “cruise and scud prayers” to target enemy plans. “Patriot prayers” to shoot down incoming threats. We should be praying for two things: (1) that the enemy leaders become confused, disoriented, and distrustful of each other; that their entire system of attack fall apart, and (2) that in God’s wildest ways, these enemies would become aware of His deep love for them and the war Jesus has already fought for them, personally, on the cross. God had Gideon reduce his army from 32,000 to 300 men. He then equipped them with nothing but trumpets, pitchers, and torches. What an odd combination to fight off well-armed soldiers. When Gideon gave the command, the Bible says the enemy fled crying and turned on each other…all because God messed with enemy plans. Prayers were started for this about a month ago. On CNN last weekend a report came out that although Hussein has nothing to lose, his generals do. Is confusion beginning to develop? Please pray for God to set the stage for defeat of all those who intend to do harm. When our men and women of uniform arrive on the scene, may they be surprised at how God had camp set up before they ever got there. Would you please do two things? (1) pray, and (2) pass this along to those you know will pray. May we build an e-mail army of over a million in force…beginning with you.

In light of these examples, it is possible to argue that religious imagery plays an important part in shoring up every social structure, even those (perhaps especially those) which claim to be secular.

Perhaps the function of religion in the One State is to establish faith in the absolute truth of the governing ideology.  The success of this imagery is evidenced by D-503’s refusal to question the ideology of the One State.  Even when he admits his own rather innocent crimes, he does so without any hint that the One State might be to blame.  Instead, when he envisions the possibility that O-90 might betray him, he decides that,

In my last moment I shall piously and gratefully kiss the punishing hand of the Benefactor.  Suffering punishment is my right in relation to the One State, and I will not yield this right.  We, the numbers of our State, should not, must not give up this right—the only, and therefore the most precious, right that we possess. (Zamyatin 1972, 114-115).

This right—which D-503 a little further recognizes does not exist, numbers can have no rights—is premised on the proposition that the One State is always right and the offending number always wrong.  The religious nature of the punishment is made clear earlier, when D-503, watching an execution notes:

According to the descriptions that have come down to us, something similar was experienced by the ancients during their “religious services”.  But they worshiped their own irrational, unknown God; we serve our rational and precisely know one.  Their God gave them nothing except eternal tormenting searching; their God had not been able to think of anything more sensible than offering himself as sacrifice for some incomprehensible reason.  We, on the other hand, offer a sacrifice to our God, the One State—a calm, reasoned, sensible sacrifice.  Yes, this was our solemn liturgy to the One State, a remembrance of the awesome time of trial, of the Two Hundred Years’ War, a grandiose celebration of the victory of all over one, of the sum over the individual.  (Zamyatin 1972, 45-46).

The function of these public executions is not merely to intimidate citizens; the executions also serve to bind the individual citizens into a community.  The citizens become accomplices to the State terror, and naturally they must justify their actions and inactions by agreeing to the fiction that the State is always right.

On another level, a state religion / ideology is an extremely powerful tool for defining “Truth”.  As the philosopher Michel Foucault has noted,

Truth is a thing of this world:  it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.  And it induces regular effects of power.  Each society has its régime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth:  that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish between true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.  (1980b, 131)

In the One State, these highly publicized state religious performances are among the mechanisms used to distinguish between true and false statements, ideas and practices.

Along with using religious imagery as an instrument of control in his fictitious society, Zamyatin also seems to be using the novel as a religious allegory.  D-503—enclosed in the safety of the Green Wall, watched over by the Guardians, whom he compares to archangels, obedient to the Table of Hours, watched and judged by the Benefactor—is a type of Adam.  Like Adam, D-503 is seduced by a woman, I-330, who introduces him both to illicit sexual activity and to critical thought.  The destruction of the Green Wall invites comparison to Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden.  Even the name of the rebels, the Mephi, is a reference to Mephistopheles, a demon who offers knowledge and power to the legendary Dr. Faust. What Zamyatin is providing then is a parable of the fall of man.  Unlike the author of the Genesis account, however, Zamyatin’s sympathies lie with the rebels.  For him, God / the Benefactor, is a tyrant who deprives people of their freedom and individuality.  So important is this idea of freedom that Zamyatin has I-330 explain that revolutions against authority must be infinite (1972, 174-177).  In other word, each time a revolution has succeeded and established itself as an omniscient authority, the citizens must once again revolt.  This call to constant revolution on the part of Zamyatin is echoed in his essays.  Indeed, in his essay “Tomorrow”, he notes,

“The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy…”.  We is Zamyatin’s contribution to this “heresy”.

Continue reading “Life Under the Bell Jar: Surveillance and the New World Order in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” II”

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