george orwell a collection of critical essays

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Twentieth century interpretations of 1984 : a collection of critical essays

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Creators/contributors, contents/summary.

• Introduction / Samuel Hynes
• 1984 / V.S. Pritchett
• Orwell on the Future / Lionel Trilling
• 1984 : the mysticism of cruelty / Isaac Deutscher
• 1984 : history as nightmare / Irving Howe
• The strangled cry / John Strachey
• Introduction to 1984 / Stephen Spender
• The road to 1984 / George Kateb
• Orwell and the techniques of didactic fantasy / Alex Zwerdling
• Letter to George Orwell / Aldous Huxley
• 1984 / Herbert Read
• Climax and change / Wyndham Lewis
• From The English utopia / A.L. Morton

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• Encountering Orwell
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The Orwell Foundation is delighted to make available a selection of essays, articles, sketches, reviews and scripts written by Orwell.

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of  the Orwell Estate . All queries regarding rights should be addressed to the Estate’s representatives at A. M. Heath literary agency.

The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider  making a donation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere.

Sketches For Burmese Days

• 1. John Flory – My Epitaph
• 2. Extract, Preliminary to Autobiography
• 3. Extract, the Autobiography of John Flory
• 4. An Incident in Rangoon
• 5. Extract, A Rebuke to the Author, John Flory

Essays and articles

• A Day in the Life of a Tramp ( Le Progrès Civique , 1929)
• A Hanging ( The Adelphi , 1931)
• A Nice Cup of Tea ( Evening Standard , 1946)
• Antisemitism in Britain ( Contemporary Jewish Record , 1945)
• Arthur Koestler (written 1944)
• British Cookery (unpublished, 1946)
• Can Socialists be Happy? (as John Freeman, Tribune , 1943)
• Common Lodging Houses ( New Statesman , 3 September 1932)
• Confessions of a Book Reviewer ( Tribune , 1946)
• “For what am I fighting?” ( New Statesman , 4 January 1941)
• Freedom and Happiness – Review of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin ( Tribune , 1946)
• Freedom of the Park ( Tribune , 1945)
• Future of a Ruined Germany ( The Observer , 1945)
• Good Bad Books ( Tribune , 1945)
• In Defence of English Cooking ( Evening Standard , 1945)
• In Front of Your Nose ( Tribune , 1946)
• Just Junk – But Who Could Resist It? ( Evening Standard , 1946)
• My Country Right or Left ( Folios of New Writing , 1940)
• Nonsense Poetry ( Tribune , 1945)
• Notes on Nationalism ( Polemic , October 1945)
• Pleasure Spots ( Tribune , January 1946)
• Poetry and the microphone ( The New Saxon Pamphlet , 1945)
• Politics and the English Language ( Horizon , 1946)
• Politics vs. Literature: An examination of Gulliver’s Travels ( Polemic , 1946)
• Reflections on Gandhi ( Partisan Review , 1949)
• Rudyard Kipling ( Horizon , 1942)
• Second Thoughts on James Burnham ( Polemic , 1946)
• Shooting an Elephant ( New Writing , 1936)
• Some Thoughts on the Common Toad ( Tribune , 1946)
• Spilling the Spanish Beans ( New English Weekly , 29 July and 2 September 1937)
• The Art of Donald McGill ( Horizon , 1941)
• The Moon Under Water ( Evening Standard , 1946)
• The Prevention of Literature ( Polemic , 1946)
• The Proletarian Writer (BBC Home Service and The Listener , 1940)
• The Spike ( Adelphi , 1931)
• The Sporting Spirit ( Tribune , 1945)
• Why I Write ( Gangrel , 1946)
• You and the Atom Bomb ( Tribune , 1945)

Reviews by Orwell

• Anonymous Review of Burmese Interlude by C. V. Warren ( The Listener , 1938)
• Anonymous Review of Trials in Burma by Maurice Collis ( The Listener , 1938)
• Review of The Pub and the People by Mass-Observation ( The Listener , 1943)

Letters and other material

• BBC Archive: George Orwell
• Free will (a one act drama, written 1920)
• George Orwell to Steven Runciman (August 1920)
• George Orwell to Victor Gollancz (9 May 1937)
• George Orwell to Frederic Warburg (22 October 1948, Letters of Note)
• ‘Three parties that mattered’: extract from Homage to Catalonia (1938)
• Voice – a magazine programme , episode 6 (BBC Indian Service, 1942)
• Your Questions Answered: Wigan Pier (BBC Overseas Service)
• The Freedom of the Press: proposed preface to Animal Farm (1945, first published 1972)
• Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm  (March 1947)

External links are being provided for informational purposes only; they do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by The Orwell Foundation of any of the products, services or opinions of the corporation or organisation or individual. The Foundation bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality or content of the external site or for that of subsequent links. Contact the external site for answers to questions regarding its content.

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• DOI: 10.2307/40129938
• Corpus ID: 160528454

George Orwell a Collection of Critical Essays

• Published 1 August 1974

20 Citations

George orwell as a public choice economist.

• Highly Influenced

Munich Personal RePEc Archive

Poem, creed, letter, foetus: george orwell's keep the aspidistra flying, george orwell, desire, and encounters with rural sex in mid-century england, george orwell, jack hilton, and the working class, how are george orwell’s writings a precursor to studies of popular culture, "the poor man's club": the middle classes, the public house, and the idea of community in the nineteen-thirties, “noble bodies”: orwell, miners, and masculinity, the voice of sesotho creative writers with particular reference to four poets., the dialogics of satire : foci and faultlines in george orwell's animal farm and nineteen eighty-four, related papers.

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Reconsidering Orwell’s Essays

Sep 30, 2013

Reviewed by John P. Rossi

G eorge Orwell was the greatest essayist of the twentieth century.

Sixty years ago, at the height of his fame as the author of Animal Farm , Orwell published a collection of essays that first revealed to a wide audience his skill in this most difficult of literary forms. Called Critical Essays in England, it was renamed Dickens, Dali, and Others when it appeared in the United States. It wasn’t his first book of essays. An earlier anthology, Inside the Whale , appeared in the early days of World War II but got lost in the dramatic events of the spring of 1940 when Hitler’s legions swept across Western Europe. Inside the Whale was quickly forgotten, although the distinguished literary critic Q. D. Leavis asserted that it showed that Orwell was one of the best prose stylists then writing in English.

Unfortunately for Orwell, writing essays was not financially profitable. For Inside the Whale his advance from his publisher, Victor Gollancz, was just thirty pounds. Orwell said he enjoyed analyzing literary figures but there was no money in it.

In 1952, two years after his death, with Orwell’s popularity growing due to the success of Nineteen Eighty-Four , a new version of his best non-fiction was published in America under the title A Collection of Essays . It was compiled from previously published material culled from both Inside the Whale and Critical Essays , plus an unpublished piece, a remarkable, often unforgettable portrait of his early school days, “Such, Such Were the Joys.” This volume was the work of the young publishing genius Jason Epstein, who had convinced Doubleday that there was a market among upscale readers and college students for quality paperbacks. A Collection of Essays was one of the first and most successful of the Anchor Books series which Epstein started and it remains in print and continues to sell today.

A Collection of Essays consists of fourteen pieces, of which the lead essay, the twenty-thousand word “Such, Such Were the Joys” about Orwell’s traumatic schooldays, could only be published in the United States because of English libel laws. It is also the longest essay Orwell wrote. It has been argued by some Orwell scholars that his unhappy experiences at school influenced his conception of the grim future in Nineteen Eighty-Four . His biographer, Bernard Crick in George Orwell: A Life , dismisses the notion that “Such, Such, Were the Joys” was written just before Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four and reflected the tuberculosis that was ravaging him at the time. Crick shows that Orwell began the essay in the early 1940s and thus there was no direct connection to the novel.

Orwell’s portrait of his school, St. Cyprian’s, called Crossgates in the essay, is in a tradition of horror tales of English education. It bears some resemblance to Winston Churchill’s experience at school in his My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930). Like Churchill, Orwell portrays himself as a frightened little boy, easily intimidated by his classmates, bullied by the teachers, and generally miserable. Neither Churchill nor Orwell admitted learning much at school.

“Such, Such Were the Joys” reveals Orwell’s skill at finding meaning in otherwise trivial events and avoiding the trap of self-pity. He tells how he was accused of some school infraction. He was innocent, but it didn’t matter; he felt guilty. It taught him that you could “commit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to avoid it … But at any rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good.” It was a thought that remained with him for the rest of his life.

The other essays in the 1952 edition had appeared before, and at least two, “Shooting an Elephant” and “Politics and the English Language,” already were well on their way to becoming classics. These two would be anthologized in American high school and college English texts as examples of good prose and would influence a generation of aspiring writers.

T he remaining essays are a testament to the breadth of Orwell’s interests. They include interpretations of two controversial individuals, Rudyard Kipling and Mohandas Gandhi; an indictment of the evils of imperialism, “Marrakech”; and two essays that deal with key events in the recent past, “England Your England” and “Looking Back on the Spanish War.” The former is part one of Orwell’s elaboration of the uniqueness of the English national character and his defense of the concept of patriotism he first outlined early in World War II in his monograph The Lion and the Unicorn (1940).

“Looking Back on the Spanish War” is in many ways a summary of Orwell’s controversial analysis of the Spanish Civil War, which he first outlined in Homage to Catalonia (1938). It is a bitter indictment of the failure of the left in England to speak out against Communist treachery in Spain. It also contains the first inkling of Orwell’s fear that the very idea of historical truth was disappearing in the face of lies and propaganda, an idea that would show up in his last two novels. He wrote that he feared that the very idea that history could be truthfully written was fading, along with the idea that such a thing as truth can exist. He wasn’t far off in that, as the deconstructionists have made clear.

“Marrakech” and “Shooting an Elephant” pick up one of Orwell’s favorite themes—the deleterious impact of imperialism not just on the colonial peoples but on the rulers. Christopher Hitchens has noted that there is a side of Orwell that is often missed—as the forerunner of post-colonial studies. “Marrakech” begins with one of Orwell’s most arresting opening lines: “As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.” It is possible that Orwell borrowed the image from his wife, Eileen, who used a similar phrase in a letter to a friend.

There is a certain disjointed quality to “Marrakech,” as if Orwell just cobbled together some thoughts about imperialism. His major theme is the invisibility of the colonized. The Moroccans he sees are the color of the earth. “[W]here the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed.”

Orwell ends by watching a parade of Senegalese troops marching by, “their curiously sensitive black faces … glistening with sweat.” As they pass he poses the question that he says every white man must ask himself: “How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?” The Europeans wouldn’t have to wait long for their answer.

“Shooting an Elephant” is the essay where Orwell first found his distinctive “voice”—the ability to write a kind of direct, intimate prose that leaves nothing between the writer and the reader. As Orwell says in “Why I Write,” good prose is like a window pane: it hides nothing.

When Orwell shoots the elephant, which he knows is no longer dangerous, he recognizes that he is responding to the will of the Burmese mob. “Here I was, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet … I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” No one has ever better described the paradox of the link between the ruler and the ruled.

T he three essays “Boys’ Weeklies,” “The Art of Donald McGill,” and “Raffles and Miss Blandish” are among the first attempts to subject to serious analysis such popular culture phenomena as comic post cards, the difference between English and American crime stories, and the reading material of English adolescents. Orwell was always suspicious of the desire of intellectuals to denigrate things that the common people cherished as examples of the trivial and useless. He reverts to this theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four with the coral paperweight and the copy book with rich creamy paper that reminds Winston Smith of the lost past. With these essays Orwell could be considered the creator of the modern thoughtful essay about an otherwise ephemeral theme.

“Charles Dickens” and “Inside the Whale” reveal Orwell’s gift for literary criticism. The former is still appreciated by Dickens scholars and remains fresh and vivid today. Orwell told Humphrey House, one of England’s leading Dickens scholars, that he never really studied Dickens but “merely read and enjoyed him.”

Orwell’s insights about things that interested him were always worth noting. Dickens had been dismissed as irrelevant during the crisis of the 1930s as having childish political views. Orwell doesn’t dispute this but notes: “I think that because his moral sense was sound he would have been able to find his bearing in any political or economic milieu.”

Orwell’s Dickens bears a striking resemblance to Orwell himself. When he looked at Dickens, Orwell wrote that he saw the “face of a man who is always fighting against something, … the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” In brief, a perfect portrait of Orwell himself.

“Inside the Whale” is Orwell’s analysis of the literary trends of the 1920s and 1930s. Using the novelist Henry Miller as an example, it is among other things a defense of the concept of art and the artist even when their social and political views are irresponsible. It is typical of the contrarian side of Orwell that he would find something positive to say about a writer who was largely despised and accused of being little better than a pornographer. “Inside the Whale” also contains an insight into why literary tastes changed from the 1920s generation of Eliot, Pound, and Yeats—who were either apolitical or downright reactionary—to the politically engaged Auden-Spender-C. Day Lewis generation of leftwing radicals of the 1930s. While critically sympathetic to the political views of the latter, Orwell noted that the 1920s writers were technically innovative despite their narrow political views. Few leftwing literary critics would have made the same point then and perhaps now. Orwell’s views have been vindicated, as the writers of the 1920s are still seen as innovators while the Auden generation now seems dated.

A Collection of Essays ends with “Why I Write,” a short piece in which Orwell discusses four motivations for writing—sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. He believed that the first three motives outweighed the fourth in his makeup, but events of the twentieth century forced him to try to make political writing into an art. It could be argued that in this he succeeded better than any other writer of his generation.

These essays written between 1936 and 1949 foreshadow the world of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four . Orwell’s essays are less well known than these two seminal works of fiction but they are equally important for understanding his world view. The origin of many of themes in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four can be found in these essays: distrust of intellectuals, defense of patriotism as the glue that held the various English classes together, the need for a true socialist revolution, suspicion of communism, respect for themes of popular culture, and concern for the idea of truth.

A Collection of Essays deserves to be read today by all interested in the worrisome issues of state power, how ideology can corrupt, and the way propaganda threatens to undermine the traditional concept of truth in the West. No one spelled out these problems better than Orwell. For those not familiar with his work, A Collection of Essays is a great place to begin.  

John P. Rossi is a Professor of History at La Salle University in Philadelphia. He has written extensively on Orwell, most recently “Two Irascible Englishmen: Mr. Waugh and Mr. Orwell,” Modern Age: A Quarterly Review , Vol. 47, No. 2, Spring 2005.

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A Collection of Essays Paperback – October 21, 1970

• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Mariner Books Classics
• Publication date October 21, 1970
• Reading age 14 years and up
• Dimensions 5.31 x 0.83 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 0156186004
• ISBN-13 978-0156186001
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

This essay alone would be worth the cover price, and the dozen other pieces collected here prove that, given the right thinker/writer, today's journalism actually can become tomorrow's literature. "The Art of Donald McGill," ostensibly an appreciation of the jokey, vaguely obscene illustrated postcards beloved of the working classes, uses the lens of popular culture to examine the battle lines and rules of engagement in the war of the sexes, circa 1941. "Politics and the English Language" is a prose working-out of Orwell's perceptions about the slippery relationship of word and thought that becomes a key premise of 1984 . "Looking Back on the Spanish War" is as clear-eyed a veteran's memoir of the nature of war as you're likely to find, and Orwell's long ruminations on the wildly popular "good bad" writers Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling showcase his singular virtues--searing honesty and independent thinking. From English boarding schools to Gandhi's character to an early appreciation of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer , these pieces give an idiosyncratic tour of the first half of the passing century in the company of an articulate and engaged guide. Don't let the idea that Orwell is an "important" writer put you off reading him. He's really too good, and too human, to miss. --Joyce Thompson

About the Author

George Orwell (1903–1950), the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic. He was born in India and educated at Eton. After service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he returned to Europe to earn his living by writing. An author and journalist, Orwell was one of the most prominent and influential figures in twentieth-century literature. His unique political allegory  Animal Farm  was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with the dystopia of 1984 (1949), which brought him worldwide fame. 

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books Classics; First Edition (October 21, 1970)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0156186004
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0156186001
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 years and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.83 x 8 inches
• #8 in Political Literature Criticism
• #11 in Historical Event Literature Criticism
• #358 in Essays (Books)

About the author

George orwell.

George Orwell is one of England's most famous writers and social commentators. Among his works are the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian nightmare vision Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell was also a prolific essayist, and it is for these works that he was perhaps best known during his lifetime. They include Why I Write and Politics and the English Language. His writing is at once insightful, poignant and entertaining, and continues to be read widely all over the world.

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there.

At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.

It was around this time that Orwell's unique political allegory Animal Farm (1945) was published. The novel is recognised as a classic of modern political satire and is simultaneously an engaging story and convincing allegory. It was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which finally brought him world-wide fame. Nineteen Eighty-Four's ominous depiction of a repressive, totalitarian regime shocked contemporary readers, but ensures that the book remains perhaps the preeminent dystopian novel of modern literature.

Orwell's fiercely moral writing has consistently struck a chord with each passing generation. The intense honesty and insight of his essays and non-fiction made Orwell one of the foremost social commentators of his age. Added to this, his ability to construct elaborately imaginative fictional worlds, which he imbued with this acute sense of morality, has undoubtedly assured his contemporary and future relevance.

George Orwell died in London in January 1950.

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75 Years of 1984 : Why George Orwell’s Classic Remains More Relevant Than Ever

Elif shafak on the relentless real-world spread of orwellian dystopia.

There is Orwell the human being. There is Orwell the novelist. There is Orwell the intellectual, the critic, the journalist, the essayist, the radical. But lately, George Orwell—who was born Eric Arthur Blair and who never fully abandoned his original name—has increasingly come to be regarded as a modern oracle, a gifted soothsayer who predicted with terrifying accuracy how fragile and fallible our political systems were, how close the shadow of authoritarianism. His body of work has become a compass to help us navigate our way in times of democratic recession and backsliding, as is the case worldwide. Among all his books, the one that has left the deepest impact on generations of readers across borders is, no doubt, Nineteen Eighty-Four .

I was an undergrad in Turkey when I first discovered the cautionary novel—a tattered copy coincidentally picked up in a second-hand bookshop. Winston Smith, a rebel who does not resemble the heroes in lore and legend; a lonely, pensive and observant individual in an oppressive regime. Big Brother, always watching, dominating every inch of daily life, like an unblinking celestial gaze. The rewriting of a nation’s past to suit the orders and needs of the government/the State/the Party. Sands of personal memory trying to survive the crashing waves of collective amnesia.

It all shook me to my core. I found myself thinking about the story long after I had finished the last page. Back in those days, I had quietly started writing fiction, keeping it to myself, dreaming of becoming a novelist—a wisp of a wish I could not even dare to say out loud. This also happened to be a time when I was reading extensively about the systemic human rights violations that had happened and were still happening in my motherland.

Forgotten truths. Unearthed stories. Taboo subjects. Historical chronicles deftly erased by official propaganda. The labelling of anyone who dared to question the dominant narrative as a ‘traitor.’ Sufferings and silences hidden under the veneer of ‘normal life.’ The world described by Orwell did not seem to be far off. Nor that surreal. It felt eerily familiar and dangerously close.

In retrospect, I do not think I was alone in this feeling. Across the world there must have been so many of us who experienced a similarly uncanny sense of déjà vu upon reading Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time. That is because for those of us who come from “wounded democracies” or autocracies-in-the-making or downright dictatorships, Oceania was never some far-fetched dystopian land set in an unforeseeable future, but something closer, much more visceral. And frightening too. It was not even a prescient warning about where things might lead if politics went unexpectedly wrong. For us, Nineteen Eighty-Four was already here. It was already happening.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, a polarized view of the world was very popular and persistent. According to this, the earth was broadly divided into “solid lands” versus “liquid lands.” The former—mostly, advanced Western democracies—were generally thought to be sturdy, safe, steady. Their citizens no longer had to worry about basic human rights and freedoms—such as freedom of speech or women’s rights—because all these had already been achieved, the threshold of social and political development crossed long, long ago.

It was in “other places,” in those storm-tossed, unsettled, liquid countries that such concerns had more justification. After all, those nations were not “there yet”—not yet solidified, they were still becoming , still in flux. But since history meant the story of progress, even those countries that were ‘lagging behind’ would, sooner or later, catch up with the West. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Union was no more. The only political model that was viable and sustainable in the long run was liberal democracy. Back in those days, there was tremendous confidence, one that was shared by many in both media and academia, that democracy was the shared future of humankind.

The World Wide Web emerged against this backdrop, which dovetailed with the excitement surrounding the new digital technologies. What followed was an era of hyper-optimism. Trade and technology would make us all interdependent and interconnected. Thanks to the proliferation of social media platforms—and the growing interaction among nations through the exchange of services, goods and capital—we would all become a global village. A democratic village! From now on, the expansion of democracy would be unstoppable since nothing could stand in the way of the flow of information.

Not even dictators, not even the worst autocrats. Social media networks would spread information far and wide. People would become “informed citizens,” and informed citizens would seek fruitful and constructive solutions. If information travelled freely, openly, how could dictators continue to hide the truth from their own people? The age of authoritarianism was over.

There was such naive trust in social media’s ability to precipitate democratic change and goodness that a young couple in Egypt named their newborn child Facebook, and a family in Israel, a couple of months later, called their third child, Like. By the time those babies were reaching adolescence the world had completely and dramatically changed, the hyper-optimism of the previous decades soured into blatant pessimism.

By 2016, it was becoming obvious to most that democracy was not on the rise as predicted, but just the opposite, weakening. The incendiary rhetoric of isolationism, nativist ultranationalism and authoritarianism was echoed in many corners of the world. Surprisingly, this was happening not only in “liquid lands,” but also in “solid lands.” Suddenly the hackneyed binary assumptions of the earlier decades, which were always problematic, were crumbling. Maybe democracy was far more fragile than we had assumed. Maybe we all needed to worry about human rights or freedom of speech or the future of democratic institutions and norms. Maybe there was no such thing as solid lands versus liquid lands, and we were, in truth, all living through “liquid times.”

Even the steady, safe countries of the West were not immune to the dangers of authoritarianism. And as this realization took full hold, the sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four soared. This rise was especially visible in the USA where the Trump administration brazenly told reporters that there were facts and then there were “alternative facts.” That sounded like something you would encounter in Nineteen Eighty-Four . No wonder then that from cinemas to theaters to Broadway, adaptations of the novel proliferated. Many Americans began to feel what we, in other parts of the world, had felt when we read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time—that it was not some farfetched dystopia set in a remote place and time. It was already here. It was already happening.

Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in a gloomy mood while he was dealing with sickness, deeply worried both for himself and for the state of the world. In particular, he was concerned that objective truth was withering away. The novel is, among many other things, about loss. The loss of truth. The loss of memory. The loss of love and empathy. This is not coincidental. Uncontrolled exercise of power and cruelty is only possible when truth, memory and love/empathy are fully subjugated. It is only then that a human being can be diminished to a “nobody,” an unperson, and the whole society can be reduced down to mere numbers.

When truth fades out on such a massive scale we are catapulted into a hall of distorting mirrors where everything is upside down. The Ministry of Peace engages in the fabrication of war, distrust and hatred. The Ministry of Plenty generates massive inequalities, causing destitution and starvation. The Ministry of Truth manufactures lies. And the primary task of the Ministry of Love is to carry out systemic torture and abuse. In this new order, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and forced-labor camps are labelled as ‘joycamps.’ Distortion of truth can continue so long as citizens do not notice, do not question, do not react—and hence, the following slogan: Ignorance is Strength.

Nineteen Eighty-Four left a profound impact on countless artists and writers from all backgrounds. Thoughtcrime, memory hole, doublethink, Newspeak… The neologisms that Orwell brilliantly coined have become essential parts of our cultural and literary heritage. In 1974 David Bowie wanted to debut a single titled “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” but it was never fully produced as he could not get permission from Orwell’s wife. Radiohead made a song called “2 + 2 = 5” and Manic Street Preachers released another named “Orwellian.”

In fact, “Orwellian” is the most widely used adjective today that is derived from the name of a writer, poet or thinker—far more than Dickensian, Byronic, Freudian, Kafkaesque or Machiavellian. I sometimes wonder whether it would have made George Orwell uncomfortable or even sad to observe that his name has become a synonym for all the things that he vehemently opposed, or would he understand and accept the pure irony of this?

Ours is the age of mass surveillance, populist authoritarian movements and fragile democracies. Social media platforms have accelerated the erosion of truth and the dissemination of misinformation, slander and hate speech. It was a mistake to regard and romanticize information as a panacea for the world’s problems. For they are completely different things: information, knowledge and wisdom. Every day we are bombarded with thousands of snippets of information, but there is very little knowledge, and no time to slow down to gain knowledge, much less wisdom.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is more relevant than ever before. This remarkable novel stands out not only because of the cautionary tale it tells, but also because it sharply discerns the power of language. Words can heal, words can hurt. They can build or destroy. Since human beings think, remember and process their emotions through words, in order to control both critical thinking and emotional intelligence, language must be policed from above. The official dialect of Oceania is Newspeak. Words that have been eliminated must be instantly forgotten.

A totalitarian super-state hates ambiguities, and therefore it will not allow nuances of thought. The philosopher and Holocaust survivor Theodor Adorno once said, “Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.” In this closed mindset there is no appreciation for diversity or pluralism. No room for uncertainty. Everything must be narrowed down to a rigid binary opposition—us versus them. The definition of ‘them’ might change depending on the whims of the regime but there always has to be an ‘enemy,’ and history must be edited and rewritten to fit the new propaganda. The Party knows that “ Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past .”

As I am writing this introduction, book bans across US public schools have increased by almost 35 per cent between July 2022 and June 2023. From racial inequality to sexuality to LGBTQ rights, any subject that is regarded as “unwanted” or “inappropriate” can be used as grounds for censorship. There might come a day when we will see Nineteen Eighty-Four being removed from library shelves. To make sure that day never arrives, this powerful and significant novel must be read, re-read and shared across the world. This we owe to George Orwell.

__________________________________

From 1984: 75th Anniversary Edition by George Orwell. Introduction Copyright © 2024 by Elif Shafak. Available from The Folio Society .

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