Nineteen Eighty-Four – Arthur Hofn

Orwell vs Huxley

Dystopia is a whole category of fiction in itself, there are countless books creating dark and twisted societies based on authoritarian overlords and the such. If you were going to boil the whole genre down there are two books that, to my mind, define the whole concept. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World – both have probably been studied and cross examined multiple times by those who love the style, but I wanted to highlight both novels for those that maybe know about them but haven’t got to round to reading them yet. Obliviously there are others, I chose to study Fahrenheit 451 as my novel of choice for my GCSE, but I don’t have the space to list all of them here; add your suggestions in the comments if you want to.

There is a warning, it’s hard to properly discuss the stories and not give too much away, I’ve tried to keep it to a minimum but anything I think that is a spoiler I will put the text in light blue so you can avoid it if you want to.

Personally I quite like the idea of twisted version of our reality, and the concept in building these worlds is either many subtle, or one blatant, change to our history; for example in Philip K Dick’s The Man In The High Castle it was the Nazis that won World War Two. Often the reason for creating such worlds is that the author is writing to make a point about our way of living but taking the concepts they want to highlight to the extreme, if we are not careful this COULD happen or even this IS happening but it’s hidden from our view therefore the story is a way of pointing out what to look for.

For me to just put both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World together doesn’t mean they are the same, in fact I picked them 1) because to me they really are the obvious two and 2) because they are very different in the way they go about telling their tales.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell was mainly written between 1947 and 1948 and would be the last novel Orwell would publish.

The plot follows Winston Smith, who at the start works for the government in the Ministry of Truth, however as the book goes on you see there is more to the man than just a drone for the dictatorship. The plot stays with the main character however through his eyes we see the world as, at best turning it’s citizens into the unquestioning oppressed and at worse torturing and destroying anyone who even remotely disagrees. It’s from this book that we really get the term “Orwellian”. The Cambridge Dictionary defines this as “used to describe a political system in which the government tries to control every part of people’s lives”, and that isn’t the only major vocabulary to our language that this book has contributed; Big Brother and Room 101 are both phrases that conjure up the concepts that are now understood by people who may have never read the book or watched the film.

We also see the ludicrousness of the extent that the Party goes to to keep everyone controlled; Winston Smith’s job means rewriting history just to suit what is appropriate for the day, if it needs to be rewritten again tomorrow then so be it and woe betide anyone who gets their history wrong.

There is a lot of other ideas which have seen fruition in our world although maybe not in the way Orwell intended, but it’s surprising how far-sighted this novel is, not just to 1984 but even to our day.

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
― George Orwell, 1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four is the the world of obvious dictators and rebellion. Brave New World is something even scarier. Taking it’s title from Shakespeare’s The Tempest Aldous Huxley’s novel hasn’t added to our language in the way George Orwell did. It’s older, written in 1931 and published in 1932, and set in 2540 – but uses a different calendar.

Here everyone seems happy or at least content. As the world is explained to us the plot centres on a wider cast, one that shifts the importance of each character as the novel progresses. For the most part despite there being a little dissatisfaction, people are shown believing they are at a peak of achievement and happiness, there is not a tyrant to fight instead it’s a system to sit back and think about how good everything is.

Even those that question it are not hunted down but are accommodated to some extent as long as they are out of the way; this is to the point that when someone truly wants to disengage he totally fails to get anyone else to see the problems that he considers are real.

Rather than using the stick this government has used the carrot to control and has been successful in the way that Nineteen Eighty-Four’s authoritarian class fail, hence their need for the likes of Room 101. What is a darker view of a despot society, one that uses torture on it’s resistance, or one that doesn’t need to because no one can see anything wrong? There are arguments for either answer.

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Both show a 1930/40s view of the future, from 80 odd years onwards it’s fun to think about not just that our world is might coincide with some concepts from these books but also how it is different, not just from the obvious but in the way opinions, language and concepts that were assumed to survive have actually be lost or updated; some for the better, some for the worse.

If you’ve not read these books I’d highly recommend both, if you just want to try one… well give Nineteen Eighty-Four a go, not just because of the contribution it has made to 20^th and 21^st Century (I was going to say Britain but it’s more global than that), but also as it might give you a taste to try some more.

Buy Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Buy Brave New World by Aldous Huxley