Bethanne Patrick
“If there was hope, it
must lie in the Proles because only there, in those swarming disregarded
masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to
destroy the Party ever be generated."
George Orwell 1984
"Who controls the
past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
George Orwell 1984
“If you want a picture
of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
George Orwell
” Orwell’s vision may
have been inspired by the USSR, but the rest of the world has become more
Orwellian in the years since. “It actually is frightening,” says Newman. “We
live in a world where if you walk down the street, there are screens everywhere
that are filming you, in New York at least. We’re living in a Nineteen
Eighty-Four in which we get to choose the government.”
Sandra Newman
“Julia” is Sandra
Newman’s retelling of George Orwell’s classic “1984. The book is well written
and researched; remaking a classic is no mean feat. The Orwell Estate
commissioned the book. Although The main executor of the Estate is Orwell’s son,
Richard Blair, he did not make the final choice of author. It must be said that
the Estate has not always acted with the utmost generosity. In 2015, it notified
CafePress that it had infringed copyright by having T-shirts with 1984 written
on them.
TorrentFreak, the
company that produced the T-shirts, said, “First off is the irony of the Estate
of George Orwell being all Orwellian, but second is that you can’t copyright a
number. This is a blatant abuse of the copyright system, and, more often, it’s
a ridiculous attempt to control something that needs no control. I am in the
process of having this image retouched and added to the store on my current
site, as I will not allow this kind of abuse of authority to stand.”[1]
Although since 2021, the
Orwell Estate has lost the copyright to the book 1984, it is still a big deal
that it asked the writer Sandra Newman to give the book a “feminist” slant. Newman
says, “people are re-examining his legacy” in light of the MeToo movement – it
seemed inevitable that somebody would produce a feminist take on Nineteen
Eighty-Four, with or without the Estate’s approval, so, “I think they had
decided almost that time had run out on not doing it.”
Newman is not alone in rewriting
classic books. Many contemporary publishing houses are retelling classic
stories from women’s perspectives. Apart from Sandra Newman’s feminist
retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Katherine Bradley’s novel The Sisterhood is
also a feminist retake of 1984, published in March this year. Other non-Orwell
books include Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Helen Oyeyemi’s Snow White, and Barbara
Kingsolver’s recent Charles Dickens Demon Copperhead.
But who knew there was a
literary term for it? The academic term “anastrophe” refers to the technique of
reversing word order in a sentence for effect. It means taking one author's
work to produce another relatively new work.
The Orwell Estate must have
come under extreme pressure from elements of the right-wing MeToo movement to
sanction this piece of “anastrophe”. The right-wing fanatics that make up the MeToo
movement believe Orwell was a misogynist. Daisy Lafarge says “Julia” would appear to “fix” Orwell’s novel
for a contemporary feminist readership.
This is not to say that
the book is worthless. As Natasha Walter writes in her Guardian review, “In the
most basic way, Julia is a satisfying tribute act. Newman has deeply considered
the language and culture of Orwell’s novel, which created its future setting by
way of early 20th-century Britain and takes us carefully through its familiar
landscape. Indeed, these scenes are so well-trodden for many of us that
re-entering each one, from the grim windowless factory floor of the Ministry of
Truth to the fragile respite of the room above the junk shop to O’Brien’s
luxurious but threatening sitting room, can feel almost like encountering scenes
from your memories.”
Although Newman’s new
book is not a direct attack on Orwell’s reputation, it is nonetheless a by-product
of a growing assault on his reputation. Newman's half-hearted defence is quite
touching: “I don’t fully understand those who are judgemental to such a degree
that they think somebody should be erased from the book of life posthumously,”
she says. “It’s not like we’re giving money to George Orwell and rewarding him
for being a misogynist.”
It seems a host of new
books and articles have one goal: to bury the already long-deceased author
under a mountain of dead dogs and, therefore, destroy the reputation of one of
the greatest writers of the 20th Century.[2]
While Newman’s book
complements the original, she has none of Orwell's highly developed political or
historical understanding. At the same time, Newman writes of a future beyond
Orwell’s ending. She prevents Julia from saying anything about the political
developments after 1984. Newman is not interested in placing Julia in the
context of today's political developments. As Lafarge writes, “The novel was
written in direct response to Stalin’s regime, yet the motives of “Julia” don’t
seem to be concerned with the differences between Orwell’s period and our
political moment. Instead, its main project seems to be redressing the gender
balance in Orwell’s fiction. As a result, claims for its “timeliness” can only
lead to vague generalisations about women’s oppression rather than examining
the political structures imposing it. For contemporary readers, whose
reproductive rights are being encroached on by the right, the novel’s
simplistic depiction of amalgamated socialist evils may feel somewhat out of
step with present affairs.”[3]
George Orwell’s “1984”
was published in 1949 with its Newspeak and Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love
and Plenty, “doublethink” — “Truth is Hate, Peace is Hate. Love is Hate” — “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance
is Strength.” we are back with a contemporary bang. It does not take much
imagination to easily recognise a description of “Oceania” or any of the terms
above as having a very contemporary resonance. The futuristic dystopia
immortalised by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four exists in today's capitalist
society.
Richard Mynick is spot
on when he writes, “The novel’s police state bore an obvious resemblance to
Stalin’s USSR. Coming from Orwell—a self-described democratic socialist who was
deeply hostile to Stalinism—this was unsurprising. But while Orwell was too
clear-sighted to conflate Stalinism with socialism (writing, for example, “My
recent novel [‘1984’] is NOT intended as an attack on socialism…but as a
show-up of the perversions...which have already been partly realised in
Communism and Fascism.…”, his Cold War-era readership was often blind to this
distinction. His cautionary notes (“The scene of the book is laid in Britain…to
emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone
else and that totalitarianism…could triumph anywhere”) were largely overlooked,
and in the public mind, the novel’s grim prophesy (“If you want a picture of
the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever”) attached itself
mainly to political systems seen as enemies of Western-style capitalist
“democracies.” Yet Nineteen Eighty-Four was no endorsement of
the West. It posits only an unaccountable elite that rules in its interests and
maintains power by taking state-run mind control to its logical extreme. It
examines what’s operationally involved in compelling a population to submit to
exploitative rule—without regard to the nominal form of economic organisation.
Put a bit differently. The book considers the psycho-social machinery of
unaccountable state power in general—regardless of whether it
originates from a ruling bureaucracy or finance capital. It explores the
general problem of maintaining social stability in a highly unequal society,
which can be done only through some combination of repression and controlling
the population’s consciousness.”[4]
Newman has written an
interesting and competent book but does not have a single inch of
subversiveness. In this age, to be subversive is to be revolutionary. As Richard
Mynick writes, “Early in the novel, Winston undertakes to commit a subversive
act: he begins writing a personal diary. He wistfully addresses it: “To the
future or the past, to a time when thought is free.” Orwell has elsewhere been
credited with “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a
revolutionary act.” Assaulted by the Newspeak of the US
political class, we manifestly live in a time of universal deceit. We are all
Winston Smith and must look to revolutionary acts of telling the truth to light
the way to a time when thought is free.”
[1] George Orwell's estate denies 'Big
Brother values' after challenge to 1984 merchandise-https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/28/george-orwell-estate-disputes-allegations-orwellian-cafepress
[2] See book review-Wifedom by Anna
Funder-Penguin Books Ltd,
£20-http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/09/wifedom-by-anna-funder-penguin-books.html
[3] A New, Feminist Retelling of
‘1984’-www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/books/review/julia-sandra-newman.html
[4] A comment: Revisiting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2010Richard Mynick- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/1984-j12.html
