1984 (orwell)

So, this book is like, prophetic, it’s like what the future used to look like and the future that never was but still might be, if you were a Spanish Civil War veteran stroke Old Etonian who’s lost faith in their youthful counter-revolutionary dreams but wanted to have it on record that those dreams existed even if they never came to fruition which is what happens with most dreams anyway, is it not?

And I imagine the writer sitting in a pub in Fitzrovia, walking home to his cottage at the top of Portobello, home of the Spanish exiles, feeling at once out of step and in step with a society which had given him so much and deprived him of so much at the same time and out of all this walking and talking and drinking and thinking emerges:

A dystopia.

Which in some ways perhaps is more of a work of autobiography than a work of socially aware politics. I write these words in ignorance, knowing little about Orwell, but trapped in the unbending cynicism of this vision, which is riddled with laborious prose and middle aged longing.

Perhaps the way in which 1984 is most modern as a novel is in how it satisfies the dystopian instinct of the capitalist era, wherein the worst excesses of our imaginations help to justify the moral compromises of the hangdog, individualistic society we find ourselves enclosed in, with its craving for indulgence dressed up as romantic freedom. This is in no way to sympathise with the excesses of the fascist regimes it critiques, but it is notable that Orwell’s alt vision feels jaded. The depiction of the proles, Winston’s last hope which is no kind of hope, feels entirely in keeping with the ongoing travails of the British class system, which has been consolidated by an era of alt-capitalism which has defeated both the communist autocracy and the fascist excesses which Orwell’s book decries. There is something hidebound and weary about the prose, which is the prose of a dying man, unhappy in his life and caught up in the petty machinations of the British publishing world.

nb Cursory research tells me Orwell lived at Portobello Road in 1927, long before the Spanish Civil War. So the above is an example of thoughtspeak or the desire to rewrite history as exhibited by O’Brien in the novel.