World Spins Madly On

Dystopia Disseration

The following is my Advanced Higher English dissertation. For anyone who is interested it is 4,499 words in length. The maximum limit being 4,500

In the books Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, how effectively do the writers present convincing dystopias, extrapolating our current behaviour in order to warn of how this behaviour could lead to an inauspicious future?

These novels are two of the most famous examples of literary dystopias, each providing their own varying, yet equally undesirable predictions of the future. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, published in 1949 in the aftermath of the Second World War, looks to the then future 1984, and predicts a society of complete government control in the absence of any personal liberty – a society where everyone is under constant surveillance and scrutiny, not just of their actions but crucially also of their thoughts. The world he presents, though extreme for having predicted it in such a relatively close future, is realistically terrifying and warns more vividly than perhaps any other book: change, or else this is how the world may end up.

The novel is based in Oceania, one of three remaining international totalitarian superpowers, comprising of Britain and all of North and South America. Or, more specifically, it is based in what used to known as London, England. It is set in the year 1984, though it is noted that the date is not certain, as it is never possible to be sure “within a year or two”. This is simply the year the government reports it to be. The story begins with the opening line,

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”.

This line immediately sets a clear tone to be followed throughout the book, a very dark, sombre and almost depressingly grey tone; the number thirteen also symbolic of bad luck. We are then introduced to the protagonist of the story, Winston Smith, an intellectual middle-aged man and a member of the “Outer Party”. Through Winston’s eyes we begin to build up a picture of the world that surrounds him, as we are introduced to one of the main weapons of the Party: Big Brother. We are described posters of a man “of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features”, suggesting the physical appearance of Joseph Stalin. The posters have a caption which read,

“BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”.

This is one of the most famous quotes from the book, and epitomises the nature of the society Winston lives in; where every single movement, glance, even facial expression may be being watched and scrutinised without your knowledge.

The Party achieve the constant surveillance of the population using a device called a telescreen. A telescreen in description is generally very similar to a television with the crucial difference that it transmits images and sound as well as receiving. There is a telescreen in the home of every Party member as well as in all public places, and even if you find a way of being out of the telescreen’s vision, it can still pick up “any sound… above the level of a very low whisper”. In outdoor places where there is nowhere to put a telescreen tiny microphones are deployed. This achieves the feeling of a constant lack of privacy regardless of where you are: even if you appear to be in a deserted and absolutely private place you never know if there are in fact hidden telescreens or microphones. The Party do not only use technology to watch citizens however, but the citizens themselves. People are encouraged to turn in those they suspect of being against the Party, and anonymous informers employed by the party, known as the “Thought Police” are also distributed around society.

The Party itself consists of four ministries: of Truth, which covers news, entertainment and the arts; of Peace, “which concerns itself with war”; of Love, which deals with law and order; and of Plenty, which deals with economic affairs. Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, which is described as “an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete”, where his job entails him editing past newspaper articles to correspond to what the Party now wish to be believed as fact. He appears to enjoy his job due to it being reasonably mentally stimulating and the freedom to decide what to write, he often expresses a pride in knowing his article will be used, whilst being made clear to us at the same time he is not in favour of the actual process.

The novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, published in 1953, can really be summarised by the quote which precedes the story:

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”[1]

In the novel Bradbury attacks those who do not think for themselves or who “follow the crowd”; those who ignore the value of human relationships; and though is strongly anti-censorship in general, particularly focuses on the worth of literature. The temperature of 451º Fahrenheit itself is “the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns”, and this is not only central to the story but symbolic of how Bradbury believes books are already being burned in our society, though without any actual fires being set. As he puts it “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches” [2]. The idea of burning books is likely influenced by the book burnings in Nazi Germany before and during the Second World War.

We follow the story of Fahrenheit 451 through the eyes of Guy Montag, who works as a fireman – which is, as in the case of Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a position of some power and respect, although they are in fact generally feared due to what their job entails. In Bradbury’s world a fireman has come to mean one who starts fires, rather than puts them out. More specifically it is their job to burn down the house, and so destroy all of the property, of anyone found to have books in their possession - the aim being the total obliteration of literature. Those who still choose to read are considered insane and generally confined to a mental institute.

The setting is one of borderline chaos. Crime is rife and teenagers roam the streets, driving excessively fast and attempting to run people over simply for amusement. People appear to lack any real conscience or self-control, and apart from persecuting those who read books or otherwise display too much individuality, any real law appears to be absent. A majority of free time is taken up by watching mindless, pointless shows on a giant version of the television, taking up the full wall – known as the “parlor wall”.

Much like Winston, Montag greatly enjoys his job and finds satisfaction in an otherwise unfulfilling world. Unlike Winston however Montag is initially unable to recognise that he is unfulfilled. The novel begins with the opening lines:

“It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.”

Despite this however Montag’s fascination is with the burning process itself – he obsesses with fire and loves the process of its destruction, giving little thought to what he is destroying, simply accepting the commonly held view that nothing good can be found in books. Both Montag’s father and grandfather were firemen, and we are told of a time in his childhood when there was an electricity cut and his mother used candles to give them light. He describes the comfort and security this gave him.

Whilst censorship is a theme common to both books, it is perpetuated in a very different way in Fahrenheit 451. Whilst in Nineteen Eighty-Four newspaper articles, records and books are edited to suit the government, in Bradbury’s world a complete absence of literature has come about as the will of the people, with the government “simply taking advantage of this”. As Bradbury himself puts it:

“Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish… has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse… Fire Captain Beatty described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.”[3]

And so, literature simply became irrelevant and is replaced by what Bradbury considers the anti-intellectual, dumbed-down medium of television. The independent medium of literature, which as Captain Beatty, the Fire Chief, put it “appealed to a few people, here, there everywhere… they could afford to be different”, makes way for the mass-medium of broadcast radio and television, and as all entertainment and so means of education or attaining information become the same, things “became simpler”. The belief commonly held is that books promote unhappiness and that society is better without them: without the single mass-medium of broadcast television society itself would fall apart. Captain Beatty expresses how he believes society is only strong if everyone believes the same, is fed the same information, effectively – is the same.

“We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other: then all are happy…”

Apart from the irony of the state of the society they live in, this is in fact - similarly to newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four - an attempt to limit free thought, i.e. people only become unhappy when they think too much, when they question things, or even simply question whether or not they are in fact happy. Beatty says, “You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed”. The belief he holds here being “ignorance is bliss”.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four freedom of thought is suppressed through the means of Doublethink and the Newspeak language. Doublethink is described as:

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them . . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

In this way it is perhaps the most important tool the Party has – even more important in controlling its citizens than the Thought Police and all of its telescreens and microphones. Doublethink allows them to actually control the minds of their citizens. It effectively turns the population into robots, believing whatever the Party tells them and never questioning it, whilst knowing the truth absent of the freedom of thought to acknowledge the truth. Telescreens and the Party’s surveillance now serve more as a means of detecting those on whom the process of Doublethink has become ineffective, and remedying this.

Newspeak is the language supported by the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four and is intended to fully replace English (referred to as “Oldspeak”) by the year 2050. Newspeak is effectively the ultimate form of censorship – actually censoring the language we use. Newspeak, the vocabulary of which “gets smaller every year”, is a vastly simplified version of English engineered by the Party in order to only contain the words the Party deems necessary. Thus freedom of thought will no longer be an issue as it shall no longer be possible – people will no longer have knowledge of the words which express freedom, liberty or rebellion. If the Party’s goal is achieved it should cement their complete and unbreakable control of the citizens of Oceania. Newspeak is even more awful a prospect than the destruction of books in Fahrenheit 451, as not only are the works themselves being destroyed but the very language expressed in them.

Love plays an important role in both novels, not only due to the importance of the relationship between the two main characters, but particularly in Nineteen Eighty-Four due to the disobedience of their relationship, and particularly of sex, in fighting the government’s morals. In Nineteen Eighty-Four both the human instinct for love and that for sexual desire are suppressed to a great extent. Marriages must be approved by a committee, and if there is any hint of the couple being physically attracted to each other, the marriage is declined. The very sexual act itself is reduced to something almost disgusting, “as a… minor operation, like having an enema”, and so preferably avoidable. The only reason to have sex is to bare a child for the good of the Party.

We are first introduced to Julia as Winston attends the daily “Two Minute Hate”, a period when Party members must watch a government propaganda film depicting the enemies of the Party and should physically show their hatred for them and what they stand for. Julia is described as a “bold-looking girl… with athletic movements”, and Winston’s initial feelings towards her are anything but affectionate. In fact he says to have “disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her… the girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most”. Apart from Winston suspecting Julia might be an agent of the thought police he despises the fact he interprets her to be the perfect party member - a complete believer in the Party and everything it stands for. It is also suggested that Winston resents Julia’s youth and beauty, in his knowledge that she, like all others with youth and beauty, is unattainable to him.

The turning point comes during a meeting between the two in the corridors of the Ministry. Julia intentionally falls in front of Winston in order for him to assist her, and allow her to exchange a note between them in secrecy. Winston returns to his desk and is careful not to read the note right away in the eye on the telescreen. He quickly becomes paranoid as he thinks of what might be written on the note, still suspecting Julia an agent of the thought police, or at best a loyal Party member who suspects him of Thought Crime. Upon finally reading the note however it does not meet any of these expectations:

“I love you.”

Winston is shocked at this news, but soon finds himself obsessing over Julia and attempting to find a way of communicating with her in order to arrange some kind of meeting. In the cafeteria he eventually achieves this and they arrange to meet a few days later in a private outdoor place Julia describes. Winston and Julia make love here, and this very act is described as a “victory… a blow against the party. It was a political act”. Winston questions Julia on her past relationships and on discovering her true promiscuous nature, expresses delight as he considers this an act of greatly undermining the authority of the Party:

“His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been hundreds – thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope…”

Julia is very important in the development of Winston’s character. Though he has been questioning the world around him for some time she almost confirms to him for the first time the he is not insane. Whilst Julia does not, especially at first, have any real interest in any kind of political rebellion against the Party, as Winston sees the simple fact that she is free-thinking and different, not complying with the Party ideals as enough. He says to her, “You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards”. She thinks this “brilliantly witty”.

In Fahrenheit 451 a lack of meaningful relationships have again come about naturally, rather than directly controlled as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. People seem to have simply forgotten that there is any worth in simply having conversation, and especially the women in the book, including Montag’s wife, show far more interest and in fact appear to have far more affection for their television parlor than for their husbands.

Montag meets Clarisse one night on returning home from work, and they begin to talk as they walk in the same direction home. Right away we can see Clarisse has a strong personality, and could be considered slightly unorthodox. When she is asked her age she replies:

“I’m seventeen and I’m crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane”.

As their conversation develops it becomes clear Clarisse is not threatened by Montag, as most people would be by a fireman. She even asks him if he ever reads any of the books he burns. Montag simply laughs at this and responds “That’s against the law!” She proceeds to ask Montag a number of questions about the nature of his work, though digresses as she begins to speak about cars and tells a story about her uncle. Montag responds uneasily by saying, “You think too many things”. This of course being unusual – questioning things too much. The two meet again a few nights later, and Clarisse tells him that he is “not like the others”:
“When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon… That’s why I think it’s so strange that you’re a fireman, it just doesn’t seem right for you, somehow.”

His meeting with Clarisse sets in motion a change in Montag’s thinking. Unlike Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the beginning Montag believes himself to be happy in his society, and in no way questions in the society that surrounds him. In Montag’s case his meeting with Clarisse is the last he sees of her as she is called in a car accident soon after, but more importantly it sets in motion a complete change in his thinking, and as further events unfold he begins to question what he has previously been led to believe further. His epiphany comes when a woman, who has been caught in the ownership of books, refuses to leave her house and her books. She in fact decides she would rather die than lose them, and uses a match to light the kerosene doused around the house by the firemen, and so killing herself. This event greatly disturbs Montag and makes him question why someone would do such a thing. He understands there must be something great about books which he does not yet understand; which makes them worth dying for.

Nineteen Eighty-Four concludes with the capture, torture and rehabilitation of both Winston and Julia. Unbeknown to them they have in fact both been being watched long before they even met, and even the bed-sit they met in and considered so private had in fact been rented to them by a member of the Thought Police, and had a concealed telescreen. They are both taken to the Ministry of Love, supposedly never to see each other again, and subjected to horrific and continuous torture. The aim being to force Winston to accept that if the Party that “two plus two equals five” then this is the case, despite what Winston once wrote in his illegal diary:

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”.

As for the final part of Winston’s rehabilitation he is led to Room 101, a place where people are subjected to their worst fears. In a moment of extreme terror as he is threatened with having rats eat his flesh he screams,

“Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her bones. Not me!”

Winston and Julia betray each and are eventually released back into society, now under the full control of Doublethink. The novel ends with the powerful statement:

“He loved Big Brother”.

Fahrenheit 451 concludes as Captain Beatty discovers Montag has stolen and hidden books in his house, informed of this by Montag’s wife. Beatty challenges Montag to burn the books, which he does but continues to also destroy the televisions and all of his past possessions. In the altercation which follows Montag turns the flamethrower on Beatty, and is then chased by the mechanical hound – a giant dog-like robot designed for nothing more than stalking and killing its programmed target. Montag manages to flee the city and eventually following the river leads him to a group of like-minded people who he discovers read books to memorise their contents then burn them to avoid detection. He then watches as war breaks out over the city, which we later learn is completely destroyed in nuclear attack. It is suggested that this means a complete collapse of society and that the group will now begin to help in the re-building process, though it is unclear if this new society will learn from its past mistakes or if the cycle shall repeat again.

Though Fahrenheit 451 and Nineteen Eighty-Four share many similarities in their plot and morals they each offer very different conclusions to the story. Nineteen Eighty-Four’s ending is, like the totalitarian society it is based in, absolute and offers little hope for any sort of change or positive future for mankind. The Party appears to have gained an absolute and eternal control, as they set out to do. This conclusion makes Nineteen Eighty-Four as a story all the more terrifying and so even more powerful a warning to us, mankind: never allow yourselves to end up here. It offers little hope, and in fact in many ways appears to have little hope in human beings themselves. Though we witness the pleas of two essentially “good” humans managing to escape from the thinking of the party, and liberated through the companionship of each other, they are ultimately defeated through their betrayal of each other. Whilst Winston claims,

“They can make you say anything… but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you”,

This is exactly what they achieve, even to the extent that they manage to stop them loving each other. Therefore, whilst it is perhaps understandable in the face of the extreme and horrific torture they are subjected to, Winston and Julia in the end give up their last inch of freedom[4]; and, if even an emotional bond as strong as the love between two people can be defeated, the perception is that Orwell believes there to be little hope left for mankind in his novel.

Fahrenheit 451 on the other hand is more optimistic, not just for the future of mankind, but for the goodness of mankind in general. It seems to hold the belief that goodness shall prevail in the end, no matter how big a mess we get ourselves into. It holds a little more faith in human beings. This however makes it so less poignant a warning against some of the current issues in our world.

Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Fahrenheit 451 present very convincing stories in a realistic setting, in such a way that we believe their warnings could in fact come true. They each share some common values, and some similarities in storyline – yet, in other ways they are very different stories. Nineteen Eighty-Four as a novel is very political, with its setting perhaps being its most powerful message; it heeds as a warning against totalitarian government, and also criticises the values of communism as it began to have more prominence when the book was written. Orwell, having witnessed the lengths communist governments would go to in order to maintain their power became very disturbed by this and thought it his duty to warn a Western society which, pre-Cold War, had not yet fully made it’s mind up on the matter. It presented an absolute realisation of a government in complete totalitarian control. It does however speak for many of the same values of Fahrenheit: for the importance of love and relationships, and of freedom of thought and expression. It also similarly holds major concerns for what the future of technology could mean for human beings.

Fahrenheit 451 is far more personal a story. The government control and ongoing war are in many ways irrelevant to the story as Bradbury almost speaks to us directly, and warns us not to forget the value of those around us; the value of discussion, and of human contact; of being free to question anything we like, and in fact encourages us to do so; of simply being alone and admiring the beauty of this world; and of course of the value of literature. It is in many ways the epitome of what Bradbury has been trying to achieve in many of his works, with clear allusions to his short stories particularly, including The Murderer and The Pedestrian, which is directly referenced.

The messages of these novels are clear and thought-provoking, and cannot fail to make an effect on the reader. As a dystopia should do they use a vision of the future to make us seriously question how we live currently. Though we have not reached the level of surveillance or censorship predicted in either book our government have been slightly more subtle in their introduction. We may not have telescreens, but with 4.2 million CCTV cameras[5] – one to every fourteen people – it isn’t hard to see some similarities to the world Orwell envisioned in this respect. Censorship is an issue in today’s society, but in fact people are arguably freer to say and print what they wish than at the time the books were written. That said, there are some signs of manipulation in the press, particularly in America where there are highly biased news sources owned by large corporations with other interests. As of yet the decline of human relationships predicted by Bradbury is not occurring, although he thinks otherwise:

“…a few weeks ago, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood starting after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio…plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog… This was not fiction.”

Whilst the advent of television has indeed meant a decrease of interest in literature in youth particularly, it is still going very strong and continues to compete alongside, and I in fact do not believe technology, for all its faults, has in any way contributed to a weakening of human relationships – the advent of the internet has in fact arguably made it easier in some cases to make contact with those like-minded. In this regard Bradbury could perhaps be considered slightly prejudiced to what is to him the unknown of technology,

In the end, all this taken into account, we are forced to ask ourselves: should we be thankful that the predictions are no where near to being fully fulfilled, or worried at the extent to which they have been?

Footnotes
[1] Quote from Juan Ramón Jiménez, a Spanish poet.
[2] From a coda written by Bradbury in the 1979 paperback edition of Fahrenheit 451.
[3] Also from the 1979 coda.
[4] The idea of a last free inch is used in the graphic novel V for Vendetta. “But it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it’s all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us. But within that inch we are free.”
[5] This Is London (2008), Article on CCTC in the UK. Available:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23390407-details/UK+has+1%25+of+world’s+population+but+20%25+of+its+CCTV+cameras/article.do