Everything from a grain: the real totalitarianism of 1984

Abstract

This essay’s premise is that it is in the logic of the aging of artworks that the way they are read through time is sedimented into their possibilities of meaning, making it so that these layers of sedimented meaning must be dealt with by subsequent attempts of interpretation. Thus, our hypothesis is that the tendency of reading George Orwell’s 1984 prospectively oversimplifies the relationship between fiction and historical reality – an oversimplification which is by its turn useful to an object of such cultural presence, working both as possible cause and relatively inevitable consequence. So, we attempt to suggest an inversion to the usual terms of discussion around Orwell’s most famous work, going through three interconnected levels. The first one would have to do with the substitution of the prospective impulse for a retrospective one, reaching the historicity of forms through an analysis of the workings of free indirect style in 1984. By its turn, the second level favors complication over simplification, again in formal terms: after finding out that the characterization of Orwell’s use of free indirect style as favoring realism is basically inadequate, we try to identify what comes into shape in its place. Finally, the third level pertains to the problem of verisimilitude in the novel, taking seriously what in 1984 most defies common sense without underplaying or attempting to justify it in order do see what lies beyond the semblance of realist conventions.