Nineteen Eighty-Four

This dystopian novel by George Orwell was first published in 1949. I read it in the 1960s and taught it to first-year college students in 1984. Last night I saw a dramatic performance adapted for the stage by Michael Gene Sullivan.

In the 60s, those of us who were active in the Vietnam War protests battled the barrage of government propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation regarding the origin of the war, the need for the war, and the progress of the war.  Orwell’s concepts of Newspeak, Doublethink, and even Thoughtcrime (Vietnam protesters were labeled unpatriotic and subversive for opposing the War) seemed to apply. FBI surveillance of Vietnam protesters seemed to mirror the watchful eye of Big Brother through the widespread use of government cameras to keep citizens in line with the Party.

When I taught the book in 1984, it seemed far-fetched.  And since then, we’ve grown accustomed to the prolific use of surveillance cameras by law enforcement and private citizens alike to deter crime. 

With the Trump presidency, Nineteen Eighty-Four has become relevant again. And the stage play was frankly terrifying, as the comparisons were unmistakable.  Instead of Newspeak and Doublethink, we have “fake news” and conspiracy theories, bolstered by doctored photos/videos and the deliberate spread of propaganda, not only by elected leaders and their staffs, but also by private citizens on social media, not to mention other countries. 

As in the original novel we now have blatant disregard for facts, science, rational thought, and the direct experience of our eyes and ears.  Trump and others publicly deny they said something that is right there on unedited video or audio transcript for all to see and read. 

In Nineteen Eighty-Four the Thought Police enforce conformity to the Party line with the use of torture.  In the stage version Winston Smith is subjected to increasing levels of electric shock until he finally agrees that two-plus-two is five and that he loves Big Brother.  That is scary enough.  What is particularly scary today is how many of our fellow citizens are willing participants in the campaigns of propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation to which we are all subjected.  Too many of us are uncritically willing to believe what we want to hear or think we know rather than to take the time and exercise the discipline it takes to at least come close to the truth.

Today the government and the Party do not need Thought Police and electric shock because they have partisan loyalists and sycophants whose eyes and ears are closed as they open their mouths to readily ingest toxic, false messages and then turn around and spew those messages out to their own followers on social media.

George Orwell envisioned a citizenry of helpless victims subjected to Big Brother’s totalitarian power; he did not envision a citizenry of willing participants fully cooperating in their own manipulation and delusion.

What I am grateful for in the scary times we live in is (1) an educational system that is hopefully teaching critical thinking and evaluation of sources for reliability, (2) freedom of the press that allows for competing points of view, even as some media outlets toe the Party line and help spread false information, and (3) freedom of speech that allows those who value facts, evidence, and reason to counter the propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation, even as it also enables the false narratives.  Unlike the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we have the right and the power of dissent. 

So let us use that right and that power to educate others, as best we can, in reliable methods of research and responsible methods of determining truth; to analyze our own sources of information for reliability and discipline our own thinking to rely on facts, evidence, and reason; and to raise our voices to counter those who would misinform, mislead, and manipulate. 

 

 The stage for the play was a hall of mirrors.  You can see the reflection of the audience. Look in the mirror, America!

Beloved II: The Political Message

The political goal of the traditional slave narrative was unambiguous: abolition now! That is hardly the purpose of Beloved. Instead, the novel serves to to show a contemporary audience, more than a hundred years after the abolition of slavery, that physical emancipation is only part of the story.

Beloved is not only the "devil child" who "possesses" the mother who killed her, but also the memory and legacy of slavery, which haunts, not only those who were physically emancipated, but also their progeny.

Sethe bears the physical scars of slavery on her back; psychological scars in her memory, her conscience, and her identity; and the social scars of deprivation, isolation, and condemnation. Just as her feet, swollen and numb from walking away from slavery while pregnant, must suffer pain as feeling returns to them, so those scars of slavery cannot heal without reliving the original injuries, both those suffered and those inflicted. And lest we forget, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts" is a constant refrain.

What are the implications for contemporary African Americans? for other Americans? Perhaps the novel suggests that one of the legacies of slavery is a kind of social and cultural neurosis that leaves no one untouched. If African Americans must relive slavery and its aftermath to heal themselves, then white Americans may need to relive it to purge themselves of ignorance, denial, guilt, and the corrosive effects of white privilege. Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans may respond with resentment at the focus on slavery as opposed to other forms of oppression, or they may empathize and apply the healing lessons to their own historical burdens.

The lesson of this novel can also be applied to non-ethnic minorities such as gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, who can certainly resonate with the legal prohibition against slaves marrying without permission from their owners: "...to get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now, that was freedom." And like any oppressed group, LGBT people bear their own psychological wounds of social outcasting, stigmatization, invisibility, and self-denial, wounds that may need to be lanced before they can heal.

Women readers may identify with Sethe's oppression based on gender, as well as race. Humiliated, whipped, and raped, she gets herself and her children out of slavery while pregnant with her fourth. Whether the result of temporary insanity or rational calculation, she attempts to murder all four when the slaveholders arrive to take them all back, suceeding, before she is stopped, in slitting the throat of her third-born, a daughter, who later returns as Beloved. Can there be a stronger indictment of slavery than as an institution that perverts mother-love from life-giving to death-dealing?

Why is it necessary to revisit the pain of history, be it our own or our country's? "Can't nothing heal without pain, you know."

Beloved I

This 1987 novel by Toni Morrison might be her most “beloved.” It also might be the richest, most complex, most difficult, and most rewarding of her works.

Often categorized as “magical realism," it can also be read as a historical novel, a fictional slave narrative, a socio-political study, a psychological novel, a gothic romance, a re-enactment of Biblical myth, or a mythologizing of African American experience in universal terms.

Historically the characters and their stories represent the African American experience of slavery and its aftermath. Like the traditional slave narrative, it recounts Sethe’s escape from captivity to freedom, but its main focus is her post-slavery quest for liberation from the psychological and social legacy of slavery and achievement of full selfhood, independence, self-worth, and dignity as a human being.

The novel’s roots in history include the actual story of an escaped slave mother who murdered her own child rather than have her recaptured, a story that Morrison researched in newspaper archives. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beloved_(novel). Its roots in slave narrative can be traced to Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in which Jacobs confesses that at one point she thought she would rather see her own children dead than to suffer the indignities and cruelties of slavery. The myth of the Terrible Mother can be found in pagan traditions of the Earth Mother or Great Goddess, a personification of Nature, who not only gives us life but also takes it. A monotheistic parallel can be found in the Old Testament Jehovah who not only saves and protects his “chosen people” but also punishes them, sometimes with death and destruction, a la the great flood.

Mythological and religious references abound in this story of the murdered child, Beloved, who returns to haunt and “possess” the mother who killed her until the “devil child” is finally exorcized and purged by suffering, perseverance, love, family, and community.

At one level the story represents Sethe’s guilt and atonement for the murder of her child (or, in other terms, her psychological illness and recovery), but the historical and mythic contexts lift it to another level, in which Beloved represents the burden of slavery carried, not only by the fictional Sethe and her family, but by all African Americans, a burden that must be lifted before full “salvation,” psychological health, and ethnic pride can be fully achieved.

This story of redemption likewise rises to the level of universal myths of birth and creation, fertility, quest, death and resurrection, sacrifice and salvation. At the same time it addresses a contemporary social and political debate over the extent to which individual behavior is the result of genetic, biological, psychological, social, economic and political circumstances and the extent to which it is the result of free will, choice, and personal responsibility. Though Sethe’s act of infanticide can be explained in terms of her brutalization in slavery and the psychological damage she has suffered as a result, the novel does not let her off the hook as an individual responsible for her own actions. We might be tempted to judge her “not guilty by reason of insanity,” but the novel holds her accountable and insists that she undergo a necessary penance before she can achieve both moral and psychological “at-onement.”

In the end, in a work that is filled with images of fertility, birth, and creation, Sethe experiences a kind of moral and psychological death followed by resurrection and rebirth.

Similarly, the novel suggests, African American culture and community, having suffered the destructive effects of slavery, will be reborn into health and vitality. For all the horror and tragedy that the novel depicts, it is a redemptive narrative that offers hope to all individuals and communities, of whatever ethnicity, who have been victimized, brutalized, and terrorized by history.