George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four turns 70 on Saturday. Six months after publication in June 1949, its author was dead, killed by the tuberculosis that plagued his adulthood. He was 46. The novel was yet to be recognised as a modern classic.
Orwell did not know that many would come to regard him as the greatest political writer in English in the past century. He did not know Nineteen Eighty-Four would become a staple of high school literature around the world or that phrases his novel contained, such as "Big Brother is watching you", or concepts such as the Thought Police and Newspeak would fall into common usage, even among those who never read him.
George Orwell, who died at 44, not knowing what impact his recently published novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, would have on the world. Credit:AP
Nor had the adjective "Orwellian" appeared in 1949. It speaks to the novel’s totalitarian world of oppressive surveillance in which reality and history are adulterated in the service of the state, language manipulated to impose political orthodoxy, and where crowds venerate Big Brother. The novel evoked a nightmarish world that seemed possible in the West as the world emerged from the horrors of World War II into the paranoid oppression of the Cold War.
It continued to resonate into the 1990s and beyond, when the rise of CCTV technology was merely one indication of extended state surveillance. Big Brother came to our television screens, borrowing its name from Orwell but less bothered about the notion of invaded privacy.
Mark Zuckerberg, too, had a sense that privacy was outdated, yet Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about National Security Agency surveillance reminded the public of genuine threats. Nineteen Eighty-Four re-entered the bestseller lists, its cultural power registered in Barack Obama publicly denying that US surveillance approximated the world of Big Brother.
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Orwell’s novel fails to account for our contemporary world of surveillance. Mobile phones and social media have added critical new dimensions to monitoring. Now we monitor ourselves and others, posting images to Facebook and Instagram, which profit from our work. We have become our own Thought Police.
Nineteen Eighty-Four also has nothing to say about data surveillance by states and corporations, the key modern extension of surveillance. Orwell can be forgiven this absence, computers being in their infancy in 1949. But his novel endures as the go-to text on surveillance for politicians, commentators and the public.
Still our realities can seem ripped from the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four: Trump adviser Kelly-Ann Conway’s attempted validation of "alternative facts", Rudy Guiliani’s logic-shredding declaration that "truth is not truth", and Donald Trump’s relentless lying and denigration of investigative journalism as "fake news". In Australia, Alan Jones used "Orwellian" to characterise the banishing of rugby star Israel Folau for daring to utter his religious conviction that gays and other "sinners" would go to hell.
In the run-up to 1984, critics who chided Orwell for getting things wrong missed the point. The novel was a projection, not a prediction. As a phrase the title continues to evoke a predicament, a state of mind. When asked in 1949 whether he thought the novel’s world would happen, Orwell replied: "It depends on you."
Seventy years after publication Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a potent catalyst for thought, discussion and action.
Professor Peter Marks is an Orwell expert in the Department of English at the University of Sydney.
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