BOOKS: 1984 and A Clockwork Orange

Nineteen Eighty-four – you just can’t get away from it.  Culturally it’s become more than the sum of its parts, like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band you don’t need to enjoy it (or even have fully read it), you just need to know it well enough to be able to appear credible.  

It is a clumsy read in places.  Winston Smith, the protagonist of the piece, is a cipher.  He represents Orwell.  When Winston tries to connect with the proles in a pub one suspects this is how the Eton boy Orwell felt trying to bond with the working class he tried to connect with but ultimately couldn’t (“Wanna live like common people?”)  Orwell’s politics aren’t seamlessly woven into the text but spelt out in marker pen. We read pages of the diadactive subversive book Smith gets his hands on, a shockingly crude technique for a book with this reputation.  

From the first chapter onwards you are waiting to see how Winston will be caught and what will happen to him.  You don’t care because you are concerned for the character of Winston – you care because you want to find out what happens in the Ministry of Love, where the bad things, and therefore the interesting things happen.  This isn’t a book that expects its readers to care about it’s main focus of attention, but to learn about life in Airstrip One.  There’s no humour in the prose but sheer exposition…

George Orwell at work in Room 101...

And that leads me to something I’d never noticed before.  The appendix linked to the book, which is written as a supposedly dispassionate history of Newspeak linked to the main text – a page from a history textbook– contains one line where it mentions Winston Smith by name.  This is jarring.  This implies that the main part of the novel has been used as a primary source for the unknown historians of Newspeak.  But the main text of the novel is not written in the first person (it is not, for instance, Winston’s diary).  So if this third-person account of Winston’s life is being used as a source whose voice is it?  Is it a dossier in the Thought Police’s files?  When you notice this it calls the authorial voice of the novel in to question, and creates an even deeper sense of unease.  Who are we when we read Nineteen Eighty-four… are we not seeing Airstrip One life through Winston Smith’s eyes after all, but through the dispassionate eyes of The Party?  The lack of humour in the prose tallies with this reading.  Nineteen Eighty-four is a record of life according to The Party in 1984.  The reader is a member of the Thought Police, and probably not a very high ranking member.  Orwell has created quite a rare thing – the unreliable third-person narrative.  This is the best way to read the book now - as a creepy, perverted, curiously emotionless report.

Anthony Burgess (who we last mentioned patronising The Beatles) calls out Nineteen Eighty-four in his book 1985.  The most interesting point about Orwell Burgess makes (and the most obvious one once it has been made) is that Nineteen Eighty-four is about 1948.  Burgess was an almost-contemporary of Orwell.  Certainly he remembers 1948, and points out a lot of the parallels between Airstrip One and post-war Britain – all of a sudden the USSR was the enemy after having been our staunch ally against Nazi Germany, in much the same way that Eurasia and Eastasia alternate as the enemy in the never-ending war in Nineteen Eighty-four.  The poor quality Victory cigarettes Winston smokes were the same brand British troops were given.  The rationing of everything was, if anything, worse than it had been during the war – the razorblade shortage in Oceania would have been all too familiar to contemporary readers.  Big Brother was part of an advertising slogan of the time and, perhaps most comically, Room 101 was where Orwell worked in the BBC.

Nineteen Eighty-four, the godfather of dystopias, isn’t a predicition of what will happen.  Dystopic stories are the author’s present concerns turned up to 11.  Nineteen Eighty-four can be read as a Thought Police dossier of life in 1948 – and is therefore destined to date.

A Clockwork Orange; Burgess’ legacy whether he wanted it to be or not is different.  It doesn’t describe society in any structural detail; it just describes one where there are violent young men.  If it comes to pass that we live in a society without youths being violent then the book will immediately become irrelevant.  But for this reason, A Clockwork Orange will never become irrelevant.  

The iconic cover to A Clockwork Orange

Nineteen Eighty-four is ‘about’ society, but mainly 1948 society.  A Clockwork Orange is interested in the individual.  Burgess’ book is concerned with morality and its place within any society.  The main difference between these two famous dystopias is that, if in Nineteen Eighty-four we have a possibly unreliable third person narrator that is faceless and disturbing, in A Clockwork Orange we have an unreliable narrator that is seductive and exuberant.  It’s easy to forget, if you’re familiar with the film, how much more of a little shit Alex is in the book.  He’s arguably only a manslaughterer in the film but in the book he’s a stone cold killer when he commits his murder in prison.  

A Clockwork Orange is not (like Nineteen Eighty-four) about a man in a dystopic society who feels, vaguely, there could and should be something better – oh, if only he had some subversive literature to read!  A Clockwork Orange is about a boy in a dystopic society who doesn’t know any better and doesn’t particularly care.  It puts the id under the microscope.  Alex destroys, for fun.  The book puts the liberal reader in an uncomfortable position and shows no mercy to values – if you want a free society you have to accept the possibility, the inevitability of an Alex.  Otherwise you don’t want a free society and are just as reactionary as the novel’s government.  What side are you really on?  Fuck with society or fuck with the individual?  Neither is attractive but…  What’s it going to be then, eh?  The freedom Winston Smith craves is available in abundance in Burgess’ world –  but Alex is young and hates virtue for its own sake – and so isn’t virtuous.  And virtue isn’t something that can be drummed into someone via traditional kickings or via the ‘humane’ Ludovic Technique.  Virtue doesn’t mean anything in any society unless it comes from the heart

A Clockwork Orange stands up as a much more complex examination of a dystopic society than Nineteen Eighty-four because it is by its nature concerned with the eternal individual, not an inverted present that has moved on.  This is not to denigrate its achievements but to recognise that its achievement is within the world of social satire and has dated somewhat – as social satire does.  Alex finds a road to redemption in A Clockwork Orange, and a potential life.  Winston Smith finds a love of Big Brother and death.  Winston Smith is Orwell’s pawn, used to show a world and discarded.  Even Oceania shows more concern for Winston Smith than Orwell.  Burgess shows how someone can be the worst kind of product of a fucked up society and still make good – because Alex would exist in any society.  A Clockwork Orange is concerned with the nature of humanity. Nineteen Eighty-four is concerned with the Britain of 1948 taken to its extremities and is by default less powerful than A Clockwork Orange because we are further away from 1948 than we are from being human.