On Saturday, BBC Radio 4 put on a marathon recitation of George Orwell’s 1984, split into several hour-long renditions by various actors, spread across the course of the day. The occasion was the 75th anniversary of the publication of the book. Interspersed were further discussion programmes about Orwell, and also about Franz Kafka, who died 100 years ago this year. One can readily see a connection between Kafka and Orwell. The words “Kafkaesque” and “Orwellian” have slipped into the language. Perhaps we use them somewhat flippantly. For example, you might spend an hour on the phone trying to negotiate with some faceless bureaucratic monolith, endlessly pressing digits on your keypad in response to multiple menus, speaking with a robot who cannot understand your accent, and finally hanging up in frustration, having got nowhere. “Honestly!” you say. “It’s positively Kafkaesque!” Or you might become aware of the extent to which supermarket stores are cognizant of your purchasing habits, and can target advertisements to which you might be susceptible, in your direction. Positively Orwellian.
I hadn’t intended to listen in to 1984, but I chanced upon Part 2, which was broadcast mid-morning, and got hooked. Syme, a colleague of Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth, is engaged in the editing of the 11th edition, the definitive edition, of the Newspeak dictionary. He has a tremendous enthusiasm for his task, which is essentially to destroy language, or at least to reduce it to a system of communication so circumscribed and so devoid of nuance, that thought, independent thought, originality, becomes literally impossible. Orwell expands upon this theme in an appendix, The Principles of Newspeak. It is really a development, indeed a culmination, of previous essays concerning the abuse of language, most notably Politics and the English Language. The distortion of language, and the imposition of an established orthodoxy, are inextricably linked. It becomes impossible to entertain a heretic thought, because the language to express it no longer exists.
Orwell could be extraordinarily prescient. We see the suppression of heretical thoughts now in the literary world. Publishing houses employ “sensitivity readers” to comb manuscripts, old and new, on the lookout for passages that are deemed “unacceptable”. It is not merely individual, offensive words that are removed, but sometimes whole chapters, with, or sometimes even without, the barest explanation. The offending text disappears down the “memory hole”, to be incinerated. How Orwellian.
In addition, the authors of the offending passages are “cancelled”. Orwell would have said they are “vapourised”. Granted I would rather be cancelled than vapourised, but the notion of cancellation remains profoundly Orwellian. It is not merely that the cancelled author can no longer be read; it is rather that the cancelled author no longer exists. All references to that said individual are removed. That individual never existed.
On Saturday I picked up more Orwell later in the day. When O’Brien, of the Inner Party, interrogates Winston, he tells him he is insane, because he believes that 2 + 2 = 4, when the Party says that 2 = 2 = 5. Orwellian prescience again. He understood the concept of “alternative truths”. But I had to stop listening. The interrogation is just too painful; literally.
Kafka and Orwell share the same preoccupation with, and indeed fear of, surveillance. Almost the first thing that the protagonist in The Trial, K, notices, is that he is being watched. And Winston becomes terrified when he realises that the young girl with dark hair, Julia, is watching him. It is impossible to escape surveillance because “telescreens” are everywhere. We are surrounded by them now. We carry them with us.
Yet for all these points of intersection, there is a fundamental difference in literary technique between Orwell and Kafka. Orwell strives for great clarity on every level. His books are fundamentally political. He is devoted to plain speaking. He wants us to see the world as it really is. You may say 1984 is a warning.
Kafka’s work defies interpretation. His stories are like parables. They seem capable of multiple interpretations, yet always the originals remain elusive, and seem to contain more than any subsequent critique. They have the quality of nightmare. In the penultimate chapter of The Trial, In the Cathedral, there is the parable of the man who spends a lifetime striving to attain the Law, who on his deathbed asks the doorkeeper to the court why it is that in all his time seeking justice he has never seen anybody else seek admittance.
“No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”
jamescalumcampbell 