![]() ![]() He longs for a capitalist past of small government and opportunities for personal financial advancement, a utopia for the petty-bourgeoisie but not for the working classes. Winston is part of that privileged, middle-class minority which works for the government, the “hands” of the “brain” of the body politic. Winston asks: “Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?” This is reactionary. But is life so bad for the proles who make up 83 per cent of the population? They are allowed to drink, gamble, and fuck, and live with relative freedom. He clearly loathes the proletarians, hearing their voices as cockney blather, viewing them as a mass of “cattle”, dismissing them as “small, dark and ill-favoured”. Though the narrator is omniscient, we effectively view Britain through Winston’s jaundiced, petty-bourgeoisie eyes. In fact, the Britain of 1984 is a socialist enclave, doing what it can to feed and care for its citizens though it is reeling from atomic war, surrounded by rogue states and beset by an extremist insurgency. Appalled by the Newspeak of the Trump administration, consumers are snapping up Orwell’s pocket-sized guide to totalitarianism and post-truth politics.īut an alternative-factual reading reveals Orwell’s message has been badly misunderstood for all these years. But the opposite of a stupid utopia is not dystopia.ġ984 hit the headlines this week, topping the bestseller charts at not-at-all-dystopic retail behemoth Amazon. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined.” “What kind of world is it we are creating?”, asks O’Brien as Winston is ground in the bowels of the Ministry of Love. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |