The other night I was lying in bed listening to a radio dramatisation of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ on my Walkman using earphones when Sarada came in, and as usual I couldn’t hear what she was saying properly because of them. Ironically, if it’s true, the very part I was listening to was the scene where Guy Montag enters the bedroom to see his wife Mildred lying comatose on the bed with the “seashells” in her ears “listening” to the radio. This was not only not lost on me but in fact I had wanted it to happen. The invention of wireless earbuds, which these weren’t because I can’t get Bluetooth to work properly and don’t approve of having basically disposable batteries in devices which in any case only last a couple of years, so I’ve heard, but they do nevertheless resemble Bradbury’s “seashells” and their use. However, Ray Bradbury said he was in the business of prevention rather than prediction but it seems someone stepped on a butterfly.
Having looked at ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, and a few years ago ‘Brave New World’, it seemed about time I looked at a third classic dystopian science fiction novel. I don’t know if it makes sense to rank these things, but if the first two count as being number one and number two, Bradbury’s novel surely belongs somewhere in the top half-dozen. Were it not for Zamyatkin’s ‘We’ and Kazuo Ishiguro no ‘Never Let Me Go’, it might even deserve an undisputed third place, though it seems quite crass to do that to these works. Nonetheless, I’m sure it often finds itself onto high school reading lists almost as often as the others I’ve mentioned, and in fact probably more often than ‘We’ in fact, which is relatively unknown. Ray Bradbury, though, differs from the other authors in being a genre sci-fi author. Of a kind, anyway. Kazuo Ishiguro ga now has tendencies in that direction but his stories haven’t always been like that. Bradbury also wrote mainstream fiction: ‘The Fruit At The Bottom Of The Bowl’ comes to mind, and is a wonderful study of misplaced guilt which calls Lady Macbeth to mind.
In general, I find Bradbury a slightly odd author and I can’t put my finger on why. As I understand it, he’s usually considered one of the Big Four: Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and Bradbury. The Big Three, however, doesn’t include him. He differs from the others in having a much more mainstream literary approach and despite his successful efforts to produce absolutely classic science fiction works such as ‘A Sound Of Thunder’, which seems to be the origin of the idea of the butterfly effect, he doesn’t really feel like a SF writer at all even when he’s writing absolutely classic stories. He characterises and uses elaborate imagery and turns of phrase, and whereas that’s admirable it also makes his prose feel foreign to the genre. To that extent, it seems inappropriate to think of his inventions as predictive or worth considering in itself. Science fiction is substantially two things: fiction whose plot depends non-trivially on the setting and fiction where ideas play the role of characters. Bradbury’s work is less like this than most SF. New Wave clearly is not like that, but that was still several years off when he was at his peak. It’s been said that he’s more a fantasy and horror writer. He’s also respectable enough for my third year English teacher (the folk singer, not the guy serving time) to have us read his 22-story anthology ‘The Golden Apples Of The Sun’, although I’d already read most of them.
The second story in that collection, 1951’s ‘The Pedestrian’, is one of the sources from which ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is taken. Depending on who’s reading this, my introduction to it may be from one of you, who described its plot to me in about ’79, before I read it, although by then I had already seen the Truffaut film, which was apparently his only English language production. The other source is the longer story ‘The Fireman’, which I haven’t read. I can identify quite strongly with the main protagonist in ‘The Pedestrian’, who is in the habit of taking long evening walks about the city. He is stopped by an automated police car and asked to justify his actions, which he does but is assessed as mentally ill by the AI and taken to a mental hospital. This very much accords with the pedestrian-hostile nature of many US cities, many of which are apparently not walkable, and jaywalking had been made an offence from 1925 on. I myself spend a lot of time walking the streets for exercise and mental health, and just to get places, and I can’t imagine how that would go in the States. One thing this story does illustrate, though, is Bradbury’s strong attachment to nostalgia.
Now for the novel itself. Guy Montag, a fireman in a futuristic world which has banned books, has a job whose main activities are tracking down people who own books and burning them, and yes that does sometimes mean the people. He meets a teenager called Clarisse whose experience of the world is more holistic and authentic than he’s accustomed to, which opens his eyes to the possibility that books must hold much of great value in view of the fact that some readers are prepared to die rather than relinquish them. In the meantime, his wife Mildred is an avid TV watcher, televisions having now become wall screens which can even be tiled to cover the entire parlour, and drifts into taking an overdose of sleeping pills which is remedied by a couple of technicians coming over and changing her blood. After he begins questioning the book ban, he begins to surreptitiously collect books himself, notably a copy of the King James Bible, and throws a sicky to stay off work. His boss Beatty then visits him at home, explains why books have been banned and hints that he knows his secret and that other firemen always do it once but surrender the book within twenty-four hours. There’s also a robot dog which hunts down miscreants and kills them, and seems also to “know” something about Montag, either automatically or through having been programmed to suspect him. At some point, Clarisse dies in a car accident and Mildred is completely emotionally detached about it, as opposed to her interest in something on TV called ‘The Family’. Montag recalls an incident when he met someone called Faber in a park who was a retired English professor, makes contact with him and goes to see him. Faber decries his cowardice for not doing more to stop the anti-intellectual drift of society for standing up for literacy and books and reveals to Montag that he has a two-way radio system which he uses with Montag to offer him guidance. Montag returns home to find Mildred has gathered with some of her friends and he tries to have a serious conversation with them which turns out to be futile. He then shows them a book of poetry, which Mildred excuses by making up a story that it’s a ritual firemen perform once a year to show how ridiculous books are. He then goes back to the fire station with a decoy book which Beatty discards and reveals that he was once an avid reader himself. Montag is then called out to a house which turns out to be his own and is ordered to set fire to his own books with a flamethrower. Mildred has reported him, but is distressed by the destruction of the parlour screens and walks out on him. He then burns Beatty alive with the flamethrower and is pursued by the hound, which injects him but he destroys it with the aforesaid flamethrower. He flees another hound and this is publicised on TV as a major spectacle, but escapes by crossing a river so his scent can’t be followed, and escapes to St Louis where there’s a rural community of people each of whom memorise a particular book. In a culmination of the aerial manoeuvres which have been going on in the background throughout the novel, his home city is destroyed by nuclear weapons but the community survives and returns to the city to re-build society.
Right, so what do I have to say about this? Well, it is considerably dated in a somewhat peculiar way and I have the strong impression that Bradbury isn’t that articulate about what he’s trying to defend. The general idea of the novel is that social and technological change have led to a general dumbing down and flatness to society, relationships and personalities because of the inconvenience of individuality and passion, which leads to life not being worth living because people drift zombie-like through it. Mildred seems to take the overdose accidentally, but she doesn’t really value her life as such so it doesn’t matter whether she lives or dies. Instead, she’s mesmerised by her TV soap opera and radio station and nothing else is going on in her life. She’s also treated like a machine, by non-medics, when she takes the overdose. It’s like changing the oil in a car – I should point out here that I have no idea what I’m talking about because I know nothing of internal combustion engines. The technicians are impersonal, callous and accidentally brutal. Mildred is really the Everywoman of that society, and this is where I start to worry and think it shows its age.
Yes, Guy Montags wife is the Everywoman. She doesn’t seem to do any paid work and it seems that whereas men have jobs, her life is vacuous because domestic labour has been rendered obsolete, but instead of it being replaced by a role where she goes out and participates in the labour market she is left without a role. What, then, is she supposed to do? Montag, the firemen and other men have that option but apparently she hasn’t, and Bradbury criticises her for it. It’s like she’s trapped in the stereotypical place of the ’50s housewife and lacks any inherent impetus to break out of it. Then there’s Clarisse. She’s been interpreted as a manic pixie dream girl, i.e. she’s only there to allow Guy Montag’s personal growth. In more detail, the manic pixie dream girl is said to be an eccentric young woman with no internal life, often seen as wish fulfillment by a lonely male writer. The other women protagonists are less significant. I find both significant women in this book problematic and unsatisfactory, which is not surprising as it was published in 1953.
That’s one problem. Another way it dates itself is in the rationalisation for the firemen’s roles. The backstory on their development is that houses are now fireproof and there are simply no more domestic fires. Although this has led to a dystopia, this sounds initially like a positive thing. With hindsight, we are now aware that making a house completely fireproof would have trade-offs. Given that it was written in the 1950s, asbestos would almost certainly be involved. A more recent approach is to use flame-retardant chemicals, which are toxic and environmentally harmful. This is what we’ve actually done, and the consequences are that our homes are still at risk of fire, though less than previously, but are more likely to give us cancer or harm us and our surroundings in other ways. It seems characteristic of the mid-century that problems would be solved with no downside, as expressed in Donald Fagen’s ‘IGY’, a song I used to find very irritating until I got it. All that said, Bradbury does portray the disadvantage very clearly, and this again relates to gender roles.
The firemen lost the purpose of their work. This is a bit peculiar as it seems to suggest that there are no industrial or forest fires or other disasters such as rescuing people from road traffic collisions, and this is too shallow for me. But it also feels like they found a new role substantially because they were underemployed, and rather than simply dispensing with the role of the firefighter, they had to find a new function. It’s almost as if the vacuum of having no station had to be filled. I very much doubt that this is the intention, but it’s productive to read that into it. Whereas the women are left with nothing to do but fill their lives with fatuousness rather than finding other niches, the men for some reason have to be given something else to do, no matter how destructive, which they have to be paid for and which has to have meaning.
There’s also an elusive issue which arises from books themselves and Bradbury’s attitude to them. It feels like he has accepted that there’s value in them without fully understanding what that value is or allowing it to inform his writing. He defends the idea of books as good for the soul and recognises that they do things like deepen thought and improve empathy and emotional intelligence, but he himself doesn’t seem to have undertaken that journey. Even at the end of the novel, the people left behind have undergone something like rote-learning without profoundly internalising the content. The defence is symbolic. We should have a right to emotional complexity and pain even though Bradbury may not recognise all that implies. I hope I’ve captured that.
Beatty’s defence of the society’s position is very clear. His view is that books are contradictory, complex and cause pain and conflict. This is where the most difficult aspect of the entire novel comes to light. Beatty traces the history leading up to all books being banned as originating in anti-racism, and for me this makes for very uncomfortable reading. He outlines a process where the offensiveness of books to certain marginalised groups expanded until it was forbidden even to offend people such as dog-walkers, bird-lovers and cookery writers. Whereas it’s easy and valid to portray this as bigoted, it is true that one may need to be offended from time to time and that hurt is an important part of life. The problem, however, is that Bradbury doesn’t seem to have any sense of either immutable traits being in a special position or of the idea of punching up versus punching down. He seems to have a view of society as it had been as fundamentally equal or merit-based with the marginalised in essentially no worse a position as anyone else for some reason. On the other hand, this view is being expressed by someone in 2025. Perhaps I’m being confronted with something which makes me uncomfortable today but something valuable may have still been lost. However, I simply cannot get on board with the idea that active racism is okay.
Salvaging something from that, though, Beatty seems to be saying that the process got beyond the political realm and started to be about not making anyone uncomfortable, which meant never being provocative. It’s tempting to see a parallel between the trend he describes and the trend towards supposedly being “right on”. This is surely something the Right would agree with nowadays, perhaps disingenuously, and it makes me wonder if Bradbury is essentially conservative. After all, nostalgia is about yearning for things to go back to how they used to be and there’s a strong element of that in his writing. Nevertheless, it still feels like something can be salvaged from this.
Beatty makes a couple of other points. He draws a connection between population growth and the loss of tolerance because people have little choice but to invade each other’s space. The idea of overpopulation being a problem is now thoroughly dead, so whether or not this could be a factor is now moot. Yet again this is a sign of datedness.
Then there’s the question of technological change. There’s plenty of vapidity nowadays in online coverage of books and book reviews, and that’s just about the ink and paper version. The books themselves can also be very much of low quality. Books also compete with videos, web pages, audio books and e-books, whereas Bradbury had only identified radio and linear broadcast television as a problem. For example, he didn’t seem to anticipate video recording. On the other hand, he did anticipate the shortening of attention span and the rise of ever shorter summaries, a tendency I probably find just as horrifying as he.
Viewing Beatty’s exposition alongside the possibility that the firemen are engaging in malignant busywork, it begins to look highly insincere. Beatty has changed from a surreptitiously well-read younger man to a self-justifying thug. Has he maybe been brutalised by his work? I feel this takes things beyond the confines of the story.
But the book is not a lost cause by any means. It still has a lot to say about the dumbing down of culture, mob rule, shortening attention spans and the dangers of veering away from emotionally difficult and troubling themes and explorations. If the reader can look past the awkward social conservatism, it’s still possible to salvage something from this, and it is the case that with the constant use of smartphones and constant shallow entertainment, we are currently seldom left with our own thoughts uninterrupted and undistracted. Finally, in my defence I’ve been doing something like this at night since 1980 and it hasn’t fried my brain yet. And finally finally, it really ought to be 233°C, not Fahrenheit 451!
Thisses title might be a bit confusing, coming as it does straight after the last one, so this might end up being even less read than usual due to people thinking it’s the same post. It isn’t. I’m also doing all of this from memory without re-reading or re-watching anything, so I’m hoping I’ve got it right.
There was a time before I read ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, and it was before 1984. My image of it was very different from what it delivered. I imagined it would be futuristic and somewhat like ‘Brave New World’, which I think I read first. There are ways in which it is, from Orwell’s perspective anyway, and there is advanced technology in it, though not often in the way that might be expected. I think for someone who’s read neither, at least in the 1970s CE, the two novels are conceptually smushed together and are just weird high-tech dystopias without much distinction between the two. In fact I once came up with a fan theory to convert Orwell’s world into Aldous Huxley’s, which went on to become H. G. Wells’ ‘Time Machine’ world of the Eloi and Morlocks, but that’s not very literary tinkering of which I’m fond but probably bores most people and can’t be done without altering details of Huxley’s back story unless that’s unreliable in-universe. Once I’d read it, I had to rewrite history with authentic memories.
Winston
With the exception of ‘Coming Up For Air’ and presumably ‘Animal Farm’, which I haven’t read, Orwell’s central characters are generally similar to himself both psychologically and physically. Winston Smith is no exception. In fact, since Orwell was basically dying at the time, Winston is also not a well man. His varicose ulcer in particular gets mentioned a number of times. However, he’s also transposed down in history and some of his experiences are therefore inevitably different. He’s divorced, feels guilty about betraying his mother and sister and is living in the aftermath of a nuclear war. He’s also complicit in the regime, like all Outer Party members, his job being to rewrite history to accord with the current party line. Orwell was involved in the wartime BBC propaganda effort, working from Room 101 of course, and I presume this reflects his ambivalence about this work. However, Winston is far more heavily coerced than the author. He’s constantly surveilled, like all of the Outer Party. Incidentally, it’s notable that the proles are not surveilled to the same extent and seem to have a lot more fun than he and his colleagues have. It’s been said that fascist regimes rely very much on the middle class to succeed, so this may be it, and the low level of education among the poorest is accompanied by lack of political awareness. The working class don’t come across very positively in this novel, and unfortunately given the attitudes stereotypically associated with them in England today, the contempt for them continues. Orwell has seen their lives from the inside and it’s made him pessimistic about the idea that they can be the source of any revolutionary activity. This doesn’t sit well with me even while I suspect it’s often true. However, they’re not a monolith and different people have different attitudes and values.
Novel-writing machines
Julia, Winston’s love interest, works on the novel-writing machines and is of course mainly seen from his perspective in the novel. Recently, the novel ‘Julia’ has attempted to tell the same story from her viewpoint, which also helps the reader see Winston from outside. Julia disguises herself as an enthusiastic member of the Anti-Sex League, and this among other things provokes the thought that the whole society is built on dishonesty and bad faith. Everyone is encouraged to think that everyone else loves Big Brother. The concept of the novel-writing machine is interesting because it doesn’t seem like it fits technologically. The trope arises repeatedly in science fiction and outside it – I think Roald Dahl uses it and Jonathan Swift does too – and I suppose it’s the author’s nightmare and since Orwell seems to have been trying to cram everything he hated into the world of ‘1984’, it finds its place there. At the time of writing, though, it must’ve seemed completely impossible and it seems out of place in the general grimy, low-tech atmosphere of Airstrip One. The solution to this, I think, is that the Party invents anything it needs to keep the populace in check, whether propaganda or some other kind of technology, so where there’s a will, there’s a way. It also makes me wonder if technology is potentially much more advanced than is seen in day to day life by the common people but they only get to avail themselves of it when it helps Ingsoc. This theme is also visited in ‘Brave New World’ where it’s openly admitted that technology is deliberately held back. Focussing on the very obvious thing which hasn’t been said yet, yes this is AI chatbots and they absolutely can produce stories of poor quality with lots of cliches and stereotypes in them, which is exactly what writing in ‘1984’ does. Song lyrics are also written by machine if I remember correctly. Like the real world, the fun creative thing which people actually want to do is taken away from them and they’re left with drudgery. Creativity would be subversive of course. Another aspect of this is that Newspeak is quite mechanical in nature and it might be easier to mechanise textual production in it than in English, but I’ll return to that later.
Telescreens are the most obvious bit of tech in the novel. Supplemented by microphones, they ensure that nobody outside the Inner Party can go unobserved in that manner. In a humorous note, the gym instructor can see Winston failing to do his physical jerks and criticises him through the telescreen. Anthony Burgess, incidentally, provocatively stated that “‘1984’ is essentially a comic book”, but what he seems to have intended by that, apart from being edgy which I think is probably his main motivation, is that Orwell takes the immediate post-war situation in Britain with its austerity and rationing and extrapolated it over almost four decades, leading to a caricature which might not have been meant to be taken entirely seriously. In my desire to make sense of the technological minutiae of the novel, which is never entirely absent from my mind, I’m given to wonder if telescreens use cathode ray tubes like the televisions of the time or whether they’re flatscreens which work in a handwavy way, because there are enormous public telescreens in places like the one in Victory Square which suggests to me that there must be a massive long tube behind them the size of Nelson’s Column or something.
The other notable bit of technology in the book is the machine used to torture Winston during his interrogation. Probably like you, I’m not sure I want to go there in too much detail but it seems able to read his mind and there’s a quantitative rating system which reminds me of electric shock therapy for some reason. I get the impression that the machine can fix transitory thoughts in the mind before doubts set in.
The nature of truth
My English teacher once observed that the novel is as much a philosophical treatise as a work of fiction. This was before I’d formally studied philosophy, so it was presented to me at a time before I had fully formed and thought-through ideas about that, but the main issues seem to be those of history and truth, or perhaps the relationship between language, thought and experience. There’s an incident during Winston’s interrogation where O’Brien burns a piece of paper and says he doesn’t remember it. Winston has some difficulty conceiving of how he can refer to something which he claims is not remembered. This is of course doublethink: being able to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. The idea seems to be not only that one outwardly expresses contradictory propositions but that the actual mental activity involves sincerely embracing the contradiction. It isn’t even a question of some thought being required to reveal the contradiction: it’s just there, blatant, as an object of one’s attention. There’s a theme throughout the novel that the indoctrination goes all the way to the centre of the mind.
This relates to the Party’s hostility to orgasm. An orgasm is a subjective experience, often ecstatic, over which the Party has no control. It can make the outside world as drab as it likes, but because orgasm is generally seen as pure pleasure, often shared between people, it has to be eliminated. There’s no control over it. It’s also possible that the existence of orgasms in such a stark world would reveal that things could be better in other ways too because of the contrast. Beyond this though, it seems to be control for its own sake, and it’s what the Anti-Sex League is about. It’s therefore a particularly telling contrast that Julia of all people is in that organisation. She is using doublethink against Big Brother.
Then there’s history. Winston is aware of the Party rewriting history to attribute the invention of the steam engine to Big Brother. He is himself involved in this activity. O’Brien’s burning of the paper is a reference to the immediate past.
Bad Faith
Parsons is Winston’s neighbour and colleague, and is scarily conformist in a very bad faith kind of way. His wife and he, though not his daughter, have a deeply buried aversion to the regime but cover it not only with a veneer of approval but one which penetrates most of the way to the centre of their identity, though not quite all the way, though they won’t even admit it to themselves. Ingsoc has had more success with their daughter, who is no “oldthinker”. She bellyfeels Ingsoc because they have moulded her from birth, and she’s reminiscent of both the Hitler Youth and the children who were to emerge in East Germany who used to report their own parents to the government. She hardly belongs to the family and is really there as living surveillance. In a somewhat similar move to Winston’s as a boy, she betrays her father to the authorities by telling them the possibly fabricated tale that he said “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep. Although this may be her lie, it could also be that this is really what Parsons said because only in an unconscious state can he admit to his abhorrence of his situation. Whatever actually happened, Parsons praises his daughter for turning him in before the rot had truly set in, that is, before he had to admit the truth to himself.
‘The Place Where There Is No Darkness’
The above is my favourite quote of the entire novel. Winston has previously dreamt that his boss O’Brien is his saviour and he later appears to demonstrate this by letting him into the inner circle of the Party but also the illusory inner circle of the resistance. He imagines that this place is one of hope, but in fact it’s the Ministry Of Truth, where the lights are on all the time to prevent prisoners from sleeping, and also the light penetrates their minds to reveal their secrets, deepest wishes and worst fears. Darkness in this context is simply anything Big Brother wants to get rid of such as sexual pleasure and happiness in general. Although it’s not his intention, I feel very much that this metaphor of light as evil and darkness as good is very productive, and also reflects the fact that Oceania is an ethical photographic negative, also shown by slogans such as “Freedom Is Slavery” and “War Is Peace”.
Maintenance of hatred to distract and unify
A very familiar aspect of the novel is its emphasis on the need for an external enemy, whether Eurasia or Eastasia. Dorothy Rowe, the psychotherapist, used to concentrate very much on this idea and I once went to a talk from her on this subject where she pointed out that soon after the Cold War ended and many people expected a new era of peace, the first Gulf War ensued and we all of a sudden had a new enemy to distract us. During the real 1984, one recent manifestation of that enemy had been Argentina. Nowadays many people would say it was immigrants and asylum seekers, and here I have a question. Some people use this novel to defend what they see as the Free World against other agents and forces such as what they call communism, and then on the Left we would tend to see it as about the likes of totalitarianism and fascism in a more right wing sense. It’s interesting that it should work so well in such a double-edged way. Orwell leads us to see that Ingsoc calls itself socialist when it clearly isn’t, and that would seem to accord with the general left wing view of state capitalism as manifested in the Soviet Union and China, but it seems to work just as well the other way around. Recently we’ve had the “War Against Terror”, which is more abstract but the same thing. Big Brother also regularly retcons the constant alternating wars with Eastasia and Eurasia, more or less entailing that the other two powers constantly shift between alliance and war. Each needs the other two as enemies. This is a particularly vivid and relevant aspect of the novel today.
Newspeak
English is called “Oldspeak” in Oceania. The idea of Newspeak is twofold. One aspect of it is within the regime, to close down thought and reasoning subversive to Ingsoc, but it also serves the purpose for Orwell of being ugly and unpleasant, and also kind of mechanical, not requiring deep thought but rather doublethink. There’s a third aspect to it which I’ll come to in a bit. I’m not entirely sure about this but I have the impression that there are no capital letters. Winston doesn’t use them in his diary, which is in Oldspeak, and there are also no capital letters in Minitru memoranda. Winston observes that someone using Newspeak speaks like a block of text with no spaces between the words, or it may be an aspect of simplifying the language while losing nuance – destroying it actually. However, there are some capitals, such as “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” and “INGSOC”. I’m sure I don’t need to go into much detail about the language if you’ve read the book. Orwell seems to buy very much into the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language shapes the world, and therefore that restricting language is restricting freedom of thought. I don’t agree with this and in fact the hypothesis is, I think, largely discredited nowadays. Interestingly, to me, Suzette Haden Elgin tried to do the opposite by creating Laadan, a constructed language specifically geared to women’s experience, but later decided that it wasn’t actually any harder to articulate that in natural languages although other women have taken and developed her conlang and disagree. It does appear to be true that we think of things differently to some extent depending on the language we’re able to use: I found it much harder to express philosophical ideas in Gaidhlig than English and I don’t think that was my lack of competence in the language.
The extra aspect of this I mentioned, and I’m not sure whether it’s intentional, is that the simplicity of Newspeak reflects Esperanto, which had reached its peak about fifteen years previously. In fact I have written a short story in Newspeak to explore this, set in a community where only Esperanto is spoken. I’m not aware of any other fiction written in Newspeak. In general, Esperanto was considered progressive at the time, so I have some difficulty reconciling this, but then Orwell was also like that – he engaged in doublethink himself to an extent, so maybe he was externalising a habit of mind. Zamenhoff’s popular conlang had its momentum destroyed by fascism and Nazism.
Film Adaptations
To be fair, this should be called “The Film Adaptation” because although several have been made I have the 1984 version in mind. I found it very faithful in terms of the events. It would have been difficult to reproduce Winston’s thoughts verbatim there, but at one point O’Brien bends down next to him in the torture chamber looking old and tired and the text in the book reads ‘you are thinking. . . that my face is old and tired.”. I was of course primed by having read it, but that does, I think, get very clearly communicated in the film. Mike Radford, the director, said that there was nothing in the film that wasn’t happening somewhere in the world that year, a very similar claim to Margaret Atwood’s concerning ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ that nothing in that had not been done to women somewhere. Orwell seems to have anticipated that one day the technology would exist to keep tabs on people minutely, which by the time of the real 1984 had already seemed to have gone too far and since then has only gone further. In a review of the film from the time of its release, “Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted” was said to be the “real” version of “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”. That year, the Met had set up a bank of cameras at Brent Cross which could recognise number plates of cars leaving and entering London by that route and cross-referenced them with DVLA records in Swansea. That was over forty years ago now. There were also concerns about computers keeping track of credit card transactions and cheques. Nowadays of course everything is done by card or bank transfer and those worries seem trivial, which just shows how much we’ve normalised all this. MI5 had also just bought two ICL mainframes with 20 Gb of storage, which doesn’t sound like very much now but compared to the 5 Mb which many hard drives could accommodate at the time, it was a heck of a lot and this had been done secretly – why? Another notable aspect of the film is that it shows nothing which didn’t exist in Orwell’s lifetime, so for instance IT is still based on valves. This leads to a little distortion in the story, particularly in the interrogation scenes, as they were clearly supposed to be more advanced than is shown on screen. Since Orwell’s central characters are self-inserts, John Hurt must have resembled him quite closely physically at the time, and I get the impression he must have starved himself to achieve that gaunt appearance. Apparently Orwell’s inspiration for the idea of altering back copies of ‘The Times’ originated from the editing of ‘The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia’ in the 1930s under Stalin’s orders, where articles on, for example, Trotsky were deleted and photos of scenes from the Russian Revolution airbrushed. Radford points out that for all the disquiet and woe of his situation, created by the Party itself, Winston actually genuinely seems to enjoy his job. Another character, possibly Symes, says that the destruction of words is a beautiful thing, and given that O’Brien has said that the only source of pleasure the Party wants to continue is the pleasure of a jackboot stamping on a face forever, much more overtly Symes but Winston also, both enjoy that aspect of their work in different ways. Symes is part of an effort to shrink English vocabulary to a size convenient for Ingsoc’s ideology and Winston destroys words printed on paper by burning them. Other sources of pleasure are denied them. During a break in filming, Radford watched a news item showing the Queen laying a wreath on the tomb of Jomo Kenyatta, who fought to liberate Kenya from the British in the ’50s. At the time he had been painted as Satan incarnate by the media, but all of a sudden he was rehabilitated and revered. Not that he should or should not have been, but the complete volteface is rather familiar. The year 1984 also saw the computerisation of much political campaigning, with for example the targetting of election leaflets on education to addresses of parents of school age children. All the stuff about our data being used to manipulate us is not new at all, although of course it’s become all-pervasive today.
A bit of an aside: there were two annoying pubic hair incidents in 1984, one connected with Nena’s armpits (okay, not pubic hair but you know what I mean) and the other Suzanna Hamilton’s, which was visible on screen. I didn’t give it a second thought at the time, but apparently more recent audiences have found it quite shocking and worthy of comment. To be honest this reminds me of the incident with the fillings in the mouth of the screaming woman, who had been born into the post-nuclear world where there was presumably no dentistry, at the end of ‘Threads’, in that it really seems like a distraction from the real point of the film, but if you like you can actually shoehorn it in, in that women in Airstrip One don’t want to squander their paltry wages on using razors to remove body hair but in fact I very much doubt anyone at all in Britain was doing that in 1948. A few other things: Richard Burton’s health was failing at the time and took forty-five takes to do one of the scenes because he couldn’t remember his lines, so he was in fact very old and tired at that point. He actually died two months before the film was released so I’m guessing it was his last movie. The scenes generally kept pace with the diary dates in the book, so the opening scenes, for instance, were filmed on 4th April. This meant, of course, that it couldn’t be released until late in the year. In connection with both the theme and the insistence on using technology contemporary with Orwell’s life, Radford wanted to film it in black and white but Virgin refused, so instead the footage was put through bleach bypass to give it the washed-out appearance it had in theatres. This added to the cost of production because it meant that silver couldn’t be reclaimed from the negative or positive prints.
Then there’s the peculiar issue of the music. The initial plan had been to use David Bowie because of his album ‘Diamond Dogs’, but he was too expensive, so the Eurhythmics were approached instead and there is of course an album of their music for the soundtrack. However, all of that was Richard Branson’s idea and he hadn’t told Radford, who had hired Dominic Muldowney to do it, who ended up scoring the entire movie. Branson then vetoed Radford’s choice and the result is that in the initial theatrical cut most of the music is the Eurhythmics’, although it does seem rather quiet and brief most of the time, but some of it, for instance ‘Oceania, ‘Tis For Thee’, which plays in the opening scene in the cinema after the Two Minutes’ Hate, is by Muldowney. Some versions of the film on Blu-Ray give viewers the option of choosing between soundtracks but there’s also a DVD which only uses Muldowney’s, which I guess is much sought after because it’s out of print. Personally I like the Eurhythmics soundtrack but think it reflects the kind of impression one has before one has read the book and the Muldowney version is much more in keeping with the atmosphere of the film because Orwell didn’t forsee popular music going in the direction it in fact did.
The other thing about the film is its influence on other near-contemporary works. In particular, Terry Gillam’s ‘Brazil’ shares a very similar aesthetic, and Apple’s initial ad for the Mac is also self-consciously very similar to the first scene.
To conclude, it probably doesn’t need saying that there’s a lot that did need saying about this novel. When I tried to write an essay about it at school, I ended up just giving a detailed synopsis because I felt it said what it did so well that it was practically impossible for me to rephrase it in any way which would be helpful, which is, I think, a general problem with literary criticism of sufficiently high-quality works. There may never have been a point when ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ couldn’t’ve been taken to describe the world outside the window, but that’s equally true now and that’s a true mark of the universalism of a great work of literature.
There you go: don’t say I don’t listen to my readers! I don’t want this to seem self-indulgent, so before I start I want to point out that this is a response to a comment, that someone would like me to do something like this, so that’s what I’m doing.
Without tinkering with HTML, it seems difficult to provide links within a document in WordPress, so for now I’ll just give you a table of contents in order to prevent you being overwhelmed with the length of this post:
1. The Eternal Present
2. The Never-Ending. . .December?
3. George Orwell Is Better Than War-Warwell
4. My Secret Diary, Aged 16¾
5. A Collision With The Great White Whale
6. Armageddon
7. The Stereophonic Present
8. Harvest For The World
9. The Ending Story
10. Life Off The Fast Lane
11. Green Shoots
The Eternal Present
To me, the year 1984 CE is a kind of eternal present. I sometimes joke about this, saying that all the years after that one were clearly made up, and someone pointed out to me that that was highly Orwellian, but in fact it really is the case that all years are made up and we just have this arbitrary numbering scheme based on someone’s incorrect guess about the birthdate of Jesus, and yes, here I’m assuming there was an historical Jesus, which considering I’m Christian is hardly surprising.
2. The Never-Ending. . .December?
There is a fairly easy if absurd way to make it 1984 still, which is just to have a never-ending December. It’s currently Hallowe’en 2025, in which case it’s the 14945th December 1984. This wouldn’t be a completely useless dating system and I sometimes think we can conceive of time (in the waking sense: see last entry) differently according to how we choose to parcel it up. Another way of making it 1984 would be to date years from forty years later, and no that’s not a mistake as there was no year zero in the Julian or Gregorian calendars. There was one in a certain Cambodian calendar of course, from 17th April 1975, where it was inspired by the French revolutionary Year One, the idea being that history started on that date because everything that happened before that was irrelevant, being part of capitalism and imperialism I presume. My insistence that it’s always 1984 is the opposite of that, as I’m affectedly sceptical about anything happening afterwards. Coincidentally, I use a day-based dating system starting on 17th July 1975 in my diary, and I don’t actually know why I do this, but it’s only ninety-one days after the start of Year Zero (there are other things to be said about Pol Pot which would reveal the over-simplification of this apparent myth). It’s based on the first dated entry in any notebook and my mother’s suggestion that I keep a diary which I didn’t follow. It’s actually the second dated entry, as the first one is of a series of measurements of a staircase, which isn’t really about anything personal. I’ve also toyed with the idea of Earth’s orbit being a couple of metres wider, which would make the year very slightly longer but which would add up over 4.6 aeons (Earth’s age) to quite a difference, but if that were so, asteroid impacts and mass extinctions wouldn’t’ve happened which did and other ones which didn’t might’ve, so it totally changes the history of the world if you do that. If the year was a week longer, it would now be 1988 dated from the same point, but a lot of other things would also be different such as the calendar. It’s quite remarkable how finely-tuned some things are.
3. George Orwell Is Better Than War-Warwell
Although I could go on in this vein, I sense it might irritate some people, so the rest of this is going to be about my feeling of the eternal present, how 1984 actually was to me and thoughts about George Orwell. I’m just telling you this if you feel like giving up at this point.
I have habitually said that “George Orwell is better than War-Warwell” as a reference to Harold MacMillan’s paraphrase of Winston Churchill, and I wonder if Churchill is one of those figures who is always having quotes misattributed to him, like Albert Einstein. The trouble is, of course, that this is a practically meaningless phrase which I can’t do anything with, although Sarada has published a story with that title. I’ve read a lot of Orwell, although unlike most people who have that doesn’t include ‘Animal Farm’. It’s been suggested that if he’d lived longer, he would’ve gone to the Right and become a rather embarrassing figure like David Bellamy or Lord Kelvin, but of course we don’t know and I don’t know what that’s based on. He was known to be quite keen on the idea of patriotism though, so maybe it’s that.
Within the universe of his novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, we don’t actually know that it is that year. It does seem to be about that time, because Winston Smith was a small boy just after the end of World War II. The Party is constantly revising history and is now claiming that Big Brother invented the steam engine, so it seems easily possible that it isn’t exactly 1984 and that either new years have been written into history or removed from it, and just maybe it’s always 1984 and has been for many years by that point. Maybe they just want to save on printing new calendars or are trying to perfect the year by repeating it over and over again, for example. Maybe ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is like ‘Groundhog Day’, and what we read is merely one iteration among many of that story. I’ve heard, although appropriately maybe this can’t be trusted, that Orwell simply came up with it by transposing the last two digits of the year he wrote it. Whereas it’s possible to play with this, the truth is probably simply that he needed to give Winston enough time to grow up and reach his forties so he could tell the story.
It interests me that there was a somewhat jocular, artsy attempt to claim that a period called the 19A0s existed between the late ’70s and early ’80s which has been edited out of history, which is similar to the Phantom Time Hypothesis. Just to cover these, I’ve written about this before, and the Phantom Time Hypothesis, so if you want you can read about it there.
A slightly puzzling aspect of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is why its title is spelt out rather than written as figures, but it seems that this was common practice at the time. It’s one thing that everyone gets wrong about the book, as it’s almost always referred to as ‘1984’. I should point out that one reason I didn’t get any further than A-level with English Literature is that I experience an impenetrable thicket of associations whenever I consider mainstream creative works which make it difficult to respond meaningfully to them. In the case of Orwell’s novel though, since it’s arguably science fiction it might be more appropriate than usual to do so, since that’s also how I respond to that genre but find it more in keeping with that kind of imagination. I’m not alone in this it seems: Orwell’s novel is analysed in such a manner by the YouTube channel ‘1984 Lore’. I myself used Newspeak to write a short story about a kibbutz-like community on another planet where everyone actually spoke Esperanto to explore whether language restricts thought, portraying it in terms of the idea that it does.
4. My Secret Diary, Aged 16¾
My personal experience in the year 1984 represents a peak in my life. Note that it’s just one peak, neither the biggest nor the only one. It doesn’t overshadow the year of my wedding or the births of our children, grandchildren or anything like that. ’82 and ’83 are also significant in their own ways. ’82 I thought of as the “endless summer” characterised by the nice pictures of young people in yellow T-shirts and long blond hair on the envelopes you got back from the chemists with the photos in them, and ’83 had been particularly poignant, but the year after those had been highly focussed on for a long time in various circles by many people. 1984 opened for me hiding under a table in a suburban living room in Canterbury whispering to my friend about when midnight came. I was wearing a navy blue M&S sweatshirt whose inner flock was worn on the inside of the left elbow, a blue and white striped shirt with a button-down collar which I was only wearing because she liked it, and jeans which annoyed me by not having any bum pockets, and she was wearing jeans which did have bum pockets and a white blouse with yellow check-line lines on it, but it was completely dark so neither of us could see anything. I was sixteen and had had a lot to drink considering my age, naughtily, as had she. We eventually conjectured that midnight must have passed and I rang my dad, who came to pick me up and whom I immediately told I’d had some alcohol (Martini, Cinzano and a Snowball) which my friend saw as not only typical of my impulsiveness and indiscreetness but also liable to get me in trouble but it didn’t. The street lights looked rather blurry on the way home. Thus opened my 1984. A few days later I was back in the sixth form and my friend Mark Watts, who was later to go on to found an investigative journalism agency and uncover a number of cases of child sexual abuse, informed me that it was vital that we didn’t fall for whatever spin the media were likely to put on it being the year named after that novel and that whenever he referred to George Orwell it would be under the name Lionel Wise (Eric Blair – Lionel Blair; Eric Blair – Eric Morecambe – Ernie Wise), which was quite clever if also rather adolescent, which is what we were. We were all very conscious that it was 1984 at last. Anne Nightingale played David Bowie’s ‘1984’ and Van Halen’s ‘1984’ on her request show on the evening of New Year’s Day. I didn’t have a hangover, because I don’t get them. I asked my brother to record something off Anne Nightingale because I was about to go out again to see my friends, and it happened that the next track was Steve Winwood’s ‘While You See A Chance, Take It’, which I’d wanted to get on tape for years but he cut it off halfway through the first verse. The machine on which that was recorded was a rapidly failing mono Sanyo radio cassette recorder which my mum was annoyed was deteriorating so fast seeing as it was less than four years old and I’d got it for my thirteenth birthday. Incidentally, I’m writing all this without reference to diaries or any other kind of record. I just remember it, plainly, clearly, in great detail, and I don’t know how this compares to others’ memories. My memories of much of the ’80s are as clear as flashbulb memories because they occur within my reminiscence bump. There are errors, such as the exact name of the Steve Winwood record, but also a lot of clarity. Anyway, later that year on my seventeenth birthday, 30th July, I got a stereo boom box possibly from Sony which I first recorded on on 8th August, namely Tracey Ullman’s ‘Sunglasses’, followed by ‘Smalltown Boy’. In September, I got my first job, as a cashier at the new Safeway, which looked enormous to me at the time but on returning to the Waitrose which it now is seems really tiny nowadays, and lost it after eleven weeks due to being too slow on the till, not assertive enough to turn people away from the “Nine Items Or Less” (now “fewer” apparently) queue, and £2 out on the cashing up on two occasions. Apparently this was a lot stricter than other places, such as Lipton’s where my sister worked and who was much further out than I on many occasions when she first worked there. I could say more about her situation there but probably shouldn’t. Anyway, I got £1.41 an hour from Safeway which I saved up to buy the first big item I’d ever got for myself, which was a Jupiter Ace microcomputer. Which brings me to computers.
I was very into computers in the early to mid-’80s, but also deeply ambivalent about them. At the start of the year, the family had owned a ZX81 for a year and a bit. I found this annoying because it was such a low-spec machine, but restrictions fuel creativity so it was in fact not a bad thing. I was spending a lot of my time reading computer magazines and wishing I had a better computer, which I resolved late in that year, and also writing software, mainly graphically-oriented, which was difficult considering that our computer only had a resolution of 64×48, although I was later able to increase this to 192 on the Y-axis by pointing the I register on the Z80A somewhere else than the character set, so I could make bar graphs which looked quite good. I did also write a computerised version of Ramon Llull’s ‘Machine That Explains Everything’, a couple of primitive computer viruses and an adventure game. Later on, after I got the Jupiter Ace, I got it to display runes and produce screeds of nonsense words in Finnish. As I said though, I was ambivalent. I’ve never been comfortable with my interest in IT for several reasons, and for more reasons at this point. One reason was that at the time I was communist, and also kind of Stalinist, and felt that the use of IT and automation as fuelled by the microchip boom would create massive unemployment and reduce the power of the workers to withdraw their labour. However, it isn’t clear to me now why me not having a ZX81 would’ve made any difference to that. In the middle of the year, I decided that communism was over-optimistic and there was a brief period during which people were very eager for me to adopt their views, but I quickly opted for Green politics. I was not yet anarchist and believed in a Hobbesian state of nature. Besides this perspective, I was also uncomfortable about my interest in computers because it seemed nerdy, something very negative at the time, and unbalanced – obsessive and not “humanities” enough to my taste. It felt too much like my comfort zone and not challenging enough. It did, however, become apparent that I had spent so much time studying computers, with text books as well as mags and experimentation, that I could’ve easily aced the O-level, which was another example of how my formal educational focus was outside educational institutions at the time, and it was also suggested that my aforementioned friend with whom I hid under the table and was trying to learn BASIC at the technical college, would’ve welcomed me teaching her. This got to the point where I helped her with her homework. On another occasion, an acquaintance was trying to write a FORTH programming language interpreter in Z80 assembler and I had a look through it with interest. One of my other friends later went on to write parts of the major GNU text editor “religion” Emacs, already almost a decade old by ’84, which I still use today. However, I found my interest in computers made me feel embarrassed and self-conscious and I felt somewhat ashamed of it. I think I found a lot of my interests at the time to be very personal and not something I felt comfortable sharing with others.
It was also the year of my perhaps most significant cultural shift. I entered the year enthusiastic about mainstream literature and poetry. I had been warned, though, by my O-level English teacher, that A-level English Lit was likely to spoil my appreciation of reading, and this did in fact happen. Early in the year my enthusiasm continued and I came to enjoy reading poetry and literature. I planned to continue my writing on the works of Samuel Beckett as part of my A-level and the fact we were studying Joyce gave me optimism in that regard. We had a fair bit of freedom to do that kind of thing. In the summer exams, my practical criticism of a particular poem was chosen as a model answer for others to emulate and I was able, for example, to uncover themes in poetry which my teacher hadn’t noticed, which was mainly due to my insistence on maintaining a wide education. I was applying to university in the later part of the year, having researched them in the earlier part, and having opted for degrees in English and Psychology or Philosophy and Psychology, I was clearly sufficiently committed to English at the time to consider it as a first degree. However, all of that was about to go to shit.
5. A Collision With The Great White Whale
It may be worth analysing what went wrong in some depth, but the simple facts of how it happened were as follows. My A-levels were in English, RE and Biology, which I want to stress is a very popular combination. At the end of the first year, around June, there was a marine biology field trip which was in itself quite formative for me because I didn’t relish getting stuck in the stinky, sticky black tarry mud encouraged by the anaerobic respiration in Pegwell Bay, an estuary on the edge of Thanet. It was cold and wet, and the water was of course salty, and I thought I’d ruined that sweatshirt I’d mentioned earlier which I was once again wearing. My dissatisfaction was palpable. Anyway, it was assumed by the English department that those who were off on the field trip would, possibly from their friends, learn their summer reading assignments, which were to read James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ anthology and Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. I didn’t get that information, didn’t talk about the assignments with my friends because it wasn’t a priority for us and consequently was confronted with reading an absolute doorstep of a book plus much of the Joyce one, which was less problematic because being short stories it was easy to catch up with that one. I was then confronted, on reading Melville’s novel, with a load of American men murdering whales for a living. Right then, I wasn’t even vegetarian but I did, like a lot of other people, believe in saving the whale. Over my childhood, I’d read a lot of story books about animals, like ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘All Creatures Great And Small’, ‘Incredible Journey’, ‘Bambi’, ‘Watership Down’ and ‘A Skunk In The Family’. Of course there was peril in these and also horrible deaths on occasion, not to mention sad endings, but the focus was on the otter, the bovines, dogs, cats, deer, rabbit and skunk. There is no problem with depicting them being treated badly, suffering and so forth. But in ‘Moby Dick’, there is never any sympathy or focus on the experience of the whales or acknowledgement of them as victims, in a similar manner to the people who had lived in North America before White colonisers turned up. It was all about something else, and there wasn’t just an elephant in the room but a whale. I was unable to bring myself to step into Ishmael’s or anyone else’s shoes. The only bits I could tolerate were the encyclopaedic sections. I could go into more depth here. I think Melville was probably trying to make a whale-sized book, was using the whale as a metaphor for the intractable and incomprehensible nature of, well, nature and the world in general and as a tabula rasa, them being white like a piece of paper, and there’s the angle that the whale is in some way a phallic symbol. Ahab also anthropomorphises the whale, seeing them as a rival in a battle with him when in the end the whale is just the whale and doesn’t even realise the tiny figures above lobbing harpoons at them are even conscious beings. From the novel’s perspective, the whale probably isn’t even a conscious being. Hence I was confronted with what I read as a hostile, nasty and animal-hating, actually animal-indifferent story where I couldn’t work out whether any of the characters were supposed to be sympathetic and,moreover, the only chapters I could actually garner any interest in were dismissed as mere padding by my teachers. I also found, for some reason, that the same approach I’d been taking to poetry up until the summer no longer seemed to work. It probably didn’t help that one of my teachers was a frustrated Classics teacher who later left and taught that at the King’s School, although I was interested in the classics she managed to shoehorn into the lessons such as Oedipus Tyrannus, the Oresteia and Antigone. I would say, though, that I really didn’t get on with the Oresteia because I felt very much that it lacked universalism. None of that was in the exams of course, but I wasn’t ever very oriented towards those. I was more just interested or not.
The autumn of the year was marked mainly by anxious procrastination about submitting my UCCA form, which I handed in a month later than I was supposed to due to indecision about what to put in my personal statement, which wasn’t up to much partly because of not wanting to admit what I was interested in, and partly because of not pursuing it in a public way due to the shame I felt about admitting it. I also got annoyed with universities insisting on being put first, so rather than selecting places I actually wanted to go to, although my first choice, Keele, I was very keen on due to the balanced and eclectic nature of their educational approach, I deliberately listed Nottingham, Reading and Exeter, followed by Sheffield in which I was in fact fairly interested in. I got rejected by all of them except Keele and Sheffield, Exeter apparently by return of post. Among the polys I applied for Hatfield, Oxford and NELP, and would’ve got into NELP in fact. I liked the modular nature of the course at Oxford, which appealed to me for the same reason as Keele did.
6. Armageddon
Another association which arrived in 1984 and which has been with me ever since is the idea of “proper Britain”. I may have mentioned this before, but the notorious nuclear holocaust drama ‘Threads’ was broadcast on 23rd September 1984, notable for being the first depiction of nuclear winter in the mass media, and I remember being edgelordy about it by saying to my friends that it was over-optimistic. I was ostentatiously and performatively depressive at the time. I did not in fact feel this, but my takeaway from it was probably unusual. There’s a scene at the start where Ruth and Jimmy are canoodling on Curbar Edge above Hope Valley which really struck me. It was grey, drizzly and clearly quite cold, even though I think the action begins in May. There’s also the heavily built up large city of Sheffield, where I might be going in a year or so, and it suddenly crystallised my image of what Britain was really like. Not the South with its many villages and small towns densely dotted about with relatively dry and sunny weather, which I was used to, but the larger block of large post-industrial cities with redbrick terraced houses, back-to-backs, towerblocks and brutalist municipal architecture set against a background of rain, wind and greyness. I relished that prospect, and it felt like real Britain. This is how the bulk of the British population lives, and it becomes increasingly like that the further north you get, hence my repeated attempts to move to Scotland, which in a way I feel is more British than England because of many of those features. By contrast, if you go from Kent to France it’s basically the same landscape and climate with different furniture. Maybe a strange reaction to a depiction of a nuclear war, but there you go.
I did, however, also feel very much that it would be strange and foreign to move away to an area dominated by Victorian redbrick terraced houses. I couldn’t imagine that they’d ever feel like home to me and I couldn’t envisage settling down there. I was still very much a Southerner at that time. I was also, however, fully aware of the privileged bubble I was living in and it made me feel very awkward.
Nor am I ignoring the actual content of the film. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction was very high in many people’s minds at the time and it almost seemed inevitable. This made even bothering to make plans for the future seem rather pointless and almost like busy work. We all “knew” we were going to die horribly, as was everyone around us, so doing the stuff I’ve mentioned, like applying to university, seemed more like something I did as a distraction from that worry than something with an actual aim sometimes, depending on my mood. This had a number of consequences. One is that I wonder if a lot of Gen-Xers underachieve because they missed out on pushing themselves into things in their youth, expecting the world to end at any time. Another is that as the ’80s wore on, pop music and other aspects of popular culture began to reflect that anxiety. Ultimately even Squeeze (basically) ended up producing an eerie and haunting post-nuclear song in the shape of ‘Apple Tree’. Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’ particularly captures the attitude and is widely misunderstood. The reason we’d be forever young is that we’d never get a chance to grow up and live out full lives. That single was released a mere four days after ‘Threads’ was broadcast.
7. The Stereophonic Present
Speaking of music, there were something like four bands in the Sixth Form at that point, the most prominent being The Cosmic Mushroom, clearly influenced by the Canterbury Scene even in the mid-’80s. My own attitude to music was to concentrate on cassettes because I didn’t trust myself to take care of vinyl properly. The advent of proper stereo in my life was on my birthday at the end of July, and there’s something vivid and recent-sounding about all stereo music I own for that reason. This is in fact one factor in my feeling that 1984 is current rather than in the past. The present is characterised by clear, stereophonic music, the past by lo-fi mono, and that switch occurred for me in summer that year. This is actually more vivid than the earlier shift between black and white and colour TV. Incidentally, CDs were out there for sure, but only for the rich, having been first released two years previously. Like mobile ‘phones, they were a “yuppie” thing, like jug kettles. Back to music. Effectively the charts and my perception of them that year were dominated by ‘Relax’, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. This was released in November the previous year and entered the charts in early January. This got banned as it climbed the charts, which boosted its popularity enormously and got it to number 1. It stayed in the Top 100 until April the next year. We played it at the school discos, the other standard being ‘Hi-Ho Silver Lining’, which we all used to sing along and dance to. My personal preferences included The The, Bauhaus and The Damned at the time, although the ongoing appreciation of the likes of Kate Bush continued.
8. Harvest For The World
On 24th October, the famous Michael Buerk report on the famine in Ethiopia was broadcast. This led in the next couple of years to Live Aid and Run The World, but from that year’s perspective it only just began. There’s been a lot of justified criticism of media framing of the famine, but as a naive teenager I didn’t have much awareness of that and simply saw it as a disaster which required a response from me, which was initially in the form of a sponsored silence for the whole school in the sports hall, then later a sponsored 24- or 36-hour fast supervised by one of my biology teachers in which I also participated. Although I can’t really mention this without pointing out that the whole thing was dodgy, it did start a ball rolling which continued in much later political activism on my part and a passionate youthful idealism to make the world a better place, which I felt confident had to come soon and meant action from me. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ was a further effort in that campaign, satirised by Chumbawumba as ‘Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records’ and roundly criticised by the World Development Movement, but at the time I knew nothing of this. By the way, it’s remarkable how the unpopular Chumbawumba cynicism managed to get from the political fringe into the mainstream in just a few years with the Simpsons parody ‘We’re Sending Our Love Down The Well’ only eight years later, although that was also linked to a Gulf War song it seems, which however is in that tradition, which I first became aware of, superficially, that year. In fact I can’t overestimate the importance of this sequence of events, even with its grubby and cynical connotations, and my support of it has a simplicity and innocence which I wish in a way I still had. I want the world to be one in which something like that works straightforwardly and simply. As I’ve said before, nobody is Whiter or more middle class than I am.
A rather different aspect of this is that I and someone called Louise almost got the giggles during the sponsored silence and we both spent most of our time doing it, which was I think a whole hour, trying not to laugh. A while after that the same thing happened with the two of us in an English class, though on that occasion we gave into it and there was actually nothing provoking it at all. It then spread through the whole class. Once again, in an English class shortly after that, the teacher, discussing Moby Dick of course, took out a model of a sperm whale on wheels unexpectedly and rolled it up and down the desk, which again led to uncontrollable laughter. This was Thatcher’s Britain, yes, and most of us hated her, but it wasn’t grim or joyless, at least for seventeen year olds, and I actually managed to get some pleasure out of Herman Melville’s writing!
CND was very active at the time. I, however, was not, for a couple of reasons. I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of unilateral disarmament, and in fact that was the last of the standard lefty/Green causes I committed to, but I had a feeling they were right and wanted to go on the demos but never actually did. This is by contrast with the Miners’ Strike. Kent, like Northern France, was a coalmining area and the strike was very close to us because several of my friends were in coal miners’ families. I asked what I could do but nothing really came to mind. I was also aware of hunt sabbing but was unable to work out how to find out about it. Had I got involved in that, I might’ve gone vegan years earlier than I did.
9. The Ending Story
Then there was cinema. My aforementioned friend under the table rang me up one day and just said we should go and watch ‘Champion’ at the ABC. That cinema, incidentally, was managed by someone I later got to know when he and I both coincidentally moved to Leicester. I was surprised my friend just spontaneously bet on the horses when I’d never dreamt of doing that, at the time because it was gambling. The film, in case you didn’t know as it may be quite obscure, was based on a true story about a famous jockey who has cancer and survives. One impression I got from it was that he looked like Lionel Blair, which is the second time I’ve mentioned him today. At this time it was still possible to sit in the cinema for as long as you wanted while the same films, yes, films plural, played over and over again. This was actually the last year it was possible. The year after, I’d just finished watching ‘Letter To Brezhnev’ and the ushers chucked us all out. It was a real shock, and you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. It meant that parents could use cinemas as babysitting services, though this may have been somewhat reckless by today’s standards. They did the same with swimming pools: Kingsmead had this going on, although specifically in ’84 I didn’t exercise much apart from walking eight miles, to school and back, every day. This lazy year ended immediately with my New Years’ resolution to go running every morning from 1st January 1985.
‘Ghostbusters’ was also quite memorable. I took my younger brother to see it and I wasn’t expecting the whole audience to shout the song when it came on. It’s a good film, with a memorable scene involving a fridge and an unforgettable line which is usually cut towards the end. It also mentions selenium for no apparent reason, and has Zener cards at the start. At the time, rather surprisingly, it seemed to be generally accepted even in academia that some people were psychic. I often wonder whether it’s really good-quality research which has led to received opinion on this changing or whether it’s just a reputational thing that psi is now widely rejected by academic researchers. The other major film I remember watching was ‘Star Trek III’, which is also very good, and at the time there was no plan to bring Star Trek back. It was considered a sequel too far by one of my friends, so at the time it looked like the show was completely defunct and they were trying to revive it beyond all reason. I also saw ‘2010’, which I liked for incorporating the new findings about Europa, but it definitely lacks the appeal of the original. Incidentally, the long gap between Voyager visits to Saturn and Uranus was underway and the remaining probe wouldn’t get there for another two years. The original ‘Dune’ also came out this year, and although I wanted to see it, I don’t think it came to Canterbury. I wouldn’t’ve liked it at the time, having seen it since, and oddly I had the impression it was in a completely different directing style and that it was also a 3-D film. It may also have been the most expensive feature film ever made at the time. ‘1984’, of course, also came out then, but that deserves its own treatment. As other people I’ve since got to know of my age have commented, ‘Neverending Story’ marked the first time I perceived a film as definitely too young for me, and in a way that realisation reflected the twilight before the dawn of adulthood to me.
10. Life Off The Fast Lane
Speaking of marks of adulthood, many of my peers were learning to drive and passing their tests at this point. Although I got a provisional licence that year and my parents strongly suggested I learn, I refused to do so for environmental and anti-materialistic reasons. Although I’ve had lessons since, I’ve never in fact got there and I’ve also heard that an ADHD diagnosis can bar one from driving in any case, if it affects one’s driving ability. I’m not sure mine would but I do think my dyspraxia is a serious issue there. 1984 is in fact the only year I’ve independently driven any motorised vehicle, namely one friend’s scooter and other’s motorbike. Like the underage drinking, it’s apparent that we didn’t take certain laws particularly seriously at the time and I’m wondering if that was just us, our age or whether that’s changed since. I was dead set against learning to drive, and this was probably the first thing which marked me as not destined to live a “normal” adult life. It has on two occasions prevented me from getting paid work.
Television didn’t form a major part of my life at the time. We couldn’t get Channel 4 yet, so the groundbreaking work done there was a closed book to me. ‘Alas Smith And Jones’ started in January and incredibly continued to run for fourteen years. I’d stopped watching ‘Doctor Who’ two years previously when ‘Time Flight’ was so awful that I decided it was a kid’s show and put it away. Tommy Cooper died on stage. The second and final series of ‘The Young Ones’ broadcast. ‘Crimewatch UK’, which would eventually become compulsive but guilty viewing for Sarada and me, started. In a somewhat similar vein, ‘The Bill’ started in October, which I used to enjoy watching years later due to the handheld camera work, which made it seem very immediate and “real” somehow. NYPD Blue is like that for other reasons incidentally. ‘Casualty’ was still two years in the future and ‘Angels’ had just ended, so I was in a wilderness of no medical dramas.
11. Green Shoots
Also, of course, the Brighton hotel bombing took place, and many of my friends felt very conflicted because on the one hand there was the general sympathy and empathy for people being attacked, injured and killed, but on the other they were very much hated for what they were doing. I’m sure this was a widespread feeling, and there is of course the band Tebbit Under Rubble, which very much expresses one side of that sentiment. Greenham Common was in progress and a major eviction took place in March. Although I was later to become heavily involved in the peace movement, at the time I was still very much on the sidelines although some of the people I knew were connected, and I do remember thinking that computer and human error were major and unavoidable risks which meant that the very existence of nuclear arsenals was too dangerous to be allowed to continue.
Then there was the Bishop of Durham, and since I was doing an A-level in RE at the time, his stance was highly relevant. The Sea Of Faith Movement was in full swing, which promoted a kind of secularised Christianity which was largely non-theistic or even atheist in nature, and the foundations were being laid in my mind which I’d later extend but allow the high-control group I became involved in to demolish, almost inexplicably. Over that whole period, I was expected to read a newspaper of my choice and take cuttings from it on relevant religious and moral issues to put in a scrapbook, so my long-term readership of ‘The Guardian’ began a few months before this and persisted through the year. It was either 25p or 30p at the time, and this was before colour newspapers had come to be. I had also been an avid Radio 4 listener since 1980, but unlike later I also listened to Radio 3 a bit, never really managing to appreciate classical music to the full.
This was also the year I finally decided I wanted to become an academic philosopher, and I still think I could’ve followed that through though it didn’t happen. This is the end of a kind of winnowing process probably connected to my dyspraxia, where I became increasingly aware of practical things which I simply couldn’t do, I’d been put off biology by the griminess and unpleasantness of field work and therefore philosophy was the way forward. That said, like many other people I was also very motivated to study psychology in an attempt to understand myself, and as you probably know a lot of psychology undergraduates begin their degrees by being concerned about major issues in their own personalities, so in that respect I’m not unusual. I also presented two assemblies, one on existentialism and the other on the sex life of elephants as a parable of romantic love.
I feel like this could go on and on, so I’m going to finish off this reminiscence in a similar way to how I started. My emotional world revolved around the friend I was hiding under the table with at the beginning of the year and our significance to each other was important to both of us. About halfway through it, having just visited her she became concerned that she and I were going to be found together alone in the house by her parents who were coming back unexpectedly, so I left the house by the back door and crept surreptitiously over the front garden, only to be stopped and “citizen’s arrested” by their next door neighbour. This turned out to make the situation more embarrassing for her and me than it would’ve been if I’d just left when they came back. I don’t know if anything can be made or a picture can be drawn of who she or I was at the time by putting those two incidents together.
I’m aware that I haven’t talked about Orwell’s book and its adaptations as much as I’d like, so that’s something I’ll need to come back to, and there are huge things I’ve missed out, but I hope I’ve managed to paint a portrait of my 1984 and possibly also yours. I may also have portrayed someone who peaked in high school, but I do also think tremendous things happened afterwards. 1984 is, though, the first foothill of my life, which makes it significant. It’s sometimes said that the reminiscence bump is only there because fifteen to twenty-five is the most eventful period of one’s time here, but maybe not. It’s hard to say.
Someone asked a question the other day about Islamophobia and why that would be counted as racism, and also discussed racism as such, so I thought it might be worth talking about it in a little more depth. I’m aware I’ve done this before, but probably not from this angle. It’s also on my mind a bit after an exchange with a White acquaintance a week or so ago which is worth revisiting.
Last week, then, some people from here went to Carlisle for a counter-demonstration to the racist protest there, including my acquaintance. I made a very common statement which I expected him to agree with, that all White people are racist. He challenged me on this and I realised I didn’t have a ready answer, so it’s worth going into more depth on this matter.
I am an extremely lucky person. I was born in the developed world in just about the mid-twentieth century CE, I’m human, White, able-bodied, my first language is English and I’m middle class. I’m privileged in most of the ways anyone can be, and it’s important to remember this because of the “let them eat cake” (yes, I know nobody said that) obliviousness this gifts me with. I’m at the top of almost every pile. I’m even from the English Home Counties. Being in such a position means that to me, many issues are abstract and have little to no effect on my quality of life. I’m out of touch in ways which may very well harm others. This might sound like self-flagellation but it isn’t. It simply means that I am as valuable and worthwhile as any other person while also having the luxury of privilege, and of course many people in other categories rightly envy my position and might want to swap if that was possible. People who are less privileged than me might find it hard to understand how someone like Oprah Winfrey or Michelle Obama lacks privilege that they might have, and they do have a point because past a certain line sheer wealth cushions one from the effects of prejudice. However, a poor working-class White man is unlikely, for example, to be transvestigated to the extent Michelle Obama has been. In case you don’t know, there are probably thousands of people who see Barack and Michelle Obama as a gay male couple and Michelle as a trans woman, partly because White ideals of femininity refer to a White ideal female body. It’s very likely that Michelle Obama is protected from potential assassins, but she has to be protected like other powerful figures, and in her case the risk is greater than it would be for someone like Bill Clinton, or for that matter a poor working-class White bloke in England. Hence White privilege, and for that matter fragility, do exist.
This bit is going to be a rehash of a previous post I’ve now lost on ethnicity. The San people, also known as the “Bushmen”, of South Africa and adjacent states, are genetically unusually diverse for a human group. Interestingly, they’re more likely to be albino than any other such group, and although people always intermarry they can be thought of mainly as the sister group to the rest of humanity. One way in which this has been expressed is that it’s easily possible for two San individuals to be as different genetically as an average Irish person is from an average Sri Lankan. There’s nothing special about those two selections incidentally. I could equally well say the average Fuegan and the average Australian Aboriginal. There is also more variation within Afrika than outside it, genetically, so if we are going to divide people into ethnicities genetically, they may as well consist of a number of Afrikan races plus a single race comprising the people of the Sahara and everyone else. This is a bit of an oversimplification though, because Central Asia also has a lot of variation compared to the rest of the planet. Speaking of Central Asia, however, there is a small group somewhere in the Himalayas, if I remember correctly, which is considerably genetically distinct from others but is never regarded as a separate ethnicity in spite of the fact that the average difference between it and other races is as big as between White people and Native Americans, for example. I’ve seen a claim that it’s the Tajiks. If it is, the Tajiks to most people are basically slightly different from Persians in a similar way to the French and English being different. But I don’t know.
Some species are more diverse than others. Cheetahs and Beluga whales are known for being particularly genetically similar within their respective species. On the other hand, there’s a species of roundworm, Caenorhabditis brenneri, whose genes are the most diverse of any known animal species, being as different as lions and tigers even though they’re in the same genus as the famous Caenorhabditis elegans and in a whole phylum of animals which are very difficult for non-experts to tell apart. Humans nowadays are very genetically homogenous because of an incident, possibly the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano seventy-four thousand years ago, which by fifty thousand years ago left fewer than a thousand humans alive outside Afrika. There are some other species similarly affected at the same time such as the other great apes, macaques, the aforementioned cheetah and tigers (which I understand to be several species so I’m not sure what that means). On the whole, species are a lot more diverse than these, so we as humans, or rather Homo sapiens, are starting out from being remarkably similar to each other compared to most other species. Other species, ourselves included, can sometimes be thought of as having subspecies. As far as we’re concerned, that’s probably what Neanderthals were compared to us. That’s not the case for us any more, and hasn’t been so for many, many millennia. I have in my life been able to identify one person who was most genetically different from myself in that she probably had significant numbers of genes from Denisovan ancestors, and so far as I was concerned she was an Indonesian woman whose ethnicity as an Indonesian was more significant to her and others than her genetic makeup, even though she would’ve been dramatically unlike nearby neighbours in that country. It just didn’t matter, and in human terms the differences were really extreme.
My point, of course, is that we’re all mongrels. We’re all mixtures genetically. Moreover, the features on which we tend to focus as White people such as eye shape, skin tone, hair texture and shape of lips are not significant and don’t mean anything in terms of other features. It would be as easy to divide people up by other genetic characteristics such as blood group, tissue type or ability to digest various different compounds in food, which would have more important implications for everyone but would show groups of people which wouldn’t mean very much at all to us. There is basically no biological significance in what White people think of races. It may be true that dark skin protects it from sunlight damage but there are other inherited traits with other benefits elsewhere. Some people might have a genetic propensity not to be able to digest a particular species of caterpillar, which could be very significant in communities where they’re regularly eaten but we don’t use that to divide people up. We do do that with gluten intolerance but we don’t usually think about that in racial terms.
Hence there is no biological basis to race, or rather, its biological basis is arbitrarily decided from a biological perspective. What there is, and this is a social phenomenon, is racialisation. White people have decided that there are separate races, including White people who are in some way the “neutral” race and therefore usually have the privilege of not being aware of their own ethnicity without that being a potential problem for them. Hence we tend to be unaware of racism. It doesn’t quite work that way because, for example, English people tend to view the Irish as somewhat different and there can be prejudice against Ashkenazic Jews and White Eastern Europeans. Groups which are racialised basically have no choice but to be aware of racism. This means that our White privilege makes us able to be oblivious and therefore ignorant of the very real phenomenon of racism.
It often makes more sense to think of racism not as something people do so much as a structural and institutional problem from which White people benefit and racialised people suffer. One way this might help White people to accept our racism is to recognise that racist is simply something we are without seeing it as something which we accuse other White people of and of which we’re innocent. Apart from anything else, whether or not we’re actively racist, the point at which we decide other White people are racist and we aren’t is the end of us working to reduce our own racism and pursue anti-racism, which as White people is more our responsibility than that of racialised groups. It isn’t really the job of Black people to educate us about how we’re racist because we’re responsible for our ignorance and they suffer from it. It’s foisted upon them, and we do it to them, however passively, and passivity is tacit compliance. And again, this might sound like a guilt trip placed on myself and other White people, but it isn’t. It’s simply the recognition that we are racist and we need to do something about it.
A related feature of Whiteness is our fragility. This is also called White defensiveness, and describes our reluctance to talk about the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism and downplaying the seriousness of racism. Another claim is of reverse racism, i.e. that White people also face prejudice. Accusations of this based on diversity-related affirmative action were once compared to the idea that having a wheelchair ramp into a building which occupies most of the width of some steps is prejudiced against able-bodied people. There clearly does seem to be “pulling the ladder up”-style racism, as with a group of a certain ethnicity then denying fair consideration to members of other, or even the same, minority groups. The Conservative cabinet in Westminster is notorious for doing this. Some research has been done into whether reverse racism exists, and it appears that it doesn’t in this respect, in the sense that it doesn’t impair opportunities to implement such policies. The idea that racism operates equally significantly or comparably between ethnicities is related to the idea that there are clear-cut biologically-based major categories of human populations between which prejudice occurs rather than the more accurate model that there are those able to escape racialisation and those who have been racialised. One thing which does happen, though, is that there can be prejudice between ethnic minorities, which serves White supermacists well through divisiveness.
Before I get to Islamophobia, I want to talk about anti-semitism as it informs the way Islamophobia is rightly understood as a form of racism. The Jewish people as an ethnicity have at least three aspects to their identity: genetic affinity, culture and faith. Jewish people are generally understood as people whose mothers are Jewish, but many people in that category don’t identify as Jewish. There are rarely also converts to the Jewish faith, which would make them Jewish, and people who marry into the faith are kind of “Jewish-adjacent” and may or may not have Jewish children. Not all Jewish people are White, and in fact it could be argued that being Jewish entails not being White, something worth analysing. First of all, skin tone varies a lot between people who are genetically 100% Jewish, such as the Beth Israel originating in Ethiopia, the Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim. These people are subject to racism within their communities. There are also straightforwardly Black converts to Judaism such as Sammy Davis Jr. Secondly, there is a sense in which they are non-White in a similar way to the Roma and the Irish are in England, i.e. there is plainly explicit and conscious racism against them because they’re not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Their skin tone in this situation is no protection against racism. Nonetheless, there may be no genetic difference at all between them and White people. Imagine two identical twins, one of whom converts to the Jewish faith. These two people would be of different ethnicities.
It doesn’t take much thought to see parallels between anti-Semitism and Islam here. Anti-semitism can be prejudice against people who are physically identical to Gentiles. These are in a small minority but they exist. Thinking back to my time in the English East Midlands, I knew at least three White English converts to Islam and a family of Albanians who to me just looked the same as White English people and were Muslims simply because Albania is an Islamic majority country. Nonetheless these people would’ve met with prejudice because of being Muslim. Many Albanians are culturally Islamic as opposed to being practicing Muslims, so they’re Muslim in the same way as Richard Dawkins is, in his own words, “culturally Christian”. Islamophobia can operate against Albanians even in their own country. Ethnic cleansing against Albanians has been called for by Albanian far-right groups, the state sponsors the promotion of Christianity over Islam and there have been attacks against women in hijabs, who have been called “terrorists”. I probably don’t need to mention what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s CE. There’s also often equation between Muslims and Arabs. Indonesia has the largest number of Muslims anywhere in the world and is not part of the Arab world. But like anti-semitism, Islamophobia is clearly racism. Besides this comparison, when you also consider the unfounded idea that racism other than these examples is based on biological differences in any significant way, then yes, Islamophobia is a form of racism. It isn’t so much co-opted in as that other forms of racism are more similar to it than often realised.
The other thing I want to stress is that racism is something which exists in White people without us needing to commit any voluntary racist acts. We’re able to operate in the world as if racism doesn’t exist, and that obliviousness is a luxury others lack and don’t owe it to us to explain, but we do owe it to them to identify how what we do is racist and what we can do to oppose racism. For instance, a job application might enable someone’s ethnicity to be identified simply through their life history and addresses, which have then been picked up by AI and used to profile a typical successful applicant, and even though the AI may be oblivious of their race, it bakes in and perpetuates racism. There are micro-aggressions, such as praising someone on their language because one assumes their first language isn’t the same as yours. That’s absolutely not intentional but it is insensitive. You might look at a photo of, say, a church website or an environmental conservation or country rambling group and only see pictures of White people without being aware of what that might imply or questioning why that might be. There are all sorts of things.
In conclusion, although there clearly is such a thing as malicious and conscious racism, the more insidious aspects of White racism that I’ve mentioned here may have a bigger impact, and this is something which disadvantages us all because we need diversity. Otherwise, we may have something like the banana plant cultivation problem: homogenous similar strains of bananas subject to being wiped out all at once by infectious diseases to which all of them respond in the same way. Monoculture is dangerous and needs to be avoided for all of us. Diversity is a strength which racism works against.
We’ve probably all imagined a group of prehistoric humans sitting around a campfire in the night, looking up at the stars and telling stories about them. Some of these stories crop up all over the planet in cultures which seem to have no connection. For instance, the Pleiades are very often called the Seven Sisters all over the world, and there are countless interpretations of Cynthia/the Moon either having a face or some kind of quadrupedal animal with long hind legs and a pair of projections on the head. I personally see a rabbit but many other people say it’s a face, which I can’t see. Given the uneventful nature of the lunar surface, presumably the earliest four-footed beasts crawled out of the water to see the same pattern as we see. The Seven Sisters, on the other hand, are younger than the non-avian dinosaurs and in any case the stars move around too much for them to be visible for more than a short period of time, geologically speaking, in a recognisable form, except for the Sun of course. In any case, it doesn’t stretch credulity particularly far to imagine Palaeolithic humans calling them the Seven Sisters too, or “Septm Swesores” many millennia later.
It seems clear, then, that we’ve long looked up into the night sky and made up stories about what we see there. We’ve put a ship up there in the form of the Argo, now broken down into the Poop Deck, Sails, Pyx and Keel (not sure about the Pyx). There’s a River, various monsters and various heroes, such as Eridanus, Hydra, Hydrus, Draco, Serpens, Ophiuchus, Perseus and Hercules. Stories also connect these to each other, for example with the Crow and the Cup being on opposite sides of the sky so that the former is always thirstily croaking for the contents of the latter. We imagined tales of heroes, rescue missions, voyages and fights with monsters, and we’ve done this for millennia. This is just Western sky lore of course, but you get the idea.
Now, there is a very broad genre referred to as science fiction. I’ve defined it in the past as “fiction whose plot depends non-trivially on the setting”, and another way I look at it is fiction whose characters are ideas rather than protagonists. The reason I used the former was to exclude ‘Star Wars’. When I say ‘Star Wars’, I’m not talking about whatever happened to it after ‘Return Of The Jedi’ but the original trilogy of films, ‘Splinter In The Mind’s Eye’, the various comic strips and radio series, and I suppose the holiday Xmas special or whatever it’s called. I’m like Freddy Mercury in that “I don’t like ‘Star Wars'”. It’s possible, likely in fact, that it’s dramatically changed since I saw ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ in about 1980 CE, and possibly even improved, but the reason I can’t stand it as I conceive of it is that it’s all about the spectacle and possibly a kind of mythic approach set in space, and also in a time and place, if that’s not too focussed a word, not able to be mapped upon our current time and place, meaning that it can be neither a warning nor an aspiration. It’s basically sword and sorcery dressed up in a sci-fi costume, and the whole thing just really winds me up. The heaps of scientific implausibility don’t help, but that kind of thing can occur in a much more engaging way, as for example it does in Brian Aldiss’s ‘Hothouse’. Because it attempts to communicate some kind of “message”, which is potentially a fairly crass thing to do in itself, to do with the idea that certain truths are timeless, and universalism is fine by the way, there’s no need for the setting. It could be in Middle Earth and it would make no difference. But what ‘Star Wars’ undoubtedly is, is space opera.
I’ll come back to slagging it off later, while taking a break to define various opera. The term “space opera” was coined as a pejorative term for a particular genre, or perhaps sub-genre, in about 1940, connected to “soap opera” and further back to “horse opera”, a possibly disparaging term for the Western, i.e. Wild West, genre of cinema. The last of these has long since fallen out of use, probably before Westerns faded from view, but soaps are still going strong as is the term. This is, I suspect widely known, but I’ll say it anyway: soap opera get their name from the fact that they were originally extended commercials for I think washing powder in the 1930s, and as “opera” seems to be a disparaging word, it’s clearly meant to classify these three types of cultural product as intellectually undemanding psychic chewing gum. I’ve followed three soaps in recent years: ‘Casualty’, ‘The Archers’ and ‘Ros na Rún’. Of these, the last is probably the most soapy, and I have to admit very enjoyable for just that reason. I have the RTE Player on this laptop solely so I can watch it, although I haven’t in a while because I’ve lost track of where I left off. ‘Casualty’ I preferred when it was like a kind of detective story of finding out what was going on in someone’s life, so for example an old woman with no medical experience manages to diagnose another patient waiting for treatment with myasthenia gravis or a blind woman is hit by a careless cyclist and finds her sight has been restored. I am, however, still able to enjoy it in differently than how I used to. ‘Casualty’ is a useful case in point here since it’s linked with the defunct ‘Holby City’. I maintain that ‘Holby City’ is science fiction whereas ‘Casualty’ is not, and the whole cluster of elements between the various series involved is quite revealing in this respect. ‘Casualty’ used to be drama whose plot depended on the setting to a greater extent than it does now, and the scientific and technological aspects of the storylines used to be more central to the drama, whereas now they are much more human interest oriented. ‘Holby City’, which, and I have to say this, ought to be an abstract noun, was science fiction because there was actual medical research going on in it such as drug discovery, the use of gold nanoparticles for cardiac therapy and whatever it was Marwood (John Gaskell) was doing before he immersed himself in the loch. So it was literally science fiction some of the time. The characters would pursue fictional scientific endeavours which were based on established real-world theories but had not been undertaken in that direction in real life, and that literally is science fiction. The plot did depend on the setting too, because, well, here’s a case study. Gaskell manages to reverse motor neurone disease for a patient in Portugal through stem cell therapy, then attempts to do the same for a patient with multiple sclerosis by removing a nerve from her ankle and “gluing” it into her spinal column with stem cells. Even though this leads to an infection, he refuses either to remove the graft or admit that he inadvertently caused it. My recollection is that this storyline ends with him drowning himself but I can’t see that on the summary I’ve just read. The Motor Neurone Disease Association complained about this story line as holding out false hope for sufferers, and this is I’m sure accurate but only one possible take on the issue. As I understand it, olfactory nerves have been experimentally implanted in spinal cords to bridge injuries caused by trauma, and this doesn’t seem that dissimilar, although it is dissimilar, and that’s the point: it’s a scientifically-based story which includes elements of the character’s arrogance and medical objectification of his patients, and it’s more likely to be perceived as holding out false hope if the series is seen as a mainstream medical drama. If it’s seen as science fiction, Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” on which so much of that genre is based carries the audience through by framing it as an escapist fantasy: wouldn’t it be nice if my motor neurone disease could be cured? Hence ‘Holby City’ could’ve been better received in various ways if it had been understood as science fiction and not mainstream medical drama.
That willing suspension of disbelief operates elsewhere in story-telling, including of course magical realism and fantasy, but also space opera. It’s something that actually brackets space opera and science fiction together. However, science fiction is not space opera. SF is often seen as originating with Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, although that also has elements of gothic horror. It does, however, date further back than that. Kepler’s ‘Somnium’ is to my mind very clearly science fiction and also very clearly not space opera. The novel was published in 1634, and unsurprisingly recounts a dream whose protagonist travels to the lunar surface and witnesses the Earth seen from space, the captured rotation of a month-long day, the extreme contrast in temperatures experienced on that body between its day and night, describes Lagrangian points, and rather oddly has the location changed to be closer to Earth even though Kepler himself discovered the laws of planetary motion which placed it incontrovertibly where it is. It was written as fiction to avoid unwanted attention from the Church, as I understand it. It actually started as a dissertation and was published posthumously. Obviously the events described are imaginary, but the scientific principles are real and as far as I know there is no earlier example of this kind of literature known. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ dates from 1726, and focusses on satire although it does have some science fictional features.
To someone who knows about the generally reported history of science fiction, my placement of ‘Somnium’ as the first example of the genre might seem to be mistaken, because it looks like I’m ignoring something else which is a lot older and more significant. There’s a reason for this, which is probably quite evident from the distinction I made earlier, but for now I want to return to the idea of space opera.
So: space opera was described by Wilson Tucker in 1941 as a “hacky, grinding, stinking outworn spaceship yarn”. The referent was soon extended and altered from this, as it could easily refer to something on a relatively small scale, and applied to lively adventure stories involving often violent conflict in space. The canvas got a lot larger. The original phrase was meant to be insulting, and from the perspective of the more cerebral science fiction it feels justified. Just to be clear, space opera is a genre apart. It isn’t science fiction and it’s none the worse for not being it. The same, in my opinion, applies to ‘Doctor Who’, although that can occasionally dip into SF territory and it definitely isn’t space opera. It isn’t a bad thing that these are not science fiction, although they can be bad or good and they don’t particularly appeal to me on the whole. Space opera, crucially, has a grand scope, heroic protagonists, action-driven plots, romantic and emotionally evocative themes, melodrama, sharp moral distinctions and spectacular technology. It often also has aliens, but not always. ‘Star Wars’ as I know it is a good example of the genre. It is not, and I can’t emphasise this strongly enough, science fiction, even though many SF fans would disagree.
You may have picked up a note of disdain for the genre in this, and I’m not going to lie: I dislike space opera quite intensely. It thrives on spectacle, portrays conservative values and politics as permanent and is scientifically hugely implausible. These are, though, possible clues as to its nature and here, something interesting is going on. I intend to illustrate this with the question: what was the first space opera? “The answer may surprise you.”
First of all, ‘Star Wars’ is probably the most prominent space opera and shows the influence of predecessors, but it was easy to do that because the genre had already been well-established. The battle scenes are very obviously taken from war films. Other aspects are taken from the Saturday children’s matinée serials, particularly ‘Flash Gordon’ and ‘Buck Rogers’. The melée battles are akin to Robin Hood and Errol Flynn swashbucklers, and are one of the more obviously absurd aspects. As well as all that, there’s a more continuous space opera and sci-fi lineage, whose most obvious work is Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ series. It just brazenly steals huge portions of ‘Dune’ without any hint of shame. The evil empire, a desert planet, the centrality of water management on Tatooine, a Messiah-like figure, a secret fraternity with psychic powers, and apparently ‘Star Wars’ even has Spice! It is of course said that good writers borrow and great writers steal, but because I don’t generally feel well-disposed towards space opera generally and loathe ‘Star Wars’, this bothers me more than it should, because I think George Lucas is an unoriginal writer who managed to pass the franchise off as something groundbreaking because the people it was aimed at didn’t read those sorts of books. And that’s forgivable given the doorstep-like nature of ‘Dune’, which must be offputting to many, but it’s not like even that was the first.
‘Dune’ is a reaction to the Foundation Trilogy. In ‘Dune’, feudalism is portrayed as the default form of human society. It encapsulates my nightmare that progressive politics might be a brief aberration in human history. It’s kind of like the Foundation Trilogy turned upside-down. Whereas the Mule is seen as a threat because he’s an influential individual with psychic powers who can disrupt the Seldon Plan, Muad’Dib is a flawed hero who can save the Galaxy through them. It’s very much about individuals mattering. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Herbert’s approach, even the fact that Asimov was a major influence on him, though as a way of showing how things shouldn’t be done in his view. ‘Dune’ also shares with Asimov the idea of a human-only Galaxy.
Going back to the Foundation Trilogy, this is a bit of an anomaly as the genre goes. A lot of Asimov’s writing consists of people having conversations in rooms far away from the action, and the Trilogy has a lot of this, although it does have space battles. Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning at this point that I’m talking about all of this as if nothing happened after about 1981, so I’m not interested in the TV series, in the ‘Dune’ films, later works in the Foundation series or its later links with the Robot stories, or whatever happened to ‘Star Wars’ after ‘Return Of The Jedi’. This is an historical perspective I’m trying to construct here. The Foundation Trilogy is Gibbon’s ‘Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire’ in space. Asimov admits as much. It differs from Gibbon in that at the start of the whole series, someone develops a branch of mathematics which can predict the broad future of history provided the scale is large enough and the populace as a whole are unaware of the predictions. ‘Dune’ was published in 1965. Asimov started the Foundation Trilogy in 1941. It’s a very dull read, I think, but it contains the essential features of space opera and also other very widespread tropes seen in it: a galactic empire, very large scale, space battles, innumerable settled and habitable planets and, crucially, faster-than-light (FTL) travel. I’m not aware of any space opera written in modern times which doesn’t have FTL starships in it.
Going further back again, there’s what looks like the beginning of the genre in the works of E E ‘Doc’ Smith: the later Lensman series and the earlier Skylark of Space. I’ve noticed that more recent editions of his novels now show them fairly as co-authored by Lee Hawkins Garby. This is a woman Smith went to school with who went uncredited for decades after his death, over to whom he handed all the “squishy, human, emotional bits” of his stories while he got on with the supposèdly meatier parts of the plot with all the starships and rayguns and stuff. I have read a couple of his short stories, but find his novels hard to get anywhere with, in a similar way to how intolerable I find ‘Return Of The Jedi’ which I can watch about ten minutes of with gritted teeth before I succumb to the urge to turn it off and go and do something less boring instead. Consequently, it’s a bit difficult for me to comment meaningfully on either Lensman or Skylark. It’s definitely worthwhile looking at the plot of the Lensman series because of what it reveals about space opera.
The basic idea behind the series is that there are two races of aliens who are manipulating the development of intelligent life in the Galaxy from behind the scenes: the Arisians, peaceful enlightened beings, and Eddorians, slug-like selfish and basically evil blob aliens from another dimension. The Arisians want to guide life towards enlightenment and the Eddorians just want to rule like mafiosi. In a secret breeding program mediated by subtle psychic manipulation, the Arisians gently nudge life on Earth and elsewhere in the direction of wisdom and heroism to counteract the plans of the Eddorians. The breeding program culminates in the emergence of the “Lensmen”, whom I assume to be universally male given the cultural setting of the time and place of writing. These are heroic and morally impeccable men who can bear a crystalline device called the Lens, which can only be worn by people of such character and functions as a telepathy device, universal translator, lie detector, protects against psychic attacks, destroys the minds of the enemy and verifies the status of the Lensman. That all seems highly convenient, I must say. The scope of the series is literally aeons.
The Lensman series began publication in 1934 in serialised form, as was the usual arrangement at the time. Several of its aspects are interesting in view of – well, something I’ll come to in a bit. It was preceded by the ‘Skylark’ series, whose first part was written in 1915, which to my mind makes it quite startlingly old, and the little I’ve read of it comes across as very old-fashioned in style. It begins with a scientist accidentally inventing a space drive, the idea being immediately copied by his enemy and the two of them using the principle to build starships and engage in a cosmic battle involving multiple star systems and planets. It seems to be far more primitive and sketchily written than the later series, but it’s also crucial in setting the pre-conditions for the space opera written afterwards, because of one major aspect: the date it was written. In 1905, Albert Einstein, acting on the Michelson-Morley Experiment, began to wrestle with the issue that the speed of light was constant in all directions regardless of the speed of the observer, and of course the ultimate solution to this problem is special relativity and the conclusion that it’s impossible to travel faster than light. Special relativity was generally accepted by physicists by the 1920s. However, E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s PhD was on bleaching flour with nitrogen oxides and its effect on baking qualities, because he was a food chemist, and at the time it may also have seemed that the speed of light being a hard limit was highly provisional and subject to refutation relatively (groan) easily. Over a century later, it seems very much baked-in. In fact it might even have been that he wasn’t even aware of Einstein’s theory when he started writing the series, and this has the interesting consequence that his version of space travel is kind of Newtonian, except that he also thinks inertia can be cancelled out without too much difficulty.
This one principle, that Smith started writing before special relativity was well-established, constitutes a sine qua non of space opera. Without some means of moving faster than light, or perhaps travelling without moving as with ‘Dune’, it just becomes completely implausible for scientific as well as other reasons. Later writers have had to come up with some kind of workaround for this, but it wouldn’t be there in the first place were it not for the highly specific timing of ‘Skylark Of Space’. It’s quite remarkable.
E E Smith was also writing at a time when H G Wells still had more than three decades ahead of him and even Jules Verne had only died recently. If his writing is to be considered SF, it still shows a remarkably inventive departure and spatial “zooming out” compared to his contemporary and near-contemporary. H G Wells does in fact make, so far as I can tell, a single mention of humans settling on an exoplanet, circling Sirius, but it’s after the Day of Judgement and God does it. There’s no technological method through which this happens and it isn’t part of a concerted, human-led expansion into space by their own devices in any way. This was in 1899. Compared to science fiction, space opera just seemed to have come along and plonked itself down unceremoniously in the middle of everything without any regard for plausibility or even being particularly pensive. It’s a very different beast than sci-fi. Another aspect of this is that Smith was able to write about this unknown realm over all our heads with the possible prospect of humans entering it one day in the very distant future. Olaf Stapledon, writing in 1930, envisaged human spaceflight not beginning for several hundred million years after the twentieth century. It’s hard to cast one’s mind far enough back to realise how completely fantastic the idea of going into space used to be, and yet this is well within living memory. It gives us a different perspective on space opera entirely.
Now for the elephant in the room. People who know the history of science fiction fairly well will have noticed that there’s one particular major work of literature which up until now I’ve completely ignored. There’s a reason for this. Far from disrupting my thesis, it really goes some way towards proving the point I will eventually be making. Before I get to it, though, I should point out that its context surprised me, as I’d always thought of the novel as an invention of something like the fifteenth century with works like ‘Le Mort D’Arthur’ and ‘Tirant lo Blanch’, then eventually ‘Don Quixote’. Apparently not. It seems to be seen as central to the nature of the novel that it’s written in prose rather than verse, which apparently started to happen in the early thirteenth century. Also, apparently it was independently developed in China. It needs a widespread readership, which is helped by literacy and the invention of the printing press, so it’s all the more surprising, to me anyway, that there is actually a total of five novels which survive in complete form from Ancient Greece: ‘Daphnis And Chloe’, ‘Aethiopica’, ‘The Ephesian Tale’, ‘Leucippe and Clitophon’ and ‘Callirhoe’. There are also fragments of others and a further complete novel survives in Persian translation. It’s extended prose fiction with a coherent narrative, plot and characters. I mean, I don’t know what more you want from me: these are novels. I know it seems anachronistic, but they existed and some of them survive. On the whole, they form a genre. They’re usually about two lovers whose love is tested by various difficulties, threats and temptations. Pirates are often involved and they tend to travel around the Mediterranean a lot, can be tempted by riches to break up. They might be compared to Mills And Boon, but with more gods. In fact, the existence of these novels, and the fact that they were written in the Koiné register rather than Katharevousa or whatever passed for it at the time, puts the New Testament into context for me. I feel that the Bible was completed as a text intended to speak to the common person and not the highly-educated. It seems to have the same audience, and in one case even a similar plot line.
Right: here we go then, the moment someone might’ve been waiting for: Lucian of Samosata!
Lucian of Samosata was a second century Syrian satirist writing in Greek who authored a satirical novel called ‘A True Story’. This was, as has been noted on YouTube, basically a space opera! I’m not kidding and this isn’t hyperbole. It’s a parody of travel writing and of the Odyssey. Lucian writes of a ship which, voyaging beyond the Pillars of Hercules, is captured by a whirlwind and blown all the way up to the lunar surface, where the Emperor of the Moon, in a world populated by strange creatures, is happy to meet fellow humans and turns out to be involved in a major space war with the Emperor of the Sun for ownership of Venus. This war is fought by giant vultures and warriors on the backs of giant ants and fleas the size of horses, and there are also spiders involved, spinning webs as part of the defence network. This last detail, incidentally, also crops up in ‘Blake’s 7’ and Brian Aldiss’s ‘Hothouse’. On leaving this conflagration, they go to live in a city inside a whale and travel to the Islands of the Blessèd, where he discusses with Homer whether he really wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. It breaks off abruptly with intimations of a sequel.
First of all, it’s clearly satire. The reason it has a narrative in outer space is to make it seem over-the-top, and it also reminds me of Baron Munchausen. Nevertheless, it does contain many space opera tropes, and the scale is part of that. It has outlandish alien beings, battle in space over another planet as territory, travel to other worlds and a “space ship”. The main difference, apart from being satire, is that it’s interplanetary rather than interstellar or intergalactic, but the scale is still very large. What it definitely isn’t, though, is science fiction. In fact it more or less couldn’t be SF because there wasn’t really any science at the time for it to be fictional about. However, whereas Lucian was writing in a situation where science was basically absent, Smith was also writing without complete information and on the cusp of a moment which would have placed major constraints on what he could convincingly write about. Both could project fanciful tales up into the unknown darkness of the night sky, as it were, and wallow in that freedom from constraint. I also suspect that Smith was entirely ignorant of Lucian’s writing or even existence. Both of them gave the atmosphere a lot of welly. Smith was melodramatic, Lucian comedic.
Taking a different stance again is a third author, Doris Lessing. I am very slightly familiar with Lessing’s writing, having read ‘The Grass Is Singing’. I probably should’ve read ‘The Golden Notebook’ and ‘The Good Terrorist’ but I haven’t. I think of Lessing as a thoroughly literary author and therefore beyond my understanding or ability to empathise with her writing, and also regard her, as I do many other such authors, with some suspicion as an insidious legislator of how one is supposed to be human. Some people with ADHD report the experience of running their eyes along lines of writing with nothing going in. This is not something I get with most writing but I’m pretty sure it would happen if I tried to read her. Also, calling a novel ‘The Good Terrorist’ doesn’t bode well for me as I think the concept of terrorism is only useful to the powerful, so it suggests a conservative outlook. Not to go off on too much of a tangent, this isn’t about the morality of terrorism so much as the idea that violence openly committed by a state is somehow more legitimate. Maybe she meant something else. It might be thought that it was right up my street, and maybe it is, but I doubt I’ll be reading it. I think she might show contempt for people who feel powerless and don’t know what to do to engage with making a difference to the world, which is of course me and many friends through my adult life. Regarding ‘The Golden Notebook’, one thing that might be relevant is an incident early in my relationship with Sarada. I have generally tended to keep at least two different sets of notebooks, one as my diary in a journalling sort of sense and the other for other stuff, for instance if I were doing that right now I’d probably write a lot about graph theory as applied to social media, but also other more personal stuff. Sarada suggested I combine the two, so I did that and it almost immediately gave me writer’s block, which I never experience, in both types of notebook for something like three years. Maybe that could be relevant, I don’t know. I’m almost wilfully ignorant of this kind of writing. I wonder if the separation into different notebooks represents a kind of fragmentation of her identity in a more negative way, probably in connection with the contradictions of women’s roles under patriarchy, but as I say that’s just a guess and I know nothing.
Just as I’m wilfully ignorant of Lessing’s writing, I strongly suspect that she was wilfully ignorant of science fiction and space opera. Nonetheless, she’s called herself a storyteller who feels the same push to write and tell stories as I experience, and going back to that Stone Age camp fire, she would’ve been sitting around it telling stories, perhaps about Canopus and Sirius. And she would’ve been, because it was before the patriarchy even existed. She might have been breastfeeding or kiss-feeding at the same time, but this wouldn’t have interfered with her story-telling urge.
Anyway, as is well-known, Doris Lessing wrote a five-novel series ‘Canopus In Argos’ whose first novel, published in 1979, covers the history of Earth as seen from the perspective of Canopus, an advanced civilisation observing accelerated evolution on this planet, known to them as Shikasta, translated as “stricken”. Earth is initially nurtured by Canopus but a misalignment of the stars leads to an interruption of the flow of the “substance of we-feeling”, and breaks the telepathic lock between Canopus and Shikasta. Consequently, Shammat, the rival empire to Canopus, is then able to seed Earth with discord, environmental destruction, violence and selfishness, hence the name “stricken”, having changed from Rohanda, meaning “fruitful”. Johor, the narrator, whose documents are scattered through the first novel, manifests himself as a human man to guide and enlighten a small group of humans and rescue the planet from turmoil.
The next novel, ‘The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four And Five’, is allegorical and depicts a planet divided into six zones, each at a different stage of spiritual development. Canopus appears to order a marriage between two individuals, the queen of the harmonious, egalitarian and feminine zone three and the king of the militaristic, patriarchy of zone four, to bridge their differences and learn from each other. Later, the king of zone four is ordered to marry the queen of zone five, a chaotic and primitive realm.
Then comes ‘The Sirian Experiments’, which concern a Sirian attempt to guide human development towards technological advancement and bureaucracy which tend to lead to catastrophe on other planets. There are two other novels but I haven’t read any of them and I don’t want to lose focus. But look at the first. Does it not sound to you, broadly speaking because I’m sure the style is very different, like the general idea of Smith’s ‘Lensman’ series? There are two rival cosmic agencies directing the history of humanity, one towards enlightenment, the other with more malign motives, and the more enlightened force leads to a hero being incarnated among the humans. It seems uncannily similar, and the thing is, I don’t think it’s “stolen”. I think Lessing knew practically nothing of space opera. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing she would be well-informed about or value. And yet she apparently reproduced a novel whose general outline, though doubtless not tone or detail, is basically the same as E E Smith’s ‘Triplanetary’ so far as I can tell. Moreover, ‘Triplanetary’ began to be serialised in 1934 whereas ‘Shikasta’ was published forty-five years later in 1979. Smith’s series as a whole was a runner-up in the Hugo awards for all-time best series in 1966, losing out to the Foundation Trilogy, so it was also phenomenally well-known and celebrated. That’s like being a runner-up to the Booker Prize, so Lessing’s ignorance, and probably that of her readers and reviewers, is absolutely breathtaking. Just to get this off my chest, and bearing in mind that I don’t actually care for space opera generally, Smith had done all that four and a half decades previously, it was considered old hat by about 1940, although still admired in a retro kind of way, and then along comes Lessing and apparently it’s all wonderful and ground-breaking rather than a heap of tired old rubbish. This is really galling.
All that said though, I honestly don’t believe Lessing ripped him off. I think she was simply writing in ignorance, and in an environment that was equally ignorant, and apparently even proud of that ignorance, considering that genre fiction could not possibly have anything to teach them. These rather annoying preconditions, though, did create a situation where space opera could once again be reinvented, though doubtless in a very different and rather arcane form rather than as popular culture.
So then, there are three separate instances of the genre being created, each isolated from the others and in different circumstances. Lessing’s background was in politics, and incidentally she ought to be very much one of my kind of people, being active in CND, an ex-communist and so on. I know the kind of person she is and many such people have been my friends. Smith, by contrast, was a food chemist, like Margaret Thatcher in a way, and his work was the most influential as he basically created the genre we now call space opera. Lucian seems to have been primarily a literary person writing in the ancient world. All of them, though, seem to have stumbled upon the same genre, even in very different historical circumstances. To me this suggests that space opera was just “out there” waiting to be discovered, actually did get discovered independently at least three times, by people who had nothing in common with each other apart from all being part of Western civilisation.
How does this happen? Has it happened with anything else? And what are the essential features of the genre which define it? I can see an attempt at grandeur and scope, accompanied by a kind of operatic approach to emotion which maybe Lessing didn’t include. I’m just not sure. But I hope you agree that this is remarkable, and once something happens thrice it’s no longer a coincidence.
First of all, my understanding of mainstream literary fiction is that it can’t be “spoilt” because although the plot is there for a reason, it isn’t the main point, so there just will be “spoilers” here. Not that it matters.
Han Kang is a South Korean winner of the Nobel Prize in literature who also won a big prize of some kind, possibly the Man Booker. You see, this is how ignorant I am in this field. She’s written quite a few novels, one of which, ‘Greek Lessons’, I’m currently reading. ‘The Vegetarian’ (채식주의자) seems to be her best known. It’s quite short. In it, a previously apparently conventional woman, Yung-Hye (romanised differently by the way – her name’s 영혜 I think) who has a series of gruesome nightmares which persuade her to go veggie. Although it’s described as vegetarian, she is in fact vegan. She throws out all the meat in the kitchen and refuses also to wear animal products. Her family problematise all of this and regard her as harming herself and being unnecessarily defiant. She loses a fair bit of weight and eventually her father hits her and attempts to force feed her a piece of pork violently. She then slashes her wrist and is admitted to hospital where she’s psychiatrically assessed and diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, then leaves and after she’s found, she’s sitting at a fountain apparently having taken a bite out of a song bird. That’s the first of three sections, called ‘The Vegetarian’ and told from her husband’s viewpoint. In the second section, ‘Mongolian Mark’, her brother-in-law, the new narrator, becomes erotically preoccupied with her and the idea of painting her with flowers because of her Mongolian blue spot, which he thinks of as a petal. She wants to retain the floral body painting. He hires a young man to do the same to, videos it and tries to get them to have sex. When he refuses and leaves, they have sex themselves and fall asleep. In the morning, his wife, that is, her sister, discovers them. The final section, ‘Flaming Trees’, is from her sister’s viewpoint. Yung-Hye is in decline in the mental hospital refusing to eat and insists on standing on her head most of the time. In-Hye, her sister, is aware that she’s wasting away, takes her into her care and leaves the hospital with her, knowing that she’s wasting away and apparently wishing to become a plant.
For me, reading mainstream literature is pearls before swine. I won’t appreciate it or understand it because I’m overcome by stress and a sense of inferiority when I attempt to read it, even if I have an aptitude for following it in the first place, which I probably lack. Also, before I read it, absolutely will not listen to or read anyone else’s take on a novel because I want my reaction to be my own rather than being informed by someone else’s personality. Therefore, what I’m about to say is purely my own reaction. Here we go then.
The novel is unusually structured, being divided into three sections, each expressing a different character’s perception of Yung-Hye. The only time she speaks for herself is through the nightmares she has at the start of the novel. I think it’s clear that this is to deny her agency and illustrate how her perspective and therefore she as a woman in South Korean society is not respected. This theme permeates the whole story. Even initially, her husband finds it embarrassing that she doesn’t wear a bra, making everyone aware of her nipples in his unfortunately probably accurate view. At no point is her decision taken seriously and it’s generally seen as wilfully causing a problem for everyone else. It would be easy to say that the mere fact of her going vegan is one possible symbolisable act among many and is fairly arbitrary, but it isn’t quite that. It’s a reaction against perceived violence, which is not only stereotypically masculine but is shown as such in the story. And to be honest, I am well aware that dietary veganism is often seen as a nuisance by carnists, and I don’t want to go into too much depth here but there is a tendency for carnists to see their own dietary choices as, dare I say, “normal”. This brings about a second theme, that of conformity and the stigmatisation of non-conformity, where the latter is seen as obstreperous and disrespected. There’s no distinction here between rational and irrational decision-making. Yung-Hye can certainly be seen as anorexic but the real point is that no attempt is made at any point to empathise with her and what of her dietary choice means to her is entirely ignored by her family and the psychiatrists.
In the second section, she’s clearly strongly sexually objectified by her brother-in-law. Concern is expressed by others that he’s taking advantage of her but it’s also ambiguous because she does seem to want to become a plant and the sex may be akin to pollination, so he’s fulfilling her desires in one sense and she could be seen as having consented, though very passively. Her brother-in-law is only very distant from his wife and I didn’t get a feeling of outrage from her about his infidelity.
In the final section, Yung-Hye’s sister comes to perceive her as having done something with her life, unlike herself, because all she’s done is conform and not really lived her life at all compared to her sister’s own decision, or perhaps natural drift, into becoming a plant. Even her psychosis is an achievement compared to her own life. At this point, I began to worry that the novel was going to turn out to be magically realist, but thankfully it didn’t. I think magical realism is the kind of thing which needs to be present throughout a story rather than introduced most of the way through, and I half-expected Yung-Hye to turn literally into a plant, which I think would’ve been silly.Okay, so there’s all of that, but I do still have a problem. A fairly unimportant part of this is that I probably missed the significance of almost everything in the story, but there’s a bigger issue, which is that of universalism. I’m aware that South Korea is a distant country on the other side of Eurasia and not much of what goes on there filters through to the Western media, so I know about a few things and as usual a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and it may lead to a mental caricature of the country. I know, for example, that it’s a young democracy where there was recently an attempted coup which was defeated by parliamentary representatives themselves, that it’s rather surprisingly mainly Christian, the origin of the Unification Church, and more relevantly that there’s a “4B” movement among women which seeks to avoid sex with men, childbirth, marriage and heterosexual dating — 비섹스, 비출산, 비연애, 비혼 — which is also prejudiced against queer men. Moreover, I’m aware of Chip Chan, a woman who appears to be mentally ill and not receiving much help who has confined herself to her flat and streams everything 24/7 because she wants the world to monitor what’s going on for her personal safety. I have also heard, and this may be incorrect, that they’re highly conformist and anti-vegetarian for that reason. There are other things, like K-pop, which are largely irrelevant to this story, and also the sublime and inspired invention of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, which is perhaps a little more so. And this is what gets me, because from those few features I could easily construct a largely inaccurate image of the culture, but at the same time I have to say that this novel does seem to confirm this. I’ve written about Korea before of course. But this is what bothers me. There’s an attitude referred to as Orientalism, which fetishises the specialness of Eurasian cultures outside our peninsula and can be seen, for example, in certain attitudes towards Yoga and the suicide forest in Japan, or even something as simple as taking your shoes off when you go in the house, where utterly routine and prosaic things are othered, so I don’t want a Korean author’s writing to be pigeonholed in this way. All the same, the question of universalism arises. I already find it surprising and disquieting that, for example, Greek drama seems to speak to us today over two thousand years later, because it makes me feel that I’m not letting the work itself speak on its own terms and not hearing the playwright owing to projecting my own preconceptions on it. I tend to find – look, I’ll try to define universalism first as that might help.
This might not be the right phrase, but by literary universalism I mean the way that works separated considerably in space and time, i.e. culturally, still seem to speak to an audience which is very different to the creators. Due to my own background as a Northwestern European, I experience this particularly with the works of William Shakespeare. That said, many people do benefit from reading the notes which often accompany his plays. We may need a study guide, and that makes a lot of sense because of the drastic differences in cultural mores between then and now. I’m sceptical that we’re really able to make a connection and wonder if we’re just hallucinating. It seems to me that there cannot be any kind of phenomenon which facilitates that. At the same time, the Good Samaritan is a relatable parable and if we really could not understand another culture, passing by on the other side would be entirely feasible. I want to give an example of this from my own life. Many years ago I was walking down the street on a windy day and a woman had her umbrella blow inside out and she was struggling with it. I decided it would be an insult to her independence to “help” and walked on by, at which point she irately and sarcastically said “thank you!” to me. This is probably an example of failing to meet expectations of some kind, and it’s also an example of trying to pass by on the other side in a supportive way. There was presumably some kind of script I was expected to follow in these circumstances which I didn’t. Likewise, the tale of the Good Samaritan, among other things, attempts to indicate that one can transcend cultural differences and marginalisation by “being human”, i.e. it does seem to recognise or assert that there is a universal human nature. I imagine that she had a kind of idea of the “done thing” in this situation against which I consciously rebelled in a manner which was supposed to be passively supportive, or rather, because that’s quite patronising, not assuming that she’d want or need any intervention from someone else to deal with her problem. Some years after when I told someone about this incident, they imagined it as a “meet-cute”, which struck me as utterly bizarre but indicates how we might try to cram incidents into particular cultural narratives which have no real significance.
This in a more general sense is what bothers me about ‘The Vegetarian’, or perhaps I should actually be writing ‘채식주의자’ to emphasise its foreignness. I generally try to avoid reading works in translation, partly because I’d then have to trust the translator but also, and mainly, because they’ve then been ripped out of their cultural context and plonked unceremoniously into mine, at which point I will fail to understand them completely while having the illusion that I have. So, looking at ‘채식주의자’, I see it as including themes of women’s oppression, conformity, cruelty and failure of empathy, and I realise that good literature has to try to leave room for ambiguity and not close off the narrative, but I don’t know how what I call veganism and what I call anorexia nervosa maps onto Han Kang’s world view. I am aware that some people, particularly teenage girls, describe themselves as going vegetarian or vegan as a way of masking eating disorders, but I also find it a little irksome that this decision is pathologised in this way. It shouldn’t be associated with what seems to be self-destructiveness because to me that’s a lazy equation which makes concessions to carnism. The trouble is that in a wider setting, Yung-Hye’s vegetarianism and what’s constructed as an eating disorder does actually work very well as a kind of quiet rebellion, shorn of the question of whether it’s primarily a conscious decision, because of its contrast with the inherent violence of Korean, and in fact most, societies. She has nightmares and this provokes her to behave in a manner her peers find unacceptable. Her husband and sister in particular then take her current behaviour and use it to reinterpret her past, as if everything was inevitably going to lead to this. Her behaviour, perhaps, feels like an accusation. She does in fact seem to impose it on her husband by throwing out all the meat and dairy and refusing to prepare animal products, but it may be more out of obliviousness than a conscious attempt to assert herself, and this is probably in fact a theme of the story.
One thing I completely failed to understand is why she seems to have bitten a living song bird, to the extent that I wonder if I got that scene wrong. This indicates a bigger issue: I lack lived experience as a South Korean woman. I don’t know how I can be expected to appreciate any of this, and more broadly how any reader can be expected to appreciate any novel. It seems like an illusion or a form of trickery to me that this seems to be possible.
I don’t know. I just find these things very hard and quite traumatising, and not because of any trauma or conflict portrayed in the pages so much as that I seem to be expected to hear this communication when I don’t know how I possibly could, and it’s quite depressing. I can’t step out of myself far enough to do that, and have doubts that anyone really can.
A Box Of Chocolates 