Following the dramatic news of the U.S. National Security Agency’s extensive surveillance operations, several organizations and journalists turned to George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in an attempt to find suitable words to describe the situation. The American Civil Liberties Union labeled the case “beyond Orwellian,” while numerous newspaper editorials worldwide made references to the acclaimed novel. Amazon recently reported that sales of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” had gone up 9,538 percent. 

Since its publication in 1949, Orwell’s novel has been seen as one of the most penetrating critiques of totalitarian ideology. In the book “The Captive Mind” (1953), the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz wrote in great admiration of the British author, who never lived under Stalinist rule but nonetheless had “so keen a perception into its life.” Simultaneously, the novel has been read as a fierce critique of Western capitalism. In an afterword to a 1961 edition of Orwell’s novel, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the most haunting pages of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” conjured up frightening scenes of managerial industrialism, “conducive to an era of dehumanization and complete alienation, in which men are transformed into things and become appendices to the process of production and consumption.”

Orwell’s novel captured a postwar sentiment of increasing vulnerability and insecurity on an individual level; the individual trapped between two ever-expanding superpowers with unlimited technological resources at their disposal. “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is perhaps the 20th century’s most powerful caricature of politics experienced as pure contradiction ― a repressive, all-absorbing political system in which the Ministry of Peace is conducting never-ending wars; the Ministry of Plenty conceals the nation’s perpetual problems of scarcity and poverty; the Ministry of Truth produces nothing but party-glorifying propaganda; and the Ministry of Love is a euphemism for a torture chamber ― a political system willing and ruthless enough to do anything in order to preserve itself.

No word captures this experience of politics as pure contradiction more fully than “Orwellian,” a term which encompasses a range of concepts nowadays so embedded in our everyday language that direct references to Orwell’s novel are hardly needed ― e.g. “Newspeak” for misleading language, or “Big Brother” for excessive and intrusive surveillance procedures. That we have failed to invent our own vocabulary to describe the present ― some 64 years after the novel’s publication ― testifies, in one sense, to the prescience of Orwell as a writer, his unique ability to recognize the most pressing issues of the 20th century; and, above all, his admirable moral judgment in a time during which many great intellectuals erred fatally.

In another sense, the continued use and relevance of the book’s neologisms testifies to the failure of the novel’s political ambition. While many critics have seen the novel as a deterministic fable of a bleak and totalitarian future some 36 years later ― it was written in 1948, while the story begins on 4 April, 1984 ― Orwell himself wanted the novel to be read more as a warning than a prophecy: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”

Now that 1984 has long come and gone, it is perhaps inevitable that we are unable to read the novel as an allegorical comment on its own present; as a literary text outlining a set of urgent political imperatives in and for its own time. Orwell’s future, his 1984, has become our past. In a recent Guardian article, the journalist Stuart Jeffries asks what the writer would have made of the year 2013, pondering that Orwell’s “once-visionary keywords have grotesque afterlives; Big Brother is a TV franchise to make celebrities of nobodies and Room 101 a light-entertainment show … Orwell is the go-to thinker to account for our present woes ― even though he is 63 years dead.” To Jeffries, it is entirely feasible that Orwell would have thought: “This is far worse than I imagined.”

One suspects that rereading “Nineteen Eighty-Four” today provokes less fear of a possible future trajectory, as it stimulates the eerie sense of experiencing something that has already happened, long ago; “There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means.”

A sense of resignation rather than alarm; if anything, passages like these sound depressingly familiar from today’s point of view. Thus, the most ironic ― some would say horrifying ― aspect of Orwell’s novel from a contemporary perspective is perhaps that words like “doublethink,” “thought crime,” “thought police” and “Room 101” have become so deeply ingrained in our way of talking about reality that we are no longer able to appreciate “Nineteen Eighty-Four” as a work of fiction, a piece of literature; and thus, no longer as a warning, a beacon of hope and inspiration along the ominous course of the world ― but as a prophecy come true.

The main character of the novel, Winston Smith, works in a huge bureaucratic machinery overseeing and controlling all kinds of information ― books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, records, diaries and other documents. Information that deviates from the party’s ideological line must be rewritten, falsified or deleted ― so that every political act in the present is supported by history. From a contemporary perspective, it would seem that such a neat dichotomy between truth and falsity ― or reality versus fiction ― has long been abandoned and replaced by an infinitely more gray area, perhaps one would say an area of indifference, passivity. Big Brother inspires less terror than boredom. Slogans like “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength” sound like clothing adverts. One might say that ours is the time when the word “Orwellian” has found its most terrifying historical articulation; an age in which “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is no longer read as an allegory of a possible future trajectory ― for it would be more true to say that we read the present, our present, as a realization of Orwell’s prophetic text, despite the author’s declared intentions.

Thus, we live in the aftermath of Orwell’s future, which in the meantime has become our past ― “Nineteen Eighty-Four” being the political dictionary of our times par excellence. In the last pages of the novel, Orwell included an appendix in which he explained the principles of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania. In this language, only the party’s ideological reasoning can be expressed. However, Orwell adds, the realization of this ambitious project ― whose ultimate goal is the total political control over all possible thoughts ― is vast and complex, especially regarding Newspeak translations of literature, including Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron and Dickens. Thus, “the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050”; as if Orwell in the last line of the novel suggests that there is hope after all ― at least for now.

By Eli Park Sorensen

Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.