wingedbeast (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wingedbeast) wrote2017-01-17 07:40 pm
wingedbeast) wrote2017-01-17 07:40 pm
Entry tags:
1984 Deconstruction: Part 2
We could go into more characterization of the society Winston Smith lives in (and we will), but I think we get the point enough that we don't have to focus directly. The story seems to want to use Winston Smith as a means of characterizing Oceana and this world, but let's let that be secondary for a moment.
We get a bit more characterization on the world, itself. The "Victory Gin" and "Victory Cigarettes" (labeling things "victory" was a common thing during WWII, if you grew your own vegetables in order to do with less for rationing to provide food for soldiers, you were growing a "Victory Garden") are of low quality, but Winston uses them in order to build courage for his, to date, greatest act of rebellion against an oppressive system.
He opens a diary. "This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death or at least twenty-five years in a forced labor camp."
This is a very small thing. It's a very small thing to risk such a big punishment. But, it's also a very small, very calculated risk. One taken only because of a set of unusual circumstances provided him with a telescreen that had a blind spot. He'd had the actual book for a while prior but hadn't worked up the courage to even grab that "Victory Gin" to work up courage until just recently.
The name of the book isn't even certain. He's fairly certain he was born in either 1944 or 1945 and, from that, he's reasonably certain the date is April 4th, 1984, but can't pin the date down to the year. I imagine date-of-the-year is easier to pin down or just less worth shifting or forgetting.
Some of his hesitation, at this point, is from a question.
Gehayi, in the comments of my first part (thanks for reading, by the way) brought up the idea that Winston Smith is the only person in the entire book who gets both a first and last name because he is the closest to being a whole person. The phrase "closest to" does a lot of work in that theory, because Winston Smith is not a whole person... or at least not a fully matured person, not to the point he should be at his point in life.
Even with that conditional, I'm going to argue that it's not true. If you were to put it to Winston Smith in such a way that he wouldn't fear himself to be signaling vice by saying it, he would believe that, of everybody he knows, he's the closest to being a whole person... depending on when, in the book, you put that question to him.
And, this quote is part of the reason. Officers may keep a log of important events and details for review by themselves and by military courts. In Star Trek, various officers keep logs for the important purpose of exposition and recapping for the audience.
Private individuals often keep these diaries strictly for themselves. That's okay. It's an acknowledgment that we might not be important to historians, at least not until it's time to do a documentary with cameras slowly closing in on old photographs. But, we are important to ourselves. That's okay. We don't need to be noted by history to at least be noted by ourselves.
He doesn't consider that he's doing this for just himself. He's stuck between thinking that he must be important to some people in the future, in order for this work to be valuable, and thinking that there's no way this could be valuable. This puts him in a light, for me, one that's uncomfortably familiar.
There's this student in Junior High School. He goes along to get along but, for the most part, doesn't really connect to anybody. He's polite and not openly contemptuous. He'll have polite conversation. But, if you've gotten a rare look into him, on some rare occasion, you'll notice that the contempt is there. At the same time, he's raging against the machine, he's also starving for acceptance and approval among those he respects.
I suppose one way to describe this combination of superiority complex and inferiority complex is the state of being thirteen. Winston Smith is in this world that doesn't care about him, but to his mind it should, regardless of how much of a case he has to make for that or capacity he has to demand it. That might not match you at thirteen, but it matched me closer than I care to admit... and for a long while after.
None of this invalidates his story. Considering his circumstances, in which his only memories of a world where it's possible to have a private thought without risking authorities executing you for the violation, it might be expected. How can he grow up? How can anybody?
His first entry into his diary backs this up. It's a long, rambling stream of consciousness about what he saw at the movie theater. The fact that the flick was of killing civilians, including a child, or that a woman was removed from the theater for objecting to showing that in front of children... it all rambles on in the same unbroken stream. Nothing breaks concentration save for a cramp in his hand.
This diary entry starts on page 19 (Nook version) if you want to subject yourself to it.
What clinches the notion of Winston Smith as a case of stunted emotional development, for me, comes in his feelings regarding two characters.
First is a yet-unnamed woman.
There's a heafty chunk of maturity missing in that view of women. The parts he would need to view them, and indeed anybody else, as every bit as whole and morally valuable and worthy as himself, is there. The text commented on it and, despite the third person omniscient, we stick close enough to his perspective, that this earlier text should be treated as something he knows.
"You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement was scrutinised."
Remember that? Winston Smith doesn't. But, his stated reason isn't the only reason and potentially isn't the real reason.
The other person is O'Brien. This is someone that Winston Smith does respect.
At this point, I don't trust Winston or the narrator to accurately describe the reasons why Winston feels a certain way towards a certain person. More than expectations of adherance to Party Orthodoxy or its absence, I see what most leads Winston's feelings being his relationship with power.
The first is a woman with indications of social status and power equal or lesser to his own and the second is a man with indications of physical, intellectual, and political power greater than his own.
Next time, we discuss the Two Minutes of Hate.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate
We get a bit more characterization on the world, itself. The "Victory Gin" and "Victory Cigarettes" (labeling things "victory" was a common thing during WWII, if you grew your own vegetables in order to do with less for rationing to provide food for soldiers, you were growing a "Victory Garden") are of low quality, but Winston uses them in order to build courage for his, to date, greatest act of rebellion against an oppressive system.
He opens a diary. "This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death or at least twenty-five years in a forced labor camp."
This is a very small thing. It's a very small thing to risk such a big punishment. But, it's also a very small, very calculated risk. One taken only because of a set of unusual circumstances provided him with a telescreen that had a blind spot. He'd had the actual book for a while prior but hadn't worked up the courage to even grab that "Victory Gin" to work up courage until just recently.
The name of the book isn't even certain. He's fairly certain he was born in either 1944 or 1945 and, from that, he's reasonably certain the date is April 4th, 1984, but can't pin the date down to the year. I imagine date-of-the-year is easier to pin down or just less worth shifting or forgetting.
Some of his hesitation, at this point, is from a question.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time, the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
Gehayi, in the comments of my first part (thanks for reading, by the way) brought up the idea that Winston Smith is the only person in the entire book who gets both a first and last name because he is the closest to being a whole person. The phrase "closest to" does a lot of work in that theory, because Winston Smith is not a whole person... or at least not a fully matured person, not to the point he should be at his point in life.
Even with that conditional, I'm going to argue that it's not true. If you were to put it to Winston Smith in such a way that he wouldn't fear himself to be signaling vice by saying it, he would believe that, of everybody he knows, he's the closest to being a whole person... depending on when, in the book, you put that question to him.
And, this quote is part of the reason. Officers may keep a log of important events and details for review by themselves and by military courts. In Star Trek, various officers keep logs for the important purpose of exposition and recapping for the audience.
Private individuals often keep these diaries strictly for themselves. That's okay. It's an acknowledgment that we might not be important to historians, at least not until it's time to do a documentary with cameras slowly closing in on old photographs. But, we are important to ourselves. That's okay. We don't need to be noted by history to at least be noted by ourselves.
He doesn't consider that he's doing this for just himself. He's stuck between thinking that he must be important to some people in the future, in order for this work to be valuable, and thinking that there's no way this could be valuable. This puts him in a light, for me, one that's uncomfortably familiar.
There's this student in Junior High School. He goes along to get along but, for the most part, doesn't really connect to anybody. He's polite and not openly contemptuous. He'll have polite conversation. But, if you've gotten a rare look into him, on some rare occasion, you'll notice that the contempt is there. At the same time, he's raging against the machine, he's also starving for acceptance and approval among those he respects.
I suppose one way to describe this combination of superiority complex and inferiority complex is the state of being thirteen. Winston Smith is in this world that doesn't care about him, but to his mind it should, regardless of how much of a case he has to make for that or capacity he has to demand it. That might not match you at thirteen, but it matched me closer than I care to admit... and for a long while after.
None of this invalidates his story. Considering his circumstances, in which his only memories of a world where it's possible to have a private thought without risking authorities executing you for the violation, it might be expected. How can he grow up? How can anybody?
His first entry into his diary backs this up. It's a long, rambling stream of consciousness about what he saw at the movie theater. The fact that the flick was of killing civilians, including a child, or that a woman was removed from the theater for objecting to showing that in front of children... it all rambles on in the same unbroken stream. Nothing breaks concentration save for a cramp in his hand.
This diary entry starts on page 19 (Nook version) if you want to subject yourself to it.
What clinches the notion of Winston Smith as a case of stunted emotional development, for me, comes in his feelings regarding two characters.
First is a yet-unnamed woman.
He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably-since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner-she had some mechanical job on one of the novel writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, swallowers of slogans, amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
There's a heafty chunk of maturity missing in that view of women. The parts he would need to view them, and indeed anybody else, as every bit as whole and morally valuable and worthy as himself, is there. The text commented on it and, despite the third person omniscient, we stick close enough to his perspective, that this earlier text should be treated as something he knows.
"You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement was scrutinised."
Remember that? Winston Smith doesn't. But, his stated reason isn't the only reason and potentially isn't the real reason.
The other person is O'Brien. This is someone that Winston Smith does respect.
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a course, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of re-settling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming-in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuff-box. Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prizefighter's physique. Much more of it was because of a secretly-held belief0or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope-that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly.
At this point, I don't trust Winston or the narrator to accurately describe the reasons why Winston feels a certain way towards a certain person. More than expectations of adherance to Party Orthodoxy or its absence, I see what most leads Winston's feelings being his relationship with power.
The first is a woman with indications of social status and power equal or lesser to his own and the second is a man with indications of physical, intellectual, and political power greater than his own.
Next time, we discuss the Two Minutes of Hate.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate