words to inspire before you expire
Horatio: …let me speak to th’ yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads. All this can I
Truly deliver.
–from Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, lines 421-428 by William Shakespeare
Hamlet: O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
–from Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 133-138 by William Shakespeare
Good morning, class, and down with Big Brother.
I enjoyed 1984 much more reading it the second time…it must have something to do with not being in high school anymore. I’m sure my high school experience was better than others, but when my English teacher helped us understand George Orwell by comparing our student news videos to the Two Minutes Hate and the manipulation of the media, a wee bit of paranoia started to set in. I’ve been a skeptical person since.
Paranoia aside, 1984 is very enlightening. Rereading it now, in the heightened political tension of our country, is particularly notable. I won’t pretend to understand the political spectrum, but I do understand ethics, and there are some unethical happenings in these United States, let me tell you.
But before jumping into ethics and politics, I want to jump into the novel itself, and get at why it’s worth reading.
For those of you that don’t know, 1984 is a novel from the late 1940s, portraying a dystopian future set in or around the year 1984. We follow Winston Smith, a regular enough guy, who spends his days updating documents in service to the Party (the ruling political body); but in his mind, he gives us the scoop on the terrible world he lives in. The Party enforces total order and removes any and all traces of rebellion or revolution; telescreens and microphones are everywhere, destroying privacy; egregious lies are perpetuated, the most notable of which is a fictional, decades-long war used to distract the masses and enforce rations; and Big Brother, the terrifying face that looms over everything, holds all of the political power.
In the privacy of Winston’s own mind, we find freedom. He can think what he wants, but that is dangerous: if his face, eyes, or body language reveal his thoughts to the ever-watchful telescreens, he will be caught committing thoughtcrime (any insurgent or disloyal thought) and for that he can be executed. So he is always mentally suppressing himself, forcing everything but the inner sanctum of his mind to walk, talk, and act like any other Party supporter would. He can only hope that this is enough to maintain his individuality.
The book is divided in three parts. In Part One, we see a handful of days in Winston’s life, and what he does to survive. In Part Two, his life is turned around by a woman he meets, who has a similar hate for the Party, and they begin an affair. I can’t give away much of Part Three without spoiling the ending, but suffice it to say that his affair leads him further inside the Party’s inner workings than he’s ever been before.
There are many ideas guiding the novel, but Winston’s individuality is the most important one. The fact that he has his own memories, his own thoughts, his own feelings… it means that he still has his humanity. The Party is, ideologically, a group mind; they believe that reality exists only in the collective mind, so if everyone agrees that something is true, then it is true. If there were only two people on the planet and they both truly believed that they had the ability to fly, then that was true, regardless of whether they actually lifted off the ground. External reality is invalid.
I think Winston is less concerned about the idea that reality is subjective, and more interested salvaging the part of him that mentally disagrees with the Party’s ideology. He wants to maintain his self by distancing it from the Party, but they have all the power, so he has to do that without them knowing, making him a sheep in wolf’s clothing. He can see his impending death, so his life is about putting that off for as long as possible, which is only worthwhile because he remains himself, at his own peril.
This may be a drastic view on Orwell’s part, but it is a dark mirror of the world we live in. Historically speaking, we have less privacy than ever before. There are drones and cameras and microphones everywhere, and there is the Internet, where social media opens up every biographical floodgate and where bloggers post at their every whim (don’t worry, I don’t do that; I may be whimsical, but I’m practically whim-less; impulsiveness is my bane). There is an incredible power to the technology we have access to, and that technology can be extremely costly to our lives and our humanity, if we aren’t careful.
But imagine, for a second, what reality looks like if exactly that happens—if we aren’t careful, if we are reckless, if we are even destructive. This novel reveals that there are two options—recklessness and order, or as I like to call them, freedom and peace. And, if you’ll allow the genre leap, these same options are offered in a much more contemporary story…Captain America: Civil War.
Well, I seem to have caught the attention of comic book fans in the back of the class—thank you for joining us. Yes, I am comparing George Orwell’s 1984 to the blockbuster hit of the year, Captain America: Civil War, at least in part because it continues Orwell’s political and ethical dialogue. It’s not a perfectly clean connection, but a very similar issue is played out between our opposing heroes, Steve Rogers’ Captain America and Tony Stark’s Iron Man.
Stark, having been partly responsible for the almost-destruction of Earth, has given up. He thinks superpowered people should answer to someone before things get out of hand, and he’s lumped himself into the group that needs to be “put in check.” He can’t stand to be responsible for more loss of life. Rogers starkly opposes this (don’t you love a good pun); when leaders start putting superheroes on a register, they dangerously approach the death of freedom. He wants to save people, and if he signs over his allegiance to a government body, he may not get the chance to do what he believes is right. He trusts his own abilities and his own morals more than those of a government.
The irony is not lost here—Captain America is opposing the American government. Well, surprise, that’s because America is its people, not its ruling body. Rogers’ decision is about freedom, and not letting the fear of loss of life get in the way of that. Stark, on the other hand, is giving into his own fears, and his guilt. He’s willing to sacrifice freedom for safety, where Rogers isn’t. Stark wants peace and order, and he’ll do what it takes to get it.
As terrible as the world of 1984 sounds, it is a peaceful world. Crime is dealt with before it happens, the ruling body stays in power unquestionably, and noble ideas about freedom and justice won’t dare topple the order that has been established. It is a deadly, terrifying peace, at the cost of freedom. Winston Smith, our aging, frail hero, is maintaining his individuality—his freedom to be himself—endangering his life at every passing moment. The novel asks an unanswerable question of politics and ethics—what’s more important, freedom or peace?
Even worse, it gives us an answer we don’t like: external reality is invalid, the Party’s truth is the only truth, and the individual’s thoughts, memories, and feelings are subjective. The Party has power and truth, and the individual’s denial of it makes the individual an enemy of the state. Everything said can be disproved, denied, manipulated…everything thought is a lie because the individual mind is a lie, and the collective mind is the only truth.
As brutally heart-wrenching as Captain America: Civil War is, 1984 takes “brutal” to a whole new level.
If you decide to try reading 1984, I recommend you come at it with determination. The language is difficult to muddle through, and at its worst, it is a tangent on ideological concepts. Orwell uses the story to explain political ideas, and he does it because the story is important, but it doesn’t seem as important to him as the political ideas. Even so, I can’t imagine that there’s a better way to tell this kind of story, which definitely needs to be told.
Your homework: answering another unanswerable question. If you had the choice between freedom and peace, what would you choose? I’ve obviously landed on the side of freedom, as have George Orwell and Captain America, but this is such a broad topic that we can easily be proven wrong. Is it more important to be free, regardless of the cost to peace? Or is it more important to have a lasting peace, sacrificing freedom in the process? Leave a reply in the comments, and bonus points for anyone who ties in actual politics to a political question.
Up next, I’m reading Hamlet. Time for some Oedipal complexes and existential crises!!
Prof. Jeffrey
“‘Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.'”
–from 1984 by George Orwell
“She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you choose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.
‘We are the dead,’ he said.
‘We’re not dead yet,’ said Julia prosaically.”
–from 1984 by George Orwell
Welcome back, class.
Today’s lecture might be profoundly interesting or dangerously boring; it depends on the level of pleasure you take in defining things. I know that some of you couldn’t care less. I can see it in your eyes.
But for those of you staring unblinkingly, waiting with bated breath…have I got a treat for you! You’re what the “academics” call “academics.” Understanding theory and theoretical ideas actually interests you, and bonus points are in order if you like learning things that have no practical value in the working world whatsoever. You’re my kind of people.
A lot of my time in literature courses at college was spent asking the probing question, “What is literature?” (We’ll get to WHY that’s an important question in a bit.) It seems like a simple enough question, but it always invokes a huge discussion that usually boils down to this: literature is art that uses words and language. It’s also described as a category of art—literature is always art but art is not always literature.
Some define it by examples: obvious ones like novels, plays, and poems, as well as more obscure examples like movies, blog posts (!), and essays. Even the most clinical or scientific documents can be told artfully, and can therefore be considered literature. I know of a woman who wrote her dissertation claiming that kitchen recipes were a form of literature.
A T-Shirt Poem
This leads me to one of my favorite claims: ANYTHING that uses words or text is literature. A letter, an e-mail, a paycheck, a coffee mug, a T-shirt, a company logo, a video game, a poster, a political speech, a prescription label…all of it, literature! So next time you have a surprise essay to write, and you’re stumped, argue that your T-shirt is a poem (at your own peril).
However, it’s worth mentioning that we don’t read tax reports like we read Shakespeare. We don’t read stop signs like we read poetry, and we don’t read magic 8 balls like we read Harry Potter. Something in our collective social standards distinguishes between high art and instruction manuals. Some metaphorical blurry line exists out there between literature and other word-piles.
Or…maybe it’s all relative. Literature is literature because someone somewhere says that it’s literature, and you can’t declare it non-literature because they have just as much a God-given right to name something literature as you do. Literature is in the eye of the beholder.
But let’s bring it back down to something resembling sanity. Why do we read? Usually, to learn something. When we read Shakespeare, we want to learn about the characters he’s created and the philosophy he’s trying to sell. When we read a letter or e-mail, it’s to keep up correspondence and to understand their goal or message in sending their note. When we read a magic 8 ball, we want a prediction, whether we believe it or not.
We read for the same reason we act at all—we want something. We break the law of inertia and move against the stillness of the world because we, as human beings, have desires. Maybe if a piece of art or text gives us something we desire, it “counts” as literature.
At this point, it might be easier to discuss literary characteristics than to try defining it head-on. We can consider the books I’ve read for this class literature: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Harry Potter series, The Lord of the Rings, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and currently, 1984. Everything you learned in High School English is there—characters, plot, themes, setting, dialogue, and various other indications of literature. Each one gives us something to take away and use…some kind of message or lasting idea, whether we want it or not. Does that make each of these novels literature? If a painting or sculpture can accomplish the same feat, is it literature as well?
I’ve tortured you enough. There is no definite answer to this question, and asking it is more academic “fun” than it is accomplishing ANYTHING. And yet, my follow-up question still stands: why is a question like this important? Don’t worry, it’s a much easier question to answer.
Defining literature is a lot like defining art or music. As soon as you start drawing lines in the sand between music and not-music, anyone can come along and claim otherwise. Example: random drum banging, screeching guitars, and uncensored swearing is as much music as Beethoven. Music and literature are art, and though their actual definitions are reliable, they are subject to change.
Oscar Wilde
I’ve quoted Oscar Wilde in an earlier post, from his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray; he claims that the only purpose for something useless is that it is admired, and that “All art is quite useless.” This isn’t bad PR for artists; it’s Wilde’s way of saying that art is supposed to affect the soul, and it has no other practical purpose.
So asking ourselves how to define something like literature is our way of defining what serves our soul, and that’s worth keeping an eye out for. Traditionally, the kind of literature that affects us most is poetry, but we’ve been open to suggestions for the past couple thousand years. The once low art form of film has risen to new heights in the realm of literature, and in a hundred years, stop signs and tax reports may surprise us.
Your homework: fight me. Take something above that you disagree with and challenge my views. Don’t be afraid to comment: you’re a human being with opinions, and it gets lonely around here otherwise. How might you define literature differently? What’s something you consider literature that most others don’t?
(No one turned in homework for last week. I’m very disappointed, students. I know professors who kick out their entire classes when such mutiny occurs. You are very fortunate to have a caring and merciful teacher like me. In any case, the option for commenting is still open, for this post and the previous one.)
I’m continuing 1984, so expect a rousing political lecture next Wednesday! Have a good week!
Prof. Jeffrey
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable–what then?”
–from 1984 by George Orwell
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies.”
–from 1984 by George Orwell
Hello again, class.
Per our discussion last week, I am unashamed to admit that I read most of The Picture of Dorian Gray aloud to myself in a terrible British accent. When I got to the really dramatic parts, I slowed it down and pretended I was in a movie. I encourage this sort of behavior in your free time.
Dorian Gray and his Portrait, from The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)
Anyway, let’s jump right in—I’m surprised at how coincidentally similar Dorian Gray’s portrait is to Sauron’s ring and Lord Voldemort’s Horcruxes. For anyone who is unfamiliar with Dorian Gray’s story, it details the life of a man whose soul is linked to a portrait of himself, manifested in two ways: he remains young while the portrait ages, and his sins damage the portrait while his soul remains undamaged.
Unlike The Lord of the Rings and The Harry Potter series, though, this is no adventure story—it’s more like a Victorian Gothic morality tale, criticizing morality. Instead of “action,” the story relies more on dialogue and Dorian’s inner thoughts. More than any of the books I’ve read so far for this class, it is unadulterated art, which makes it challenging and refreshing.
A Statue of Oscar Wilde in Dublin, Ireland
For a little backstory: author Oscar Wilde is actually better known for his plays. The Picture of Dorian Gray is his only novel, but it has moments that seem like a play—dialogue is uninterrupted by descriptions, chapters take place only one scene at a time, and the story splits evenly into two separate “acts” (Dorian as a young man and Dorian in his late 30s). Wilde probably wrote it as a novel because he wanted to capture Dorian’s thoughts, which analyze the soul, art, God, evil, England, love, sin, and fashion…all at once.
Wilde included a preface as a way of defending his work, where he explains that art and morality are separate and criticizes nineteenth century treatment of art. I’m betting Wilde added this preface because people didn’t catch the messages in the novel itself. No need to worry—Prof. Jeffrey caught on! In every piece of dialogue between the three main characters, they discuss the battle between art and morality, and what that means for society. These moments distance themselves from the story, and though they tend to come off as preachy, they’re always interesting. These moments help the reader seriously consider Dorian Gray’s immortality and his addiction to sin.
Dorian Gray is something of a cross between a vampire and Peter Pan—stuck in the prime of his life but disconnected from his soul. He is a lot like Shakespeare’s Hamlet—a youthful figure trapped between a tormented soul, a tragic fate, and lengthy dialogue—which further cements his status as an amazing literary character. If you’re looking for a reason to read Dorian Gray, he’s it: his inner thoughts show us his temptation to commit evil acts and his obsession with his portrait, and the spectacle of his life is beautiful and tragic. He disgusts, moves, and terrifies us because he is simultaneously the worst and best versions of ourselves. Feel free to listen in on the art-and-morality lectures as you read, but you should stick around to experience the cataclysmic life of Dorian Gray.
I’m moving on to George Orwell’s 1984 next. I’ve been remarkably stuck in the fantasy genre, and a little dystopian drama might shake things up a bit around here. That being said, fantasy is probably my favorite genre to read in, and I’d like to hear what novels you’ve read.
Your homework: leave a comment describing your favorite fantasy novel. Tell me what it’s like—I don’t want the summary I can find just about anywhere, because I’d much rather have your personal impression of it. Why did you like it so much? And the question of the hour—you know what this class is about—WHY should I read it?
I look forward to your comments. See you next week!
Prof. Jeffrey
“‘Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even… But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face and your marvelous untroubled youth–I can’t believe anything against you.'”
–from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
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