Orwell
argues that totalitarianism makes literature impossible. By literature, he
means all kinds of writing in prose, from imaginative fiction to political
journalism; he suggests that verse might slip through the cracks. He writes,
too, that there is such a thing as “groups of people who have adopted a
totalitarian outlook”—single-truth communities of sorts, not just totalitarian
regimes or entire countries. These are deadly to literature as well.
Orwell was
writing in 1946, five or seven years before scholarly works by Hannah Arendt,
on the one hand, and Karl Friedrich, on the other, provided the definitions of
totalitarianism that are still in use today. Orwell’s own “Nineteen
Eighty-Four,” which provides the visceral understanding of totalitarianism that
we still conjure up today, was a couple of years away. Orwell was in the
process of imagining totalitarianism—he had, of course, never lived in a
totalitarian society.
He
imagined two major traits of totalitarian societies: one is lying, and the
other is what he called schizophrenia. He wrote, “The organized lying practiced
by totalitarian states is not, as it is sometimes claimed, a temporary
expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to
totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration
camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.” The lying entailed
constantly rewriting the past to accommodate the present. “This kind of thing
happens everywhere,” he wrote, “but is clearly likelier to lead to outright
falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given
moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the
past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of
objective truth.”
He goes on
to imagine that “a totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself
would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of
common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but
could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist.”
Orwell was
right. The totalitarian regime rests on lies because they are lies. The subject
of the totalitarian regime must accept them not as truth—must not, in fact,
believe them—but accept them both as lies and as the only available reality.
She must believe nothing. Just as Orwell predicted, over time the totalitarian
regime destroys the very concept, the very possibility of truth. Hannah Arendt
identified this as one of the effects of totalitarian propaganda: it makes
everything conceivable because “nothing is true.”
As for
what he called “schizophrenia,” this, too, has been borne out. In 1989, as the
longest-running totalitarian experiment in the world, the U.S.S.R., neared what
then appeared to have been its demise, a great sociologist named Yuri Levada
and his team undertook a large study of Soviet society. He concluded that the
Soviet person’s very self-concept depended on a constant negotiation of
mutually exclusive perceptions: the Soviet person identified strongly with the
great Soviet state and its grand experiment, and yet felt himself to be
insignificant; he worshipped at the altar of modernity and progress, and yet
lived in conditions of enforced poverty, often deprived of modern conveniences
that even the poor in the West had come to take for granted; he believed in
egalitarianism and resented evident inequality, yet accepted the extreme
hierarchical order and rigid class structure of Soviet society. To live in his world—simply
to function day to day, balancing between contradictory perceptions—the Soviet
person had to engage in constant negotiations. In “Nineteen Eighty-Four,”
Orwell predicted this negotiation, and named it doublethink. You will recall
that “even to understand the word doublethink involved the use of doublethink.”
Doublethink destroyed the mind and crushed the soul, and yet it was essential
for survival. It killed as it saved, and that, too, is doublethink.
But
perhaps Orwell’s most valuable observation in this essay concerns instability.
“What is new in totalitarianism,” he wrote, “is that its doctrines are not only
unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on the pain of
damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a
moment’s notice.” Orwell had observed the disfavor and disappearance of
prominent Bolsheviks and the resulting adjustments to the official narratives
of the Revolution—the endlessly changing and vanishing commissars. Arendt
argued that the instability was, in fact, the point and purpose of the purges:
the power of the regime depended not so much on eliminating particular men at
particular moments but on the ability to eliminate any man at any moment.
Survival depended on one’s sensitivity to the ever-changing stories and one’s
ability to mold oneself to them.
(...)
But why,
exactly, did Orwell think all this was so destructive to literature? He defined
literature as a sort of conversation—“an attempt to influence the viewpoint of
one’s contemporaries by recording experience.” He added that “there is no such
thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like
our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are
near the surface of everyone’s consciousness. Even a single taboo can have an
all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger
that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.
It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of
prose writer.” Note that he is once again talking about the atmosphere of
totalitarianism: the lived experience rather than the mechanics of it. It would
follow that, as with the perpetual lie, this literature-deadening effect can outlast
state terror. Of course, taboos exist everywhere. But Orwell notes that
“literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes.” It is having to
cater to the instability imposed by totalitarianism—having to constantly adjust
one’s world view—that is murderous to the writer, or at least to the writing.
(...)
Orwell
suggests one more way in which totalitarianism kills writing. “Serious prose,”
he writes, “has to be composed in solitude.” Totalitarianism, as Arendt
famously wrote, eliminates the space between humans, turning them into One Man
of gigantic proportions. Separately, she spoke about the peculiar illusion of
warmth and closeness that totalitarianism engenders. Totalitarian societies
mobilize everyone. Supporters of the regime may be gathered in the big square,
chanting their support for the leader, but opponents band together in tiny
clumps that are always under siege, always in struggle to hold on to a patch of
knowable truth. This is an honorable effort, but it is as far from an
imaginative exercise as anything can be. No one can imagine the future—or, for
that matter, the present or the past—with their teeth clenched and their minds
in singular focus. This leads me to the best-known line from this Orwell essay:
“imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”
I want to
zoom out a little to provide context for that famous phrase:
“Literature
is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country
which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the
totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification
of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer…. Unless spontaneity enters at
some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself
becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to
separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only
that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”
It's
remarkable that Orwell ends the essay on a note of some uncertainty. His lament
for the possible—probable—loss of the imagination is itself an exercise in the
imagination. That is what makes this essay both a work of literature and a
political work.
We live in
a time when intentional, systematic, destabilizing lying—totalitarian lying for
the sake of lying, lying as a way to assert or capture political power—has
become the dominant factor in public life in Russia, the United States, Great
Britain, and many other countries in the world. When we engage with the
lies—and engaging with these lies is unavoidable and even necessary—we forfeit
the imagination. But the imagination is where democracy lives. We imagine the
present and the past, and then we imagine the future.
When the
values, institutions, and most of what we hold dear about politics is under
attack—which it most certainly is—we find ourselves fighting the good fight to
preserve things just as they are. This is the opposite of imagination, the
opposite of literature, and, I suspect, the opposite of democracy. Fighting to
preserve things as they are inevitably becomes a battle to think and speak of
things in certain ways, either defensively or preëmptively. In trying to
salvage the meaning of words as they pertain to the present, we keep words and
concepts from evolving. Salvaged words quickly dry up and crack. Then they
fail. We face the future empty-handed, language-wise; we are dumb in the face
of the future.
I have
been struggling with this in my own work. Last week, reporting in Detroit, I
found myself looking at an architectural model of an urban farm. The perimeter
of the model was made up of large, symbolically windowless gray buildings.
These were the blocks that planners assumed would be bought, as so much of
Detroit has been, and developed speculatively into faceless buildings that
could be anywhere and belong nowhere. I know how to describe those buildings,
and I have the language to describe what’s happening in Detroit. I can write
about the collapse of government and the vanishing of faith in democracy. I can
write about the disenfranchisement of the African-American residents, who make
up eighty-six per cent of the city. I can write about the homogenization and
privatization of public space, complete with a private security force that has
supplanted police in the neighborhoods of so-called revival, and about the
private tram line for the gainfully employed residents of Detroit, who happen
to be mostly white. I can even write about what’s not there: houses that used
to belong to families, schools, shops, music venues, the landscape of the life
that used to be. I can write about the business of buying up and securing
ruins, turning even unoccupied space into private space, preëmptively. And I
can write about a middle-aged African-American man who was wandering the
streets of an apparently unfamiliar neighborhood, most of which was no longer
there, looking for the building he was supposed to be guarding; it was his
second day on the job at a private security firm.
But how do
I describe what was in the center of the architectural model? It was
translucent, illuminated in pink here and there, light but not quite ephemeral.
Made of plexiglass, this part of the model contained houses, trees,
greenhouses, and other structures. Some of what was here was already there, in
the actual physical space depicted. Some was not. It was functioning the way
literature works: by depicting and augmenting, illuminating and imagining. But
what was I looking at?
I was
looking at a kind of community, a sort of kinship, and a mode of coöperation. I
was looking at economic arrangements that do not involve—or involve very
little—wage labor. I was looking at an alternative to private property. For some
of the participants, it was an alternative to the nuclear family. I was looking
at something that appeared to exist parallel to capitalism. But I still had no
words to describe what it was. All my words belonged to the world of the gray
monoliths around the perimeter. Of the thing itself, I could say only what it
was not.
And yet I
think this is the job of writers right now: to describe what we do not yet see,
or what we see but cannot yet describe, which is a condition almost
indistinguishable from not seeing.
I want to
find a way to describe a world in which people are valued not for what they
produce but for who they are—in which dignity is not a precarious state.
I want to
find a way to describe economic and social equality as a central value—a world
in which inequality is, therefore, shrinking.
I want to
find a way to describe prosperity that is not linked to the accumulation of
capital.
Find a way
to describe happiness as a public good, and the current pervasive crisis of
mental health in a way that doesn’t involve the frames of norms and pathology,
or the language of “fixing” people.
Find a way
to describe a world without borders as we have known them—a world in which
nation-states are not prized or assumed.
Find a way
to describe learning that does not involve the warehousing and disciplining of
children.
Find a way
to describe justice whose objective is not retribution but restoration.
Find a way
to describe politics that are genuinely participatory, that reflect the
complexity and diversity of human experience, that avoid arbitrary divisions
along party lines and emphasize coöperation around common goals.
Find an
ever more complicated and evolving way to write about gender.
Find ways
to describe kinship that is not the nuclear family or framed by the nuclear
family. Find ways to tell the stories of friendship and community.
Find ways
to describe a humanity that protects its planet, itself, and other creatures
that inhabit the earth with us. Find words for reasonable and responsible
coöperation.
Find a way
to describe public space that is genuinely public and accessible, and include
in this the virtual space of social networks and other media.
Above all,
find a way to describe a world in which the way things are is not the way
things have always been and will always be, in which imagination is not only
operant but prized and nurtured.
And find a
way to describe many other things that are true but not seen, seen but not
spoken, and things that are not but could be. Orwell wrote that, for the
fiction writer, subjective feelings were facts; being compelled to falsify
those feelings in a “totalitarian atmosphere” amounted to the “prevention of
literature.” Orwell’s perceptions of totalitarianism formed the basis for his
novels, which, in turn, shaped much of our current understanding of
totalitarianism. I am proposing that subjective hopes are also, for the
purposes of writing, facts. These are the facts endangered by the fear and
despair prevalent in our current politics. If one insists on writing the truth
of those hopes—or, rather, if many writers do this—the result may not be great
literature, which is always a miracle, but it will exercise the imagination. If
it is good, or good enough, it will fuel conversation. And may it be half as
prescient as “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
by Masha Gessen, The New Yorker , June 10, 2018
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