My 3 Encounters with 1984

My 3 encounters with 1984

I first read 1984 when I was in JC 1, first-three-months. I still disctintly remember reading it in the not-so-brightly-lit bus to college in the mornings, sitting on the long seats facing the ticketing machine.

I found the novel rather crudely written, as if Orwell was more interested in the message than in how he was saying it. He wanted to paint a negative picture of totalitarianism and he used bold, harsh strokes to do it, even if often a times they seemed high-handed - the violent subject matter was presented in an equally, and ironically, violent style.

I also found the politics of 1984 crude. What's all this talk about pure, naked power? Orwell is just theorising, talking about power abstractly. Nobody talks like that. Nobody acts like that. It's totally unbelievable.

During my post-gradudate studies in NUS, I tutored a few first-year Lit classes, and one of the prescribed texts was 1984. I had to re-read it again. This time, I found something there that I had not noticed before. Armed with post-structuralist theories and ideas, Winston's act of writing, in defiance, immediately caught my eye. Here, is the real politics of 1984. Not in the war or in Room 101, but in the mind, in writing, in language, in thought.

And reading the novel in this way made me realise that Orwell was on to something quite profound. He was rethinking an old philosophical issue that Rene Descartes had so famously stated in 1637 - "I think, therefore I am". Now, we can't think without language. Therefore we should say "I think in language, therefore I am." But, language is not pure. It affects and is affected by social forces. In that case, what "I am" is mutable, potentially unstable, potentially malleable.

And when I finshed my studies, and finished my NIE course, I came to Meridian Junior College, and once more, I found myself having to teach 1984. This time, I paid more attention to the historical context of the novel, read more widely from Orwell's corpus of works, and became an instant fan of his essay style - he writes brilliantly, using simple words and short, neat sentences. This time round, I saw the relevance of Freud to a reading of 1984. Definitely, the text deals a lot with repressions and what Freud calls "the return of the repressed". Perhaps I will work that into some of the lectures.

So that, my folks, is the short history of my 3 encounters with 1984. Of course, this is an account of my reading of 1984, the history of my reading. Yours may differ entirely; your experience of 1984 will be from a very different perspective and context.

(PS: For Derrida/Deconstruction disciples, the words in bold hint at "deconstruction at work"; pardon the pun....)

LT