Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell [9]
But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’. We remember that back on page 6 we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don’t – we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, as a condition of acceptance by the Club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, ‘A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing … I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run.’ Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, Why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’ is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post-1984, in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past – as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.
In his 1946 article ‘James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution’, Orwell wrote, ‘The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society.’ In its hints of restoration and redemption, perhaps ‘The Principles of Newspeak’ serves as a way to brighten an otherwise bleakly pessimistic ending – sending us back out into the streets of our own dystopia whistling a slightly happier tune than the end of the story by itself would have warranted.
There is a photograph, taken around 1946 in Islington, of Orwell with his adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair. The little boy, who would have been around two at the time, is beaming, with unguarded delight. Orwell is holding him gently with both hands, smiling too, pleased, but not smugly so – it is more complex than that, as if he has discovered something that might be worth even more than anger – his head tilted a bit, his eyes with a careful look that might remind filmgoers of a Robert Duvall character with a backstory in which he has seen more than one perhaps would have preferred to. Winston Smith ‘believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945 …’. Richard Blair was born 14 May, 1944. It is not difficult to guess that Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, was imagining a future for his son’s generation, a world he was not so much wishing upon them as warning against. He was impatient with predictions of the inevitable, he remained confident in the ability of ordinary people to change anything, if they would. It is the boy’s smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and radiant, proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the day, is good, and that human decency, like parental love, can always be taken for granted