Tonight sees the announcement of this year's winner of the Booker Prize for fiction: you can find out more about the shortlist here as well as interviews with the authors here. And you can watch the announcment on follow the Booker livestream here.
Even more excitingly, for the first time ever, we've managed to schedule our annual 'Predict the Booker Prize' event for the very same evening as the real thing. For those of you unfamiliar with 'Predict the Booker', it's a bit like a balloon debate. But with books. Six books, six readers, five minutes each: our Pauline readers present each of the shortlisted nominations before the audience votes for the one that the SPS community thinks should win this year's prestigious Booker Prize.
We'll be reporting on that event later in the week, but meanwhile, today's post. After Donald Trump's first election victory in 2016, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four rocketed up the best-seller charts, especially after Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase 'alternative facts' to defend false claims the Trump administration made about the supposedly high turnout for Trump's first inauguration. Last week, the phenomenon was repeated, with a 250% increase in the novel's sales since last week, although this time round, Orwell's dystopia has been eclipsed by Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, sales of which increased by a 'whopping 6,886%' according to CNN. But is it right to connect contemporary events to this particular label? Noah Kasolowsky considers how popular usage can redefine a legacy.
Noah Kasolowsky
In an age where digital surveillance is a common practice, and the memory of government intervention in the lives of its citizens looms large in much of the world, the phrase ‘1984’ has enjoyed a resurgence. But as this term has fallen into common use, the meaning has subtly changed, reflecting its development independent of the source material, and its watering-down in the process.
In an age where digital surveillance is a common practice, and the memory of government intervention in the lives of its citizens looms large in much of the world, the phrase ‘1984’ has enjoyed a resurgence. But as this term has fallen into common use, the meaning has subtly changed, reflecting its development independent of the source material, and its watering-down in the process.
The term, as many GCSE pupils would likely know, references the title of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the final novel by George Orwell, in which the narrator navigates a communist dystopia, filled with surveillance, homogeny, and misery, ultimately falling victim to its clutches. The novel quickly became an anti-communist rallying piece, as it detailed the fears of many over the outcome of the introduction of such a state, even if some elements were decidedly sci-fi.
Partially, something must relate to the vastly altered political landscape since the book was written. Communism has fallen and the West has risen, and the overarching threats that dominated the book, though far from absent in many countries, no longer loom large in the public consciousness to the extent found during the cold war, driven by Western propaganda and hysteria.
By contrast, the policies and events which in the modern age might be considered ‘basically 1984’, are more often those of Western, freedom and democracy espousing countries, who are much more likely to recoil in shame. This was especially common during the Covid-19 period, where it was often difficult to escape these comparisons, despite the scale of state intervention in most countries being far cry from what is depicted in the book. In this way, the legacy of Nineteen Eighty-Four has been degraded from an extrapolation of a very present and threatening political behemoth, into a simple cautionary tale used as a line of criticism where any similarity whatsoever may appear.
Furthermore, the phrase ‘1984’ has fallen prey to the same trappings as many other critical phrasings, in that it has lost a lot of its meaning and become simply a substitute for ‘something that I do not like’. Legislation subject to comparison has included, on the one hand, the US surveillance of citizens, but on the other, the enforcement of hate speech laws. Ultimately, the overuse of the term, especially in overblown and alarmist comparisons, has not only dramatically reduced its impact, but also muddied the waters as to what the phrase actually applies to. It has been applied to almost every example of government intervention, without much respect to the source work and its concerns. Exposure to the phrase has for a long time not required exposure to the text, and through this the understanding of its meaning and its usage has continued to become vaguer, less direct, and less meaningful.
Overall, the phrase ‘1984’ is one that has become divorced from its source material through overuse. With the fall of Communism, ‘1984’ lost much of the context that lent it weight, and doomed it to a life as a cliched attack on political events that often do not deserve.
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