Free English Literature Essays - Explore the extent to which the control of language and meaning is of central importance in the societies in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' and 'The Handmaid's Tale'
Both Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale represent unusual future visions, framed in experimental science fiction. Atwood’s text is grounded in contemporary concerns, as it is partly an attempt at imagining what kind of values might evolve if environmental pollution had finally rendered most of the human race sterile. It has also sprung from the debates raging within the feminist movement of the past thirty years, a movement that Atwood has been very much a part of, although she has never spoken for any specific group- insisting on her individual perspectives. Dystopias such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale isolate certain social trends and exaggerate them, magnifying their most negative qualities. They are cautionary tales, meant less as predictions of a likely future and more as a commentary on the present. Atwood’s text explores some of the traditional attitudes that are embedded in the thinking of the religious right, Orwell’s studies the imposing extremes of the political right- and both authors are driven by the threats to their liberty that they perceive to be present in their respective contemporary societies.
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is an exploration of the dystopian notion of power as it is held and enforced by the state. The significance of Orwell's discussions, both implicit and explicit, about the dystopian abuse of power becomes clear only through analysis. Then it becomes clear that Orwell’s critique of society is inextricably linked to a critique of the power structures that surround communication. Orwell’s writing is cautionary: it illustrates the point that communication is so integral to human instinct and desire that it can easily be turned into an extremely powerful tool for oppression.
As well as presenting power as a means of controlling language, and thus thought, the anti-utopian force of Nineteen Eighty-Four operates as a kind of twentieth-century contrast to the Humanist work of Sir Thomas More. Orwell's text expresses, "the mood of powerlessness and hopelessness of modern man just as the early utopias expressed the mood of self-confidence and hope of post-medieval man" Nineteen Eighty-Four’s cautionary agenda perceives man's bleak future to be one of dehumanization, induced by fascist dogmatism.
For Orwell, language is power. Since desire is the most powerful expression of individuality and is sated fully in the utopia, any dystopia must function through blocked desires. Orwell envision this suppression of desire taking place fundamentally within the context of language, "at least so far as thought is dependent on word" since it is only through words that man is capable of expressing his potentially dangerous wishes.
Atwood’s is also concerned about the potential for exploitation in ambiguous vocabularies. Atwood has been equally interested and alarmed by the trend for some feminist anti-pornography groups to establish alliances with religious anti-porn zealots- right wing traditionalists who oppose the feminists on virtually every other issue. In this way, the language of "protection of women" could quickly slip from a demand for more freedom into a retreat from freedom, a kind of appalling neo-Victorianism. The nineteenth century repression of women was justified by a stretched claims that “good” women were being “protected” from sex; protection that extended to women being confined to the home, barred from participating in the arts, and of course voting. A rhetoric of protection is generally preventative. It controls, limits, and represses the women. The language may be is feminist, but it also entirely ostensible. The result, as seen in this novel, is the perpetuation of the patriarchal status quo.
In Orwell, words are commodified, becoming just another appropriated human liberty. Words acquire capitalist value- their weight depending upon their perceived worth to the state. Hence words are crudely reduced and objectified, existing in "an extreme form of pragmatism in which truth becomes subordinated to the Party”. Orwell records the Oceanian state’s efforts to impart its dogma fundamentally, adjusting thoughts through altering language. Language control in Nineteen Eighty-Four is contrived deliberately to repress citizens’ expression of reality, thus their psychological perception of it. As Orwell himself states, the dehumanising regime was "designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought” and,
"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible."
As a result of controlling peoples' language, their ability to both express and discern the truth with words, the state acquires a genuine level of power over reality. When filtered by the omnipotent political dogmatists, "all reality is ideological"
Through subjugating the language of the people of Oceania, the state effectively converts ideology into truth, and the state's rhetoric functions as the vehicle for that truth: "Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else...whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. If this is so, then by controlling men's minds the Party controls truth" So the regime's rhetorical power over reality includes the power to determine arbitrary values of right and wrong, truth and lies, good and bad.
All the activity produced by Orwell's state is motivated by a need to maintain its powers, whether rhetorical or real. The faceless state imposes its bizarre version of reality on the people, tyrannically- both through the verbal force of rhetoric and the physical force of torture, or even execution “vapourisation”. For the regime, language – like any other instrument of power- exists as a weapon independently of objective truth- generating contradictions and lies – “war is peace” etc- in order to maintain greater lies. Yet this controlling state robs its inhabitants of their reason, and will induce a confused sense of freedom in some of its occupants. In Fromm’s words, man
"has surrendered his independence and integrity completely, if he experiences himself as a thing which belongs either to the state, the party or the corporation, then two plus two are five or 'Slavery is Freedom,' and he feels free because there is no longer any awareness of the discrepancy between truth and falsehood."
Man’s reason, then, is clearly proportional to his ability to determine the truth of a situation. And this in turn depends on the effectiveness of his powers of communication, powers which are mutually dependent on his thought. Since Orwell's dystopia robs him of his freedom to speak, it blocks his power to develop independent and sophisticated thoughts and ensures he will always be servile and essentially infantilised.
As a tool of independent efficacy, language is recovered by the narratives in The Handmaid’s Tale. Since its straightforward use has become so corrupted and suspect, and although it sounds rather contradictory, communication finds liberation through encryption. The protagonist’s discovery of the mysterious inscription she feels certain must be for her, "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum", translating of course as “don’t let the bastards grind you down” is a prime example of this. Power is returned though the hidden, the secretive codes that undermine the autocracy in both their content and their mere existence.
Dates, time, antiquity, preservation, all are inextricably linked in The Handmaid’s Tale. Memories escape corruption through their preservation; their written inscription. The original vitality and naivety of human feeling, often youthful human feeling, is represented symbolically in the novel through carvings and shorthanded phrases, through illegally lip-read conversations- another silent code- in dormitory beds. The book pulses with the ingenuity of vital youngsters, revealed through the delightful surprises of unearthed inscriptions. The narrator herself gladly participates in the game, apparently imagining herself as an intrepid archaeologist, somehow mystically chosen to interpret the carvings at the moment she sees them,
“On top of my desk there are initials, carved into the wood, and dates. The initials are sometimes in two sets, joined by the word loves. These seem to me like the inscriptions I used to read about, carved in the stone walls of caves, or drawn with a mixture of soot and animal fat. They seem to me incredibly ancient…These habits of former times appear to me now lavish, decadent almost; immoral, like the orgies of barbarian times.”
References to language in The Handmaid’s Tale, then, serve to inform the reader about the protagonist’s character, as much as they illustrate social and political points. Atwood’s character seems to be some kind of literary representative of herself,
“My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.”
Orwell’s relative insensitivity to his characters, by the same token, is a literal extension of the barred independence experienced by the figures that populate his fictional universe. His impersonal journalistic style contrasts with Atwood’s poetry, and, by virtually extinguishing the illusion usually afforded by an authorial tone, only makes the novel more chilling. Orwell’s style has been identified as the “passive voice”; it has been argued that he manipulates the expression of agency in order to prevent Winston Smith from being in control of any situation. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, many times, instances of depersonalisation coincide with passive language use, and an alienated medium of communication,
“ The telescreen barked at him to keep still,” and “The telescreen barked at him to keep still”
The depersonalisation method employed by Orwell in his writing repeats the depersonalization process that operates within his fictional society. Both function according to the literary technique of metonymy, where a part of a person- a voice or a thought (usually the least physical and least active feature) works figuratively, to represent the whole person. So just as Orwell’s words function according to reductive metonymically, so do the tyrannical forces behind his society. Most interesting as an example of metonymy is the thought control operating within the book. Orwell’s language in some way resembles the language he is writing about, his narrative, while heavily ironic, controlling the reader to the extent that it has been pruned down, into a concise, consciously reductive, rendering of the story. It is, then, no surprise that his commentary on the communication control coincides so frequently with his own devices of communication control, his metonymic compression that impress passivity. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, thoughts are no longer something we project into the world; they are inescapably imposed onto us by the regime. Similarly, reading books we are struck by an identical, if smaller scale, tyranny- in Orwell’s universe, his words are all we have to go on, and he commands a similar trust through his own economical rhetoric,
“And the thought struck him ....”
Atwood’s passivity is of a different sort- her characters are unwitting victims of a different sort. The protagonist repeatedly challenges her powerlessness through secret codes, secret languages, defensive ritualistic behaviours, and indeed secrecy itself. But she, too, is a shadow of her author. She is preoccupied with words; unlike the tyrannous regime of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Atwood’s characters’ codes are designed to expand meaning. The encryption functions of every level, in fact- the reader will find the book makes more sense if they trace the linguistic curios to their origins. The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel that rewards further study. So just as the characters defend themselves through elaborate codes and secrets, the reader is invited to defend themselves against incomprehension and enter into the meaning of the story, through their own investigations of the names, language, and word play in the novel. The place name "Gilead", for example, is an ideal land in the Bible, which appears in Numbers 36. It appears many times in the Bible as one of the twelve traditional divisions of the land of the Hebrews. It is likely, though, that Atwood was referring to Jeremiah 8:22:
"Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?", a verse made famous because of its use in the old Black spiritual:
"There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul." Placed in the Christian context, then, Gilead becomes the source of healing- Jesus Christ himself. It is easy to see why a fundamentalist Christian group would call itself Gilead because of these associations; but the original context in Jeremiah- describing the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians- creates some duplicity of meaning resulting in considerable irony. It might be that Atwood had that verse in mind when the narrator is forbidden to have hand lotion- balm.
Offred and the Commander’s games of Scrabble probably function as symbolic both within the novel and the dialogue in which the author and reader are permanently engaged, to the extent that Scrabble is a competition over language and creation- albeit “only” the creation of words. The person most skilful at creating (words) wins the game. The games are metaphors for Gilead’s authorities, and their manner of manipulating the masses through language. The language of manipulation is generally religious; power mainly conveyed through Biblical ideas or names. For example, the enforcers of the regime are called Guardians of the Faith, women robbed of all individuality by being named only in terms of their relationship with men: Of-Fred. Other terms in the book reflect Orwellian sensibilities- compression words like Unwomen and Unbaby represent how manipulations of language can both fit and form a political ideology. Scrabble’s relative harmlessness is tied to its perceived timelessness and simplicity, but the use of this gentle game as a metaphorical device only makes the implications of the metaphor even more chilling. It is clear that in real life, forces that can control language also control society, and that, in Atwood’s universe- as in Orwell’s- language is both symptom and instrument of social order.
Other instances of post-modern awareness are even more explicit. When the narrator visits the dress shop, Atwood’s feminist sensibilities are very thinly veiled. The pornographic reduction of the female forms to symbolic shorthand is expressed through the imagery of the dress shop which has lost its literal significance, and is now known only through its sign. The dress has come to stand for the female; the lily a signifier for all women- connoting virginity or simply extreme femininity, and the gaudy sign a visual abbreviation for all consumable womanliness,
“The store has a huge wooden sign outside it, in the shape of a golden lily, Lilies of the Field, it’s called. You can see the place, under the lily, where the lettering was painted out, where they decided that even the names of shops were too much temptation for us. Now places are known by their signs alone.”
Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale UK: Vintage (1996) p. 35
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Hewitt, Janice. "More to Orwell: An Easy Leap from Utopia to Nineteen Eighty-Four."George Orwell. Eds. Courtney T. Wemyss and Alexej Ugrinsky. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.
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Ringbom, H. George Orwell as Essayist: A Stylistic Study, Finland: Acta Akademia Aboensis, series A, Vol. 44, no. 2. (1973)
Web References
Principles of Newspeak- http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_app
Language in 1984- http://www.gradnet.de/papers/pomo2.archives/pomo98.papers/jysideris_a98.html
1984 general http://www.answers.com/topic/nineteen-eighty-four
1984 general http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/N/Ni/Nineteen_Eighty-Four.htm
“Suppressing agency in 1984” http://papyr.com/hypertextbooks/engl_103/1984final.htm
Handmaid’s Tale essay notes http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/worldlit/canada/handmaid.html
Handmaid’s Tale study guide http://www.wsu.edu:8000/~brians/science_fiction/handmaid.html
