2

Newspeak as a Manual for Translation

The last chapter ends on a hopeful note: cultural translation is the tool we use to shift people’s perspectives so they see the world differently. It’s a technique for opening a space where we can welcome people who aren’t like us, whom we’ve excluded in the past.

But there’s a risk in that perception. It leaves open the question of who “we” are. I’m presuming my readers are like me in that they want to overcome the divisions we impose upon the world when we separate people into categories like us and them. That assumption is false. If recent politics has shown anything, it’s that people are worried about outsiders causing them to lose their identity. They want to maintain those categories. The Rassemblement national in France (formerly the Front national), the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs in Austria, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and the UK Independence Party in Great Britain have all made electoral gains by appealing to nativist sentiments and exploiting people’s fears of outsiders.¹

There’s a second risk to consider. The processes of transformation described in the last chapter work in more than one direction. Cultural translation—the replacement of one sign by another—can close down the potential for exchange, too. It can make oppression possible. It can exclude.

This chapter is about that second direction. It’s about George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which tells the story of a man’s struggle in a dystopian future where free thought is no longer possible, having been undermined by linguistic engineering, probing surveillance, and unrelenting violence. This chapter focuses on the appendix “The Principles of Newspeak,” which describes the purpose of the novel’s invented language as making “heretical thought”—that is, any thought not consistent with the ideology of the totalitarian government—“literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words” (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 198).² In that respect, it shifts our perspective on Nineteen Eighty-Four by treating it as a translation manual with a novel appended. “The Principles of Newspeak” is about how to replace words strategically to reduce the range of things people can think, which is to say, to translate them. The novel illustrates the ends to which such translation can be put, especially when its practitioners also have the means to surveil and torture those who think beyond the parameters set by the authorities. It serves as a warning about the logic of cultural translation, whose utopian potential is always held in check by a “fearful asymmetry” that comes about when people with power seek to impose their will on others.³

This chapter proceeds in the same way as the last. It starts by describing who Orwell was and how people have tended to read his work. Then it shifts perspective to bring about a parallax view. After it misreads Nineteen Eighty-Four, it shifts once more. All is not lost, and in the places where the novel goes beyond its appendix, we come to see that the power of surveillance and violence is not as absolute as it appears.

George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair, who was born in 1903 and died in 1950. He was a prolific essayist and novelist and a harsh critic of totalitarianism and socialism, especially as it was being institutionalized in Europe after the Second World War. As a writer, he was known for his straightforward style and avoidance of “dying metaphors,” “pretentious diction,” and “meaningless words,” as he explained in his essay “Politics and the English Language.”⁴

Orwell is best known for his novels Animal Farm, a parable about animals who overthrow their human masters only to become human themselves, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, about everyman Winston Smith and his struggles against a state ruled by the Party and led by a figurehead called Big Brother. It was published in 1949, as “British capitalism was indeed merging with socialism under the guidance of Fabian social planners, and was doing so as welfarism.”⁵ It introduced an enduring set of ideas about language and government, such as the Thought Police (the all-powerful enforcers of orthodoxy who caused people to live “in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized” [4]) and doublethink (the practice of holding “simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them” [25]).

The story Nineteen Eighty-Four tells is part romance, part thriller, part morality tale. Winston Smith lives in the oppressive super-state of Oceania, one of three that control virtually the whole world. The other two are Eurasia and Eastasia. Oceania includes most of the English-speaking world along with South America, while Eurasia includes Europe and the northern parts of the former Soviet Union, and Eastasia includes the southern parts of the Soviet Union along with China, India, and Pakistan. They are in a perpetual state of war, although alliances often shift. The war is unwinnable, and its real purpose, as Winston learns, is to provide social stability and structure by creating clear categories of us and them.

Oceania is ruled by the Party. Its elite members—the Inner Party—make up about 2 percent of the population. Its non-elite members—the Outer Party—make up about 13 percent. Non-members—the proles—make up the remaining 85 percent. The Party administers the government through four ministries. The Ministry of Truth produces the lies that allow the Party to maintain its power. (It also produces the saccharine pop songs and tawdry books that pacify the proles.) The Ministry of Peace runs Oceania’s endless war, first with Eurasia, later with Eastasia. The Ministry of Plenty oversees rationing. Finally, the Ministry of Love tortures anyone who resists the will of the Party.

Winston rebels against the Party with his lover Julia. They are both Outer Party members, and they ally themselves with O’Brien, “a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face [who] had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming” (9). He is an Inner Party member who claims to be part of the Brotherhood, a resistance movement ostensibly led by a disgraced Party leader, but in fact he is loyal to the Party. His invitation to Winston and Julia is a trap. Winston and Julia never know if the Brotherhood really exists, or whether it was just a rumour O’Brien used to lure them in. When Winston is incarcerated in the Ministry of Love, O’Brien is his torturer, and he causes Winston to betray his love for Julia. The book ends with Winston sitting in a café, shedding tears of joy because he has finally overcome his resistance to the Party. Just as an assassin’s bullet—which O’Brien promised him would come—enters his brain, “Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother” (197). In that respect, Nineteen Eighty-Four is like Orwell’s other novels that end with their “alienated heroes losing their individuality and being reconciled to the social order.”⁶

Interpretations of Nineteen Eighty-Four

How have readers interpreted Nineteen Eighty-Four? The story is rich enough for many to find in it warnings about their own political circumstances. It is not hard, for instance, to find examples of doublethink in the words of the politicians one opposes. (Chapter 4 of this book describes how some Americans have interpreted Donald Trump’s presidency through the lens of Orwell’s book.)

The same was true of the book when it first appeared. Early reviewers debated whether it was satire, in the same vein as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a way to talk about the contemporary world that surrounded them. Some saw in its descriptions of London the wartime city they themselves had known only a few years before.⁷ Reviewers who found themselves on the side of the political spectrum Orwell opposed saw something else altogether: rather than a critique of totalitarianism, they saw a defense of capitalism, leading one Communist reviewer to say the book “coincides perfectly with the propaganda of the National Association of Manufacturers.”⁸

In the first decade or two after Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, a wide range of critics engaged with Orwell and his work. According to Simon During, “Lionel Trilling, Q. D. Leavis, Richard Hoggart, Richard Rorty, and even (with reservations) the young Raymond Williams, praised him.” But Orwell has been “neglected,” During writes, since the 1970s.⁹ The aspects of his work that have continued to attract interest relate to language and good writing. Composition and rhetoric scholars, not to mention scholars of political communication, have focused in particular on the idea of “doublespeak,” an invented word made by combining two other invented words, Newspeak and doublethink, which they use to mean

language which makes the bad seem good, something negative appear positive, something unpleasant appear attractive, or at least tolerable. It is language which avoids or shifts responsibility; language which is at variance with its real and purposed meaning; language which conceals or prevents thought.¹⁰

Others note that Orwell’s philosophy of language, as described in Nineteen Eighty-Four and “Politics and the English Language,” is divided between a laudable search for plain-spoken clarity and a nostalgia for the past, “a conservatism that sometimes comes close to sentimentality.”¹¹ (It’s not clear whether the clarity Orwell sought ever existed or could exist, even within the bounds he himself tries to establish.)

“The Principles of Newspeak” as Translation Manual

If this is how people have interpreted Nineteen Eighty-Four, how do we generate a parallax view to see the same book from a new angle, one that places its parts in a different relation to each other? We focus on the appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak,” rather than on the novel itself.

It’s tacked onto the end of the novel, which mentions it only in passing with a note early in the first chapter that says, “Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology, see Appendix” (5). It seems peripheral in that the story the novel tells is complete without it. But readers familiar with translation studies, if they look closely, will see in the appendix a description of different modes of translation, much like more conventional works of scholarship.¹² If we focus our attention there, the story becomes an illustration of a philosophy of translation put into practice.¹³

Newspeak, as the appendix explains, “was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism,” and its purpose 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” (198). It had identifiable means, goals, and effects. It functioned by substituting one word for many (means) as a way to restrict thought (goals) and cut people off from old ways of speaking and thinking (effects). The Party even employed a cadre of translators “engaged in producing garbled versions—definitive texts, they were called—of poems [and other texts] which had become ideologically offensive but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies” (29–30). Thus to see the appendix as a translation manual is not terribly farfetched.

The words devised for Newspeak (and thus the translation tools available to members of the Party) were divided into three categories or vocabularies. The first, the A vocabulary, consisted of “the words needed for the business of everyday life,” generally those “involving concrete objects or physical actions” related to eating, working, getting around, and so on (199). The second, the B vocabulary, consisted of compound words “which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes” (200). This category included the words most closely associated with Nineteen Eighty-Four, such as Newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime, and so on. Finally, the C vocabulary included “scientific and technical terms” (203), although not in the sense we might recognize today. Like the words in the B vocabulary, they were ideological: they “were constructed from the same roots [as the scientific terms we know now], but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings” (203). Technicians had access to the words they needed to do their work, but they had little knowledge of other branches of what we would recognize as science. In fact, science as a form of inquiry into the external world was simply inconceivable: “There was, indeed, no word for ‘Science,’ any meaning that it could possible bear being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc” (203).

As one of the architects of the language (a character named Syme) explains to Winston, his job was not to create words but to destroy them:

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good,” for instance. If you have a word like “good,” what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good,” what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. (35–36)

The appendix spells out this logic even more explicitly (199–200). To negate a word, a speaker added the prefix un-. To emphasize it, a speaker added plus- or, for still more emphasis, doubleplus-. Speakers could combine prefixes (making doubleplusun- an emphatic negation), as well as add suffixes such as -wise, to turn words into adverbs, and -ful, to turn them into adjectives. Nouns could also be used as verbs. Combined with the restriction of meanings to ideologically correct ideas, this logic made it possible to substitute one word for many. Goodthink (meaning “orthodox,” “orthodoxy,” “thinking in an orthodox way,” etc.) and its derivatives (ungoodthink, etc.), could take the place of the class of words related to emotions (figure 14), which were politically dangerous in so far as they were unruly and hard to control (200–203).

The Goals and Effects of Translation into Newspeak

The goal of Newspeak was to make ideas unthinkable by depriving people of the words they needed to think them. Newspeak’s architects (as dreamt up by Orwell) observed that without language, people would experience the world around them as a meaningless flux, a jumble of impressions and sensations. Language imposed order by imposing meaning. Words carved the world up into discrete units.

Anyone who has learned a second language will grasp this idea intuitively: sometimes there’s a word in your new language that simply doesn’t translate back into your old. The units carved out by your new language are too different. An internet search for “words that don’t translate to English,” for instance, yields lists that tell you things like dépaysement is French for “the disorientation felt in a foreign country or culture, the sense of being a fish out of water.”¹⁴

The linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf developed this hypothesis—that language structures how we see the world—in the 1920s and 30s.¹⁵ Sapir, for instance, wrote,

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.¹⁶

Whorf went still further:

Language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for [her or] his analysis of impressions, for [her or] his synthesis of [her or] his mental stock in trade.¹⁷

If we take this assertion as a strong hypothesis, the implications are clear: to control how people think, it is enough to cut them off from their accustomed ways of speaking. (We can also take the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in a weak form, too, where we identify exceptions and counterexamples. We will return to the weak form later in this chapter.) The architects of Newspeak wanted to make speaking a reflex, like when a doctor taps your knee and your leg jerks forward: “Ultimately,” Orwell writes, “it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ‘to quack like a duck’” (203).

In short, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak is effective because it cuts people off from their history and deprives them of their ability to make sense of the world themselves. Think back to the discussion of interpretants in chapter 1. People hear a word, and it makes them think of an idea, which reminds them of another, which reminds them of still another, and so on. Newspeak cuts people off from those interpretants. It substitutes the interpretants the Party wants, or, if somehow speakers achieve the “ideal”—such as it is—of duckspeak, it eliminates interpretants altogether (figure 15). In other words, Newspeak, along with the violence inflicted on people who rebel, helps create the conditions for a form of collective solipsism. If people can’t trust their interpretations of the world or their recollection of history (on which they might base interpretations of the world), then the Party can interpret the world for them. O’Brien makes this state of affairs clear in a long exchange with Winston as he tortures him. Winston says that the world is older than the Party, and O’Brien tells him to prove it. Winston can’t because he has no independently verifiable evidence. O’Brien (not to mention the Party he represents) claims that whatever Winston remembers, he remembers it wrong. Even if he had physical evidence, O’Brien would claim it was phony, a claim Winston could not refute. (If he tried to refute it, what evidence would he have?) As O’Brien says,

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. (176)

Through torture, O’Brien deprives Winston of any grounds on which he might stake a contradictory claim, just as the Party, through its institutionalized violence and surveillance, does to the people of Oceania. Through Newspeak, the Party deprives them of the very tools they would need to imagine that there might be a different way to know the world. Violence and language work together as complementary means of control.

Solipsism

At this point, it would appear that cultural translation can be short-circuited. Its potential comes from the gap between what one person says and another person hears and understands, a gap brought about by the play of interpretants. If language and violence can cut people off from those interpretants, the potential for change will go unrealized.

In other words, we’re 180 degrees away from where we were at the end of chapter 1. To find our path back, it is necessary to look more closely at the philosophy (or more precisely, the epistemological stance) of solipsism, whose name derives from the Latin words solus, meaning “alone,” and ipse, meaning “self.” As O’Brien tortures Winston, Winston wants to object to the “belief that nothing exists outside your own mind” (177). He searches for the name of this idea, which O’Brien gives him: “The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing; in fact, the opposite thing” (177).

What exactly is this idea? Think of the movie The Matrix.¹⁸ In the beginning, the hero, a computer programmer named Neo, is living a normal life, although he is puzzled by things that keep repeating themselves. He is contacted by a man named Morpheus, who offers him a choice. If Neo wants to understand the anomalies, he can swallow a red pill, although Morpheus warns him that if he does, he will face consequences he cannot yet grasp. If he wants to avoid those consequences, he can take a blue pill and return to his life. Neo takes the red pill, of course. (If he didn’t, there’d be no plot.) He is then dragged violently out of his world, and he awakes to find himself in a womb-like pod with electrodes plugged into his brain. Everything he has experienced up to that point was in the matrix, a computer-generated world that felt real because his mind treated it as real. Now he is in a much harsher world, which gives him the perspective to see that the matrix simply provided him with a powerful illusion.

The matrix was a solipsistic world, existing (for him) only in his mind. Neo was made to imagine it.¹⁹ It’s the idea of being made to imagine that O’Brien has in mind when he says collective solipsism is not the same thing as solipsism. Collective solipsism is imposed from the outside, and it’s more insidious because it causes people to doubt their senses and memory. How does the Party implement its strategies on a large scale? How does it create and control a collective form of solipsism? It uses techniques such as gaslighting, or “psychologically manipulat[ing] a person into questioning their own sanity,” often by telling them that something they remember is not true.²⁰ The Party has an entire apparatus to do just that, including the Ministry of Truth, where Winston works, which is devoted to changing “historical” records to match the narrative of the day. The people of Oceania trust the narrative they are given more than their own memories or perceptions, to the point where it comes to replace their memories. Early in the book, for instance, Winston hears that chocolate rations are being reduced from thirty grams to twenty. He is called upon as part of his job to rewrite documents that showed that the ration had ever been thirty grams. The rewriting is so successful that a day later he hears that

there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. (40)

More dramatically, at a climactic point in the story, Oceania’s war with Eurasia—its enemy up to that point—becomes an alliance, and its alliance with Eastasia turns into a war. Everyone is gathered for the public execution of Eurasian prisoners when, “at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally” (120). This statement contradicts everything people see around them. All the propaganda says the Eurasia is the enemy, but the Party’s gaslighting is so efficient that the only possible response is the idea that they have been tricked: “The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein [a traitor to the Party and ostensible leader of the Brotherhood resistance movement] had been at work!” (120).

In short, the Ministry of Truth treats history as a palimpsest, or a document (such as a medieval scroll) whose text is scraped off so the page can be used again. It constantly erases and rewrites the historical record, which has already been erased and rewritten often enough that the word historical is nonsensical. The record bears no relation to events that have actually happened, but in the Party’s gaslit collective solipsism, those events don’t matter. In fact, those events don’t exist. The only ones that matter are those that matter to the Party: “In no case would it have been possible, once the deed [of fabricating the historical record] was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place” (28).

Where does all of this—Newspeak, torture, solipsism, gaslighting, and the palimpsest of history—leave the question of translation? “The Principles of Newspeak” ends by quoting the first lines of the U.S. Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”). Then it explains,

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby [Thomas] Jefferson’s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government. (205)

In other words, translation from Oldspeak (English as we speak it now) into Newspeak brings about a complete transformation of sense and reveals the limits of substituting one set of words for another when the words come from languages characterized by disjunctive worldviews.

The Lived Contradictions of Newspeak

This is the point where Orwell’s explicit reflection on language stops but where the novel itself goes further. It provides certain clues about Newspeak in actual use, which is far more complicated than the appendix might lead us to believe. Linguistic reduction might work hand-in-hand with historical amnesia, but its effectiveness is not absolute. Orwell offers an important caveat: Newspeak would render “heretical thought” unthinkable only “so far as thought is dependent on words” (198). This caveat hints at the fact that, in some instances, thought is not dependent on words. Here is where we revisit the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in a weak form, one that allows for the possibility of thought outside of language: although language does impose a way to interpret the world, it is not ironclad. The example I gave of a word with no equivalent in English—dépaysement—helps us understand the room we have to manoeuvre. I used English—despite its lack of a word!—to explain the concept in ways that helped you understand it. If a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis held true, we would not be able to think outside the structure imposed by our language at all.

So how do we do it? In Nineteen Eighty-Four, characters think outside the structures of Newspeak in at least three ways. First, they engage in doublethink (the ability to treat two contradictory thoughts as true at the same time). Second, and more interestingly, they react to nonverbal signs, such as smells or sounds in nature. Finally, they encounter complex signs (those that are more than simple words) multiple times, and the signs evoke different things each time. In other words, characters are reflexive about their own thoughts. They are not as cut off from their history as the book would lead us to believe.

Doublethink

Throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell repeats the same cryptic trio of aphorisms:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

At first glance, these translations (which is what they are, as peace replaces war, slavery replaces freedom, and strength replaces ignorance) seem nonsensical. How could war be its opposite? Or freedom or ignorance? What they reveal, in fact, is that Newspeak is grounded in a contradiction, that of doublethink, or the act of knowing and forgetting at the same time (but also forgetting what you needed to forget, and then forgetting the act of forgetting). “Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink” because people had to forget they were doing it (25). This act is the contradiction that makes Newspeak possible: doublethink involves having thoughts that Newspeak would stamp out, but without doublethink, Newspeak could not exist.

What makes the aphorisms examples of doublethink? War is peace because Oceania’s perpetual state of war with its neighbours allows the Party to maintain order, if not peace, within its borders. Freedom is slavery because, as O’Brien explains, “power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual” (175), which is to say, in so far as he submits himself to slavery. Ignorance is strength because the Party remains strong so long as its individual members are kept in a state of ignorant servitude.²¹ In a feat of acrobatic dialectical thinking, people have to forget that war is war, freedom is freedom, and ignorance is ignorance. But the negated term in the dialectic remains in latent form. If it disappeared completely, there would be no need for either the Ministry of Truth (which labours to impose the Party’s ideological apparatus) or the Ministry of Love (which serves as its repressive apparatus).

Nonverbal Signs

Other signs reveal something different about the caveat about language. They are nonverbal—sounds, sights, smells, or other sensations that evoke something for characters, even if the characters struggle to name what it is. The taste of real chocolate, rather than the “dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted . . . like the smoke of a rubbish fire,” stirs up for Winston “some memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling” (81). Later, when he is awaiting his torturers, hunger evokes visceral notions of pain or panic, depending on how intensely he experiences it (152).

What makes these signs dangerous to the Party is their unruliness: the interpretants they evoke are visceral, and language is inadequate to describe them. They risk escaping the Party’s control. Consider the moment when Winston and Julia first meet, beyond the reach of the Party’s surveillance (or so they believe). They are in a field with bushes and trees, and they hear a thrush who seems to sing for the pure joy of it: “The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity” (82). Winston gives himself over to the performance: “by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt” (82). Later, the last time he and Julia are together before the Thought Police move in to arrest them, they revisit the scene:

“Do you remember,” he said, “the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?”

“He wasn’t singing to us,” said Julia. “He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.”

The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. . . . Everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure [a prole woman Winston has seen before], made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four. (147)

Julia insists the bird’s song was without meaning. Winston finds meaning there nonetheless: it reminds him of the prole woman he has heard singing, and the singing itself signifies something like freedom (figure 16). Hence the fear the Party has of these signs, which is apparent in its attempts to stamp them out. “The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world” (110). The Party can never take this persuasion for granted. It constantly has to resort to brute force to try to overcome the power of these signs. The amount of force it uses is in direct proportion to the power of these signs.

Signs That Evoke History

A third set of signs reveals in yet another way the limits of the Party’s control over thought. In contrast to the nonverbal signs, which tended toward the simple and unmediated, these signs are complex. They share an important trait: Winston encounters them twice over the course of the book, and their meaning changes because of the repetition.

What makes these examples interesting is that it is O’Brien (and through him, the Party) who exploits the semiotic gap between one use and the next. He presents them to Winston as a way to bring him into the Party’s solipsistic world. The first time Winston encounters each of these signs, they evoke ideas of freedom; the second time, frustration and hopelessness, as O’Brien turns the idea of freedom against itself. In the first example, Winston is at the Ministry of Truth when he comes across half a page of newsprint with a photo of men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. The Party’s official history records them as traitors. They confessed to their crimes and were executed. But the photo makes it clear that they were somewhere else when their supposed crimes took place. It is historical evidence that proves they were forced to lie. Such evidence, Winston realizes, is “enough to blow the Party to atoms” (53).

Later, Winston sees the photo again. O’Brien shows it to him briefly and then withdraws it from his sight.

“It exists!” [Winston] cried.

“No,” said O’Brien.

He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole [where people put paper to be incinerated] in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.

“Ashes,” he said. “Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.”

“But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.”

“I do not remember it,” said O’Brien. (164)

Winston recognizes O’Brien’s reaction as doublethink. The photo that once meant hope now meant “deadly helplessness” (164).

The second sign is an entire conversation Winston and Julia have with O’Brien when he has tricked them into believing he belongs to the resistance. O’Brien tells them they will receive orders they do not understand, and he wants to know what they are willing to do (figure 17). Will they commit “murder” or “acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people”? Will they “betray [their] country to foreign powers”? Will they be willing “to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases,” or even “to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face” if it would help weaken the Party? (114–15).

Yes, they answer. Their assent, as they see it and as O’Brien explains it, evokes a hope without hope, the idea that the future will be better, even if they will not know it. “There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime,” O’Brien says. “We are the dead.²² Our only true life is in the future” (117). Later, when O’Brien is torturing Winston, he plays a recording of this conversation: right after Winston accuses the Party of cruelty, O’Brien makes him listen to the terrible things he said he would do. A conversation that evoked notions of sacrifice in the name of freedom now evokes duplicity and moral depravity (figure 18).

What do we learn from this example? The conversation itself does not change. Its second iteration is a recording, after all. O’Brien uses the repetition to attribute new meaning to it and break Winston’s will. But there is something nonetheless redeeming about these examples, for they demonstrate that even the Party cannot change the fact that to use a sign is to transform it, and through that transformation, to translate it.

Conclusion: Cultural Translation Between Utopia and Dystopia

Chapter 1 presented a utopian vision of cultural translation: we can exploit the gap between signs to open up space for people who have been socially or politically excluded. This chapter presents the other side of the coin: we can also exploit this gap to close off space (the Party told people whom to hate) and impose our will upon others through real and symbolic violence.

In this respect, Nineteen Eighty-Four, although fiction, provides a valuable lesson for the worlds we walk through every day. What should we make of the fact that people can see in it their current political situation? If anything, the book and the tension it illustrates (between things that can be controlled through violence and things that can’t) help clarify the relationship between hope and work. Cultural translation has the potential to bring more openness to the world, but we must not let optimism overcome us. Similarly, cultural translation has the potential to allow for cruelty and injustice, but we must not let pessimism overcome us, either. Whatever effect is to be achieved, we must work to achieve it. We must actively engage with each other and with the systems of power that structure our relationships.

Hence the need for tactics to prompt others to see the world from a different perspective. Hence the question that grounds the next chapter: what tools do we have at our disposal to allow us to engage meaningfully with people with whom we do not see eye-to-eye?

1 See Kyle Conway, “Modern Hospitality.”

2 All page numbers in this chapter’s in-text citations come from the critical edition edited by Irving Howe, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Text, Sources, Criticism. Nineteen Eighty-Four is in the public domain in some jurisdictions, including Canada, where the full text is available on the website of the Gutenberg project, http://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/orwellg-nineteeneightyfour/orwellg-nineteeneightyfour-00-h.html.

3 Tomislav Z. Longinović, “Fearful Asymmetries: A Manifesto of Cultural Translation,” 6.

4 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 251–52.

5 Simon During, “More Orwell.”

6 During, “More Orwell.”

7 See, for instance, the reviews collected in Howe, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, 291–97.

8 Samuel Sillen, “Maggot-of-the-Month,” 299.

9 During, “More Orwell.”

10 William Lutz, “Notes Toward a Definition of Doublespeak,” 4. The rest of Beyond Nineteen Eighty-Four—a volume that Lutz edited and from which his essay comes—explores similar themes. Note that the word doublespeak does not appear in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

11 Walker Gibson, “Truisms Are True: Orwell’s View of Language,” 13.

12 For instance, Antoine Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign.”

13 Some of the few people to start with “The Principles of Newspeak” as a lens through which to interpret Nineteen Eighty-Four are the writers and producers of a 2017 stage adaptation. They observe that the appendix is “a really radical gesture against the rest of the book. It’s a book about how you can’t trust the written word.” Quoted in Jennifer Shuessler, “With ‘1984’ on Broadway, Thoughtcrime Hits the Big Time.”

14 Dan Dalton, “14 Perfect French Words and Phrases We Need in English.”

15 Whorf was Sapir’s student. Although Sapir’s influence on Whorf is clear, they did not in fact write any articles together, and much of what people recognize as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is an extrapolation from their respective publications.

16 Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a Science,” 209.

17 Benjamin Lee Whorf, “Science and Linguistics,” [6]. See also Lutz, “Notes Toward a Definition of Doublespeak,” 2.

18 Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, dirs., The Matrix (1999). The conceit that makes The Matrix work, namely, that computers can create worlds that seem self-sufficient to the people inside their programs, is common in popular culture, revealing a range of different ways to think about solipsism. Fans of the 1990s program Star Trek: The Next Generation will recognize it in the episode “Ship in a Bottle,” where a self-aware holographic “person” believes he exits the holodeck when really his consciousness is uploaded to yet another program. Fans of the more recent series Black Mirror will recognize it in a number of episodes, including “San Junipero,” where the hero uploads her consciousness to a computer-generated island paradise.

19 Of course, how do we know that the “real” world Neo enters after he takes the red pill is any more real than the one he left behind?

20 American Dialect Society, quoted in Ben Yagoda, “How Old Is ‘Gaslighting’?” The term comes from a film called Gaslight released in 1944, which was based on a play produced in 1938. It is about a man who tries to undermine his wife’s confidence in her own perception by insisting that the gaslights in their house do not flicker, even though they do.

21 Much of this philosophy is laid out in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, a book-within-a-book signed by Emmanuel Goldstein, the figurehead of the Brotherhood resistance movement. (O’Brien reveals when he tortures Winston that he is actually the author.) See 122–33.

22 This is the same phrase—“We are the dead”—that Winston uses when he thinks about how the proles (whom he has seen singing) might overcome the Party. Right before the Thought Police raid their room, Winston and Julia repeat the phrase again. It loses its messianic overtones and becomes quite literal when the Thought Police confirm in response, “You are the dead” (147).