George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Modernist Fable
GEORGE ORWELL’S NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR: MODERNIST FABLE
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.[1]
The world that Orwell presents in Nineteen Eighty-four has often been called a nightmare vision of the future. Writing sixteen years into that future, we can see that not all of Orwell’s predictions have been fulfilled in their entirety! Yet, “1984 expresses man’s fears of isolation and disintegration, cruelty and dehumanisation…Orwell’s repetition of obsessive ideas is an apocalyptic lamentation for the fate of modern man. His expression of the political experience of an entire generation gives 1984 a veritably mythic power and makes it one of the most influential books of the age, even for those who have never read it.”[2]
The impact and power of the novel continue to influence the reader even if it seems that the spectre of the dehumanised collective has been vanquished. However, the purpose of this assignment is not to assess the accuracy of the prophecy but to examine the novel against the parameters of modernist fiction.
To do this, I think it would be helpful to begin with an extremely brief summary of the chief characteristics of the modernist novel, and of modernism in general. Bradbury outlines four great preoccupations of the modernist novel: • the complexities of its own form • the representation of inward states of consciousness • a sense of the nihilistic disorder behind the ordered surface of life and reality • a freeing of narrative art from the determination of an onerous plot.
There is, in the modernist novel, a questioning of the conventional linear narrative, logical and progressive order, the establishing of a stable surface of reality. Frequently, metaphor and metonymy occupy a more prominent position than was considered normal in prose fiction. While the modernist novelists do not seem to depart from the broad categories/genres that they inherited from their
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.[1]
The world that Orwell presents in Nineteen Eighty-four has often been called a nightmare vision of the future. Writing sixteen years into that future, we can see that not all of Orwell’s predictions have been fulfilled in their entirety! Yet, “1984 expresses man’s fears of isolation and disintegration, cruelty and dehumanisation…Orwell’s repetition of obsessive ideas is an apocalyptic lamentation for the fate of modern man. His expression of the political experience of an entire generation gives 1984 a veritably mythic power and makes it one of the most influential books of the age, even for those who have never read it.”[2]
The impact and power of the novel continue to influence the reader even if it seems that the spectre of the dehumanised collective has been vanquished. However, the purpose of this assignment is not to assess the accuracy of the prophecy but to examine the novel against the parameters of modernist fiction.
To do this, I think it would be helpful to begin with an extremely brief summary of the chief characteristics of the modernist novel, and of modernism in general. Bradbury outlines four great preoccupations of the modernist novel: • the complexities of its own form • the representation of inward states of consciousness • a sense of the nihilistic disorder behind the ordered surface of life and reality • a freeing of narrative art from the determination of an onerous plot.
There is, in the modernist novel, a questioning of the conventional linear narrative, logical and progressive order, the establishing of a stable surface of reality. Frequently, metaphor and metonymy occupy a more prominent position than was considered normal in prose fiction. While the modernist novelists do not seem to depart from the broad categories/genres that they inherited from their