Reply #28: All your questions are... [View All]

[punpirate]

... interrelated. What does O'Brien tell him as he is torturing him? That the only thing that matters is the state, all else is subordinate to it, including Winston's individuality.

O'Brien was simply testing him. Had Smith shown no curiosity, or had reported O'Brien, he would be considered a good Outer Party member, and therefore, trustworthy. Because he didn't, he had to have his mind cleansed, according to the Party.

The time lapse might be to suggest that the Party didn't get around to things very quickly (was highly inefficient), but it's also possible that there was some arbitrary determination that he was needed as an example to the rest of the Outer Party at that time. When everything is for show, and nothing is real, it's a bit like needing a new game show contestant--just pluck one out of the available pool.

The torture and the capitulation are part and parcel of the desire for absolute conformity--of action and thought. That's the point about Newspeak--it's meant to short-circuit rational, independent thought. The party exists for its own sake, and anyone not thinking of it always lacks allegiance to it and is a threat to it.

Being able to torture someone into a capitulation means, in a way, resurrecting them to the party. For a system which operates for its own sake, the worst situation is having one or more people walking around who see the party for what it is--an arbitrary system which has no purpose other than to preserve power for the few. This is the point about 2+2=?. The rational answer is four, but in an upside-down, Alice-in-Wonderland society such as INGSOC, the proper answer is whatever the party says it is. Reducing Smith to the point of not being able to any longer form a rational thought makes him a suitable member of that society again.

The history of Orwell's writing of the novel certainly hinges on his disillusionment with communism after Stalin's purges and the institution of that particular brand of totalitarianism, but he also felt that the rest of the world had sunk to a level where arbitrary systems controlled what people knew and felt and thought, particularly through the distortion of language, even in Great Britain. As I recall, the title came not out Orwell's desire to imagine a future, but to suggest a present, to suggest that those distortions of language to control thought were current at the time of the writing of the book. He'd simply reversed the last two digits of the year in which he was writing the book, 1948.

For more on Orwell's take on the politicization and distortion of language, be sure to read his essay, "Politics and the English Language," which is here:

http://www.george-orwell.org/Politics_and_the_English_Language/0.html

Cheers.