Star’s Reading Blog

And my journey through dystopia comes to a close.

I think I got most of it out of my system yesterday. Today I’ll note that the whole thing with the war confuses me a little. I mean, it does and it doesn’t. I get it as a literary device, a way to communicate to the reader the conflict that Montag experiences within himself. It seems, however, to be more than just a metaphor; it seems to be an actual thing that is happening in the world of the book. In that sense, from a purely narrative point of view, I don’t understand how bombing one city both began and ended the war in one fell swoop. There aren’t really any details given about what that was supposed to mean. It’s not a huge thing, because the war itself is only incidental to the plot and serves more as that kind of reflection of Montag’s inner turmoil that I mentioned (in which sense it does work), but it kind of bugs me.

The 50th Anniversary Edition is crammed with all kinds of things after the end of the book. There’s an afterword about how the novel was written (on pay typewriters, a dime a half hour) and then a coda about censorship, and then an intervew with the author. The coda makes me wonder, in the unlikely event that I actually managed to make it as an author, what people would try to censor in my work. I suspect it would be the things I’d never even thought of as objectionable, or things that I hadn’t seen myself, probably. But then, while I’m learning more self-confidence, I am still not so egotistical as to think that my work will ever be half, a quarter, as well-known as Bradbury’s. So perhaps no one will try to censor it, because the people who do such things won’t take notice of it.

I leave you with these words from the coda:
If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture…

…In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.

Wikipedia:
“Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which leads to a perception of knowledge as being composed of ‘factoids’, partial information devoid of context, e.g. Napoleon’s birth date alone, without an indication of who he was.”

I read those lines before starting the book this time around, and with that in mind have been trying to be conscious of what theme was being conveyed. And no, it’s not really about censorship. The censorship is there, sure, but it’s only a part of the larger problem. After all, by and large the populace doesn’t want books anymore, in Montag’s world. Not because they’ve been conditioned not to want them, as in Brave New World, but because they don’t care anymore. The things on the parlor screens are more interesting. Who needs poetry when you have the “family”? Hell, who needs family when you have the “family”? We have, in Montag’s world, become so absorbed in television that we have allowed it to absorb us in a way that’s almost literal. We have surrounded ourselves with it to the exclusion of everything else, and that is literal.

Reading is a common thread, I’m realizing, through these dystopias I’ve been visiting. In A Handmaid’s Tale, women are forbidden to read anything, even something as relatively innocent as a sign on a shop. In 1984, reading is not forbidden, but print material is controlled by the Party, used to control the populace in turn. In Brave New World, reading is not specifically prohibited, but is considered a dirty and shameful activity, and the populace is conditioned to believe this. Why? Why are words so important?

Because they give our thoughts substance and allow us to share them. Because reading exposes us to ideas. Because reading teaches us how to think — not what to think, although it can do that too, but how to think. Because reading teaches us not just the patterns of thought and behaviour that we ourselves use, but also those to look for in other people. Because when we read, we discover individuality and creativity and reality and faith, both our own and others’. These are dangerous things for a government seeking control over its citizens. They are dangerous things for a citizen to lose. It’s a short jump from Fahrenheit 451, where people simply don’t care anymore, to Brave New World, where they can’t care anymore.

I can’t agree that television is the problem, though. I’ve ranted this rant elsewhere, somewhere. Our DVD library includes things like Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing. Is it inherently better to read the scripts for those plays than to watch them acted out on screen? By the same token, is it better to grab a trashy, mass-produced Harlequin romance than to watch those same Shakespeare adaptations? And if the answer to either of those is “yes”, then… why?

Then again, I suspect television now is a very different thing than television in 1953 was. How it’s different, I can’t say. And I’ll grant that an awful lot of what’s on our TVs today does seem pretty mindless, or at best filled up with all the little factoids and bits of trivia that Bradbury was afraid would keep us from seeing the bigger picture. I think, though, that we need to focus on the “apathy” part of the problem rather than the “television” part. (Or the “Internet” part, which I suppose is a whole other post of its own.)

I didn’t blog this one as I went along because I had a hard time coming up with anything to say that wasn’t fairly obvious. And perhaps my observations on other books have fallen into that category, too, but here it just seemed particularly pointless. I could go on about conditioning and an anything-goes culture and a society so dedicated to consumerism that even the human beings making up the society become products. I could talk about soma, the government-endorsed drug with no side effects. I could get into the culture-shock issues that John the Savage encounters.

You know what? I think I did that already; I first read this two years ago (coincidentally, specifically prompted by Banned Books Week, which is also this week), and blogged it at the time. Here, here, and here. I have little to add. Everything I thought I was going to say is more or less covered there, as is a bunch of stuff I hadn’t necessarily thought of this time. So… I think I’ll just spare myself the typing and let you read those past entries.

It’s been a long time, and my memory of the book had gotten reduced down to the incomplete general perception I mentioned earlier. Big Brother, constant surveillance, Thought Police, thoughtcrime, etc. I had forgotten the ending. The bleak, hopeless ending. There is no escape. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. There isn’t really a great deal of ambiguity to give that ray of light like there was in The Handmaid’s Tale. We know what happened to Winston and Julia. The power of the Party is absolute.

And yet…

The “appendix” giving a brief overview of Newspeak and how it was used to control the populace by controlling their thought patterns intrigues me. Not so much for the discussion of language, although that is interesting enough in and of itself. But it’s written as though someone in the future were looking back on it, documenting a phenomenon now dead. Everything is in the past tense; none of the information the writer is looking at is current. The point of the narrative itself seemed to be that the whole situation was hopeless, and yet… Here is a subtle indication that maybe the rule of the Party was not as absolute as it thought it was, perhaps there is hope after all.

Wikipedia tells me that I am not the only one to whom this thought has occurred. Apparently this is a subject of serious critical debate, whether the appendix “implies a hopeful end”. Of the opposition’s case, it says, “The counter view is that since the novel has no frame story, Orwell wrote the essay in the same past tense as the novel, with ‘our’ denoting his and the reader’s contemporaneous reality.” I don’t… think I can quite buy that, because wouldn’t that require some sort of time travel on Orwell’s part? The book was published in 1949. It would be difficult for him to write anything looking back on the year 1984 from that perspective. He wasn’t, after all, writing alternate history; it just reads that way to us now because real time has overtaken his fictional timeline. And if he’s projecting what he would say in the future and writing in narrative past tense, doesn’t that make it still part of the narrative?

Perhaps my perspective on this is influenced by having just read The Handmaid’s Tale, which ends in an epilogue which discusses the Republic of Gilead from the perspective of people in its future. The Appendix of 1984 feels very similar to me; people from the future of Oceania dissecting this strange dystopia that exists in their past. (Indeed, I see Margaret Atwood is listed among those who support the theory that the Appendix implies hope.)

I don’t know that I’d exactly call it “hopeful”, though, or at least not in the same sense that The Handmaid’s Tale is. There, we see the flaws that will eventually lead to the downfall of Gilead. There are already cracks in the system which have only to be exploited. It can’t last long. Here, we are shown cracks and then shown how the Party itself exploits them or fills them in. At every turn, Big Brother is watching. Every percieved freedom is shown to be false.

“Then it comes to be that the soothing light
At the end of your tunnel
Was just a freight train comin your way…”
–Metallica, “No Leaf Clover”

The Appendix itself is all we have to go on. It might be written five years after the narrative ends, or five decades, or five centuries for all we know. It’s hope of a kind, but a vague, nebulous hope. Sometime, somewhere, something will change. There isn’t an end in sight, you can’t count on some revolution changing everything. And by the way, you don’t have a prayer of starting that revolution yourself, either. You’d better get used to it, because Big Brother is here to stay. Which only keeps the system running as before, of course.

1984, too, is remembered slightly inaccurately in public consciousness. It is remembered for Big Brother, for constant surveillance, for the Thought Police, for the way those who disagree or think unorthodox thoughts are simply “vaporized”, not just killed but their existence erased entirely. Funny thing is, this doesn’t apply to the vast majority of the population of Oceania. These strictures apply only to members of the Party, and Winston estimates that 85% of the population are proletarians, proles — non-Party members.

This doesn’t mean, though, that things are not as bad in Oceania as they would be if that kind of repression were common to everyone. The proles are not precisely treated well, either; they simply aren’t regarded as anything better than animals. And though they might not be subject to the all-seeing eye of Big Brother, they are still controlled. They are lulled to sleep through propaganda and careful filtration and alteration of information, the rare troublemakers culled before they have a chance to stir the populace. Winston observes, “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they can never become conscious.”

Which, in fact, is precisely why the Party members must be so closely policed. Party members, especially those like Winston who work directly with the information being altered and are more or less aware of what’s happening, have the ability to deliver the slap, the bucket of icewater, that will wake the proles up. They cannot be allowed to do this. Through keeping Party members silent, the Party protects its hold on the minds of the proles without having to expend their resources keeping them under control.

All of which makes the “are you sure this isn’t happening now” even more relevant.

But then there’s Julia. Winston has the hardest time convincing her that history is being retouched, and when he does sort-of get through to her, she doesn’t seem bothered by it. She shrugs it off as irrelevant to her. As long as she can work within and around the system to secure her own comfort, a life that suits her, she doesn’t care about the rest. She isn’t bothered by the idea that everything she knows is false. And, do you know, I think this keeps the Party in power just as much as the Thought Police do. Apathy. Lack of recognition that an issue has any importance at all, unwillingness to do anything about it.

I babble. This book, and others like it, tend to do that to me. I try to pick it apart, see how it’s held together, if only so that I might have half a chance of seeing the warning signs if those conditions start creeping up on me…

I think that in some ways 1984 is more chilling than The Handmaid’s Tale. The thing about Tale is that it’s the sort of thing you can see maybe coming about under the right circumstances, with the wrong group in power. 1984 is the sort of thing that you read and wonder if it isn’t in progress already.

If the government were manufacturing truth, rewriting history, would you know it? How many times do you have to be told a thing is true before you believe it yourself, when none of the documentation you remember saying anything contrary exists anymore and everything that does exist says it’s true? Would you even know you’d been tampered with?

It is, I think, a less-feasible prospect now than it was in the late Forties when Orwell was writing the novel. International communication and travel has become much easier now. It would be much more difficult for one government to exercise that kind of control over the information available to its people. It could still be done, but the scope of the changes that would have to be made to hide anything major is mind-boggling.

Or is it? Does all this information at our fingertips make it more or less difficult? Do we become overconfident in our ability to find anything on the Web, making it easier to simply delete something and pretend that it never existed? Do mistakes become easier to cover because everyone knows 90% of the Web is crap and therefore conflicting data becomes less troublesome? Does the Internet make information more mutable? Certainly it would speed the delivery of “corrected” information to the masses. Consider, too, that many of the things the Party “corrects” aren’t major projects. A statistic changed here, a speech slightly reworded there. They add up to a lot, but each change in and of itself is just a tiny detail.

It’s easy to get eyeball-deep in conspiracy theory here. If you were a government with that kind of power and control, would you allow a book like 1984 to exist? No… But then it could be a ploy, a misdirection. “If this book still exists, surely we can’t be as bad as that, because we would have eliminated it, right?” “Or maybe they’re on their way to it, but don’t have the manpower to do it yet.” And so on and so forth. And in all honesty I do think that’s largely an exercise in paranoia. (Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to think!)

But at the same time, I think it’s good to question truth and reality once in a while. It keeps those critical thinking muscles strong. And I do think that it’s dangerous to get too complacent. Books like this come in very handy for sparking that kind of thing, which is maybe why I feel the need to take a turn through this literary space just now.

Well, I’ve reached the end of Tenant. Overall, I’ll stick with my previous observations. It’s a nice enough book in general, but best when Helen/Mrs. Huntingdon/Mrs. Graham is telling the story. When Gilbert Markham is narrating, things just seem to get really slow and overly melodramatic. Which, given that Helen is the one relating the story of abuse, I suppose is an acheivement in and of itself. I suppose, though, that’s not necessarily an indication that there isn’t a high level of drama in Helen’s parts of the story. Rather, the drama there is appropriate to the situation. To see the same level of it in Gilbert’s worries about whether he’ll ever get to marry her seems sort of ridiculous by comparison.

I never did really come to like Gilbert. I suppose some of this is cultural clash. I feel like he’s got only himself to blame for taking so long to get in touch with Helen in the final few chapters. OK, he didn’t know her address — but her brother was right there. He knew where she was. Ask, Gilbert, ask. If you don’t, whose fault is it that you didn’t find out? But maybe this is something that just Wasn’t Done in that time. Then again, Helen seems to have expected him to, so I’m not sure.

And then that ridiculous flight to Grassdale! I knew from the instant he heard the rumour that sent him there it wouldn’t be true. Gilbert! Wake up! Since when is Eliza Millward a reputable source of information? You know better than this! Don’t you remember what a gossip she is? If you’d just stayed where you were, you would have had your explanation quickly enough. Of course, it’s possible that then it would’ve taken him another decade or so to finally get in touch with Helen, waiting for Lawrence to say something to indicate that she was thinking of him or just happen to drop word of her address in Staningley or whatever.

And then, yes, the visit to Staningley. I was with him up to the part where Helen and little Arthur and Helen’s aunt came upon him standing by the road. OK, I get going there ASAP. I get that when he finds out she has property now, it puts her out of his social league. I think the notion to spare her the agony of having to decide between following her heart or following society’s strict rules was misguided, but I get where it came from at least. But then she asks if you came to visit her, and you say you came to visit the place, and you wonder why the heck she suddenly gets all frosty toward you? And come on, the symbolism of the rose blooming in winter was really not that difficult; did it really take her all but hitting you over the head with it?

All that sounds very harsh on the book, I suppose. I don’t intend for it to be. There are parts I was not thrilled by, there are parts I found a little annoying, but there were also parts that were very good and parts that I found engrossing. I would certainly recommend reading it at least once if you’re at all interested in literature from this time period. It’s just not my new favorite book, is all.

I think this book is most well-known for the portrayal of the subjugation of women, particularly of the Handmaids. From them all choice is taken. They are denied not only the choice we, here, today, usually mean when we speak of “a woman’s choice” — to abort or not to abort — but also any other possible choice of any consequence that can instead be made for them. They do not choose whether to become pregnant, whether to have sex (though Offred herself refuses to describe it as “rape”), whether to keep the baby after its birth or allow a Wife to adopt it. They do not choose what they wear, where to go or when, what to eat, or even whether to eat. They are not even allowed the choice of ending it all; every precaution is taken to remove any opportunity for suicide. No sharp edges, nothing to hang oneself from, shatterproof glass in the windows so that they can’t even jump out and hope. Offred describes herself, at one point, as a womb with two legs. This is what the Handmaids are, in the Republic of Gilead. They are a living support system for one organ, one function only.

The same problem is reflected, to a lesser extent, in the other women. The Wives, the Aunts, the Marthas, the Econowives. All tools to keep society running, the human race alive, nothing more than impersonal tools. The men are in power, the men have the control, the men are the only people and women are only there because they cannot be done without.

Except that’s not it, not it at all. The Handmaids, and women in a more general sense, are the most visible signs of the problem. The repression of women in Gilead is a symptom, though, not the disease. The whole society is broken at its core, rotting, sick, dying. Take a look at the Commander, for example. He is one of the highest-ranked men in Gilead, potentially one of its original architects. Even he feels constrained. He has more choice and more control, perhaps, than Offred does — not difficult to achieve given how little she has — but even he cannot so much as play a game of Scrabble with his Wife without risking dire consequences. The rules may be relaxed for him, as a male of high rank, but even for him certain things are contraband, certain activities are prohibited, certain words and ideas are heresy. Even he is not free, and he is in a better position to be free than nearly anyone else in the Republic.

This book is not a warning to women, keep an eye on what the government’s doing or you could end up a walking womb. This book is a warning to all of us, us people, regardless. Do not let this happen. It is not healthy for anyone. No one prospers. It will not last — and is that a warning, or a promise? It will not last, a society like this is not stable, there is light at the end of the tunnel, this too shall pass if it ever comes to be.

The epilogue puzzles me. What is its purpose? It does not tell us Offred’s eventual fate (which I’m just as happy about; I like the ambiguity). It speculates on the Commander’s identity, but that means little to us. It reassures us that Gilead did not last, I suppose. It perhaps serves to remind us that the details, these details that these future historians are focused on, are not the point. The point isn’t who Offred was or who the Commander was or what happened to either of them after the narrative ended. The point is, this is not healthy, and here is how we sank this low, here are the warning signs, beware.

I don’t know what else to say.

Previous entry:
“There are hints that Offred’s mother was a bit of a fundie, and perhaps the religious climate in her home growing up was not particularly healthy.”

Reading further, I am reminded that her mother is a radical feminist and a single mother by choice, not a fundie. Oops. In my defense, when people are burning porn it’s easy to get confused about their motives. In any case, it still supports what I was saying before. Fundie or radical single-parent feminist, Offred does not seem to consider her mother to have been a bad mother — she seems to love her and miss her quite a bit — but said mother’s influence does seem to have made life uncomfortable. As such things went before, in the time of anarchy and freedom to, that is.

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.

In the days of anarchy, women were free to. They were free to choose their clothing, their partners, their lifestyle. They were free to earn and spend money. They were free to smoke, to drink. They were free to read. Now they are free from. They are free from assault, free from worry that a walk in the wrong place at the wrong time will have dire consequences. They are protected, prized possessions, valuable assets. They are free from the burden of choice. Offred is one of the most prized, the most protected, a fertile woman in a land now largely infertile. Offred is free from, and remembers the days when she was free to.

The really interesting thing here is that Offred’s tale is not one of a perfect life ripped away from her by a totalitarian, misogynistic regime. She was not the good girl, the one who always did everything right but in the end got suppressed along with everyone else anyway. She tells us the story of her life “before” almost as much as she tells us the story of her life now, and it’s clear that the situation wasn’t perfect. She had a husband and a child, once, yes. But her husband was someone else’s husband when their relationship began, and something (as yet unclear to me) went wrong along the way. The child was taken from her at least once, Offred herself declared unfit. There are hints that Offred’s mother was a bit of a fundie, and perhaps the religious climate in her home growing up was not particularly healthy. She smoked, she had vulgar friends, she said and did vulgar things herself. Drug use is suggested; she says that there is a long time she can’t remember, and that she doesn’t believe she could have lost all that time without help, though she isn’t entirely certain herself.

And yet even when she’s recounting unhappy memories from before, there’s an evident longing to have that time back. Freedom to includes the freedom to seriously fuck up your own life — but freedom from that is clearly not worth the price in Offred’s estimation. She wants the time before back. Affairs and drug use and accusations of being an unfit mother and all. And that says more about the situation she finds herself in now than any fall from grace possibly could, I think.

The other thing that strikes me about the book, this time through, is the choice to tell the story in present tense rather than narrative past. Offred is narrating her life as it happens, not telling us something that has happened in the past. It’s an interesting choice to me not because it makes the story more immediate (though it does), but because of the way it underlines the division between the time before and now. There is no past, anymore; the past is just a dream, a wish, a prayer, a ghost. There is only now, and there only ever will be now.

Shiver.