1985, or 'Tis Thirty Years Since

Burgess's 1985 was written in 1978 about 1984 (which, it insists, was actually about 1948). It owes something to 1990, quietly includes a jonbar point at 1937 and I read it in 2015. Let's take that in order, shall we? Ah: but which order?

1: 1984

1984 comes first, I suppose, since it is the jumping-off point for the whole enterprise, and because the first 102 pages of Burgess's 240-page novel constitute a monograph-length critique of Orwell's book. (I know, incidentally, that Orwell's actual title was Nineteen Eighty-Four; but I'm going to stick with the numerals for consistency with Burgess's follow-up). Burge makes two main points in this long intro: first, that 1984 is a comic novel, although few people recognise it as such; second, that the world of the novel, with its decaying social fabric, shortages and rationing, the smell of boiled cabbage and so on, is very precisely the world of Britain immediately after 1945. Burgess appends a quantity of personal reminiscence to bolster this latter point, and I have no problem accepting it. On the other hand, treating the novel as a grimly comic period piece hardly accounts for its global impact (and there's a case for pegging 1984 as one of the most influential works of fiction of the 20th-century). What Orwell does is that Shakespearian thing of parlaying cultural specificity into universal resonance. If 1985 fails to do that same thing, we can at least agree it's a pretty high bar to clear.

Orwell's specificity cuts two ways. One is to retort back on the more absurd elements of British life: Burgess talks about the Butlin's Holiday Camp quality of the social regimentation in the book; the BBC-ish flavour of the Ministry of Truth and so on. (On the former, he's quite astute: these camps 'prove that the British proletariat is not really averse to discipline. The working man opposes army life not to civilian freedom so much as the infusion of geniality into regimentation' [24]). But the second way it cuts is more prophetic. Orwell genuinely gets under the skin of the totalitarian mindset. His fable captures something horribly accurate about life in 1940s Russia, 1960s Burma, contemporary North Korea. The twentieth-century will be remembered, alas, for its genocides and its deep engagement with autocratic and totalitarian social praxis, something Orwell, Beckett and Kafka all captured in their writing with a vividness that supersedes 'realism'. This is what makes them arguably the three greatest writers of their time.

Nonetheless, one aspect of Orwell's novel has always bothered me, and it's the great care and attention the senior party official O'Brien lavishes upon the torture-brainwashing of Winston Smith. It certainly works, dramatically; and elements from this portion of the book (the rat, 'Room 101', O'Brien's 'if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever') remain of course the novel's most famous and widely known moments. Still it's surely, shall we say, unlikely that a senior officer in the Thought Police would have the time or leisure to devote several weeks to one insignificant figure. Were Smith some notorious or important celebrity, the turning of whom could be put to propaganda usage, it might make sense to invest all this time and personal attention in him. But Smith's an outer-party-member nobody, a mere cog in the machine, and any ruthless totalitarian power worth its salt would either send him to a camp to be reeducated by rote with thousands of others, or more likely would simply shoot him. The latter seems to me the more plausible eventuality.

I know I'm being a little obtuse in noting this. The book is a fable, and the passage of Smith through the hands of O'Brien stands-in for a larger process by which people are broken and remade (we could compare Koestler's Darkness at Noon, a direct influence upon Orwell, in which the two torturers seem to have endless time to work on the lone figure of Rubashov). We could also speculate that O'Brien is enjoying himself: his big speech inhabits a distinctly sexualised BDSM idiom of delight in staged humiliation even as it boasts that 'we shall abolish the orgasm'. But I have a different point to make. It's that I think a better way of reading these scenes is to see O'Brien less as a secret policeman or state-sponsored torturer, and more as a kind of schoolmaster. The idea that brainwashing and ideological reeducation might involve solving an elementary blackboard sum (2 + 2 = ?) takes us back to a deliberately inverted sense of Eton as ‘Airstrip One’ (strip out the ‘rs’, the ‘rip’ and lop off the final ‘e’ and what have you got?). And actually D J Taylor notes this about O’Brien: his ‘schoolmasterly’ quality, in the sense of ‘a patient, occasionally exasperated instructor urging on a student who may still “make good” if he is sufficiently goaded. Orwell even notes that he “assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil.’ [D J Taylor, Orwell: the Life (Chatto 2003), 404-05].

This is relevant to Burgess's 1985, I think. Orwell worked as a teacher for a couple of years in the early 1930s, but his dramatic perspective aligned itself much more with the experience of being the schoolboy than the master. Burgess, who spent much longer stretches of his life as a teacher, in the army, in the Far East and in England, is much more the natural educator, much less in sympathetic affiliation with the kids. Something of this is behind his Explainderby tendencies, I'd say; and many of his books are straightforwardly designed to teach the reader things about things.

I'm not saying that Burgess's allegiance is with O'Brien, even subconsciously. Not at all. But I am saying that, in following Orwell and filtering his dystopia through the classroom, he comes at the matter from the opposite side entirely. Burgess's protagonist, the put-upon Bev Jones, used to be a history teacher ('at Jack Smith University'; a dig either at this guy, or perhaps this one), but he lost his job for ignoring a Ministry Directive to restrict all teaching to 'the history of the trade union movement' [114]. Having become an un-person Jones journeys around a ghastly extrapolation of 1970s Britain never missing the opportunity to lecture the people he meets on freedom, truth and the like. Eventually he is incarcerated in a re-education centre, in scale somewhere between the individual and dolorous tutorials Winston Smith receives and the mass institutions of Maoist China. Of course the 'education' being promulgated in this place is a travesty, and Burgess's Jones easily resists it. The novel ends with him committing suicide in prison, but there's something Romantic and heroic about the deed. By folding the novel into the comfortable bosom of 'tragedy', broadly conceived, Burgess misses something crucial in Orwell's original conceit. Patrick Reilly notes that

Winston begins as our spokesman, upholding the same pieties that we revere. When he rejects these pieties, his recantation poses a problem. We are not to join him in craven capitulation to Big Brother, but neither, at the risk of being Pharisees, can we dismiss him as a weakling who has fallen miserably below our own high standard. To imply that Big Brother’s good fortune was not to have us for opponents smacks of presumption. The book asks us to identify with Winston and say honestly how we would fare in his place. Orwell’s mortifying intention within the text is to extort the humiliating confession that we would do no better. [Patrick Reilly ‘1984: the Insufficient Self’, in Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey and Nahem Yousaf (eds) New Casebooks: George Orwell (Macmillan 1998), 122]

A better 1970s dystopian vision, both more effective and more fully Orwellian, is Pink Floyd's The Wall, because it understands how the structures of power as domination match the schoolroom's arbitrary heirarchised performance of authority with an inescapable, ongoing deformation of the inward person. How Burgess would hate the comparison! But (and, pompously enough, I'm taking the significance of The Wall as a major dystopian text for granted here) one's reaction to the Floyd may gauge one's openness to the premises of Burgess's Orwellian rewiring. I remember when the single 'Another Brick in the Wall' charted Clive James took to his Observer column to express his disapproval of a choir of inner-city kids singing 'We Don't Need No Education'. 'British kids don't need no education like the Sahara Desert don't need no rain' was his judgement. You see his point, of course: education is a huge social as well as personal benefit. I'm sure Burgess, if he was ever aware of the song, would strongly have deprecated it. But unless you can grok the affective subaltern truth in that song's, and album's, appropriation of 'the school' as a means of talking about tyranny then I wonder if you can properly grasp 1984. Which, in a nutshell, is the point I'm suggesting Burgess missed in 1985. And talking of that novel—

2: 1985

1985 has not been well received, critically. Since I've already mentioned Clive James, here's his review of the novel:

1985, which could just as well have been called Look Forward in Mild Irritation, avowedly exaggerates trends already visible in present-day Britain. The unions are in control, everyone is on strike, children learn nothing in school, and the whole place is overrun with Arabs .... 1985 sounds like the same union-bashing gone in for by all those members of the British managerial class who are convinced that their entrepreneurial flair is being stifled. It seldom crosses their minds that they, too, are part of the problem. Solipsistic without being self-searching, Burgess shares the same irritable conviction that he knows how things should be. 1985 is a yelp of annoyance, already out of date before it is published. Nineteen Eighty-Four, a minatory illumination of the darkest propensities in human nature, will be pertinent forever.

James's review, actually, is at the milder end of Burgessbashing where this particular novel is concerned. James Nicholl for example declares he would have preferred to publish '1111 words of me screaming incoherently' as 'a suitable riposte' to a book that consists of 'an elderly conservative moaning on about how the trade unions, women’s lib, gay homosexuals, and Those Darn Kids ruin everything, leaving poor Britain supine before the virile might of the Islamic world.' Instead of that, he confines himself to calling the novel 'a colossal waste of time' and 'crap'.

Both responses (and these are far from alone) articulate an honest hostility bounced-off the novel's manifest right-wing ideological agenda. And looking back with our Scottian thirty years of hindsight, it's clear Burgess was crying wolf rather than Cassandra-ing. His dystopian Britain is called 'Tucland' because the TUC has overlaid its socialist sickle-C over the honest K of the acronym 'The United Kingdom'; closed shops are legally mandatory and workers who recuse themselves from union membership are denied both the chance to work and access to unemployment benefit. Every strike swiftly becomes a general strike. The narrative hook for the novel portion of 1985 is a fire in a hospital, set by the IRA. Because the firemen are on strike, they do not put it out. Bev Jones watches in horror as his wife burns to death. This event sets him on a self-destructive path through destitution, shoplifting, prison, a re-education camp, dalliance with a quasifascist private militia and finally an encounter with the new Islamic powers in the land. He has a thirteen-year-old, mentally challenged daughter who spends her time masturbating and watching TV. This lass eventually joins the harem of Sheikh Jamaluddin Shafar ibn Al-Marhum Al-Hadji Yusuf Ali Saifuddin, 'chairman of the Islamic Oil Union' [198] and defacto ruler of the UK. Bev ends the novel in prison for a second time. Believing his daughter dead, he commits suicide by throwing himself on the electrified fence surrounding the facility.

That makes the novel sound dour, which it isn't at all. And the obvious point is how anti-prophetic it has proved. There certainly was a degree of right-wing fear in the 1970s that the unions were too powerful, and I'm old enough to remember the various inconveniences (power-cuts, rubbish lying uncollected in the streets) that attended that decade of strikes culminating in the 'winter of discontent'. But the drift of society through the 80s and 90s was away from unionisation; and the closed shop, which is Burgess's real bugbear, is now strictly illegal under section 137(1)(a) of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992. I'm a union member, have been in my time secretary of my local association, and I do not share Burgess's animus against unionisation. It seems to me that prodigious, humane and vital advances have been made in social justice via the power of labour to bargain collectively. More, I'll confess that when I first read this novel, some years ago, I bounced off it almost as hard as James '1111 words of me screaming incoherently' Nicholl. Re-reading it in 2015 has, though, completely changed my view of the novel.

I cannot claim that 1985 is one of Burgess's masterpieces, or even that it is a likeable novel. What I can do is suggest that its very unlikeability, ratcheted to almost hyperbolic levels, is actually the point of this book. The mistake we are liable to make is to read the novel as if Burgess himself has buttonholed us in the pub and is ranting about the evils of decimalisation, unions, the dumbing-down of language and culture and Arabs. It's undeniably one of the ways we might take this novel, but I'm not sure it's the best way.

The novel presents itself as anti-Union, but Burgess's underlying point is less party-political and more aesthetic, or it would be more accurate to say 'novelistic'. The TUC is one side of the (as Burgess styles it) dystopian possibilities of totalitarian power. Islam is the other. In either case, power depends upon the ability to maintain an effectively collective harmony. In both cases, Burgess's opposes collectivisation on the basis of a kind of supernaturalised naturalism, a Romantic investment in the individual. Here's how Bev's story ends, in prison:

His heart was weak, watch that heart. He stumbled through the unknown pasque-grass to that part of the electrified perimeter that was framed by two knotty apple trees. Those trees had given sour crabs for a long time. They would survive for a while, and that was a small comfort. The moon, defiled by politics, its poetry long drowned in the Sea of Storms, had but recently risen. ... He nodded farewell to the moon. Then he bared his fleshless breast to the terrible pain of the electrified fence, puzzling an instant about why you had to resign from the union of the living in order to join the strike of the dead. He then felt his heart jump out of his mouth and tumble among the windfalls. [219]

That slightly wobbly attempt to universalise union membership and strike action into existential categories aside, this is a perfectly lovely bit of writing, similar in tone and purport to the ending of Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading (1938). But where Burgess's protagonist dies into a kind of Romantic apotheosis, Orwell's Winston Smith lives through the death of the Romantic inside him, precisely in order to lives on as a type of post-homo-sapiens. Not for nothing was Orwell's working title The Last Man in Europe.

It's one of the ways that Orwell's book has so little family resemblance to 'the novel' as conventionally written. Burgess is working in the mainstream of fiction as a fundamentally bourgeois narrative of an individual in society. Even novelists like Dickens or Joyce who include a large and varied cast of characters focus their novels on the one bourgeois point-of-view individual. Of course there have been attempts to broaden the scope of the novel, to write not about the one heroic or anti-heroic individual and his/her vicissitudes, but instead about 'society' and 'history' in a larger sense. Dos Passos's U.S.A. comes to mind, and I wonder if it is significant that Burgess wrote 1985 after abandoning the experiment of a Dos Passos-style historical novel about Edward the Black Prince. Maybe he couldn't get it to work to his satisfaction. Certainly 1985, working so poorly as a portrait of a society, works much better as the narrative of an individual. The really revolutionary implication of 1984 is that it hints at ways of moving beyond the latter. Very swiftly, ab sublimum ad ridiculo, I once planned a sequel to 1984 myself: I was going to call mine 2084, and start from a place where individual human beings had actually been abolished, individual actors were mere cells in the body of the three superstates. These hive-minds would, during the course of the novel, slowly come to a new level of consciousness, signalled by writing the beginning of the story actually in Newspeak and only slowly broadening it. It would have no focal point characters with which readers might identify and would be hated by the few and ignored by the many, but I'm still quite tempted to write it. Maybe when Orwell's literary estate comes out of copyright in 2021.

3: 1990

One thesis I have is that 1985 is less a response to the socio-economic specificities of the late 1970s, and more a metatextual triangulation between Orwell's 1984 on the one hand, and a much less-well-known text, 1990, on the other. This latter was a 1977 TV serial conceived by Wildred Greatorex, whose name always used to strike as having something dinosaurian about it. The show starred Edward Woodward as Kyle, a crusading journalist, helping dissidents escape the tyranny of a future socialist UK to the freedom of the States.

Britain, under the heel of the Public Control Department, increasingly crushes individualism, and several key plot elements of these two series (and novelisations) surely informed Burgess's own dystopian imagination. The protagonist getting tangled up in the creation of a private militia is one: Greatorex calls his the 'pentagon'. Another is the main hinge of the series, in which having publically humiliated the government one time too many, Kyle's union status is stripped from him and he becomes a non-citizen. Although he is brought back from these lower depths for series two, the experience has changed Kyle: he has lost his idealism and now helps illegal emigrants for money rather than principle.

I watched this show avidly when it was aired, and even read the two tie-in novelisations. It always struck me much more as a through-a-mirror-darkly drama about the Soviet Bloc than as having any immediacy or relevance to Britain. Partly this was because the topics focussed on in ther specific week-by-week dramas (show trials; chess geniuses desperate to defect) seemed much more straightforwardly Soviet. If one of the things I am arguing here is that Burgess was aware of Greatorex's series, then by splitting the difference as he does between 1990 and 1984 he is also repudiating the efficiency and totality of the vision of dystopian social control. AB argues repeatedly that 1984 is actually a comic novel, and 1985's version of dystopia is certainly that—the humour is dark but actual, and a lot of it concerns the failure of repressive intent and practical command to link up. An officer of the state is leading Bev and other malcontents to a reeducation facility by train; the train stops abruptly because the train driver's union has called a wildcat strike. There are no buses. Nothing the secret policeman can do will alter this immutable fact. And so on. One of Burgess's points is that 'classic' dystopian narratives like We and 1984 are predicated upon implausibly effective and wide-ranging systems of oppression and control. Real life, and certainly real UK life, is just too shonky and crappy for that. Hence his preferred name for the type of novel he is writing: cacotopia. Tales of Shitland.

That shittiness is often funny, as Burgess writes it: but crucially it extends not just to the worldbuilding of this novel but to its narrative tone. The narratorial positions here are just a bit shitty: a bit racist and homophobic and reactionary, and I think Burgess knows it: hence the immoderate length with which he goes on and on about the wickedness of decimalisation. Burgess defends 'old money' on the gloriously daft premise that 12 pence in shilling and 20 shillings in the pound is more logical than the new system—as if working out, like Pip in Great Expectations, what 43 pennies are in shillings and pence (Pip is prepared to go with 'forty-three pence seven and sixpence three farden') were as simple as agreeing that 43 pennies is 43p; or as if adding 12/7 to £1. 15s. 11d were as straightforward as adding 65p and £1.50. The shittiness, I'm suggesting, is a calculated strategy, right down to the jokes, which are often genuinely crappy. Example: the Arabs, having taken over all the country's hotels, rename them 'Al-Dorchester', 'Al-Hilton' and 'Al-Idayinn' [121]. Look at that last pun once again. Shitty, no? I could extend this analysis a little further by suggesting that Burgess's real target is the dark glamour of the worlds of We and 1984. The 'danger' of Arab takeover in this novel is less a question of hatred of a racialised Other, and more about the alluring purity of vision Islam offers the hard-pressed, heath-robinson, rubbishy, disorganised, bickering people of these shonky islands. Such purity is essentially totalitarian, Burgess thinks, because people are not pure.

In 1984, Orwell conceives of 'Newspeak', a genuinely alarming linguistic possibility in which the language is pared-down and refined to a point of such unsulliedness that it becomes no longer even possible to think thoughts in opposition to the ruling party. In 1985 Burgess's make sly mock of this with 'Worker's English' or 'WE' (a nice little Zamyatin nod, I think) characterised by estuary pronunciation, dumbed-down syntax and a preference for the merely phatic and redundant. 'The National Anthem began to pulse from the loudspeakers':

Send im victorious
Appy an glorious
Long to rine orious
Gawd sive ve— [212]

This is probably less class-condescending than it seems. 'Orious', after all, has the ring of something prayed-for and sanctified. WE, by obscuring meaning, acts almost the opposite way to Newspeak. 'I never know whether you're being facetious or not,' one character observes, 'with your WE, I mean' [164]. Also there is something both genuinely earthy and often funny about the proletarian demotic in the novel. On trial, and having expatiated with various degrees of highfalutin pomposity about individual freedom, Bev finally reverts to: 'fuck you, shitbag'. The court officer approves. 'Better that is, boy bach. Talking like a worker you are now' [154]. The carnivalesque ribaldry of much of this is like nothing at all in the much more sexually puritanical 1984. Bev has to share a cell with another delinquent, who is beguiling the time by singing this filthy song:

They shoved him down and they shoved it up
Till his cup was well-nigh overflowing,
And this went on till the crack of dawn
And all the time their cocks were crowing. [149]

Look again at the name 'TUC(K)land'; Trades Union Congress, yes; The United Kingdom, OK. But 'Tuck', like the word 'Cut' (to which it may be related, although the term may be simply anatomically descriptive) is slang for female genitalia.

4: 1937

In April of this year Eric Blair, serving with the Spanish POUM forces, was shot in the throat. He recovered, of course; but he might not have done. Burgess, in a throwaway reference, makes clear that this is the hinge-point in the novel's back-history .

'George Orwell' Bev said. 'My uncle fought with him in Spain. God, fifty years back. Orwell died very unpleasantly at Pamplona or somewhere. Planning, so my uncle said, a book about homage to Catalonia till the very day he was shot.' [164]

That's all we get, but it's enough to take some of the sting from the 'grumpy old man in the pub' aspect of the novel. Let's treat the novel not as a reactionary anti-Union sermon but instead as an alternate history. This is amongst other things a way of Burgess paying huge, if tacit, tribute to Orwell himself as a kind of genius of the apotropaic: for the implication here is surely that simply by writing 1984 Orwell prevented '1984' from coming about. In You've Had Your Time Burgess concedes that much of the novel simply doesn't work because the Monaco-resident writer was 'out of touch with British life' ('my fictional workers were old-fashioned stereotypes puffing Woodbines and eating plum duff and custard. The reality was more sophisticated' [YHYT, 354]). That's right, I think. But he goes on to disavow prophesy as his mode:

What we mean by futfic ...

(Pausing a moment to shudder with revulsion at AB's horribly flatulent-sounding coinage, here. Ugh. On we go:)

What we mean by futfic or future-fiction is the creation of alternative worlds which do not have to relate to the possible or plausible. Remake the past, as Keith Roberts does in Pavane or Kingsley Amis does in The Alteration and you are safe.

Safe from what? Perhaps the point is that we read Pavane as a meditation on Englishness and the fragility of history, rather than as a pointedly anti-Catholic tract (although actually it is quite anti-Catholic, as articulations of 'Englishness' often are). Does this let Burgess off the hook, from a Nichollsian 111 words of screaming incoherently at the antiquated and reactionary ideology of the piece? Maybe a little.

5: 2015

This was the year I read the late Christopher Hitchens's book on Orwell.

Before reading this I hadn't realised that Orwell was essentially identical to late-period Christopher Hitchens, ideologically and temperamentally speaking. (It's not a bad book, actually; but good grief Hitch isn't coy about rewriting his subject as himself). Still, the broader misrepresentation of Orwell notwithstanding, Hitch makes a number of powerful and telling points, and here's one of them about the ill-fit between 1984 and specific party political agendas. First he quotes Orwell's repsonse to a New York Daily News editorial claiming the book was anti-socialist:

My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences. The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism if not fought against could triumph anywhere.

Hitchens adds:

Notwithstanding this elaborate disavowal or démenti authors in need of a quick fix continued to use even the clapped-out Labourism of the late 1970s as a template for a sub-Orwellian literary enterprises. Anthony Burgess's 1985 has, instead of Airstrip One, a country named 'Tucland', for the old dinosaurs and carthorses of the Trades Union Congress ... even Robert Conquest wrote a poem entitled '1974: Ten Years to Go' in which the menacing figures of Tony Benn, the TUC (again), student Sparts and the IRA were pressed into service. Not all that frightening even at the time, they seem almost quaint today. There is an aesthetic as well as an ideological difference between a deindustrialised banana republic and a hermetic terror state; Orwell's insistence on the distinction was just and necessary. [Hitchens, 77]

Quite.