Orwell said in an essay titled Why I write : "It is my purpose to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole." How far does Orwell achieve this in 1984 ?

Résumé du document

It is to be remembered that George Orwell fought for the Republicans (against Franco) in Spain towards the end of 1936. It was during this battle that Orwell was wounded. We know that George Orwell's ?Nineteen Eighty-Four' (published in 1949) publication was given this title because the novel was written in 1948. The novel was written during a muddled phase of global political unrest and on the other hand, a sense of calmness which was being weathered. Indeed it was the time when the Second World War had consummated and the downfall of Hitler's Nazi regime. It was at that time that Stalin's regime in the U.S.S.R. still deported the enemies of the Party to gulags. Further, the Cold War between the U.S.S.R and the United States of America had just triggered out. The U.S.S.R was regarded as the most totalitarian regime until Stalin's death in 1953. Orwell's work directly or indirectly criticizes totalitarianism and praises democratic socialism. This is evident as each and every line of his serious work that [he has] written since 1936 reiterates this criticism and appreciation. Considering those thoughts, it is an indisputable fact that Orwell's novel ?1984' as well as his previous political allegory on Animal Farm is both a literary masterpiece and a treatise on politics and totalitarianism.

Extraits

[...] Thus, Orwell does not hesitate to exaggerate some aspects of his novel, often playing on irony capitalists were fat, ugly men with wicked face ') and using specific stylistic processes (such as the simile ‘sheep-face'), in order to shock his reader I ever tell you [ ] about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market-woman's skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh ? But keen as mustard!'. In addition, we have long descriptions of the Minutes Hate'; we are also given details on the crowd attending the procession of the Eurasian (or were they Eastasian?) prisoners. Some passages are even poetic: was a peculiarly beautiful book. [...]

[...] Those three rhythmic powerful sentences, though short, sum up extremely well the whole ideology of Ingsoc! Orwell's art is also his play on symbols: one of the most important that can be found in 1984 is the division of the fictional superstates in the book, made according to the division that could be found during the Cold War Oceania stands for the United States of America, Eurasia for the U.S.S.R. and Eastasia for China. To my mind, we could also regard the paperweight Winston buys in the old junk-shop as a symbol of the fragile little world that Winston and Julia have made for each other: they would be the coral inside of it. [...]

[...] This official language of Oceania has been devised to meet political needs of ‘Ingsoc' and is also supposed to be an artistic exploit, at least according to the Party ideology. The purpose of Newspeak is not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits that would be proper to devotees of Ingsoc, but also to make all other methods of thought absolutely impossible. With Newspeak, ‘Doublethink' will be even easier and unorthodoxy will completely disappear. [...]

[...] Therefore, the lack of interest of the Party in proletarians leads to astonishing details: in the poor districts, one can find things that are abolished and forbidden to Party members, like old books, old furniture, prostitution and alcohol Is the working class simply too uneducated and to unorganised to pose any real threat? Probably. However, it remains that, as Winston says, there hope, it [lies] in the proles'. Orwell's greatest achievement to ‘fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole' is perhaps, as far as I am concerned, his invention of ‘Newspeak'. [...]

[...] To give two last examples, the ironic use of the word ‘joycamps' (equivalent in Newspeak of ‘forced labour camps') also remains us of Stalin's gulags and the character of Emmanuel Goldstein somehow stands for Trotsky, a leader of the bolshevist revolution (both were Jews rejected by the leader of the Party after their political success). As was stated previously, Orwell really intends to show through his novel a faithful painting of real political life in totalitarian regimes, but 1984 would not be a masterpiece if its content and style were the same as those we could find in a political treatise. 1984's originality is indeed the fact it makes a large audience take an interest in deep political problems, because the book is as attractive as a work of art. [...]