"Do It to Julia"

Abstract

There must be a limit to what we will do in order to stay alive.' Gandhi's words provide a glimpse into what can be meant by the term from either a religious or a humanistic perspective. It is Orwell's vision in 1984 2 of man without spiritual being that makes the novel a particularly frightening account of tyranny, reflected in other literary sources as well. Literature, including popular literature, is in part an attempt to assess our lives and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Two widely read modern novels-Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park3 and Saul Bellow's The Dean's December4 provide contemporary evidence of where we think we have arrived in 1984, and their vision, while not identical to that of 1984, conveys a similar message. Orwell's book was more a warning than a prophecy, and 1984 an arbitrary year in which to place the society which it projected; nevertheless, we can agree that conditions similar to the outer aspects of the 1984 society can be identified in many parts of the world. Argentina has just emerged from a military dictatorship characterized by the suppression of basic human rights and by imprisonment, torture, and death for its political opponents. The terrorizing of populations in the penitentiary societies of the Soviet bloc, in Latin America, and in the Middle East is familiar. It is also true that the major conditions of the Orwellian world have not come about in the way he described. What Orwell identifies that makes his book still pertinent is his perception of a dimension of modern totalitarianism affecting the spiritual being of its victims. Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism states that the aim of totalitarian societies is not to establish justice in a legal sense, but rather to