Hope against Hope: Orwell’s Posthumous Novel

Abstract

few books published in the twentieth century had the impact of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It crossed the line between a popular and a literary audience and intrigued students of politics as much as readers of futuristic fiction. It mirrored contemporary history but also influenced history by making the case against totalitarianism especially Soviet-style Communism so intelligible and unforgettable. It turned the long-standing themes of Orwell's journalism into a fable and the Utopian claims for the workers' paradise into a nightmare. When I first read it in high school, I was most taken with Orwell's ingenious phrasemaking: Newspeak, Big Brother Is Watching You, the Anti-Sex League, the mentory hole, unperson, doublethink. Though I was no great fan of science fiction, I knew that the Cold War had found its authentic poet. Rereading the book in 1984 itself, I marveled at how the ubiquitous surveillance in Orwell's future state anticipated later advances in the technology of snooping. I was struck too by Orwell's geopolitical vision, borrowed from the work of a well-known social critic, James Burnham, as he portrayed three large blocs in perpetual but limited war against each other the Cold War and the nonaligned group in a nutshell. The early 1980s saw Orwell writ large in the Cold War's last intense flare-up. In the aftermath of the Soviet takeover in Afghanistan, an American president revved up the arms race, campaigned against the Evil Empire, and helped undo the conservative, geriatric leadership in the Kremlin. New