The Dystopian Beyond: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract

Stretching behind the literal or metaphorical frontier, the beyond—regardless of its ontological status—constitutes, this article argues, a necessary complementary component of any dystopian reality that determines whether the dystopia in question is of the Orwellian or Hollywood type. Proposing to treat dystopia as a nonsemiosphere (i.e., a potentially semiotic space that eliminates independent acts of meaning assignation and uncontrolled socializing), the article discusses various methods of construing and deconstructing the beyond of the Orwellian type as exemplified in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Hence, the main focus is not on the core dystopian space of semiosis but, rather, on its periphery, boundary, and domains expected to be beyond dystopian control. What is taken into consideration are the political, social, temporal, psychological, textual, and generic “beyonds.”