UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA

ANIMAL FARM and

NINETEEN EIGHTY-
FOUR
Sir Thomas More
(1478 – 1535)
• The word “Utopia” was coined by Sir
Thomas More for his 1516 book of the same
name. More used the word both to name
the unknown island described by the
Portuguese sailor Raphael Hythloday.
• To coin the word “utopia”, More
resorted to two Greek words – ouk (that
means not and was reduced to u) and
topos (place), to which he added the suffix
ia, indicating a place. Etymologically,
utopia is thus a place which is a non-
place, simultaneously constituted by a
movement of affirmation and denial.
• What are the features of More’s UTOPIA:
• ● it is isolated, set apart from the known world;
• ● its inhabitants and its laws are so wonderful that
it should be called Eutopia (the good place) instead
of Utopia.
• * UTOPIA and EUTOPIA are pronounced in exactly
the same way.
• Over the centuries since the publication of More’s book, rich utopian literature has
been produced, representing utopia as a better place or time, a portrait of a happy
society. At the same time, there has been a trend of scepticism which has resulted in
the production of ANTI-UTOPIAN or DYSTOPIAN writing.
• The first recorded use of dystopia (which is
another derivation neologism) dates back to 1868
and is to be found in a parliamentary speech in
which the philosopher John Stuart Mill tried to find
a name for a perspective which was opposite to that
of utopia: if utopia was commonly seen as “too good
to be practicable,” then dystopia was “too bad to be
practicable.”
Utopia Versus Dystopia
In “dystopia” dys comes from the Greek dus, and
means bad, abnormal, diseased.
Dystopian writing existed before the 20th
century. Nonetheless, it is generally
assumed that in the twentieth century
dystopia becomes the predominant
expression of the utopian ideal, mirroring
above all the colossal failures of
totalitarian collectivism in the former
Soviet Union.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is
perhaps the best-known instance of
dystopian fiction produced at a time when
the Second World War gave way to the
Cold War. As the resource on Orwell’s life
shows, in the 1930s he put his life on the
line in order to defend the radical
democratic initiatives of the Spanish
Republic.
• The final sections of his book Homage to Catalonia
(see the resource on Orwell’s life) offer a grim
witness to the liquidation of democratic socialist
forces in Spain by the Communist Party-aligned
Republican government in 1937, a purge that Orwell
narrowly escaped by fleeing to France.
Burned by this first-hand experience of
Stalinism and horrified by the British
government’s suppression of information
about the Stalinist purges during the
Second World War, when Britain was allied
with the Soviet Union against Nazi
Germany, Orwell wrote the anti-Stalinist
novella Animal Farm (1945).
ANIMAL FARM
Animal Farm is a political fable.
 A classic fable is a short,
fictional tale which has a
specific moral or
behavioural lesson to
teach. Most fables feature
animals as their main
characters, representing
human beings, or perhaps
particular types of people
or kinds of behaviour.

A classic fable….
Animal Farm depicts a rebellion of farm animals in order to
allegorize the miscarriage of the communist revolution in the
Soviet Union. In this political fable, the emancipatory energies of
the revolution are corrupted when the pig Napoleon drives his
rival Snowball – allegorical representations of Joseph Stalin and
Leon Trotsky, respectively – into exile, and then scapegoats
Snowball for all succeeding mishaps on the farm. Napoleon
enforces his increasingly draconian rule by using a group of dogs
he has personally trained, in a reference to the Soviet secret
police organization Orwell had encountered in Spain.
Orwell had a great deal of trouble finding a publisher for Animal
Farm during the war years as a result of its perceived Trotskyist
critique of the Soviet Union; in one instance , a publisher
rescinded his agreement to go to press after a British Ministry of
Information official, who was later unmasked as a Soviet agent,
advised against publication.
• Embittered by these experiences, Orwell wrote Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949) in order to warn against the dangers of
creeping totalitarianism.
• The novel was written after much of the scale and enormity of
totalitarian brutality had been revealed.
Totalitarianism, a form of government that theoretically permits no individual
freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of the individual’s life to the
authority of the government. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini coined the term
totalitario in the early 1920s to describe the new fascist state of Italy, which he
further described as: “All within the state, none outside the state, none against the
state.” By the beginning of World War II, “totalitarian” had become synonymous
with absolute and oppressive single-party government. The totalitarian states of
Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler (1933–45) and the Soviet Union under Joseph
Stalin(1924–53) are well-known examples of totalitarianism, in which the state
achieved overwhelming popular support for its leadership. This support was not
spontaneous; its genesis depended on a charismatic leader; and it was made
possible only by modern developments in communication and transportation.
Totalitarianism is often distinguished from dictatorship,
despotism, or tyranny by its supplanting of all political
institutions with new ones and sweeping away of all legal, social,
and political traditions. The totalitarian state pursues some
special goal, such as industrialization or conquest, to the
exclusion of all others. All resources are directed toward its
attainment regardless of the cost. Whatever might further the
goal is supported; whatever might foil the goal is rejected.
• Because pursuit of the goal is the only ideological foundation for the
totalitarian state, achievement of the goal can never be acknowledged.
• Under totalitarian rule, traditional social institutions and
organizations are discouraged and suppressed; thus, the social fabric is
weakened, and people become more amenable to absorption into a
single, unified movement. Participation in approved public
organizations is at first encouraged and then required. Old religious and
social ties are supplanted by artificial ties to the state and its ideology.
As pluralism and individualism diminish, most of the
people embrace the totalitarian state’s ideology. The
infinite diversity among individuals is blurrred,
replaced by a mass conformity (or at least
acquiescence) to the beliefs and behaviour
sanctioned by the state.
Large-scale, organized violence becomes permissible and
sometimes necessary under totalitarian rule, justified by the
overriding commitment to the state ideology and pursuit of the
state’s goal. In Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, whole
classes of people, such as the Jews and the kulaks (wealthy
peasant farmers) respectively, were singled out for persecution
and extinction. In each case the persecuted were linked with
some external enemy and blamed for the state’s troubles, and
thereby public opinion was aroused against them and their fate
at the hands of the military and the police was condoned.
While Nineteen Eighty-Four has commonly been
interpreted as an anti-Stalinist book, it has also been
suggested that Orwell combined certain anti-
modernist and anti-capitalist themes with a hostility
to Stalinism and Fascism.
Despite the prominence of the anti-communist interpretation
of the work, Orwell himself wrote that it was
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 centralised economy is liable and
which have already partly been realised 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.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in Oceania, Airstrip One.
• As explained in Emmanuel Goldstein’s Theory and Practice
of Oligarchical Collectivism, the book within the book, which
turns out to be written by Inner Party leaders, the existing
world system is one of three great states engaged in
permanent warfare both for labour-power and as a means of
ruling their own populations. These wars expend the results
of machine production without actually raising the standard
of living, which Orwell implies would threaten their power
and legitimacy because greater equality would threaten
hierarchy. The three states share the same set of values,
variously defined as Ingsoc, Neo-Bolshevism and the
Obliteration of the Self. The object of war is thus to maintain
the ruling structures of the three regimes, hence the
truthfulness of the apparent paradox, “War is Peace.”
In Oceania, the Party is an oligarchy, though “not a class in the
old sense of the word.” Inner Party members seek power for its
own sake: “power is not a means, it is an end,” a leading Inner
Party member insists. Ultimately the Party’s power rests upon
its ability to manipulate the past: “Who controls the past
controls the future; who controls the present controls the
past.” The Party even insists that “Reality exists in the human
mind, and nowhere else.”
If imperfect, the system nonetheless functions
adequately. Amidst an atmosphere of drabness,
shortages and monotony, the novel recounts the
clumsy rebellion of Winston Smith, an anti-heroic
lower-level Outer Party member, whose crimes are
writing a diary and having an affair with Julia,
Orwell’s crudely drawn female character, who is
“corrupt to the bones.”
Drawing on his stints at the Ministry of Information
during the war (see Chronology), Orwell created his
hapless protagonist, who spends his days rewriting
history according to state dictates in order to
neutralize dissent. Working at the Ministry of Truth,
Winston uses the debased language Newspeak in
order to expunge all possibilities of critical thought
from the English language . As Orwell puts it in his
chilling appendix to the novel, “the purpose of
Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of
expression for the world-view and mental habits
proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all
other modes of thought impossible.”
Winston being
tortured…
Winston’s individualistic rebellion (of course!)
fails. He is caught, tortured and then
rehabilitated. At the end, “He loved Big
Brother.”
As a satire or caricature of totalitarianism the novel focuses on two
dominant themes. The first is the totalitarian demand for complete
loyalty, which requires slavish submission by the intellectuals, the
debasement of logic and language (“doublethink” and “newspeak”),
the evocation of the worst popular passions (“Hate Week”), and
hostility to individualism (“ownlife”), with even eroticism suppressed
in the name of war-fever and leader-worship. Secondly, there is the
omnipresence of state power: the telescreen, the posters of Big
Brother (who may or may not actually exist), the ubiquitous Thought
Police, the continuous rewriting of the past. The grotesquely simple
and blatantly unapologetic dishonesty of the regime stands out for
many commentators as the grand theme of the work; one of Orwell’s
greatest concerns about totalitarianism was that it attacked the
concept of objective truth.
•
CAN BIG BROTHER’S
REGIME COLLAPSE?
We are not led by Orwell to believe that this regime is
likely to collapse from internal pressures, for the Party
stifles its own dissent easily. Winston reflects, thus, that
“if there was hope, it must lie in the proles.” But they are
kept from rebelling by a diet of mass literature, heavy
physical work, films, football, beer and gambling. No one
cares what they say, and Winston is informed, in a crude
paraphrasing of Marxist theory, that they could not rebel
until they were conscious, and vice versa. Nonetheless the
proles retain a moral honesty and authenticity which
Orwell clearly believed they possessed in real life. They,
crucially, have not been corrupted by power-worship.
Neither, at least not completely, has Winston, left
pondering his fate at the Chestnut Tree café. But then his
rebellion never stood much chance of success anyway.
The corruption of the intelligentsia by the lust for
power, then, remains the central and most
compelling theme of Orwell’s chief work.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell captured SOME OF
the true horrors of the twentieth century with great
accuracy.