Religious fanaticism is in fact strangely absent from Oceania, except in the form of devotion to the party. Big Brother's regime exhibits all the elements of fascism - the single charismatic dictator, the total control of behaviour, the absolute subordination of the individual to the collective - except for racial hostility, in particular anti-Semitism, which was such a prominent feature of fascism as Orwell knew it. This is bound to strike the modern reader as puzzling. The only Jewish character in the novel is Emmanuel Goldstein, and maybe only because his original, Leon Trotsky, was Jewish too. And he remains an offstage presence whose real function in 1984 is to provide an expository voice, as the author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
Much has been made recently of Orwell's own attitude towards Jews, some commentators even going so far as to call it anti-Semitic. If one looks in his writing of the time for overt references to the topic, one finds relatively little - Jewish matters did not seem to command much of his attention. What published evidence there is indicates either a sort of numbness before the enormity of what had happened in the camps or a failure at some level to appreciate its full significance. There is some felt reticence, as if, with so many other deep issues to worry about, Orwell would have preferred that the world not be presented with the added inconvenience of having to think much about the Holocaust. The novel may even have been his way of redefining a world in which the Holocaust did not happen.
As close as 1984 gets to an anti-Semitic moment is in the ritual practice of Two Minutes Hate, presented quite early, almost as a plot device for introducing the characters Julia and O'Brien. But the exhibition of anti-Goldsteinism described here with such toxic immediacy is never generalised into anything racial. "Nor is there any racial discrimination," as Emmanuel Goldstein himself confirms, in the book - "Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party . .." As nearly as one can tell, Orwell considered anti-Semitism "one variant of the great modern disease of nationalism", and British anti-Semitism in particular as another form of British stupidity. He may have believed that by the time of the tripartite coalescence of the world he imagined for 1984 , the European nationalisms he was used to would somehow no longer exist, perhaps because nations, and hence nationalities, would have been abolished and absorbed into more collective identities. Amid the novel's general pessimism, this might strike us, knowing what we know today, as an unwarrantedly chirpy analysis. The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]
The other day (recall) I used Pynchon's "Introduction" as a foil to reflect on the the nature of Newspeak in 1984. And since I will be critical of it today, again, I will note, first, that I find his, "The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily," a sublime observation. The claim is not just true of Orwell, but of much of the intelligentsia since 1945. Pynchon does not pause to explain why Orwell, who is just about as astute a commentator on his own age as one can imagine, would fall victim to this mistake. A mistake, I hasten to add, that can be easily avoided if one reflects a bit on, say, Lucian and the admiration More, Hume, and Adam Smith had for him. I suspect that even in magnanimous Orwell the costly mistake is due to an abiding, progressive view of history in which certain stages are overcome and beyond us.
Be that as it may, Pynchon's claims about the absence of "Jewish matters" in Nineteen Eighty-Four is rather strange. He misses entirely, and, as I have noted before, he is not alone in this, that the first thing Winston Smith writes about in his diary is his experience of going to the movies and watching war films which, upon reflection, turn out to be occasions for the audience to cheer on war crimes against (recall) "a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean."* And, included in it, is a gruesome scene involving a "middle-aged woman [who] might have been a Jewess." And so while I agree with Pynchon that there is a reticence in Orwell about describing the camps -- vaporization occurs off-stage in 1984 --, the allusion to the Holocaust is right there in the opening pages of the book. The whole first diary entry supports, in fact, Pynchon's contention that 1984 is misread if one only sees in it anti-communist, cold-war propaganda, and overlooks the book's major focus, which is on the diagnosis of enduring fascism.
I used 'war crimes' in the previous paragraph. Because one of the notable features of Oceania is that it is constantly hanging enemy soldiers for war crimes. And yet its own entertainment depicts war crimes of one's own as mere spectacle, and a further instance of building social cohesion within it. And put this abstractly, 1984 is as timely as ever.
When I wrote that Pynchon's claims about absence of "Jewish matters" in Nineteen Eighty-Four are rather strange, I had in mind the fact Pynchon ignores a crucial feature of the Appendix to 1984, despite the fact that Pynchon's own "introduction" is structured on the significance of this "Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak" (and so devotes relatively outsized attention to it). For in it the nameless implied author, who is (as Pynchon notes) writing a considerable time after the events described in 1984, claims the following:
As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible.*
So, rather than being absent, key features of life in Oceania are modelled on a certain interpretation of the Old Testament. Now, if I were in a polemical mood (which I am not) I would note there is a flirt with anti-Semitism here; a trope one could imagine existing among disillusioned intellectual Christian Socialists (a "near Communist" in Orwell's terms) who trace the origin of fascism to the fanatical particularism of the Hebrew Bible in the manner, say, in which (in my life-time) Jabotinsky's and Begin's Zionism were depicted as sharing roots with fascism. But I am not interested in polemics today.
That the Hebrew Bible is a source of political craft, even the elements of a political science, is a central feature of Machiavellian republicanism--this is hinted in The Prince, and fully developed in both the Theological-Political Treatise and, perhaps more important for the purposes of reflection on Orwell, Harrington's Oceana. And as it happens Orwell engaged seriously with the most able Machiavellian of his time, James Burnham, in his (1946) essay, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham," which discusses critically Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians: defenders of Freedom. I am surely not the first to note that plenty of themes of the former -- especially the power-hungry technocrats and intelligentsia who would develop a new kind of oligarchy -- discussed by Orwell found their way into 1984. In fact, one of Pynchon's key themes, viz. that 1984 is concerned with the international division of the world into three gigantic spheres of influence, is central to Orwell's treatment of Burnham. But while in the latter he has some interest in exploring the roots of fanaticism, Burnham does not, I think, trace some of the roots of fascist technique to the Hebrews.
One peculiarity of the claim about the ancient Hebrew by the implied author of the Appendix is that while it is, indeed, central to the whole spirit of Oceania that "the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible," in virtue of the fact that Oceania lacks written laws. The reader learns this in the opening scene when the thing that Winston "was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws)." But this is the exact opposite of the law-saturated life of the ancient Hebrew! And, while the Hebrew Bible is not an instruction manual into a life of service to the false gods, Baal and his priests are mentioned surprisingly frequently in it, and is (for example) central to the narrative about Jezebel in the Book of Kings.
In fact, in Orwell's posthumously published, autobiographical essay, "Such Were the Joys," he writes that "if I had sympathetic feelings towards any character in the Old Testament, it was towards such people as Cain, Jezebel, Haman, Agag, Sisera."** Whatever else they have in common, they are all idolaters in some sense (Cain being a tricky case). So, Orwell presumably knows there is something peculiar about what the implied author of the Appendix says about the "ancient Hebrew." Interestingly enough, Orwell is clear that he finds Christianity "strewn with psychological impossibilities."+ And in context it is clear that the Old Testament does not suffer from these.
Where does this leave us? Pynchon is right within the text of 1984, we are regularly invited to contemplate the religiosity (without religion) of members of the Party and the various forms of social psychological techniques and rituals that facilitate it. But he is wrong to suggest that this is somehow divorced from Judaism. On the contrary, yhe implied author of the Appendix explicitly connects this with the attitude of the "ancient Hebrew." But the text of the Appendix also suggests that its implied author has superficial acquaintance with the book, the Hebrew Bible, that characterizes the life of the ancient Hebrew (something one cannot say about Orwell). And at the risk of overreading, this suggests to me that the vantage point of the Appendix, which is projected much into the future from 1984, and whose implied author is a member of a future intelligentsia -- the official subject matter of the material is the rise and fall of Newspeak -- is one in which the Old Testament is not part of lived experience or knowledge by direct acquaintance, but merely hearsay. As it happens I think (but I would) that this supports my claim (against Pynchon) that the perspective of the Appendix does not hint at (now quoting Pynchon on 1948) "restoration and redemption." But it is, in fact, the state of affairs in much of contemporary life.++
*The passage might be taken as the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation, which I disputed last week, that the Appendix represents a certain kind of political restoration and defeat of Ingsoc. It would be surprising for a member of the Party to understand the Party in light of the practice of the old Hebrews.
**Again, a polemicist in bad faith might explore how Orwell is rooting for the enemies of the Jews.
+In context, Orwell uses 'religion' not 'Christianity,' but what he describes is Christian not Jewish religion.
++I hope to do one more essay on the significance of the Old Testament to 1984.
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