#which makes me not to like them.. they have potential but geniunely i think they're bad. for some other reasons as well

[multicoloredglob]

tbh, i don't see why this couldn't be on the friendship path as well

[bakurapika]

aight 1984 thoughts, scattered, since i don't want to overwhelm my groupchat about them

it's a lil difficult to tell when something is geniunely intended by the author vs when it isn't. because winston isn't necessarily an "unreliable" ( limited 3rd person pov) narrator, but he's written as having grown up with severe psychological conditioning.

specifically im thinking of like. 1) his convo with the old man. which was the only time i really wanted to reach through the pages of the book and grab winston by the shoulders and shake him. the old man was giving him so much useful info despite winston's uniform making him a super threatening person to talk to. but winston's prejudice about the proles being stupid - and honestly probably just him being trained in uncritical thinking - made him unable to hear the words behind the words.

and without trawling wikipedia for context from the book (i'm unsure what decade it was written in! because some of its description of the world wars are spot on but other parts feel speculative fic. which makes me think it was written like A Long Time Ago, like after ww1 started but not ww2, since it called them "the great wars," but got a lot unfortunately right? and i want to finish reading it before checking [audio book so i'm not just flipping to the cover page]), im not sure if that situation was supposed to be both aggravating and tragic to the reader or not.

i don't actually remember how the book ends! ive read it before but like hm. when i was a teen i stopped during the sex scene because oh no ew sex evil sinful, and yes i realize the sad irony in that. And I know I read it as an adult at least up to the room 101 bit where i am now, but i'm very fuzzy about it.

listening to it as an audio book did wonders for me reading and understanding the manifesto, which VERY MUCH feels like it was written by the author, who realized it didn't have the context to be emotionally meaningful, and then wrote a book around it. and if that's the case it was a damn good choice btw. but i think i skimmed or outright skipped it when reading previously because it's pretty fucking dense as text!! but listening to it as audio was like "HOOOOLY SHIT"

but!!!!! that is another point of potential unreliability!!! where winston started reading it and reflected to himself that it was great as a book, not because it was teaching him new ideas, but because it repackaged the ideas he already had in a more systematized way. and the context of the manifesto existing, who gave it to him and why, brings everything about it into question.

which so far imo is a really masterful way of forcing readers to think critically as long as they're willing to engage with the text that much. because you read/listen to the manifesto and think "wow! this is groundbreaking stuff! this guy knows so much!" but then you have to go, "hold on. even IN FICTION this was written to appeal to emotion instead of reasoning. and it DIDN'T HELP anyone." (again at the point in the book where i am, and i don't remember what happens beyond that point)

i was gonna disclaim about politics on main but that's literally what the book is, so here's my opinion on marxism, which i admit im not super educated in - that was also a manifesto making excellent points about how to think about power and the world. and the strength of its ideas has carried it. but the context of who wrote it and why involved some... im trying to think of more polite/diplomatic words. very off base predictions about the near future that didn't come to fruition, not as a side note but as the reason why the whole damn thing was written. again to my limited understanding. which makes relying on the communist manifesto as a foundational text really questionable.

The Book in 1984 feels the same way to me. like im trying to parse it critically and find flaws, instead of appreciating it for what it got right. i think the main Big Issue is the sweeping generalities it makes. it wouldn't exist without that - sweeping away individual cultural differences in order to focus on the nature of post-industrial national power. but the world is complicated and complex in a way that does make the Book seem more suited to fiction as a thought experiment than reality.

im critiquing how this works as if from the pov of the evil dudes who set up the system btw, because their self-interest is why the system described in the Book exists

secondly, a major flaw is the lack of room for assholes. by which i mean that, in this system where the inner party at least holds a lot of control distributed amongst themselves, there is going to have to be someone trying to solve the prisoner dilemma. there are going to be people who do stupid shit, even to their own detriment. with all the psychological tests and ways to limit who can get into the inner party, none of them can really entirely guard against humans being humans. and with such a precise worldwide machine, it seems like one minor problem might fuck the whole thing up. and to clarify, i mean assholes as in, yeah you're doing evil world controlling nonsense. but one of your coworkers is doing the evil world controlling nonsense very wrong because he spaced out during world nonsense school.

and on that note, the requirement for a very rigid standard of psychological normalcy in both the inner and outer party. again in fiction, it's great. but the party has spent a huge amount of resources on each person in the party. to continually unalive people (in a literal sense, beyond just murder lol) is kind of crazy. the work they do - in winston's department anyway - is ridiculously specialized. there's a lot of intentional redundancy but you can only get away with that for so long if you keep offing people. it seems really short-sighted, although it makes sense in-universe that the regime has only been around for a few decades.

part of the same point is also that ... literally no one can hold up to the standards of the party, as described. is anyone going to be perfectly psychologically average in every single way. no, but shit like being suspected of talking in your sleep is enough to get you disappeared. so that implies more of a system of discrimination (who gets the unspoken rules enforced against them and who doesn't, if everyone breaks them at some point?) than the Book allows for

again though i'm picking at crumbs to try to do what the novel implicitly is asking me to do, not because i think the Book sucks. the thesis of war being perpetuated specifically for the sake of preventing people from access to equal resources is sooo loud and relevant, as is the horrific depiction of bombings being a normal part of life (for people in eg Palestine, not in London like winston is). some of the Book is just ridiculously incisive about modern politics and nationalism

the tactic of relying on secret knowledge - including that big drumroll build-up that made me genuinely think it was going to be an asspull, which it was, lol - is contrary to the presumed reason for the book's existence. as is the claim that it was written by goldstein, who used to be a big fucking proponent of ingsoc. (side note, so far all the commentary on racism incl antisemitism, despite/because of using words that would be offensive today of course, has all been pretty spot on so far. it'd be so easy to make the thing an antisemitic rant about cabals, but all the racism is in character/universe with very specific and obvious motivations that make it seem like an excuse for hatred)

but i'm disappointed (again, feels like the author intended this) in winston for uncritically swallowing a doctrine he knew almost nothing about just because it was the alternative to the one he knew and hated. happily signed away all his rights in a way that was very jarring. the way o'brien treated julia - pretty sexist but lowkey - felt like intentional foreshadowing too.

i feel like calling this book ahead of its time would be a devastating blow to whatever rhetorical point it tried to achieve though lol.

that's not everything i want to say but i think it's most everything i had a burning need to say :P

oh wait ! edit ! i'm surprised so far at the willingness to chuck winston into torture. it feels like the book is about the threat of constant surveillance and the unknown of extrajudicial punishment from within your own national/political sphere. and in that case, the choice to go into detail about torture seems to break the suspense and make the whole thing feel more like an adventure story than a metaphor. as much as i'm enjoying the psychological fuckery going on in room 101, it was a very bold choice that may be to the story's detriment. the reason i don't remember this section is probably because it's not nearly as well known or memorable as Big Brother Is Watching You.

because if winston dies at the end of this, then in terms of the real-world affect on the reader, that feels like... so what? dude grew up in a dystopia, said to himself "im gonna die because of this dystopia," then died because of the dystopia. and if winston doesn't die, then the threat of - okay wait i just had a jimmy neutron brain blast memory i'll write about in a sec - but the threat of ingsoc is really diminished. it's no longer about fear as a control tactic but the threat of violence. which may seem like a quibble but when the entire power of big brother is about vague fear and not specific fear, that's a big fucking deal.

anyway my brain blast. i THINK i remember how it ends. i think they let winston go, because i think i remember a scene of him getting coffee at a cafe. and like it's chill but also he knows he's gonna get offed at some point in the future. and then some kind of callback to the 3 dudes in the photo that he threw in the memory hole.

but all that feels like it makes my point, if that's true, because i didn't remember it. because that turns the book into a work of fiction instead of a poignant metaphor. which isn't bad on its own but does feel like it emotionally betrays the point of the rest of the book.

i'm not saying that the story shouldn't have been written. it... hmm. it feels more like it would work as a sequel that people could take or leave. but the point of the original novel feels like it could have ended, not at confirmation that the thought police were around every corner. but just enough evidence to suspect it and to think that winston is about to get caught. but leave the reader in suspense about it.

because yeah, the scooby doo thing about everyone winston ever talked to pulling off a wig and being an evil CEO the whole time was kind of a let-down. like oh! it wasn't about control via paranoia that everyone he knows might be evil! it was just that every person he knows was evil.

(im using evil in a tongue-in-cheek way to descrbe them doing bad shit to winston while knowing im oversimplifying, since winston as an outer party member also did plenty of bad shit.)

edit 2- i forgot but remembered something else i wanted to say!!!

1- winston's emphasis on eyes. like i don't have anything to say about it except "hey! a recurring theme! neat." his mom's eyes, his sister's eyes, big brother's eyes. his first thing about julia is that he doesn't remember her eye color.

2- neat and interesting portrayal of the romance between winston and julia. it's not a romance for the ages no matter what they think. it's a circumstantial coupling. a lot of their deep personal traits don't actually mesh well. and im not saying that as a criticism of the relationship but a praise of it.

the generation gap is a cool method of storytelling and worldbuilding, with julia's disinterest in politics even though it's something so interesting to winston.

something i HAVEN'T wrapped my mind around, and im inclined to chalk up to the time the story was written, was how julia was supposedly with dozens of men before and winston was super into it. so you're set up to think of this as a sexual fling. but then it becomes a monogamous relationship without any kind of question or resistance, as if that's the natural next step. julia never even mentions that she's stopped sleeping with other men even though it seems like that's a huge shake-up for her. it felt like a very odd choice that was maybe betraying julia's motivations in order to develop winston's story. again, not odd for the time, but it feels like a genuine flaw that the author didn't consider? especially since it could have been fixed with like a single line of julia being like "babe we have this deep connection i don't have with other dilfs"

3- this is something i didn't realize until this read-through. i thought i'd remembered something weird about how winston's dreams seem to have genuine metaphysical power in a way that doesn't jive with the rest of the book. yeah he experiences memories and character growth, which is normal. but him anticipating "the place where there is no darkness," which o'brien recognizes as legit, was VERY weird.

but!!!!! now reading that and knowing about o'brien's betrayal, o'brien was clearly just yes-anding! he was like oh yeah that's definitely a revolution phrase we say all the time. good job winston. and that itself was foreshadowing lol

edit 3 - no need to flood my dash with these thoughts on a no-note post so i'll just keep editing. haven't read more yet. but uhhh

so the idea of the inner party as presented by the Book is that it's not a like genetic oligarchy; it's not passed down via family lineage. it's intended to survive longer than that based on the strength of its ideas (it's compared to Catholicism in that respect).

but the political foundations are that the upper class are trying to escape the cycle of revolution (in which lower+middle classes band together, overthrow the upper class, and old middle class becomes upper class). not for the sake of political stability itself but in order to keep the same upper class in power. ingsoc ideology was essentially created (according to the Book) for the sake of this goal

however, new inner party members are recruited based on skill. so the only thing tying old inner party members to the new one... is their loyalty to ingsoc.

it doesn't really make sense. im not even saying that because i think it's a criticism of the fictional device because honestly... self-perpetuating nonsense cycles are what the world runs on. but it does make the inner party members' motivations a lot more iffy unless the Book is hiding something or missing something