Frankly speaking, I was not fully understood at first to the concept about reemerging value in the Killingsworth’s article, Appeals to Time. The article says that Orwell fought against the notion that “the struggle against abuse of language is archaism like preferring candles to electric light…” (Killingsworth 4o) How does this sentence define about old ideas and time appeal? In order to trace Orwell’s concept of “reemerging value”, I reread partly one of my favorite novel, Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984.
In this novel, he tried to deliver a message, when up-to-dated ideas hide the meaning and value of old ideas, problems occur, if we consider about the government’s cheating, that must be more or less than Winston and Julia’s tragic end. First of all, old ideas are not like archaism in Winston’s eye, when he faces the governments’ lying and brainwashing. Organization tried to manipulate an individual’s mind and changed the truth of the world. It shows the power of new made ideas which is false and apparently dangerous here. People are taught by the newspaper and tele-screen which are prevailed in the place wherever people live. Media taught people that aeroplane had been invented by the party. However, Winston remembers in his school days, it was only helicopter that the party claimed to have invented.
By showing the dangerous possibility, Orwell warned against old idea’s absence and at the same time he showed its role as a source for delivering truth to people. A guide book for 1984, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four North Korea, shows a same living example in the North Korea.(Orwell 75) According to one guy who actually could get an opportunity to visit North Korea, its government was cheating citizens. “As soon as the truck arrived, the Japanese logo was removed and a North Korean logo put in its place as if the truck was manufactured in North Korea.”
Though Orwell doesn’t tell that new idea’s advantage and advocates for progress to urban society, he emphasized in his master piece, 1984, that continuity of time for human beings because without language and truth world becomes against human.
P.S) I think George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four North Korea's author is not Orwell. but I coudn't find its author in the book. If i find I hope to add and clarify it. i borrowed from Wells Library and it is published by Tower Press in Korea.
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Orwell is using a futility thesis in his book 1984 in moving the audience towards inevitable complaciency. This can be seen by how how the book ends: with Winston loving Big Brother. Furthermore, the fact that the "truth of the world" can be totally be changed by those who teach the truth shows how Orwell thought that education itself is a "sentimental archaism." Most importantly however is Goldstein's book, which Orwell uses as an icon for government control. In this book, Orwell discusses political issues and how there is an inevitable end to government expansion. No matter what happens, government can only move towards a perfect balance. It is futile to try to resist, and Orwell shows this with his story of Winston, Big Brother and Goldstein's book.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with Josh’s statement that “Orwell is using a futility thesis in his book 1984” because I think that the primary argument in Orwell’s 1984 is based on Killingsworth’s idea of “Perversity.”
ReplyDeleteKillingsworth defines futility as a type of reactionary argument that “holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to “make a dent”” (Killingsworth 48). I don’t think that this can be true of 1984 because of the government’s ability to control its people through its transformation of society. Wilson says “who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past” (Orwell 221). He also describes how “he is shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair” during the “Two Minutes Hate” (12). This shows the brainwashing that he undergoes as part of society. So, the government acts as the “social transformation” that is able to “make a dent.”
Instead, I would like to propose that Orwell is using Killingsworth’s idea of “Perversity,” which is that “any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social or economic order only serves to exacerbate the conditions one wishes to remedy” (Killingsworth 48). This is evident in the descriptions of the setting as always falling apart, such as the neighbor’s constantly clogged sink. Also the constant state of war and hunger. In order for the state to gain complete control to save the people from the greedy capitalists, the situation is actually becoming worse because the government must keep the people to tired and hungry to revolt.