| ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ George Orwell began his novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ with this chilling sentence, which set the tone for his imaginative yet disturbingly prescient story of a post-war world only thirty-five years away from the time his book appeared in 1949. Orwell’s futuristic world is already eight years behind us. It envisaged a global consisting of three areas – Oceania Eurasia and Eastasia. Oceania was ruled by the Party headed by Big Brother and organised as a totalitarian state whose motto proclaimed: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. The official language of the state was Newspeak, a new language with a vocabulary ‘so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could possibly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings’. |
| His clever imagery of a clock striking an unnatural thirteen (digital clocks were uninvented in Orwell’s Oceania) was meant to indicate a perversion of an accepted order, and reminded his war-shocked contemporaries of Hitler’s twisted reversal of the Jaina swastika symbol as the symbol of his Nazi party. [EXTRACT] |
Published in THE NATION 3 Sept. 1992, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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