Authors: Anthony Burgess
1985
1985
Anthony Burgess
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained
from the British Library on request
The right of Anthony Burgess to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Copyright © Anthony Burgess 1978
Introduction copyright © Andrew Biswell 2013
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No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
First published in 1978
First published in this edition in 2013 by Serpent's Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
www.serpentstail.com
ISBN 978 1 84668 919 2
eISBN 978 1 84765 893 7
Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
to Liana
State and superstate: a conversation
12 Clenched fist of the worker
If you had been in the United States, West Germany, France or Spain on 1 January 1984 and opened a copy of
Newsday
, the
Miami Herald, Der Spiegel, Le Point
or
El Pais
, you would have found an article by Anthony Burgess, which appeared under the headline â1984 Is Not Here'. In the course of a lengthy and detailed reflection on George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, Burgess examined various elements of Orwell's dystopia, and investigated the origins and context of his novel. But of course this essay was not an impartial assessment of Orwell's achievement in the genre of dystopian fiction. As most readers would have been aware, Burgess was also advertising the merits of
1985
, his own book-length response to Orwell, which had been published around the world six years earlier.
Burgess's essay begins with the bold proposition that
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is not about the future but the past, âa post-war Britain on to which certain fanciful things have been grafted'. He often argued in his criticism that historical or futuristic fiction is an allegory for the time in which a novel was composed. Writing in
The Novel Now
(1971), a survey of contemporary fiction, he makes a similar argument about the futurism of
A Clockwork Orange
: âPerhaps every dystopian vision is a figure of the present, with certain features sharpened and exaggerated to point a moral and a warning.' It is clear that Burgess was referring to the ways in which left-wing ideologies of the late 1940s had been extrapolated and caricatured in the invention of Ingsoc (Orwell's imaginary political system, whose name is a corruption of âEnglish Socialism'). As Burgess puts it, âOrwell felt that these intellectuals were all crypto-totalitarians, ready to lick Stalin's arse if not Hitler's.'
This is what makes
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, in Burgess's view, âa fantastic satire rather than a sober forecast,' because there would never be any possibility of the English intelligentsia, meaning the readers of the
New Statesman
, finding themselves with political power in the real world. Burgess's interpretation is consistent with Orwell's statements in his
pre-1939 writing, where he said that he wanted to save English socialism from middle-class socialists, many of whom, he believed, had never met an actual member of the working class. âThe job of the thinking person,' Orwell wrote in the final chapter of
The Road to Wigan Pier
, âis not to reject Socialism but [. . .] to humanise it.' For Orwell, writing at a time of crisis, âwhen twenty million Englishmen are underfed and Fascism has conquered half of Europe,' declaring himself to be a socialist appeared to be the only possible course of action.
1
But his experience of being persecuted by Soviet-backed forces while fighting for another Marxist militia in the Spanish Civil War gave him cause to reconsider his allegiances, and a good deal of his scepticism about Stalinism comes through in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
.
Burgess, in his essay, was keen to correct various misapprehensions about Orwell's novel. He was annoyed by the slapdash use of the terms âOrwellian' and âBig Brother' in the everyday English of the 1970s, and he made the important point (still true today) that anti-theft cameras in shops and information-gathering undertaken by corporations, though perhaps undesirable in themselves, are very different from Orwell's projection of the state looking into areas of private life where it has no legitimate business to probe. To describe the architecture of a shopping mall or an airport as âOrwellian' was as good as meaningless. The point about Orwell's book, as Burgess identified it, is that liberty ought to mean âfreedom to make moral choices without coercion'.
It should not come as a surprise that the author of
A Clockwork Orange
, a parable about the importance of free will, should have been strongly influenced by Orwell's mid-century novel of tyranny and resistance. Burgess first read
Nineteen Eighty-Four
shortly after it was published in 1949, and, imitating Winston Smith in the novel, he wrote âDown with Big Brother' on the title page of his diary for 1952. A search of his book collection reveals that he owned multiple paperback copies of Orwell's novels, plus a hardback volume of the
Critical Essays
published in 1954, the four-volume edition of
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
(1968),
Orwell
by Raymond Williams (1971), French and Italian translations of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, and the two Orwell biographies by Bernard Crick (1980) and Michael Shelden (1991). It is evident from Burgess's notes that he had read all of the dystopian literature reviewed
by Orwell or mentioned in his essays, including Zamyatin's
We
and
The Managerial Revolution
by James Burnham. By the time he came to write
1985
, Burgess had been living with Orwell's novel and thinking about its implications for more than twenty-five years.
Orwell's essays and letters show that the genesis of his novel was connected to the gradual development of his thinking, over many years, about sadism, totalitarianism and power. In a letter dated 16 December 1943, he wrote: âI think you overestimate the danger of a “Brave New World” â i.e. a completely materialistic vulgar civilisation based on hedonism. I would say that the danger of that kind of thing is past and that we are in danger of quite a different kind of world, the centralised slave state, ruled over by a small clique who are in effect a new ruling class [. . .] Such a state would not be hedonistic, on the contrary its dynamic would come from some kind of rabid nationalism and leaderworship kept going by literally continuous war.'
2
One of the problems with dystopian novels is knowing how literally they are supposed to be taken. It is too easy to play the game of awarding points for accurate or inaccurate predictions: a tick for Orwell's two-way telescreens; a cross for the Anti-Sex League and the Two Minutes Hate. But it is futile to pretend that
Nineteen Eighty-Four
and
1985
are intended as prophecies about what the future is actually going to be like, or how the future looked from the perspectives of 1949 and 1978. If we ask how these dystopias seek to engage their readers on an emotional level, we can see that the genre occupies an uncertain borderland somewhere between horror, satire and cartoon. Burgess suggests that the right response to Orwell is a pleasurable shudder. Yet we should not ignore the impulse to warn which stands behind the horror:
this
is the way things might turn out if we fail to defend our liberties. Orwell found himself reaching for italics to make the point: âThe scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism,
if not fought against
, could triumph anywhere.'
Orwell's novel is well enough known that there is no need to summarize it here, and Burgess's pleasingly detailed discussion inevitably sends the reader back to
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. If it is difficult to give an account of the flavour of
1985
, this is partly connected to the unusual
genesis of Burgess's text. It is one of the few books that he ever wrote to commission, at a point in his career when he was feeling very uncertainâabout his own fiction. In 1977 he had been working for nearly seven years on a long novel, provisionally titled âThe Affairs of Men' (eventually published in 1980 as
Earthly Powers
), but he was still three years away from completing it. Meanwhile, he was deeply immersed in other theatrical and screen-writing projects, including a stage musical about Leon Trotsky in New York, a Hollywood version of âMerlin', and a television series about the military career of General âVinegar' Joe Stilwell. None of these sub-literary ventures came to fruition. As Burgess admits in
You've Had Your Time
, he was miserably depressed because he âwanted to write a masterpiece and did not have the courage to do it'. Without his knowledge, his wife, Liana, wrote to the American publisher Little, Brown and persuaded them to commission a book about Orwell.
His decision that the book should be a hybrid of criticism and fiction was unexpected but not unprecedented: Raymond Williams ends his book on
Modern Tragedy
, reviewed by Burgess in June 1966, with an original tragedy of his own. Burgess began with the novella, whose working title, âDon't Let Them Get Away With It', confirms that it was written in a state of savage indignation. But it is difficult to understand this piece of fiction without knowing something of the political and economic conditions in which it was composed. In 1976 the UK inflation rate was running at 17 per cent, partly due to high wage demands from trade unions, to which the Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan meekly assented. To a cultural conservative such as Burgess, it seemed as if the apocalypse had arrived, and that the British government had ceased to govern. Yet the novel's hatred of strikers, punks, religious reformers and people who watch television is so intemperate that the author occasionally struggles to control his material. When he is not railing against the vulgarity of popular culture (he invents television programmes called
Sex Boy
and
Sky Rape
), he depicts striking fire-fighters looking on as a hospital burns down. It is interesting to note that, when the real-life fire-fighters went on strike over a 30 per cent pay claim in November 1977 (shortly after Burgess had completed his novella), they broke their strike to put out a fire at St Andrew's Hospital in East London. The implausibility of Burgess's plot indicates the extent of his detachment from the reality of British life in the mid-1970s.