1984

Indeed, the world of Oceania in George Orwell’s famous novel is routinely described as oppressive, and hopeless, and variously deemed a horror story, an elegy, a threnody, a shriek of terror, a wail of despair, a death cry. Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of both Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, referred to it in 1955—in the wake of the controversial BBC broadcasts and their “fatal” consequences—as the “Black Millennium,” when George Orwell turned a segment of time forever into charcoal dust. Literary and cultural critics have described 1984—or rather Nineteen Eighty-Four, to use the British title that Orwell himself preferred—as the vengeful death wish of a cynic, the tubercular projection of a dying man, the paranoid fantasy of a writer in despair, the Schadenfreude of a neurotic adult schoolboy who sent the entire world to room 101, and a totalitarian tract devised as a desperate invalid’s futile protest against the specter of totalitarianism, whether in the form of Hitler’s on the right or Stalin’s on the left. Nineteen Eighty-Four is none of these. Rather, it is instead an affirming flame, even an optimistic vision of a hope-filled time just over the horizon.