George Orwell: Politics and Power

This essay considers how Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) assesses the function and limits of ‘ideas’ in two ways: by focusing on how ideas (plural) can be reduced, through the operations of power, to an idea (singular); and by investigating how people can be turned into abstractions through the work of ideology. Attending throughout to the form of Orwell’s most famous novel, the essay positions Nineteen Eighty-Four in relation to Wyndham Lewis’s critique of Orwell in The Writer and the Absolute (1952); traces the origins of Orwell’s account of power and truth to his experiences in the Spanish Civil War; and compares Orwell’s writing with the work of H. G. Wells, a key precursor. The essay concludes with some reflections on Nineteen Eighty-Four’s ambiguous ending and on the ingenious yet problematic critical strategies through which a tincture of hope is discovered in this bleakest of bleak satires.