Nineteen Eighty-Four: the Insufficient Self

Abstract

Orwell’s debt to Swift is plain even to an inattentive reader — Animal Farm is so clearly a levy upon the comic treasury of the Travels — but a reading of the essay on Swift reveals the full extent of the reluctant admiration wrested by the genius of the great Augustan from his twentieth-century descendant.¹ While barely willing to allow the Travels as a work falling just on the right side of sanity, Orwell nevertheless simultaneously ranked it as one of a handful of irreplaceable masterpieces produced by western man, a test of our trusteeship, to be preserved whatever else we might be forced to relinquish. The Swift connection is by now a commonplace of Orwell criticism; what is still not, however, sufficiently recognised is the degree to which Nineteen Eighty-Four is shaped by Swift’s great fable; how, specifically, in wrestling with the central problem of Gulliver’s Travels — the hunt for the human being — Orwell came to create his own dark masterpiece.