The Inversion of Form: Deconstructing 1984

Abstract

The year 1984 now recedes into memory and text, but it remains what we might call (using Lacan’s term) a point de capiton, a buttoning-down point in the fabric of our interpretations of history as we come to conceive it through our experiences of literature. When we were in 1984 our experience was textualized in a different way, in that we were looking for the year to be a metaphor of itself, and sought identities between time and text. We tried to place the text by the time and the time by the text. If the year 1984 is (or was) better or worse than the fictional year 1984, then was Orwell right or wrong? Was he a prophet or a perceptive Cassandra or someone whose advice kept us off the terrible path to totalitarianism? Or, from the other side, can we find new value in Orwell’s myth by looking at the terrors of our world and reading his novel as an allegory that gives us a frisson of recognition? All such readings (and they are part of the established atmosphere of Orwell criticism) assume a classic book rather than a text, a book whose meaning is determinable.