Time, Space, and Resistance: Re-Reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract

It has long been a critical commonplace to observe that the narrative environment of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) is strongly influenced by the ‘blitzed’ landscape of immediately post-war London, and then little critical attention is paid to the subtle contribution of narrative setting, place and space in the novel. The temptation within such readings is often to simplify what is a rich and complex novel — a risk perhaps of being identified with he dystopian genre — particularly so in the way place and environment convey an, albeit ambivalent, promise of hope that carefully tugs against the devastating re-education of Winston Smith and the closet rebel Julia. This critical stance is exemplified in Bernard Bergonzi’s observation that it is a ‘limitation of Nineteen Eighty-Four that it cannot be read out of the context of its origins in the way that Animal Farm (1945) can’ (100). George Woodcock takes this contextual emphasis further by directly relating Orwell’s wartime experience of London to the novel:

But in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with true polemic genius, Orwell made a virtue of his weakness of invention by setting the dread world of the future in an even more decayed version of the wartime London in which he and I walked in the last decades of his life. There are the rundown, unrepaired 1930s blocks of flats, the tumbling shored-up buildings, the vacant lots with fireweed, the rockets unpredictably crashing down, and even, served in the canteen at the Ministry of Truth, a stew with ‘amongst its general sloppiness, cubes of a spongy pinkish stuff that might have been a preparation of meat,’ which astonishingly resembled a wartime dish that Orwell and I and some of our friends would eat when we went for lunch to the Bodega in Fleet Street. (24)

If, having fixed the original form in our mind’s eye, we ask ourselves how that form comes alive and fills with life, we discover a new dynamic and vital category, a new property of the universe: reverberation.

Eugène Minkowski, Vers une Cosmologie (1936)