1984

1984

| ruthpelletier

By George Orwell

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

In general, I’m not a huge fan of banning books. I think that people should get to read pretty much anything they want. Books can contain ideas or information, and we should have the right to encounter both. Be they counter-productive, perverse, even wrong, the right to consume them or not should lie with the individual. And, again in general, I believe that this is a universal right: if you can read about an idea, I don’t think anyone should have the power to stop you.

However (and perhaps this is breathtaking hypocrisy, I don’t care), I don’t think teenagers should read ‘1984’. And I definitely don’t think it should required of them.

Unfortunately, it often is. ‘1984’ is required reading in many high school curricula – it certainly was in mine. I read it the first time years ago, as a ninth grader, and I believed that I understood it. I thought it was about the natural culmination of the authoritarian state, about surveillance and propaganda, Big Brother and Thought Crime and 2 + 2 = 5. I dismissed the human story as irrelevant. I thought Winston and Julia and their love story were merely props upon which Orwell was resting his polemic; I thought those set-pieces of authoritarianism were the point of the novel.

And because I thought it was merely about those set-pieces, because I ignored the human story entirely, I thought ‘1984’ was very simple, and I wasn’t at all impressed by it. I thought it was obvious. 2 + 2 does not = 5, clearly, I already knew that; Big Brother is sinister, duh. It seemed like an awful lot of words to make an unoriginal point: Authoritarianism is bad – yes, thank you, I know all about the Nazis, I get it*.

*I was such an asshole.

Many years later, I reread ‘1984’. I didn’t want to, by the way – that’s how alienated I had been from the text when I was a kid. But my father gave me Orwell’s collected non-fictions, and I decided to reread a few of his most famous works as prep. That was when I discovered that I had completely missed the real point of the novel. And I had missed it because I was a teenager, and there are certain things that most teenagers can’t understand yet.

The surveillance state isn’t the point of ‘1984’ – it’s the premise. When Winston is taken into custody, and tortured for months, as his will breaks, he begins to believe the lies Big Brother tells him. He tells his torturers, swears to them, that 2 + 2 = 5, and he really believes it, and I thought that that was the moral of the book: that eventually, under enough duress, we can believe anything.

But the important part actually comes next. As he is being tortured, even as his sanity breaks down, as he begins spouting Big Brother’s propaganda back at him, Winston keeps something back.

“For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under the torture? He had told them everything he knew about her [Julia], her habits, her character, her past life; he had confessed in the most trivial detail everything that had happened at their meetings, all that he had said to her and she to him, their black-market meals, their adulteries, their vague plottings against the party – everything. And yet, in the sense in which he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not stopped loving her; his feelings toward her remained the same.”

And for this last reluctance, he is taken to Room 101. Room 101 reveals, of course, the real purpose of the surveillance state. Because They have been watching you every moment of your life, They know your every hope, your every fear. They know what scares you the most. And in Room 101, They can inflict it on you.

Winston’s worst fear is rats, and in Room 101, the state has devised an apparatus that will allow rats to eat off his face while he is still alive (as a side note, this is one of the very few choices that Orwell made in ‘1984’ I don’t agree with – it’s a little too outlandish, too dramatic, for me). That moment, as Winston is facing down the rats, is the real point of the book:

“The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then – no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment – one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.

‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you to do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!'”

The rats are stopped, and Winston is released. He is allowed back into the outside world; he is not even monitored. Because he has sacrificed his love to the torture, because the state has destroyed his capacity to love, and the state knows that people who cannot love are not a threat to anyone.

The power of this moment can only really be understood by someone who has loved another person more than they love themselves. That’s the only way to feel what it would mean, in a moment of danger, to offer up that loved person in your place, to want them to suffer instead of you. If you have not cherished someone else’s happiness and safety more dearly than your own, it is impossible to imagine what would be required to wish them harm of that magnitude. If you have, this moment is horrifying, because you know that it would require the denaturation of your very self, your entire being.

That is the point that Orwell was trying to make, I believe. That terror, sustained terror, deprives us of our ability to love other people. And that the ability to love other people is a necessary part of our humanity. Without it, we are not fully human.

And the State, the modern, industrial state, is one of the few entities able to exert the force you need to instill that level of terror, that loveless, dehumanizing terror, in a large population of people (the Church being another). The ultimate tragedy of the terror state is not that it tortures and kills – it isn’t even that it warps reality for the purpose of control – it’s that it deprives its citizens of their ability to truly love each other. It reduces them to crouching and fearful animals, capable of caring about nothing besides their own survival.

Teenagers, with some exceptions, have not had the opportunity to love something else more than themselves. They are incubating the personalities they will roll out as adults, and that requires most, if not all, of their attention. They are the center of their own worlds, and perhaps rightly so. But that means that the visceral horror of Winston’s capitulation – the fear you feel as an adult imagining what it would take to make you turn on your own – that is probably not accessible to most teenagers.

George Orwell

It certainly wasn’t accessible to me as a teenager. And while I obviously don’t think people should be kept from reading books simply because they might misunderstand them (I think now that perhaps I have never really understood any book the first time I read it), it does hurt my heart to think about all those teenagers walking around believing that they have read and understood ‘1984’, when in fact they missed it completely. If it were not required reading, some of them might have found their way to it, as adults, understood it then and been moved by it, but they don’t, because they think, as I did, that they’ve already it.

It’s too good a work to be missed in this way. It’s too good to be forced onto an audience who cannot really grasp it. ‘1984’ is one of the most powerful, brutal, prescient novels ever written. When I read it as an adult, it devastated me, and my respect for it became the foundation of my relationship with George Orwell, the writer I love most in the world. I admire ‘1984’ deeply, and I regret bitterly all those years that I misunderstood it.

The Obelisk Gate

| ruthpelletier

The Broken Earth: Book Two

By N. K. Jemisin

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

So, now I’ve had some time to think.

Sometimes, when you’re flying through a book, you don’t stop to think about why you’re loving it so much. This is especially true with plotty books – you don’t need to think about why it’s working, you can just lie back and enjoy the ride.

But it’s a worthwhile exercise, once you pause for breath. And I had a busy week at work, and so was forced to spend time NOT reading ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy, and so I thought about it.

I want to be clear: this pause was not voluntary. I need to work to eat; otherwise, I would have chewed all the way through the series without washing or sleeping. But, like I said, it was a busy week, so I only just now finished ‘The Obelisk Gate‘, the second book in ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ series.

And I know that ‘The Obelisk Gate‘ is technically a separate book, but the entire series really reads like one book, one story, and I am only taking the time to stop and write about this installment for the sake of personal discipline. So, for coherence, I will probably refer to the trilogy as a single work, which it clearly is.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about why the trilogy is so good. And…

I don’t know.

‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy is about a world that is ending. And I suspect that, like all stories that are about the world ending, it is really about the evil which people do, which comes out of us naturally, inevitably, like breath. About the primitive, tribal cruelties that we perpetrate, in all times, all places, when we are frightened.

There’s a question I wonder sometimes: do you have to understand a novel to love it?

There are two ways to say what a novel is about. Let’s take an easy one: what is ‘The Scarlet Letter’ about? Well, technically, it’s about a woman being punished for adultery through sartorial intervention.

But, obviously, that’s not what it’s really about about. ‘The Scarlet Letter’ is about sin, and guilt, and hypocrisy. It’s about how God is all-knowing and all-loving and we are not, and so when man’s law tries to approximate God’s law, the discrepancy will necessarily result in injustice. It’s about humility.

See what I mean? There’s about, and then there’s about about.

I know what ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy is about. Jemisin is a clear, effective writer, much more than most science fiction or fantasy writers. Even when she is describing things which are actually beyond description, she is never hard to follow or understand. She’s really good.

But I am not at all sure that I know what this trilogy is about about.

On the most superficial level, ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy is an allegory about racism and xenophobia and otherness. It’s about human cruelty, and about whether we are capable of preserving our humanity, our ability to be kind to the other, when we are desperate, or in danger, or facing extinction. And the fact that this allegory is obvious a) doesn’t mean that it isn’t a valuable metaphor (it isn’t as though we’ve solved this problem, so, by all means, let’s keep working it through in prose) and b) doesn’t mean that it’s all that’s going on in these novels.

I also suspect that it is about about climate change. Bear with me: the premise of ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy, tectonically-speaking, is that humans, at the acme of their civilization, committed an act which so permanently destabilized the earth’s crust that it threatens the survival of everything on it. This is understood by all living human inhabitants of the earth as its revenge, that the earth is essentially, permanently, hostile to human life. That seems pretty clear to me.

But the problem with explicating allegory is that it makes the work seem preachy, or academic, or pedantic, and that is emphatically not the case here. In fact, the lack of pedantry is partly why I’m having trouble discerning the allegory.

So, am I allowed to love a story without understanding the allegory?

Obviously, the answer is yes – I can enjoy it any way I want. I can even enjoy it while totally misunderstanding the allegory. But (and honestly, this may be wrong) I think that understanding the allegory makes the experience of the books richer. And I know that this makes me sound like a complete nerd, but I am a complete nerd, and I really do enjoy a book more when I understand not only the story, but also the other stories which the story is referencing, the moral questions it is obliquely pondering, the historical events which it is recapitulating. They make me appreciate the story more, the skill of its writing, the depth of its thought.

And when you know, or suspect, that a story has these extra layers, and you aren’t quite getting them, it’s disorienting, like when you fall asleep in the middle of a movie and miss a whole bunch of plot. You might technically understand the ending, but can you say that you really understood the movie?

Not really, and so I don’t feel like I can say that I understand ‘The Obelisk Gate‘, and it’s making me feel very insecure, because I really, really like it. I want to understand it, and so I’ve been thinking about it.

N. K. Jemisin

One of the most salient threads which runs through the first two novels of ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ is that our fundamental selves are revealed through our treatment of our children. This is true on the level of the society as well as on the level of the individual. Children are a major, major part of ‘The Broken Earth’ books – love for them, grief for the loss of them, rage at the people who hurt them.

And cruelty to children winds through the books. There is an idea which pervades the entire trilogy (so far) that, in health, children are loved and cherished, protected and cared for. It is only in sickness that we allow them to be tortured or mutilated, abandoned or killed.

Earth has become a sick place, and the question which Jemisin is asking is, is it possible to be a healthy person in a sick place? Can you bring children into a sick world, raise them in a sick society, love them healthily when you cannot truly keep them safe? When the society in which they will grow up might abuse or murder them, use them or break them? When the very earth on which they walk might drive them and every one they love to extinction at any moment?

What does parental love even mean in that context? Parents love their children, ideally. Parents will do anything, risk anything, for their health and happiness – what does that mean in a world where health and happiness are impossible? What happens to love in a world like that?

It curdles, turns inward into rage, becomes destructive, deadens. Twists and becomes murderous in its turn. Even love becomes impossible, in a sick world.

Now that I think about it, this is kind of what ‘1984’ is also about. Actually, this is exactly what ‘1984’ is about: the idea that in a totalitarian society, even love, even private, romantic love, is impossible, because there is no private space for a human heart to have something normal and good, like love.

And, in ‘The Broken Earth Trilogy‘ trilogy, that’s true of parents, too: on a hostile earth, where we are threatened at every turn, where constant fear and danger have made us base and mean and vicious, we can’t even love our children. Because loving children is hopeful, and hope requires a future, and in a world with no future there’s no way to love them – it’s too painful.

I know that I’m not making ‘The Obelisk Gate‘ sound fun – I’m probably making it sound like the world’s bleakest book about parenting. It is fun, in a bleak, scary way. It’s one of the most absorbing books I’ve read in years, and, as I mentioned last time, I honestly just resent the time I have to spend here, writing about it, instead of thinking about it. It’s so, so good.

1Q84

| ruthpelletier

By Haruki Murakami

All Posts Contain Spoilers

When is it OK to decide that you don’t like an author?

I really struggle with this question.  On the one hand, there is more to read in this world than can be accomplished in twenty lifetimes, and so wasting time on authors you dislike comes at a high price, opportunity-cost-wise.

But, on the other hand, no two works, even by the same author, are completely equal, and to take a stand against an author is rule out works of theirs, unread, which you might love.

In a way, this is only a sub-section of the enormously important and complicated question: How do you decide what to read?  Do you hew to the canon?  Do you trust the recommendations of friends?  How about the New York Review of Books?  Do you read everything in the Sci Fi/Fantasy section, no matter what?  Let Amazon’s algorithm decide for you?

For myself, I hew strongly to canon.  I defer to the ages: I reach for Literary Giants, and cast a skeptical eye at modern literature (sometimes to my own detriment, as I have admitted).  I want to read the Great Books, even if that means missing a few cult favorites.

Now, I would like to be clear about something: something needn’t be old to be a Great Book.  An author doesn’t have to be dead before a critical consensus can emerge about his Greatness.  And really, it is this critical consensus to which I respond: if everyone thinks something is Great, I tend to think it’s worth spending some time and energy figuring out why.

So, yes, maybe I am a snob, but I do believe that, if the critical consensus is that an author is a genius, there is a higher bar to deciding that you don’t like them.  You should read a lot, if not all, of a Great Writer’s work before you should feel enfranchised to further disregard.

Why?  Why waste time on authors you hate, just because other people seem to think that they’re the shit?

‘1Q84’ is why.

Before this, I had read three of Haruki Murakami’s books: ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’, ‘Kafka on the Shore’, and ‘Underground’, and he was definitely an Author I Did Not Like.  There was something about his style, about the bleak, gray expanses of his prose, which I found aversive, both boring and actively unpleasant at the same time.  He reminded me, in this way, of Don DeLillo, who’s grimness also seeps through his words and alienates me. 

But I felt a nagging sense of…not guilt, but unease, about this aversion.  Murakami is one of the most, if not the most, beloved writer of Japan, and it is apparently something of a national hope that he will win a Nobel Prize (and an ongoing source of national grief that he has not).

And yes, look, just because someone is good doesn’t mean I have to love them. An author can be both talented and not to your taste.

But there’s something patronizing about saying that, isn’t there? “Oh, yeah, Murakami’s great, really, such a good writer, just not my style”. Is art really like pizza, just a matter of preference? Surely not; surely we have some responsibility to Greatness, an obligation to ourselves to go to it, to try to see what other people see in it, and not to dismiss the men and women who have shaped the literature of nations simply as a matter of taste?

Haruki Murakami

So I didn’t know what to do about Murakami. I really didn’t like his books, and I didn’t want to read any more.

But I kept hearing about ‘1Q84‘. People told me that it was different than his other books, plottier, that the magically-realist tinge in his other books had come more to the fore. And I love George Orwell, and I find ‘1984’ devastating. So I decided to roll up to ‘1Q84‘ for my Christmas long-read, and give Murakami another shot.

And now I’m in a real fix, because I might have loved ‘1Q84‘. I think I loved it? I certainly lived in it, barely came up for breath. I had to: it’s 1,200 pages, and I finished it in about a week.

‘1Q84‘ is a magical tale. It’s also a cautionary tale about a bleak and dangerous future, but only a little. Mostly, it’s a love story, a profound and old-school love story, about two people who belong together, two souls who will find each other across time and space and distance. About two souls who will find each other across universes.

It is plottier than his other books. It is full of plot, and mystery, and magic. Details, mysterious connections, and sinister evil. I almost don’t want to say more, don’t want to give my normal plot summary, because anything I say I will be insufficient, either to explain the plot, or to express the strange, compelling aspect of the novel.

‘1Q84‘ is a novel from multiple points-of-view, a technique which, not to stress the obvious, either works or doesn’t. Here, it works. Aomame and Tengo (our protagonists) fill in the gaps in each other’s narratives, but in a way which builds suspense, fills out the world, rather than contradicting or merely delaying the plot.

And the novel is suspenseful, anxiety-provoking to the point where it disrupted my life. ‘1Q84‘ is one of those books that consumes your free attention, makes you want to sneak to the bathroom at work, leave parties early, tell friends that you have other plans, just so that you can keep reading.

But that compelling quality doesn’t necessarily mean that a book is ‘good’, per se. It only means that it is…well, compelling. And I guess that I’m not sure that ‘1Q84‘ is ‘good’, actually. I certainly don’t think that it’s beautifully written, but I am always hesitant to judge the language of a book in translation.

But, I think I also found it moving. It’s hard to say, because I am emotionally obtuse, but I think I became quite invested in the fate of these two characters. These traits of Murakami’s, the bleakness, the alienation, in ‘1Q84‘, they become the traits of the characters, of Aomame and Tengo, and they can therefore be solved, eased, by the existence of the other.

I think that is why I am so hesitant to give up on authors, to really leave them as lost causes. Sometimes (rarely, it’s true, but sometimes), the traits which alienate you from a writer, which make you hate a book, can change suddenly, can turn and become an aspect in a larger story which you love. When alienation is the work, it’s tough, but when alienation is a part which can be overcome, then you can work with the work, care about it and grow with it. You can root for it.

I can no longer say that I don’t like Haruki Murakami. We now occupy an ambivalent space, two bad books and one great one. Reasons for optimism, but an essential lack of trust.

But I’m not done with Murakami. Not yet.