‘The Unavoidable Order of Things’: Fabricated Resistance in George Orwell’s 1984

This essay reclaims _1984_ (1949) from recent reinterpretations by critics that locate it in the ‘fairy tale’ (Bowen) mode of the Gothic fantastic. Orwell’s famous dystopia, it is argued, is a treatise of philosophy and social criticism that depicts a future superorganism, a society in which a totality of social determinism has created a new species of human being that is entirely constructed by the totalitarian superstructure that Orwell saw emerging. It is argued that even the triangle of ‘thought-criminals’ who seem to have stepped out of Big Brother’s ‘collective solipsism’ and reconstructed their identities as historical persons, Winston Smith, Julia and O’Brien, are collaboratively acting out a bizarre drama entirely scripted by ‘Big Brother’ to provide an antithesis to the Party. This antithesis is a necessary mechanism for ‘Ingsoc’s’ internal stability and thus part of ‘Oceania’s’ inherent logic. All three of them own dissociative identities split between ‘crimethink’ and ‘Thought Police’ and betray their rebellion. In its outlook, the essay discusses Orwell’s relevance today.