Orwell’s Endgame: Winston Does Not Love Big Brother.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a puzzle – one you must work out for yourself.
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
So said George Orwell’s character, Syme to Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The aim of this eradication of the lexicon was to narrow the range of thought so as to, in modern parlance, “ensure that thoughtcrime is literally impossible.” Syme would surely feel at home with today’s “wokists” and bureau-technocrats with their earnest cycles of “continuous improvement” and fulsome LinkedIn accounts. Here, the word “literally” is used in its authentic sense, as something exact and appertaining to words. Syme relays the Party’s intention, strictly to the letter. Exactly.
Readers at the time of its original publication and until very recently, may have struggled to visualise quite how Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four could have manifested. It seemed too bleak, so far removed from our world that surely we would be able to tell if anything remotely like it were to come into being? Alas, this has turned out to be wholly mistaken. Over the last two and a half years in particular, the dour joke has been that Nineteen Eighty-Four was supposed to be a warning not a blueprint. Some have watched with dread as more and more surveillance apparatus is installed in public spaces, using cash is discouraged or even impossible at times. A digital totalising monitoring of our habits is envisioned with the Un-Trudeau example of the threat of account freezing for any minor infringement of the ideology.
The novel generated a whole vocabulary of its own that has come down to us almost seamlessly. Who has not heard of Big Brother, the Thought Police, Room 101, the proles? Who has not noticed the gargantuan efforts at state propaganda, at enormous unaffordable expense? Who is not now aware of a Newspeak and an Oldspeak, where the former reconfigures new definitions of “vaccine,” “herd immunity,” or even “woman?” The frequent mentions, memes and allusions to the novel’s tropes have served as a reminder to reacquaint ourselves with its warnings before we reach a point of no return.
Thanks to Thorsteinn Siglaugsson, my attention was drawn to a recent article on the Brownstone Institute website by Hannah Grace. She writes about how her younger son was “taken” by a cult, one which I refer to frequently as the “covidian cult.” Her older son, an avid reader, had recounted the ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four to Hannah Grace who had previously declined to read it fully herself because, “it disturbed me too greatly.” Grace then provides a sorrowful account of her youngest son’s increasing ensnarement into a modern-day dystopian web of fear. Grace’s account of her drive for questioning and critical thought, for seeking different perspectives and to protect her son from a world of fear bring to mind Orwell’s warnings. In Nineteen Eighty-Four:
Lies are Truth,
War is Peace;
Freedom is Slavery;
Ignorance is Strength.
Hannah Grace’s eldest son’s recounting of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s ending however, may not be wholly correct. Grace’s conclusion, via her son (along with many others) is that Winston, the novel’s protagonist, falls for for the Party’s “cult,” and comes to love Big Brother. Ultimately, the message is that all is lost. In what follows I want to examine a completely different interpretation. One with a measure of hope. I am going to argue that Winston does not love Big Brother, that there is an alternative way of understanding the novel’s ending. In order to get to where I can justify what must seem like an audacious claim, I need to set out some of the novel’s most important themes.
Two recurring themes consist of “history” and the Party’s desire to eradicate the past, and language. (Often these two elements are combined) Big Brother seeks to incrementally remove all remnants of the past, and often does this via the reduction of words themselves, or the alteration of meaning or the reconfiguration of “facts.” The frequent shortening of Nineteen Eighty-Four to 1984, as with the novel’s reduction of English Socialism to Ingsoc is referenced as a tactic totalitarian states (and more benign ones) use to hide what is actually represented. Hence the acronym Nazi works to hide the wording of National Socialist Workers Party, and it is the convenience of the acronym that encourages its use.
It is Winston’s civil service job is to re-write history by “correcting” the Times’s past articles. It becomes increasingly impossible to gauge what is true, what happened or how things used to be. Winston’s conversation with an ordinary man in a pub proves fruitless as the man’s memory is distorted and vague. There is no standard by which anything is measurable or tested; no anchor and no ground. Truth is what Big Brother says it is, and Winston and his ilk are required to put its will into practice. Such is the stuff of today’s cults of covid, climate and gender where truth is what we are told it is, and we are increasingly required to distrust the evidence of one’s own eyes. (Crucially, we are encouraged to distrust any existing facts or discoveries not approved by the powers that be, no matter how true they actually are).
One of the observations I would make about this aspect of Orwell’s novel, is Big Brother’s reductionist conception of language as a mechanised entity of sorts to be taken in a literal, inflexible way. The one-sided, limited understanding of language as mere communication, as if it were a series of simple universal diagrams not only distorts our understanding of our own cultural heritage; as one of Big Brother’s nastier techniques, it distorts interpretation of Winston’s outcomes. It is in its own way, a kind of scientism like a type of binary code recreated in the Party’s image.
However, language is not merely “words for things.” Language is the place in which cultural meanings live. Language is rooted to place and time, and often words carry echoes of times past. Taking Winston’s surname of “Smith” as an example. In English, we might talk of something being smashed to “smithereens” echoing the blacksmith’s spray of minute fragments and sparks. In Britain, many sayings are linked to our nautical heritage, we talk about “all hands on deck,” and how we must “toe the line,” have a little money to “tide you over,” whether or not we like “the cut of one’s jib,” and so on. Moreover, some words simply do not translate into other languages. The British language of Welsh, Cymraeg, has a wonderful word, Hiraeth which means a special kind of longing rooted in place. However, there is no equivalent word in English and it nearly always has to be explained in several sentences. In Cymraeg, like Hebrew, the sentence begins with the verb not the subject indicating perhaps that what is being done is more important than who is doing it.
Syme’s enthusiastic explanations for the reduction of language convey the Party’s aim to continually destroy words as a means to narrow the range of thought. Syme criticises Winston for his work on the Times suggesting that Winston’s writing, although “good enough” is merely translating Oldspeak into Newspeak. In essence, Winston’s heart is not in it. He does not “grasp the beauty of the destruction of words.” This feels true at least. Winston’s big act of rebellion is to write a diary, by hand, with an “archaic” pen. In 1949, the year of the novel’s publication, such an idea would have seemed preposterous, but in the present day where we are all surrounded with telescreens of one sort or another, the suggestion that one would not need to write by hand is a very graspable reality. And, in a curious parallel with Genesis where God brings the world into being through words, it is through the words that Winston writes that he begins his journey into thought crime, and into sedition.
Why are words and thought so threatening to Power? Consider the current attempts to eliminate the word “woman,” and the corresponding promotion of phrases such as “safe and effective” in the attempt to control ideas, perceptions, truth and ultimately reality. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is through the destruction of language that the destruction of thought happens, leading ultimately to the elimination of the human. Here we observe an allusion to the transhumanist policies of current powers that be. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is the proles who are not considered to be human; and yet it is they who represent a source of hope for Winston. If there is hope it lies with the proles. They must be capable somehow, of language, thought, and memory.
In the conversation with Winston, Syme’s casual predictions are that by 2050, knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. Is it coincidence that the WEF goal is that by 2050 that all our confected climate woes will have been eliminated, the point at which we reach one of a range of promised lands on offer. For those who survive, at least. Oldspeak seems to represent something much more than language-as-words-for-things, it carries within the embedded trace of the human.
I recall that Hannah Arendt devoted much of her intellectual life to the very concept of thought. Her book, the Life of the Mind is a fascinating tour de force into this field. Arendt’s observations of Adolf Eichmann at his trial for war crimes (which led to her wider discussions on totalitarianism itself) were concerned with his lack of thought. However, it was not that Eichmann was especially “thoughtless” as a person. On the contrary, he was an intelligent man quite capable of thought. What is often assumed as a lack of capability should more accurately be described as a lack of inclination to think in Eichmann’s case.
This is how I understand it. It is important to grasp that Eichmann did not commit his crimes because he was thoughtless or that he did not think about the consequences of his actions. It is that Eichmann stopped thinking in order to commit his crimes and facilitate the “Final Solution.”
Thought matters.
To reduce language, and thus thought and thus the human to the simplest of binary code is to see the human being as “meat,” as Neil Oliver described in a recent YouTube broadcast. It goes hand in hand with the facile belief that man can control everything (the planet, the climate, the human). This hubristic illusion of control is described through, and about language in Nineteen Eighty-Four where everything is understood in rational, scientific materialist means.
I offer up a beacon of hope here. Orwell offers his reader a kind of meta narrative over and above the actual story. And it is this that will lead to my claim that Winston may not, in the end, come to love Big Brother contrary to most interpretations. Here is my thesis. One of the themes running throughout the novel is the theme of chess. In many commentaries, the appearance of chess is something that occurs in the background, something not especially significant.
However, in foregrounding chess as a means for communicating to his readers, Orwell can be understood to be testing you to see if you have understood any of the novel at all. Do you believe that Winston loves Big Brother? Why? Because it says so? Have you not yet learned that words and meanings get changed on a whim in Oceania? Bear with me.
In the novel, the site of rebellion is the Chestnut Tree café. It was not forbidden by the Party, but Winston knows that it is a place where painters and musicians (and chess afficionados) frequent, and that it is “frowned upon.” The name is a fairly obvious play on words, a chess nut is someone “nuts” about chess. American Chess Nuts was a book published in 1868 comprising of chess problems and endgames. It is important to note that such problems are carefully designed and are not taken from actual games. This will be relevant to what follows. The preface to American Chess Nuts explains that the phrase Chess Nut originated from someone’s signature in an edition of the Illustrated London News. Whether or not Orwell was actually acquainted with this or the book remains to be established. Nevertheless, the pun is an easy one to construe and the chess references are relevant.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, chess is established as a dissident activity and additionally, it becomes a kind of language. Remember, language is not just words for things. The chess motif speaks to readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Big Brother claims omnipotence. Big Brother believes he can eliminate words, people and they will be gone, but traces always remain. Some regard Orwell’s use of chess as an illustration of Winston’s position as a pawn in a larger game. Chess is thus reduced to a literal and simplistic war to parallel the phoney war constantly relayed on the telescreen. The appearance of chess in the final scene is crucial to understanding the importance of the chess motif in the novel and that all is not what it seems.
At the conclusion of the story, after Winston’s appalling experiences at the hands of O’Brien, he makes his way to the Chestnut Tree Café. His thoughts are distracted, fragmented.
A waiter, again unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue of The Times, with the page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston’s glass was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was no need to give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved; even when the place was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too close to him.
The page is turned down at a chess problem. Note that this is not a game, but a problem to solve.
He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. ‘White to play and mate in two moves.’ Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.
First of all, Winston examines the chess problem and sets out the pieces. The use of the word pieces tells us that there are no pawns in this problem. This is because pawns are not strictly speaking, pieces.
Then the tricky ending is described as involving two knights. Their colour is not described. However, this is not the main aspect here.
The phrase “white always mates,” (meaning to win), is simply not true for a chess problem or study, or here. For example, in a chess game, there are three potential outcomes. One can win, lose or draw. The outcomes are not, therefore, strictly binary. In chess endgame studies and problems there is not a uniform outcome (i.e., “white to move and win”) Therefore, if you simply take that statement as it is, believe it to be true, you are believing something untrue; or, we could put it more dramatically, you believe a lie. In order to progress a lie, one has to assist the liar. For white to win in this case, black must assist.
The sequence of events here is clouded by Winston’s odd recollections, and mass media distractions.
His interest flagged again. He drank another mouthful of gin, picked up the white knight and made a tentative move. Check. But it was evidently not the right move, because —
And at this point, Winston drifts towards a memory of playing Snakes and Ladders with his mother. The elaborate scene has nestled within it the recollection that they played eight games, winning four each. This represents a draw. Winston labels this a false memory, but the description could easily be one of a person’s instinct, or gut feeling at work. Chess players will tell you that once you move beyond the mechanics of chess, one learns to play with a certain amount of instinct.
Some things had happened, others had not happened. He turned back to the chessboard and picked up the white knight again. Almost in the same instant it dropped on to the board with a clatter. He had started as though a pin had run into him.
And this is the section that drives many to assume that Winston is defeated.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
It sounds convincing. However, the phrases, “white to play and mate in two,” and “white always mates,” were convincing and they were not true. For white to win, black must assist. If you don’t play chess, this is easily missed.
Reader, you have to work it out for yourself.
Just because it says, “he loved Big Brother,” does not mean it is true. (Just because they say it is “safe and effective” does not mean it is true).
Winston’s realisation is that the chess problem is not “white to mate in two with a resulting win,” because the problem actually results in a draw. It is his instinct, which is attributed to “false memory,” that tells him that. The important question to ask is, does he collude with a lie? Implicitly the reader is asked in turn, will you collude with a lie? This is because, for white to win in this problem, black must assist. In this way, Orwell tells us that to make lies true, one has to assist the liar. In order to facilitate totalitarianism, one has to assist the regime.
Chess problems are carefully composed works, rather like a well written story. They are constructed so that there are no wasted pieces. They are not full games. Orwell would have known that, and arguably he put this knowledge to good use in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston’s subsequent move (appearing to love Big Brother) plays like a chess sacrifice. The sacrifice of himself. However, in reality, he makes his own move to win.
Orwell’s clever meta narrative uses a chess motif to signal dissidence and thought. It is Winston’s instinctual thoughtfulness that tells us that he retains his humanity, despite all he has experienced. The novel itself then, can be understood as a puzzle. And one which you have to work out for yourself.
Just because it says “he loved Big Brother” does not mean it is true.
So, to Hannah Grace, whose son is lost to the covidian cult. Should you read this someday, I hope it gives you some hope. Read Nineteen Eighty-Four, and remember that you have to work it out for yourself. And, in order for a lie to become true, it requires us to assist.
Down with Big Brother.
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Pictures by The Sideways Thinker.
The Sideways Thinker would like to thank Kev Gilligan for his input on chess for this essay.
I haven’t read 1984 yet but I will get it at some stage, it’s certainly getting a lot of references across the board.
Thanks for another great bit of writing.
I wonder just going by what you wrote, maybe he’s saying “I love you big brother” in a way he’s realised he’s got something to live for or go against in a worthy adversary. Something to put his energy into like working out the chess problems he’s going to work out how big brother works.
I could be way off cause I haven’t read it.
I will put some thought into it when I do.
Cheers Craig.