http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,978156,00.html
Consider the following in your 750 word response:
- What it's like to experience your adolescence (a critical and confusing phase of your life) in our post 9/11 world.
- Frye's The Educated Imagination
- Atwood's last question
- What you will do with your life
Orwell and me
Margaret Atwood cried her eyes out when she first read Animal Farm at the age of nine. Later, its author became a major influence on her writing. As the centenary of George Orwell's birth approaches, she says he would have plenty to say about the post-9/11 world
Monday June 16, 2003
The Guardian
I grew up with George Orwell. I was born in 1939, and Animal Farm was published in 1945. Thus, I was able to read it at the age of nine. It was lying around the house, and I mistook it for a book about talking animals, sort of like Wind in the Willows. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book - the child's version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead.
So I gobbled up the adventures of Napoleon and Snowball, the smart, greedy, upwardly mobile pigs, and Squealer the spin-doctor, and Boxer the noble but thick-witted horse, and the easily led, slogan-chanting sheep, without making any connection with historical events.
To say that I was horrified by this book is an understatement. The fate of the farm animals was so grim, the pigs so mean and mendacious and treacherous, the sheep so stupid. Children have a keen sense of injustice, and this was the thing that upset me the most: the pigs were so unjust. I cried my eyes out when Boxer the horse had an accident and was carted off to be made into dog food, instead of being given the quiet corner of the pasture he'd been promised.
The whole experience was deeply disturbing to me, but I am forever grateful to Orwell for alerting me early to the danger flags I've tried to watch out for since. In the world of Animal Farm, most speechifying and public palaver is bullshit and instigated lying, and though many characters are good-hearted and mean well, they can be frightened into closing their eyes to what's really going on.
The pigs browbeat the others with ideology, then twist that ideology to suit their own purposes: their language games were evident to me even at that age. As Orwell taught, it isn't the labels - Christianity, Socialism, Islam, Democracy, Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good, the works - that are definitive, but the acts done in their name.
I could see, too, how easily those who have toppled an oppressive power take on its trappings and habits. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was right to warn us that democracy is the hardest form of government to maintain; Orwell knew that to the marrow of his bones, because he had seen it in action.
How quickly the precept "All Animals Are Equal" is changed into "All Animals Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal Than Others". What oily concern the pigs show for the welfare of the other animals, a concern that disguises their contempt for those they are manipulating.
With what alacrity do they put on the once-despised uniforms of the tyrannous humans they have overthrown, and learn to use their whips. How self-righteously they justify their actions, helped by the verbal web-spinning of Squealer, their nimble-tongued press agent, until all power is in their trotters, pretence is no longer necessary, and they rule by naked force.
A revolution often means only that: a revolving, a turn of the wheel of fortune, by which those who were at the bottom mount to the top, and assume the choice positions, crushing the former power-holders beneath them. We should beware of all those who plaster the landscape with large portraits of themselves, like the evil pig, Napoleon.
Animal Farm is one of the most spectacular Emperor-Has-No-Clothes books of the 20th century, and it got George Orwell into trouble. People who run counter to the current popular wisdom, who point out the uncomfortably obvious, are likely to be strenuously baa-ed at by herds of angry sheep. I didn't have all that figured out at the age of nine, of course - not in any conscious way. But we learn the patterns of stories before we learn their meanings, and Animal Farm has a very clear pattern.
Then along came Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. Thus, I read it in paperback a couple of years later, when I was in high school. Then I read it again, and again: it was right up there among my favourite books, along with Wuthering Heights.
At the same time, I absorbed its two companions, Arthur Koestler's Darkness At Noon and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I was keen on all three of them, but I understood Darkness At Noon to be a tragedy about events that had already happened, and Brave New World to be a satirical comedy, with events that were unlikely to unfold in exactly that way. (Orgy-Porgy, indeed.)
Nineteen Eighty-Four struck me as more realistic, probably because Winston Smith was more like me - a skinny person who got tired a lot and was subjected to physical education under chilly conditions (this was a feature of my school) - and who was silently at odds with the ideas and the manner of life proposed for him. (This may be one of the reasons Nineteen-Eighty-Four is best read when you are an adolescent: most adolescents feel like that.)
I sympathised particularly with Winston's desire to write his forbidden thoughts down in a deliciously tempting, secret blank book: I had not yet started to write, but I could see the attractions of it. I could also see the dangers, because it's this scribbling of his - along with illicit sex, another item with considerable allure for a teenager of the 50s - that gets Winston into such a mess.
Animal Farm charts the progress of an idealistic movement of liberation towards a totalitarian dictatorship headed by a despotic tyrant; Nineteen Eighty-Four describes what it's like to live entirely within such a system. Its hero, Winston, has only fragmentary memories of what life was like before the present dreadful regime set in: he's an orphan, a child of the collectivity. His father died in the war that has ushered in the repression, and his mother has disappeared, leaving him with only the reproachful glance she gave him as he betrayed her over a chocolate bar - a small betrayal that acts both as the key to Winston's character and as a precursor to the many other betrayals in the book.
The government of Airstrip One, Winston's "country", is brutal. The constant surveillance, the impossibility of speaking frankly to anyone, the looming, ominous figure of Big Brother, the regime's need for enemies and wars - fictitious though both may be - which are used to terrify the people and unite them in hatred, the mind-numbing slogans, the distortions of language, the destruction of what has really happened by stuffing any record of it down the Memory Hole - these made a deep impression on me. Let me re-state that: they frightened the stuffing out of me. Orwell was writing a satire about Stalin's Soviet Union, a place about which I knew very little at the age of 14, but he did it so well that I could imagine such things happening anywhere.
There is no love interest in Animal Farm, but there is in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston finds a soulmate in Julia; outwardly a devoted Party fanatic, secretly a girl who enjoys sex and makeup and other spots of decadence. But the two lovers are discovered, and Winston is tortured for thought-crime - inner disloyalty to the regime.
He feels that if he can only remain faithful in his heart to Julia, his soul will be saved - a romantic concept, though one we are likely to endorse. But like all absolutist governments and religions, the Party demands that every personal loyalty be sacrificed to it, and replaced with an absolute loyalty to Big Brother.
Confronted with his worst fear in the dreaded Room 101, where a nasty device involving a cage-full of starving rats can be fitted to the eyes, Winston breaks: "Don't do it to me," he pleads, "do it to Julia." (This sentence has become shorthand in our household for the avoidance of onerous duties. Poor Julia - how hard we would make her life if she actually existed. She'd have to be on a lot of panel discussions, for instance.)
After his betrayal of Julia, Winston becomes a handful of malleable goo. He truly believes that two and two make five, and that he loves Big Brother. Our last glimpse of him is sitting drink-sodden at an outdoor cafe, knowing he's a dead man walking and having learned that Julia has betrayed him, too, while he listens to a popular refrain: "Under the spreading chestnut tree/ I sold you and you sold me ..."
Orwell has been accused of bitterness and pessimism - of leaving us with a vision of the future in which the individual has no chance, and where the brutal, totalitarian boot of the all-controlling Party will grind into the human face, for ever.
But this view of Orwell is contradicted by the last chapter in the book, an essay on Newspeak - the doublethink language concocted by the regime. By expurgating all words that might be troublesome - "bad" is no longer permitted, but becomes "double-plus-ungood" - and by making other words mean the opposite of what they used to mean - the place where people get tortured is the Ministry of Love, the building where the past is destroyed is the Ministry of Information - the rulers of Airstrip One wish to make it literally impossible for people to think straight. However, the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus, it's my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he's usually been given credit for.
Orwell became a direct model for me much later in my life - in the real 1984, the year in which I began writing a somewhat different dystopia, The Handmaid's Tale. By that time I was 44, and I had learned enough about real despotisms - through the reading of history, travel, and my membership of Amnesty International - so that I didn't need to rely on Orwell alone.
The majority of dystopias - Orwell's included - have been written by men, and the point of view has been male. When women have appeared in them, they have been either sexless automatons or rebels who have defied the sex rules of the regime. They have acted as the temptresses of the male protagonists, however welcome this temptation may be to the men themselves.
Thus Julia; thus the cami-knicker-wearing, orgy-porgy seducer of the Savage in Brave New World; thus the subversive femme fatale of Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 seminal classic, We. I wanted to try a dystopia from the female point of view - the world according to Julia, as it were. However, this does not make The Handmaid's Tale a "feminist dystopia", except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered "feminist" by those who think women ought not to have these things.
The 20th century could be seen as a race between two versions of man-made hell - the jackbooted state totalitarianism of Orwell's Nineteen Eight-Four, and the hedonistic ersatz paradise of Brave New World, where absolutely everything is a consumer good and human beings are engineered to be happy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed for a time that Brave New World had won - from henceforth, state control would be minimal, and all we would have to do was go shopping and smile a lot, and wallow in pleasures, popping a pill or two when depression set in.
But with 9/11, all that changed. Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once - open markets, closed minds - because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance. The torturer's dreaded Room 101 has been with us for millennia. The dungeons of Rome, the Inquisition, the Star Chamber, the Bastille, the proceedings of General Pinochet and of the junta in Argentina - all have depended on secrecy and on the abuse of power. Lots of countries have had their versions of it - their ways of silencing troublesome dissent.
Democracies have traditionally defined themselves by, among other things - openness and the rule of law. But now it seems that we in the west are tacitly legitimising the methods of the darker human past, upgraded technologically and sanctified to our own uses, of course. For the sake of freedom, freedom must be renounced. To move us towards the improved world - the utopia we're promised - dystopia must first hold sway.
It's a concept worthy of doublethink. It's also, in its ordering of events, strangely Marxist. First the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which lots of heads must roll; then the pie-in-the-sky classless society, which oddly enough never materialises. Instead, we just get pigs with whips.
I often ask myself: what would George Orwell have to say about it?
Quite a lot.
25 comments:
And this all means what, exactly?
It is not all fun and games being an adolescent. Being in my last year of high school I am of course excited, but also saddened. My last four years have been the most care free years and now I am forced leave the places where I feel most comfortable and venture into the unknown, where all decisions will be my own. I have accomplished so much throughout my elementary and high school career, and experienced many different life altering situations that have all prepared me for this- life in the real world. These life altering situations include, growing apart from friends that I have been close with for years, the death of family members, and people whom are as close as family, and the terrorist attacks that shocked the world on September 11, 2001. All these situations are incredibly important and have their own affects on my life, but the 9/11 attacks affected everyone, everywhere. On September 11th, even if you lived under a rock in the ocean and your neighbour was a sea turtle, you knew what happened, and you knew who did it. You probably knew that the result of these acts of violence was going to be war, and you probably feared the beginning of “The Third World War”, or at least that was what everyone was talking about. Still visible today are the sites where the Twin Towers came crumbling down in New York City. Having seen this site with my own eyes I can say that it is heartbreaking. Tall fences stand around the perimeter and construction signs identify warnings. However this is not the worst part, the worst part – for me anyways – is that everyone is scurrying by, talking on their phones, and running back to the office before the boss notices they took a long lunch. Most of all people, especially young people, have forgotten the extreme actions that occurred that day and the aftermath that presents itself today. The repercussions of September 11, 2001 are hardly noticeable to young people; we just take it as the norm – even when it is not. Such things as security and surveillance are disregarded because they are the norm, for us anyways. For everyone born in 1990, the 9/11 attacks happened before first recess of grade six. Grade six is a crucial time in a child’s life, it is the time we go from being “little kids” to “big kids”, and because of the timing everything that happened after September 11, 2001 did not seem like that big a change. Only now do we realize, at the age of sixteen and seventeen that we do not like when people can read our personal emails, and locate every single webpage viewed on the internet. Only now do we actually realize what September 11, 2001 meant for the world.
In my whole life I have never read a piece of literature that resembled anything like Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination. Frye’s essays posed serious and yet, curious questions about life and literature. Kind of like the questions we keep bottled up inside because knowing the answer is not something we want to distinguish at this point, we want to remain unaware of the facts because, lets face it- ignorance is bliss. But how long can this type of bliss remain? When you do not know where you come from, how can you know who you are? This question resembles the types questions asked and answered in The Educated Imagination. Everything in literature evolves from another piece of literature, which means everything develops from mythology. Without proper knowledge of mythology one is simply restricting the mind that could make a genius.
Margaret Atwood, a famous writer, grew up with the works of George Orwell. Atwood asks a question at the end of an article published by The Guardian in the UK, the question is as follows, “…What would George Orwell have to say about it”? Atwood is asking what Orwell’s thoughts would be about the post 9/11 world. For me, I believe Orwell would be shocked at the progression of the world since he left us. Even though he wrote 1984, I believe that he meant the novel to be an extreme example of a totalitarian government and not what actually would happen – especially while living in under a democratic government. In Canada and in the United States we live with democratic governments, however it is ironic that each and every day we are moving closer and closer towards a totalitarian government. Anyone who is in a position of power can monitor you and obtain more than enough useful information about, not only you, but your spending habits, any debt consumed over the years, your travels, and what sites you visit on the web. I believe Orwell would be speechless to the fact that this is actually happening, it’s not just in his novel anymore.
I know that I cannot just stay in high school for the rest of my life, even though I have adjusted since the beginning of grade nine. I know that I must choose, and soon, the programs I want to be in next year…at university. It is a scary thought to most, including myself, mostly because I am not 100% positive of what I want to do for the rest of my life. I do not believe that at this point in my life I am able to choose what career is going to be perfect for me. Maybe in a couple years, perhaps longer, I will know for sure that a certain career will be right for me, that it will benefit me, and make me happy to wake up in the morning. Right now though I can only hope the career that is waiting for me is the one that I am pursuing.
Nineteen Eighty-Four: That’s Life!
An unfortunate truth, unknown to many of the citizens of North America, is that they are actually living in a fictitious world established by George Orwell. Lives are spent without ever understanding the society in which one resides. Individuals accept what they are presented with, never considering another choice or motive. The uneducated mind is not aware that their existence is controlled by higher powers, such as government authorities or the media. The adverse reality of our life is that ideas and situations, described in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, are transpiring presently in our post 9/11 world. The continuous fear that citizens experience, coupled with the authorities attempting to control our thoughts, is leading us toward a totalitarian society.
The September 11th terrorist attacks on the United State’s World Trade Centre was a dreadful incident. For many of the adolescents at the time, 9/11 was the first horrible devastation to be experienced. They have had to mature in a world filled with fear and hatred. Only ten years old when it happened, I was confused and too immature to understand the effects that such a disaster would have. The realization that thousands of lives were lost and thousands of families had been destroyed had not entered my mind initially. Growing up after 9/11 had given me an unalterable view on terrorism and the understanding for the need of national security. Citizens were led to believe that all those of the Muslim race were dangerous and untrustworthy. Although the attacks had not directly affected our country, there became an increase of bomb threats toward Canada. The possibility that Canada was next instilled fear and anger. Living in the post 9/11 world has generated constant apprehension in the entire population, not just for adolescents. In an effort to protect the sense of security for individuals, precautions have been taken in order to sustain our safety. For example, surveillance cameras appear in many locations. The thought that these cameras are placed in numerous areas to keep watch over citizens for reasons other than safety has never been considered for most individuals. Similar to our society, Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, introduced a new technology called the telescreen. Any citizen of Oceania who owned a telescreen could be watched over and listened to by government officials. Completely conditioned, they were unaware of this absurdity and the invasion of their privacy. In Margaret Atwood’s article, “Orwell and Me”, she states that supervision over society has increased, “But with 9/11 all that changed. Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once – open markets, closed minds – because state surveillance is back with a vengeance.” Atwood compares the telescreen to the security camera, indicating that Orwell’s prediction was slightly correct. The population of North America is being watched just as Oceania’s citizens were. Presently, many individuals my age cannot connect our world to that of Orwell’s. Perhaps, it is due to the oversight of our society or the fact they have not read Nineteen Eighty-Four. For this reason, it is important that everyone educates their mind to be able to understand the world in which they live and make important relationships between the world of literature and reality.
Northrop Frye was a literary scholar who believed in the preservation of literature and the need to educate oneself to form their own opinions. Unlike the Orwellian society presented in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Frye lectured on the importance of the imagination and individual thought. In the fictional world of Oceania, the government strived to eliminate personal thought, “Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”(45) The purpose of this was to make it impossible for individuals to express themselves. The diminished language allowed the administration to have complete control over its citizens. With the authority, the totalitarian Party trained everyone’s mind to think and believe in favour of the government’s actions. While any form of thought in Oceania was a crime, our society is much less severe. The ability to think for oneself is encouraged by the government and the media. However, these biased organizations often persuade us to think a certain way, instead of neutralizing the information presented and allowing us to create our own opinion. Much of the population of North America, and elsewhere, are ignorant to the reality that we are slowly being conditioned. In his essay, “The Vocation of Eloquence”, found in The Educated Imagination, Frye explains Orwell’s theory, “Orwell even goes so far as to suggest that the only way to make tyranny permanent and unshakable, the only way in other words to create a literal hell on earth, is deliberately to debase our language by turning our speech into an automatic gabble.” (91-92) Frye reveals that the combination of thought and imagination will ruin a totalitarian government. Unmistakably, it is essential that individuals educate themselves and feed their imagination in order to exonerate the prospect of a totalitarian administration, one that could be fast approaching.
There is a frightening reality that the democratic society of North America could become a tyrannous culture. The prediction and warning that George Orwell presented to the world could, in fact, be accurate. However, the present world cannot be compared directly to Orwellian society, as it is not as extreme or noticeable, but there are clear indications that the imaginary world of Oceania is slowly becoming a reality. The continuous war against terrorism, the uninformed mind, and the loss of certain rights are three examples in our world that relate to Oceania’s slogans: war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. While Orwell’s novel is an amazing literary work, Atwood shares that he had been “accused of bitterness and pessimism - leaving us with a vision in which the individual has no chance…” Atwood believes otherwise stating that he “had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he’s usually been given credit for.” Margaret Atwood’s last question considers what George Orwell would have to say about the progress of society. I think that Orwell had a vague idea that the future would become what it is today. He experienced the horrors that occurred in the 1940’s giving him a certain outlook. He must have realized that the past haunts the present, giving him reason to believe that a dictatorship government would one day rise again. I think that Orwell discovered that totalitarianism would not prevail when there are such intelligent individuals in the world. It is unknown the true thoughts George Orwell would have about our post 9/11 world, but I think he would be surprised at the similarities between the imaginary world he created and the reality we are facing today.
The constant fear that surrounds our lives and the efforts of authority figures to control its citizens are warnings that prove we have aspects of a totalitarian state. In order to save ourselves from the treacherous government that may one day control our lives, we must educate our minds. We have to create our own thoughts and opinions and not be trained to think a certain way. This is why I plan to be as informed as possible and to carefully absorb and process all that is presented. I now know that much of the information that is released can be propaganda. As I complete my education, and soon begin my career, I will continue to formulate my opinions from my own thoughts, not from anyone else. The possibility that my freedom to think and evaluate according to my own beliefs could one day disappear, encourages me to continue informing myself in order to reject a totalitarian state.
Times Have Changed, First Comes the Downfall.
George Orwell created a society in his novel 1984 that was based on non-existent privacy, fake incidents, altering the truth of the past and the vaporization of people. I am positive Orwell did not want nor expect the world to become as intense as the Oceania he shaped – but did Orwell suspect that the future would bring forth new laws and new technology? Probably.
It is not such a bad life that we have today. With our new technologies we are able to cure diseases and communicate with people all over the world. We are able to research things and even shop for our groceries online – but if Orwell were living in our modern day society, would he be a ‘Winston’ in our large group of ‘Mr Parson’s’? It is true, technology has helped us with many things, but sometimes we go overboard. We have lost some privacy, with telemarketers calling our houses knowing our purchasing history, cameras watching us drive or even walk around our high schools. Have we lost so much trust that the government is forced to have such things found around our communities? With the attacks of 9/11, with shootings such as the ones that occurred in Columbine, our government has increased its security immensely. Is this security our government’s parallel to Big Brother’s want of their citizens to live in fear?
There are negative things in our society that one might not agree with, such as the media that gives us the impression we need to look a certain way while also encouraging us to stand out and be unique – it’s kind of hypocritical. We all read magazines, we all get our image ideas from one source, this being the media. These sources give us a variety of different looks but with similarities such as waist size. It’s telling us to be free but at the same time stay within the lines, it is not as extreme as 1984's society but it is most definitely a start. If in my life it could be changed so that people didn’t look at media’s temptations to be perfect, then we would most likely be on the boat Orwell would be on, a world of freedom. First comes the temptation to be all alike, and then comes the longing to be unique. It is our nature to sometimes agree and to sometimes not agree, just as it was Winston’s nature to not love big brother – the difference is that our society doesn’t force people or kill people to think one way. The media may be a more subtle ‘room 101’ but we have the freedom to push it down, to hate it. We have our collapses but we always rise.
Atwood states, “To move us towards the improved world - the utopia we're promised - dystopia must first hold sway.” This quote really hits me as the perfect justification to why we are the way we are now. To reach our perfect state of a healthy earth, a controlled, peaceful, war-free environment we must go through a state of hard times. Our global warming, our incontrollable terrorists, our wars – they will all lead us to respecting our earth, preventing such terrible crimes and countries resorting to violence to settle their differences. Yes Orwell would be shocked to see how our government deals with threats to their power or to their country, but with new decades comes new discoveries and new ideologies. We, in the future, don’t always agree with how things were handled in the past and those in the past may not always agree with how things are handled presently, but times have changed. Our actions will soon hold way to a society that is still free, we will never reach an “ Oceania-like-state”, we will soon get to a state where everything is happy and peaceful because the technologies that the ‘Winston’s’ in our societies may not agree with, help us learn more about our planet, they help us stay connected with news and improvements in health and everyday living – they will eventually help us reach the Utopia many people dream of.
1984, Literature, and You
In any society that humans are governed in, humanity will succeed as long as one this is present among even a fraction of people, the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind will keep people from changing exactly who they are because someone else cannot change your subconscious mind as long as you are not willing to change it. Dictators and outside influences can impact what you choose consciously but as long as you, in your mind, do not want to change, you will not.
Margaret Atwood states this when she describes Animal Farm by George Orwell in her article, “Orwell and Me.” She states that the sheep in the novel were so stupid as to what the pigs were feeding them, they went along with it, “The fate of the farm animals was so grim, the pigs so mean and mendacious and treacherous, the sheep so stupid.” This goes to say that unless your subconscious mind has something to stand up for and truly believe, you will believe anything that is thrown to you. Atwood tells the reader that Winston Smith in 1984 was a character she sympathized with, “probably because Winston Smith was more like me…and who was silently at odds with the ideas and manner of life proposed to him.” The reader can related to Winston because he had a subconscious mind and knew that what the Party was doing was wrong, and that he shouldn’t be a part of it, but consciously he had no other choice because of the torture the Party was putting him through. There was no way for Winston to voice his thoughts without persecution, which was the difference between his subconscious and conscious mind. Atwood, by comparing the characters from George Orwell’s novels, is telling to reader to figure out and know what they stand for because if your conscious and subconscious minds do not differ you will have no backbone for yourself and believe anything that is handed to you.
Concepts of conscious and subconscious minds also come up in Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination. Frye expands on this idea to include his belief that in order to establish our conscious and subconscious mind, we need to read literature and build upon our imagination. He states, “Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.”(82). The more literature you read, the more you imagination grows and improves which helps you to transvaluate the world around you and what is going on in that world. The more you build up on your imagination, the easier it will be to form an idea about the kind of society you want to live in. Frye writes that, “The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.”(86). With this in mind, the reader can begin to see how literature helps to transvaluate the society around you and set up your subconscious mind about your idea of society.
Frye’s concepts of teaching literature at a young age tie into what it’s like to experience your adolescence post 9/11. After September 11, 2001, the amount of propaganda and media influence in society has skyrocketed. This affects everybody in society but youths are most heavily influenced by this media because they are only beginning to figure out and establish their beliefs. Many youths are influenced by what everyone else is doing and are not figuring out exactly what they want to do. Frye believes that exposing children to literature as an early age helps them to spark their imagination and imagination helps to produce a vision of what they want society to be like. This concept is supported by Atwood as she explains, “The whole experience was deeply disturbing to me, but I am forever grateful to Orwell for alerting me to the danger flags I’ve tried to watch out for since.” Exposing children to non-fiction or fiction mocking real life events, helps them to see what happened in the past and watch out for signs of it attempting to repeat itself. Without knowledge of history, youths will not know what to look out for when propaganda reaches their minds. Youths will not be alert as to what is happening around them which is a very scary thought.
“What would George Orwell have to say about it?” Atwood asks at the end of her article. I believe that Orwell would have hope for humanity because of his novel, 1984. At the end of 1984, Orwell writes the Appendix which is written in the past-tense and in Standard English. This leaves the reader with the impression that humanity has prevailed against the Party. Despite all the effort put into changing society, the Party could not change those who did not want to change themselves. They could not change those with a subconscious mind; those who were educated enough as to see what was going on with society and who did not want to be a part of it because of the knowledge they had acquired about what had happened in the past. I believe that this is the message that Orwell wanted to send to society when he wrote 1984. He was not trying to tell us that there is no hope left and that eventually our world will turn to this, but he was trying to say that as long as we are subconsciously aware of what is going on in the society around us, dictatorship and totalitarianism will not prevail.
In order to establish your subconscious mind, you need to read literature to be able to transvaluate the society you are in and the society you would like to be in. Orwell tried to show the world, through 1984, that as long as human spirit exists, totalitarianism and dictatorship cannot take over. If humans want to keep living in the free world there is today, they need to have a view or idea of that society in their subconscious minds, because as much as outside forces can try to change your subconscious mind, they cannot.
I Want to Be Me, Not Who They Want Me to Be
Adolescence is a crucial time in anyone's life, it is the time of your life in which you struggle to find your own identity. It is a quest to find something that makes you special and sets you apart from everyone else and that is fueled by the desire to step over the boundaries society has been putting in front of you your whole life, telling you what is considered “right” or “wrong”. It is a time of rebellion, a time of change that is meant to test you, for in that struggle, you will be forced to question what you want to do with the time that has been given to you, who you are, what you truly want, and what is important to you so that at the end, you emerge not only with a sense of identity that makes you unique and sets you apart, but also with a new focus of what you want to do with your life. In this course I have learned, that the process is always more important than the result, for in the process you discover the pieces that make you whole. But what happens when society is forced to change and tries to inculcate in you certain principles that they consider to be necessary in order to avoid chaos and maintain order after the change has taken place? We often hear the slogan, “think outside the box”, but how can we do so when we are exposed to such a constant flow of media that is often bias towards one side or another?
Such a change took place after the events of 9/11. At the time I was in 7th grade and did not realize just how much this event was going to affect the system because I was too worried thinking about the next episode of Pokemon. Now that I have a better understanding about how things work in the world, I can see that decisions are now based on fear rather than in logic and common sense.
Cameras are been installed in every corner, records of what you do or say are kept and monitored. I feel confused and scared when I see that in order to have a sense of security, our society feels the need to become paranoid and, what scares me even more, is that a lot of people are buying into this idea because they believe what the government tells them. I feel that the subliminal message society is sending is that, “in order for you to be safe, you must live in constant fear”. I can see now how the world we live in is slowly become the dystopia portrayed in 1984.
But that is why adolescence is such an important phase of our lives.
Because of the desire to be different and the belief that there has to be something more, we instinctively criticize the system and its principles and try to come up with new ideas and methods that other people might find offensive or far-fetched because they have either, convinced themselves that there is no solution, or have been brainwashed into thinking their society is the best it can be.
It is also important to understand that in order to be able to criticize an idea or a principle in one's society and be able to come up with a solid opinion, one has to be well informed and had been exposed to a variety of information because, as stated before, a lot of the information is bias and has been designed to hide something that could prevent you from reaching a conclusive and solid opinion. Something I learned when I read The Educated Imagination was that, our imagination is the tool we use to solve problems and transform the world that we see into the one we envision.
Teenagers still have the innocence of a child with a wild imagination and dreams, and also have the desire to change the world around them into the one they find acceptable, that is why we are in the perfect stage in our lives in which we can “think outside the box” more easily because it just comes natural to us. But just like we saw in 1984 with Julia, rebellion without brains will not take us anywhere, and an imagination that is not fed will not help us come up with any solutions. That is why reading is important. By reading we expose ourselves to the many different ideas of what it means to be human, what is right and wrong, the dilemmas we will most likely face in the future. It also helps us see the recurring patterns in our human nature and trains us to keep an open mind to new ideas by feeding our imagination and our minds so that we are willing to take a stand for what we believe in when someone tells us these beliefs are unjustified or must be modified to fit a certain criteria.
As to what Orwell would have to say about our current society, I imagine he would probably ask us if we are happy with the society we have and if we would like our children to live in a society that bases its decisions on fear instead of morality and logic.
I plan to live my life as freely and fully as I can. I plan to educate myself so that I can become the person that I want to be and not someone that is made the way society wants them to be, of course I realize that the society I live in will have a lot of influence on me, but that is why I will try to keep an open mind about all the ideas, beliefs, and principles around me, specially the ones that make me who I am, because I realize now that if I know what makes me the person that I am, then no one will ever be able to change me.
Today’s World Through the Eyes of a Teenager
I believe that the lives of North Americans have changed greatly since the 9/11 attack on the twin towers. Not only does the attack strike fear in pedestrians all around the continent, but it changes the way we think completely. The attack makes people think twice about where they are going, because they know that anything could happen at any time. I remember that day in grade 6, sitting at my desk on what seemed to be a routine day, when I heard the news on the morning announcements. I could not believe my ears when I heard what happened. Such an attack is something that you would read in a storybook. Never in my life had I experienced the feelings that this attack gave me. I believe it changed me as a person because it opened my eyes to the evil in the world and it made me see that extreme things like this can and will happen in my lifetime. The attack drilled fear into everybody’s heads. I became more scared of another possible attack because those around me kept talking about it. Even my parents, who I relied on when anything went wrong, were scared of any further attacks. Despite how terrible an event it was, I took what I could from it. I believe that it has helped my generation of adolescence mature faster than others by teaching us that the world can be harsh at times.
In this modern post 9/11 world, it takes an educated imagination to understand what is true and what is false about what the media tells us everyday. Since the attack, there has been constant propaganda. The media constantly tells us that we should hate all Muslims. This message is wrong, and it is your choice to believe it or not. Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination teaches us to transvaluate situations like these with a trained imagination. If our imaginations are trained by reading literature, then we will understand everything the media gives us and we will understand that most of it is false. The imagination also helps us really understand what happened. The more we read, the better we can picture things in our minds from imagination, in this case, the 9/11 attack.
Today’s world has become very similar to the world portrayed in George Orwell’s 1984. Some similarities between the two are a constant state of war, false propaganda, overpowering political leaders, and privacy-stealing security. To answer the question, “what would George Orwell have to say about it?” I think that George Orwell would feel as if he is a fortune teller. 1984 was published back in 1949, and the future is slowly becoming the same government that was in 1984. All of these qualities were brought forth by the 9/11 attack. The constant state of war between America and Afghanistan puts fear in the people, just like the war in 1984 between Oceania and Eastasia/Eurasia. False propaganda convinces citizens of America to fight for the war, even though they may not be accomplishing anything. This propaganda also comes from the 9/11 attack. The man in front of all of this propaganda is now America’s overpowering political leader, George Bush. George Orwell would be surprised at how similar Big Brother and George Bush are. The 9/11 attack also brings forth a larger amount of security than ever before. You will now find a camera in every public building you enter, watching your every move, possibly recording everything you say too.
Many of the things that have resulted from 9/11 have ended up affecting people like me in negative ways. For the rest of my life, I will never be able to enter a plane without being suspected of holding a life threatening weapon. I completely understand that the security has to be higher, but I often wonder what drives people to do the things that make security so high. For the future, I am going to try to become as aware as I can about what to listen to and what not to listen to. I am going to pursue college or university, whichever one I feel I have the best chance at. Hopefully as I progress through the rest of my life, the world won’t end up like it is in 1984. Another attack like 9/11 could progress our government towards an Orwellian government.
Everything Thing You Do Count
Being an adolescent in not only being smartness or being persuasive the are more behind that. Been exactly two years in Canada and my last year of a high school I am really content for that, especially being in Canada. My past two years in Canada I can not describe it as good or bad, what I mean is that me being in Canada is great; but sometimes I think I really misses something so special, of course I have to feel this because leaving all people that you grown up with, everything that you had started with since you were born even your first language behind to start a new life in a different place, making new friends, trying to fit into this new environment trust me it is the hardest thing in life. I used to blame my guardians for not getting good marks in English because they did not send me to a French school though they know French is my first language this really drives me crazy sometimes, but I come to a conclusion that it is a stupidest thing and immatureness to be blaming somebody because something don’t happen they way you want it to; It is my life my feelings I need to be responsible for that. The hardest thing of being adolescent is decision making and if there is no one there to go through this with you, you can make wrong decisions which you can never go back and restore after you grow up your life may screw up forever. As an adolescent be careful what you choose. Me growing up seeing outrageous things around me and far away from me, makes me believe more than ever that there is somebody out there who is above all human being omnipotent, omniscient and all that He had said and was written down will come truth. 9/11 is something that did not wake only me or Americans up but the whole world, this is why this situation is a very important to me it is something extravagant ever happen in my generation, it did not have an impact only on me but every single species in this world. On the earth, from the skied to the land into the deepest part of the sea every taxonomic Rank feels the attack. You knew what happen too, this is all because somebody took one day less than a minute to make a selfish decision that will change the world forever, I know my life is different, though I’m not always quite sure how, but there is something I know, I know that I become more sensitive to stress around me; angry people, inconsiderate people. There were like three thousand people who died and there were a lot of terrorists who gave up their lives just to kill people I guess. I feel that it is necessary for everyone to create secure space around himself to withdraw. This situation had really made people life vulnerable because of the fear in them, their rages of violence against strangers is almost beyond comprehension. But what inspired me more is the goodness in people, by their commitment and love when they give all they can for others and the world. I feel more vulnerable now but vulnerable to love.
One of the most important thing I learn in this year’s English class is the value of literature, I have never read any English literature that can be compare to Northrop Frye’s Education Imagination, this help me to know more about myself. He let me know that if you do not know where you came from you will never know were you are going. Northrop Frye mostly talk about imagination which is one of the most important thing is human life. Imagination is very important in our live because we model our society base on our imagination. Everything that we are thinking of doing will come truth if we hold on to that memory. Frye said we become what behold mean you will become what you always think of. If you keep on thinking of something you are attracting that thinking from imaginary world into the world of reality.
Orwell’s works have inspired Margaret Atwood’s since he was young. Atwood asked question at the end of article, by the guardian in the UK, the questions as follows “What would George Orwell have to say about it?” she mean what would George Orwell thought about what is going on in world now I do not think Orwell would be so surprise because this had started long time ago since 1984. a world with full of totalitarian government no one want to understand one another; because they are influence by their government for example think about 9/11 do you think that was coincidence? Someone just give up their lives just to kill somebody’s child, put someone’s wife in pain I don’t think Orwell will be surprise at all.
Of course it is not anyone’s dream to stay in high school more than four years. As I said being adolescent decision making is very difficult. You are not really sure what to do in your post secondary Education. By the advice of my parent and school counselors, I chose to do what I am good at which is French and math. All that I always pray for every night is to get into a good school next year. It is really scary though finishing high school and don’t know what to so with your life. I know very well that it will be well with me when I got there (university).
The way the world is heading
The period of adolescence can be a confusing time. Young people like to spend time at the movies, participating in extra curricular activities but in the transition between childhood and adulthood there’s a search for identity. While I experience adolescence in this post 9/11 world, I find myself interested in the things I thought were so irrelevant and boring. My parents would watch the news and read news articles and I couldn’t figure out why. Now I see that things occurring in other countries than my own have an impact on the way I live my life. So although adolescence isn’t easy, the new lessons I learn everyday prepare me for adulthood.
In The Educated Imagination, Frye mentions that when a belief system stops being a belief system, it becomes a myth. Myths are seen as irrelevant to today’s world, when in truth they share beliefs and themes people can relate to. Margaret Atwood read Animal Farm had only seen talking animals and wasn’t aware at a young age to recognize any relations to politics in the world. Just like Margaret at age nine we consider myths to be irrelevant to today’s world. When people are destroyed for lack of knowledge destruction can be the result of it. That is why when people of different belief systems come together, devastation occurs because there is a misunderstanding of cultures. The happiness of ignorance can only last so long, but after a while knowledge is wanted. Societies protect their legends for the world views and beliefs within them are significant to that cultures continuation. Northern Frye mentions that “the most complete form of this myth is given in the Christian Bible and so the Bible forms the stratum layer in the teaching of literature” It is then true that throughout civilization’s history, literature derives after mythology.
George Orwell’s book 1984, a character named Winston grows up in a world where power is abused by the government and those in high positions. Realizing that the necessary supplies of clothes, food, money and other goods aren’t properly distributed around the country, the government deceives the people into thinking that they are better off than those in the past. Winston knows this isn’t true and that people are being treated poorly on purpose but having telescreens and microphones watching every move and hearing every conversation, the truth is covered up. Margaret Atwood asked “what would George Orwell have to say about it?” If George Orwell were around today, I think he would remember the book 1984 and say that he saw it coming. For instance, Canada is a country that is said to be a place where people live in freedom and are treated as equal. The things people often take for granted like money for the groceries and clothes we sometimes repeat are things poor people in Africa and the less fortunate in down town Toronto would love to have. Even though people aren’t openly punished for their beliefs here in Canada, the prejudice white and black people have for each other and the judgment people pass on the each other is a small step towards a world like 1984’s.
Having a passion for animals I thought I was destined to be veterinarian and took all the necessary courses to become one. When I took biology U and chemistry C in grade 12, I struggled in the university class and came out with a mark in the 50’s. I found the chemistry class easier to understand and ended up with a mark around 75%. I wasn’t happy with my overall marks but to see if I had the right profession in mind I took co-op. I realized cleaning after animals wasn’t something I wanted to do as a career. I decided to return to high school for another year and I’m now focusing on nutrition, another passion of mine. I’m taking things slow and spreading my classes out in 2 semesters. I’m taking classes at the levels I can handle and things are a lot less stressful now. For now I’ll stick with this dream of becoming a dietician, see where it takes me but I’ll leave the rest for God to handle.
Hey kid... thats life
Margaret Atwood’s article of how her views and thoughts were changed by George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal farm are very interesting in a way that I also can relate to her views on the subject of politics and how these books can change a person’s outlook and perspective on the world round us.
Since the 9/11 attacks back in 2001 many things have changed; some for the better and some for the worse. At the time I was only 12 years old and had no idea of what terrorists were and why any of this was happening, I just remember my teacher bringing our class outside and trying her best to describe what was happening and why. With all the media coverage of the attacks and numerous reports and speculations going around most of my questions had gotten their answers, but I still had no clue as to why any of this happened. The next few years saw many changes in our society like all the different alerts of terrorist activity and numerous reports of terrorist plots and plans. This all brought on a sort of hysteria and people believing every single thing the media threw at them; people in a sense were helpless in a way that they couldn’t think for themselves and followed everything and hung onto every single word the media said. Growing up in these times were difficult, I would hear stories of kids being arrested because the dyed there hair a certain colour and people saw this as an act of defiance and people being detained at airports just because of their race or ethnicity. It was difficult for me to understand because I had never experienced or even heard of any of these kinds of situations in my life and then all of a sudden hundreds of reports came out of problems like this. I can compare my experience very closely to Winston’s own experiences in the novel 1984 because he too questioned most of the acts of the party but still followed them and also how he could vaguely remember a time when it was different and there was no hysteria and fear. I remember when I was younger, just after 9/11, I felt like I was always being watch by someone somehow and It always made me uneasy and on edge. With time though I grew out of the fear and managed to put it all in the back of my head and just live my life as normally as I can. Now as I’m leaving high school in my last year my view and thoughts on the world have changed compared to when I first walked into high school back in grade 9 and the events of 9/11 and all of its aftermath have helped me in changing these views.
Margaret Atwood also mentioned the importance of our language and how in 1984 they were trying to destroy the language all together in order to prevent anyone form having and of their own thoughts and to prevent thought crime, making the people less into humans and more like sheep. This automatically made me think of Northrop Frye and The Educated Imagination. I remember how Frye talked about how without our literature and imagination that we would not be able to think as a person and just become automatons. This scared me because it was basically what had happened to the world after the 9/11 attacks, people had no clue what to do without someone telling them and the government had an overwhelming power over the people telling them what was right and what wasn’t and all this by using the peoples fear, and with this they all followed blindly with no questions asked ever. This fear didn’t last long, thanks in part to the people and the people essentially are the ones with the power. This is what Frye was talking about and what Orwell mentioned in the book, the people are the ones with the power.
I am not sure what George Orwell would think of our time in this post 9/11 world. He might be surprised at how the world has changed and how he somewhat had an idea of how people might turn out. As to what I am going to do with my life I am still undecided. I have a lot of things I want to do and hopefully no external factors will stop me from doing them. For now I can only hope to achieve what I want to do and try my best to achieve them, maybe I can change peoples views on the world like Orwell did someday… or not.
Two Thousand Seven
It is quite easy to read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and assume that the events of the novel are those that could never occur in our time. We perceive the situations presented by Orwell as ludicrous and bizarre and rarely stop to consider the fact that modern day Nineteen Eighty-Four is occurring presently. Growing up in this post-modern society has instilled into us one concept that is common amongst most North American teens: fear. As children we feared what we did not know and what we could not be certain of. However, a new type of fear took over our way of thinking and reacting to situations after the events of 9/11 transpired. This new type of fear is centered on other people, and not what we do not know, but what we cannot comprehend. In Margaret Atwood’s article, “Orwell and Me”, she writes of her experience reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. She tells of her reactions to the situations and the characters and reflects on the possibility of these circumstances occurring in her time. Atwood says that after reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, the conditions in which the people of Oceania were subjected to (surveillance, lack of freedom of speech, the memory hole, etc.) “frightened the stuffing” out of her. Although she did not completely understand what Orwell was relating it to, she could see it happening anywhere. This stood out to me because I cannot only imagine that Nineteen Eighty-Four could happen anywhere, but I can see the beginnings of it in the post 9/11 society I live in. After reading both Atwood’s article and Nineteen Eighty-Four, I am left to consider what the effects of an Orwellian society would be on me, how humanity can fight it, and what Orwell would think of the world we live in.
Having gotten used to living in a post 9/11 world, I am accustomed to hearing of tapped phone lines and secret agents, and none of it meant anything to me until I read Nineteen Eighty-Four. Now I am able to see that civilization is being effected by certain authority figures. Our democratic government could turn into one that is closer to totalitarianism and some of the population would not even be capable of differentiating the two. It is crucial that every individual living in this modern society is perceptive of where our world is going, and what the results of an Orwellian society would be on humanity. For me, what would be most frightening would be the lack of privacy and free speech. Being incapable of expressing opinions freely, even in the privacy of the home, would put an end to any personal freedom this country offers. What is truly worrisome about being unable to share beliefs is that literature on a whole would become obsolete – with the exception of unbiased books like science and math textbooks. The fear I live in today comes as a result of noticing the world moving toward this Orwellian state. Atwood says, “But with 9/11, all that changed. Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once - open markets, closed minds - because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance”, stating that if the world stays on the course it is presently, we will inevitably be headed toward a dystopia appearing in some form. Censorship has put an end to a great deal of public free speech, and the installation of “crime-stopping” cameras at street corners is a direct invasion of privacy. After high school I wish to pursue education in either psychology or literature so it has become quite obvious to me the kind of effect this kind of suppression would have on my life. If individuals are to be neglected the rights to express feelings, and literature becomes something that is thought of as archaic, this condition will become one that I am incapable of being a part of.
However, for every individual, this type of Orwellian world is not one that we are forced to give into. If one is capable of retaining their own thoughts and not giving into the patterns of this world, they are safe from the kind of suppression this type of dystopia presents. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party was ultimately unsuccessful if they failed to change the thoughts of even one individual, and Winston was that person. Because Winston was unable to simply accept facts he knew to be untrue, he was able to resist the Party’s restraint on his inner thoughts, and therefore was free. On the other hand, when put under the circumstances of Orwell’s Oceania, this is not an easy feat. When Julia, who was a self-proclaimed “rebel”, was worked through by the Party, she was instantly changed. The party was quite successful in controlling the majority of people’s physical actions, but ultimately failed to control some thoughts. In Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination, he explains the role that Newspeak plays in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is used to limit the civilian’s vocabulary, and therefore make it nearly impossible for them to express themselves. The creators of Newspeak even go so far as to eliminate negative words like “bad” and turn them into differentiated versions of positive words – “ungood” or “doubleplusungood”. Frye says, “Orwell even goes so far as to suggest that the only way to make tyranny permanent and unshakable, the only way, in other words to create a literal hell on earth, is deliberately to debase our language by turning our speech into an automatic gabble”(91-92). Therefore, it is important to remember that reflection, self-awareness, and an opposition to government’s influence on your mind can aide in putting an end to an Orwellian society but it might not be as possible to avoid the situation on a whole. It seems as though our democratic government is taking advantage of the technology and using it to benefit themselves, which becomes a detriment to civilization, “For the sake of freedom, freedom must be renounced. To move us towards the improved world - the utopia we're promised - dystopia must first hold sway”(Atwood). Because it appears inevitable that we will adopt this Orwellian society, we must concentrate on developing the mindset and the means to resist the influence it will have on our intellect.
The second last line of Atwood’s article says, “I often ask myself: what would George Orwell have to say about it?”, which is a question that is incredibly interesting to ponder on. What would Orwell think about his predictions becoming reality so many years later? Throughout the novel it seems as though Orwell has an incredibly negative outlook on the state of the world and where the world is headed. However in the appendix of the novel, he writes an essay on the principles of Newspeak in the past tense, indicating his belief that man is capable of rising against the totalitarian government presented in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Atwood touches on this theory in her article and states, “For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus, it's my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he's usually been given credit for”. Because Orwell witnessed the totalitarian environment of Stalin’s Soviet Union, which he bases his novel on, he would be incredibly disappointed to see that the world really is moving towards the dystopia he wrote about. His story of telescreens and memory holes was written in 1949 and was meant as more of a warning than anything. Now several years later we are moving towards the society Orwell warned us of, and a good majority of the population is completely unaware.
In reading Nineteen Eighty-Four I have not only gained a greater understanding of what the situations of the world mean to me personally, but I have also learned a great deal of where the world is headed. This novel has introduced me to concepts that had previously not even crossed my mind. I have realized how incredibly important it is to stimulate and educate my mind so as to withstand influential forces. Margaret Atwood’s article tackles what it was like to comprehend Orwell’s novels in the world she grew up in, and it is very easy to relate back to the reactions she had to them. Orwell’s response to the world we are living in would be difficult to predict. He wrote of the type of dystopia we are leaning towards, but had enough faith in man that he would be capable of overcoming such circumstances. Perhaps Orwell’s warning was a prediction, and we will eventually become the victims of a world of suppression and limitations. One can only hope that given those conditions, the appendix was part of this prediction.
The parallels between George Orwell’s dystopia in his novel 1984 and 21st century North America have gone unnoticed for far too long. Most of my worthwhile memories have happened in the post 9/11 world, and my life so far very well could have turned out quite differently if it weren’t for the disaster. Such a catastrophe is the only way to simultaneously bring families together and tear a nation apart. Northrop Frye commented on the absurdity of the government using language to spread conflicting ideas and shift blame from them in a time of disaster, and also on how literacy is of the utmost importance and putting it to use helps us transvalue current events, and see where the same mistakes have been made before. Frye thought as well, that through using our imagination to its fullest potential, we can envision for ourselves a better life, and a better world for us to live in. At the end of her article, Margaret Atwood posed the question “what would George Orwell have to say about it?” and I’m as sure as Atwood that he would have quite a bit to say. Taking all of this into consideration, it is time for me to take my life into my own hands, and swim upstream against the “dead”, and do something that someone somewhere will see as significant.
September 11, 2001’s attacks on the world trade centers in New York City have come to be known as 9/11 across North America, and we devote a full day every year to the remembrance of it. What happened that day was no doubt a tragedy, but the lives lost and the families affected were only the beginning. Through the subsequent war, the rebuilding, and the rip in the nation’s core, today has been radically changed by the events of that day. The continual war in Iraq has terrifying similarities to the wars fought in the fictional world of 1984. Could it be that George Bush is doing the same things now as “Big Brother” did in his world? It is entirely possible, as it happens in “Airstrip One”, there is two minutes hate, in our world, there is CNN, which whenever the words “Iraq”, “Osama bin Laden”, or “al Queida”, are spoken, it is automatically connotative with fear and hate. All of this is directly affecting my adolescence, as I will never be given unbiased information, and there is no more impressionable time than now, and truth, to me is needed so sorely.
The Educated Imagination, being the single most important book I’ve read in my lifetime, has just started to affect my life, and yet the effect thus far is great. Frye elaborated upon the theory that all bases in literature is repeated and known to us subconsciously. We know we’ve seen this situation before, the struggle for ultimate power, good triumphs, and evil fails. But what happens when the line between good and evil blurs? Right now the face of the government is blurry, and most can not put trust into it, but as Frye explains in The Educated Imagination,”This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature” and if this theory holds, we will once again see noble leaders take charge and put everything back in its place.
George Orwell was one of the world’s most notable literary critics, so as could be imagined, he would have something to say about Margaret Atwood’s piece on 1984, and we would have no choice but to listen. Events occurring after Orwell’s death have made him out to be a prophet of sorts, but it is a fairly broad and truthful concept, that totalitarianism cannot be functional or justified. I believe Orwell would be disgusted, but at the same time, not shocked in any way. He had the kind of foresight to know the situation had to present itself in real life, America has had too much power for too long, and someone needed to knock it down a peg. Ultimately the thing Orwell would most want to say to the world right now is “I told you so!”.
Using what I’ve learned thus far in ENG 4U1 thus far, I can undoubtedly say that my perspective on the world will not be the same, ever. As I move into another phase of my life, post-secondary school (hopefully), I’ve started to think less about how the world can help me out, give me more money, make me happy, and more about leaving a mark. How is my life really significant if I’ve had no barring on anything, and changed nothing? I’ve made a vow to myself, that with my psychology degree or whatever I turn out with, my occupation will be to help people, and to learn how to make them understand why things are the way they are in their life.
The 9-1-1 world
The influences in the world today, shape a society that is often misleading. Things such as the media play a big part in manipulating the masses, which is the hardest thing to escape. You are fed more and more information from the television, radio, computer, etc. everyday, and it becomes difficult not to be consumed by it. This is how I would describe the post 9/11 world we live in. When the 9/11 attacks occurred, I really didn’t know much about how or why, so when it was announced over the p.a. system in elementary school, it was overwhelming to say the least. The only thing there was to do, was go home, and watch CNN, to find out what was going on. For me, this is when I began to really fear the world we live in. CNN would be on all night, feeding images of the suspected terrorists, collapsing buildings, and yet I did not turn it off. The nights after, I would have nightmares of terrorist’s attacks in my backyard, with Osama leading the way. I believe this is when a lot of the world began living in fear, and this is partly due to what the media decides to tell us, so that we will continue to watch and live, in fear. Growing up around all of this can be looked at two ways, easy, like your mom putting out dinner every night and you consuming it without thinking, or hard, like having to make your dinner, or actually think about what is happening and define what is wrong with our society and attempt to fight it.
I believe that one of the most important things in the world today, is to know and realize that the media is feeding everything to you, which I am still working on myself. If you fight against what is attempting to de-humanize you, as Winston does in 1984, you will always be human. If you refuse to fight against it, and it is a choice, then you will become nothing more than a ‘prole’, as Northrop Frye explains in The Educated Imagination, “If you recognize no other society except the one around you, you can never be anything more than a parasite on that society.” (94) Frye is clarifying the ideas brought forth in George Orwell’s 1984, which is that if you refuse to fight against the ideas being provided for you, you will become a slave to society, as many people today do. However if you become conscious that ideas and manipulations are given to you every day, you can begin to develop your own ideas, and stay human.
If George Orwell were alive for today’s post 9/11 world, I believe that he would not be very surprised on what the world has become, as he saw the beginning of it in his lifetime, and to a certain extent, predicted it. However I do not believe that Orwell would give up hope on humanity just yet, just as he ended off his book, if there is any one person willing to battle against the falsification of society, one person who is able to develop their own ideas, then it is impossible for a totalitarian world to survive.
All my life, I have been influenced and fed nonsense by the media, government and corporations. Only now, with literature, am I beginning to realize what is wrong with the world I live in. I will continue to attempt to be conscious of what information is being given to me. I believe that real, free societies do exist, and will continue to exist, just as humanity will always exist. It will not be easy to fight off the major influences affecting people, including myself, in the world today, but I am determined to develop my own ideas via literature, and hopefully learn how to block out the false society we live in.
Living in a world filled with fear and false societies was something that George Orwell predicted, but he also had hope for the human spirit to prevail. Growing up in today’s world is hard, because you need to learn how to identify when you are being targeted by the media, along with government and large corporations. However, the main point of all the texts in this course still holds true; if you can learn to have the power of choice, and to use the power of choice, to decipher between the information given to you in today’s society, then you will not be consumed by the world around you.
Life is Constantly Changing, Deal with it
Human competition has existed forever. Competition keeps humans alive, the struggle and desire to be best at everything; to be the alpha male or female. Beneath the alpha male or female there is the beta male or female. The second strongest/dominant human. The leader lives in constant fear of being overthrown by the beta male or female. Therefore, it is only human nature to want to eliminate the beat male or female. This is evident in adolescents.
In the modern day world, who really would be the alpha male or female to an adolescent? Perhaps one of the adolescent’s parents. Parents control the rules and law in an adolescent’s home life. But after an adolescent becomes self sustaining the power that their parents once had, disappears. Then who controls adolescent’s after they grow up? The government. And the head of the government is the alpha male or female. Striving for complete power and trying to eliminate the beta males and females (adolescents). The novel 1984 by George Orwell is what I believe to be an exaggerated version of what is slowly happening in the world. But never the less the changes are beginning and we, as humans must recognize these changes before we cannot change them or do anything about them. Change. Probably one of the more frightening events that can occur. Humans are afraid of the unknown. And change is so resented by humans because they are afraid of the results of the change (these results are not usually known). This is why it is a difficult time of life for adolescents, because everything about them is changing. You begin to understand why 2 + 2 = 4 and not that it just equals 4. Along with the deepening of the adolescent’s intellect, physical changes occur as well. Oh, and did I mention you have to basically choose your career path before your eighteen? The only way an adolescent can survive this hard part of their life is by being able to control their emotions and cope with them. Once you lose control of yourself, you lose control of your world.
In my response to discussion 7 I talked about the “USA Patriot Act” (for those who do not know what it is, it is an act that increased the United States ability to search telephone and e-mail communications and medical, financial and other records, allowed the US to gather more intelligence of foreign countries, and reduced rights of immigrants). This act was passed 45 days after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. After reading the novel 1984 and my English teacher “opening my eyes” I seriously began to wonder if I do live in a free world, or if I am just a prole. I also began to wonder at what expense must our privacy be exposed for “security”. An example of this would be going through security at an airport. Security can search anyone bags randomly. I am not saying this is a bad thing, because everyone has the right to feel safe. But simply saying the word terrorist at an airport would cause complete chaos. This fear represents the same type of fear implemented by big brother in 1984. The fear of sharing your own personal thoughts.
Predicting the future is impossible, but history has many patterns. Therefore it may be possible for someone to have a great perception of the future. George Orwell had just that. He wrote 1984 based on what he thought would happen in the future. Some people may argue that his dystopic society has and will not ever occur. They are entitled to their opinion, but they are wrong. As a reader you have to look past the text and analyze the symbols. George Orwell creates many parallels between 1984 and our modern day world. But how could someone write a novel about 50 years ago that is so accurate to the modern day world? I cannot remember the exact quote but Northrop Frye states something along the lines that all pieces of literature are copies of whatever the author has read before. This may be present along the plot of 1984, but the predictions of the society in 1984 and the modern day world are very accurate to each other. I believe both what Northrop Frye said, and the predictions made by George Orwell in 1984 are true, but when coincided are not consistent with each other. Both are past the intellect of the average human, and both would be frustrated with the modern day world.
Adolescents are constantly changing and growing. The way they grow and change dictate the rest of their lives. I personally, have no idea what I want to do with my life, except start a family. I also know I do not want to be a prole.
Fear for Thought
After reading “Hamlet”, “The Educated Imagination”, and “1984”, ENG 4U1 has simply been the most rewarding course I have taken to date. Learning about Hamlet’s “insanity”, where literature comes from, and the horrors of dystopia, the information presented to me has become a life lesson that I will always remember. Adolescence is a crucial time in one’s life, and without guidance, can be generally very difficult. In our post 9/11 world, it has ultimately become more difficult. When 9/11 occurred, we were still very young, and we had not experienced a world without fear. Though it may not be obvious, we are always living in a constant state of fear. Furthermore, “1984” and “The Educated Imagination” have further stressed the importance of literature. In “1984”, we are presented with Newspeak, which ultimately tries to destroy the English language by limiting our thought process. In addition, “The Educated Imagination” has stressed the importance of literature and archetypes in our modern day world. Ultimately, the fear we live in is related to what we see in literature, as the archetypes displayed in literature are happening as we speak.
When doing the past blog assignment, it was only then that it occurred to me that George Orwell’s prediction was more accurate than I could have imagined. When entering my own workplace, the first thing you see is a security camera, and a television that monitors your every movement within the camera’s radius. If I was to keep walking, most of the aisles would have a security camera. When heading into the back through the public washroom entrance, I would have to put a combination into the keypad. Even most products over fifty dollars are tagged with security stickers to prevent theft. In addition, when I’m finishing a shift at work, a pocket check is conducted. At one point, because there was an internal theft going on, every time an associate would want to leave the store, our shoes and socks were inspected randomly. Has it come now that we cannot even trust our fellow co-workers? We are living in such a constant state of fear of something going wrong. Cameras monitor many of our movements in most of our environments, and we are always being watched. Even public transportation is being strictly monitored.
In “The Educated Imagination”, Northrop Frye stresses the importance of literature in our every day lives. In reverse, “1984” displays Newspeak, which is ultimately destroying the English language and hindering the human thought process. Thankfully, the destruction of literature is not being practiced as we are constantly adding new words to our vocabulary. However, our thoughts are being suppressed in different ways. In some nations, when your thoughts are different from the government’s ideology, you die - literally. An example of this would be the horrors we have learned at the Remembrance Day Ceremony this past Friday. As we heard from a recent e-mail form Afghanistan, a young boy was hung, and his throat slit, for being in possession of a few American dollar bills. The bills were shoved in the boy’s mouth as he was hung in the middle of a city square. This was to send a message to those living in the city. They government has used this to send a message to the people of that city, and will use it as a deterrent for anyone else who’s thoughts disagree with the government. Like Winston had committed thought crime by purchasing the diary and the pen, the young boy was sent to death because of possessing something “The Party” was against.
Not only do we live in a physical state of fear for our bodies, people always fear failure. Currently, many of us are trying to get into a university of our choice. For some, it will come easy, and for others, it will be extremely hard. For those who graduate from university, they will then have to compete for a job. It is then that some of us might be exposed to doublethink. For some who may be entering the field of politics, doublethink might me harder to avoid than with other occupations. Day to day, politicians will be present with situations that will not be in the best interest of the people, and yet they still carry on with the actions. Similarly, the same can be said for any ordinary citizen. At times, the government will impose their ideologies on the citizens, and some may not agree with it. Some people may even end up agreeing for the sake of agreeing. Doublethink has been an occurring process that is evident in our everyday lives. George Orwell was definitely right when he coined the phrase doublethink, and was even more right that it would be used often. An example of this would be the blackwhite example in Goldstein’s book. To look at black and say it is white just because someone else tells you, and being fully aware you are looking at black is doublethink. Similarly, in American politics, doublethink is surely present. “We are fighting the terrorists in Iraq, so we do not have to fight them over here” and “We are in Iraq to bring peace to the Middle East” are both statements of doublethink.1 They are fighting in Iraq to bring peace to the world, which brings the notion of “War is Peace” to life.
At the end of the article, Atwood asks a question about what George Orwell would have to say about all this, and evidently, Orwell would definitely have a lot to say regarding our post 9/11 world. Orwell could simply say “I told you so,” but that would not be the case. Orwell obviously had faith in the human race as the appendix of “1984” enforces the fact that The Party fell. The reason that he has faith in the human race lies in Winston, and any other people like him. In “1984”, Winston was brought to the Ministry of Love for processing. However, if you resist The Party, you cannot be processed. However much The Party tires, they cannot enter your subconscious mind. It is an impenetrable barrier that will not cave in unless you give in. This is why The Party will fail. If they cannot process one individual, then the system fails, and ultimately shows evidence of Orwell’s faith in the human race. Orwell had faith that the human race would not stoop down to the level of suppression displayed with The Party, and that we would correct our ways, or diverge from that path. Though some level of monitoring and law is necessary, the human race has still done itself well. If George Orwell was around today, he would simply say, “Good for you. I had faith in you all along.”
1. http://www.micahnelson.com/?p=125. These two quotes were taken from the top of the page.
Living in a 1984 World in 2007
The world that most of us have grown up in is a democratic world, and according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau “ democracy is the hardest form of government to maintain”. The novel 1984 written by George Orwell is an extraordinary work of literature that expresses the view Orwell has on the future of government and society. Atwood’s paper is a response to Orwell’s novel 1984 and the more idealistic novel Animal Farm. Atwood does a very good job of uncovering how the methods that the government structure in the novel 1984, and the control of the pigs in Animal Farm is closely tied to our post 9/11 government and society.
In the novel 1984 there were many extremes. In real life there may not be telescreens or the thought police, but if you take a step back and think about our society and government through Orwell or Atwood’s eyes you may realize that were are living in a modern day 1984. In high schools there are cameras in the hallways everywhere you turn, you go home and write an email and it is being screened, you watch TV and you are being monitored for what channel you are watching. It seems, as though no matter what you are doing there is really no privacy in your life. The government insists that the security cameras are only for your safety and security, but do you ever wonder if it is not for something more. Something like an easy way to keep tabs on people and where they are and what they are doing. A person needs their privacy and it seems that it is slowly getting taken away every year.
You might think that these things only happen in a dictatorship, and that living in the democratic government that you are in now means your safe. Think about the idea of Goldstein in the novel 1984. It does not matter if Goldstein is a real person or if the Brotherhood, which he apparently leads, is a real group. What matters is that the civilians of Oceania have a person or group to control their hate and paranoia on. There really is not much of a difference between Goldstein and Osama Bin Laden and the Muslims. You may think that Goldstein, the Brotherhood, and the two minutes of hate are totally far fetched and are not very realistic. But is Osama Bin Laden and his group of Muslim terrorists not doing the exact same thing. They are creating paranoia and are a target of hate in America. Before the Muslims it was the communists, which also set fear and paranoia on the civilians of North America. It does not matter if Osama Bin Laden is alive or dead, what matters is the idea of Osama Bin Laden. The idea is what instills the fear in society. The fear of something outside your country that can harm the civilian’s inside your country is what instills the worship of the countries leader or government. The war in the novel 1984 between Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia that is never ending and has no purpose is not unrealistic by no means. The war on Iraq that America is fighting right now is a very comparable war to the one in 1984. There is not really any purpose for the United Sates to be in Iraq and each year billions of dollars are being spent on munitions for the war. This is the same idea as the Oceania war, it keeps the economy running off of itself and never stopping.
All of these ideas connect to Northrop Frye’s book The Educated Imagination. If people do not read and inform themselves then they will not be able to input an opinion into anything. If people cannot input an opinion into anything then how can they stand up against a government and say this is not right, or this is right. If people continue to not read and not make themselves smarter and more aware of what is going on in the world then they are just scarecrows. They will just go with the flow of whatever the government tells them. They will do what they are told and not think about what it is they are doing. People need to read literature like Frye stated, to increase their intellect and be able to form opinions. This will stop them from being the walking dead and they will become people in society.
What I have learned while reading Atwood’s paper and Orwell’s novel is that no matter what our society or government changes into you cannot change the subconscious mind of an individual. You can force then to say something or hate an object or idea, but you cannot make them subconsciously hate an idea. A subconscious inner feeling or “gut feeling” can never be taken out of a human. No matter how much our government structure changes in the next 100 years, every person in this country will always have their subconscious mind, and that will never get taken away from them. When I am older and I am living my own life without the help of my parents, I am going to read and educate myself. This is the only way to form an opinion and realize what is really going on with the government and how our privacy is being taken away. This way I will not be a scarecrow who just goes with the flow, I will be able to make my own decisions and live a life that I chose, and not one that was chosen for me.
No one knows if we will really ever experience telescreens in the near future, but as technology advances it seems very possible. To answer Atwood’s last question; if George Orwell was living in today’s world what would he have to say about society and the government. I think he would say, “I told you so”.
2007: Orwellian or Modern?
As a child, you have an unbelievably vast imagination. Anything and even nothing can be turned into something through the playful imagination of a child. During the early years of that child’s life, their parents read them numerous stories about adventure, love and morality, developing their minds and preparing them for the real world. As you mature you being to train your imagination, strengthen it and use it in everyday life. But what would happen if we were denied this by our government? What if our thoughts, actions and words all had to abide by the beliefs or rules of our government, just like in the books “1984”, or “Animal Farm”? Although our society may not notice it, it seems as though we are slowly reforming in that manner. Already, our emails are being scanned for inappropriate word choices, we are being watched by surveillance cameras in malls and on street corners and any defiance against our country will be labeled as a terrorist act. It seems as though Orwell knew what was inevitably approaching.
In the post 9-11 world, life has changed immensely, yet many people are not fully aware of it. The alterations that have been made by society may seem absurd to some, but in our fear- driven nation, these changes are deemed necessary to avoid terrorism and the likes of 9-11 from reoccurring. In Margret Atwood’s article, “Orwell and Me”, she stated “In the world of Animal Farm, most speechifying and public palaver is bullshit and instigated lying, and though many characters are good-hearted and mean well, they can be frightened into closing their eyes to what's really going on”. This is a prophetic example of what is going on in our society today. We allow all of these changes to happen because we believe that our government is protecting us, although many of us do not see (or do not allow ourselves to see) that by “protecting” us in this manner, they are taking away our freedom. The way in which our world is operating now, allows adolescents to relate to Winston. His life changed when the party came into power; he lost all of his freedom, and life became boring and dull. We can relate to this because along with the post-9-11 world came strict laws, which were enforced to avoid acts of terrorism. Although I believe that most of it only took away the freedom of the citizens.
Atwood’s last question is not only directed to what Orwell would think of today’s society, she is also questioning us, as to how we can allow this to be happening to ourselves. We do not oppose or up rise against being watched and controlled constantly; we accept it and embrace it. We reassure ourselves that it is for our own good and that our government is protecting us from all the evil that is trying to harm us. Similar to the citizens of “1984”, many of us are living a carefree life; oblivious to the majority of what is happening, not daring to question our governments’ means, only agreeing with all of their conditions. If George Orwell were to see us now, I believe that he would not be surprised. I believe that he would only be disappointed, knowing what sort of future we are destined for, and the fact that none of us have made a large enough effort in order to stop it from occurring.
What I hope to do with my life is a question I have put much thought into over the past year. Ever since I was a little girl, I had a straightforward goal of pursuing the career of a veterinarian for the purpose of helping animals. Since grade twelve started I began to put more thought into this idea and realized that it was not exactly what I wanted any longer. My idea of helping animals has moved past that of performing operations and having regular check-ups with the family pet. I have broadened my perspective and found a job that I truly desire. I have always wanted animal cruelty to be taken more seriously and for there to be more laws enforced against those who are cruel to animals, by becoming an Animal Cruelty Investigator, that’s what my job will entail. Just as human beings deserve laws to protect their rights and officers to ensure that, animals need to have this option also and it should be taken more civilly.
With our society unfolding with a fearful symmetry to that of the novel, “1984”, I believe that we should transvaluate the situation and realize what we need to do in order to ensure that we maintain our freedom. Our world is not that of “1984” or “Animal Farm”, but they are both realistic assumptions of what could happen to our lives if we allow our country to try to “perfect” us. The attempt to make something perfect is achieved through enforcing rules and regulations, of which only work to mutate our society further.
A Lament for Freedom
I was in grade 7 when the events of 9/11 transpired. I was at home, sick with the flu. Sitting in bed with my soup looking for some good cartoons I came across a news station, watching as the news anchor started to report about a building crashing into the World Trade Center. As a few minutes go by, I watch as the camera shifts to the sky, and another plane hits the second tower. Little did I understand at that point, that the United States were going to have another event that they could say it was “a day that will live in infamy”. 9/11 changed the world around us in a single night. People were afraid of their neighbour, to travel, and in some cases to even leave the house. When I was younger, I cannot remember many things of my childhood, but the most interesting thing is the freedom a person had. There were no “Orange Alerts” or terrorist threat downs. The airports took only minutes to pass through security. The most important act was the announcement of the Patriot Act in the United States. Looking back it now, it is scary to see people giving up freedom to save it, something Ms. Attwood makes note of.
Mr. Northrop Frye, in his collection of essays, The Educated Imagination, Frye makes references to the idea to teach the bible in classrooms, as well as increased learning in classical mythology. The idea of this is not only to understand the present and the allusions around us, is that, in my opinion, is to teach us about hjavascript:void(0)
Publish Your Commentuman history, so that we as a species can see our past mistakes and correct them for the future. Also, Frye gave the idea of knowledge is power, with can be seen in George Orwell’s 1984 when the totalitarian regime has taken this idea to heart and goes about destroying all information of the past to comfort to their future, there by corrupting human knowledge, crippling the ability of independent thought. This is the critical flaw in the system however, that one cannot completely destroy this, as the human imagination, and spirit will always survive, as there is no feasible way to destroy such a thing, because as Frank Miller wrote in one of his graphic novels, “ideas are bullet proof”.
George Orwell showed us an example of what could happen if we give up out freedoms. Today, we weep as our freedoms that existed as few as 8 years ago are no longer here. People in Canada today can be pulled off the street and arrested for crimes that are not even proven at first. The Patriot Act in the U.S. which let the government arrest and detain prisoners indefinitely. This is the world we leave in. The warning Orwell left is to avoid such things, and not let fear control our actions. Fear gives way for people to control others, to influence thought and action, something that can only have negative consequences, for example warfare.
As I stand here on the eve of my life, I slowly open my eyes, an awaking of sorts to what this world is, and what it will be come. Is it correct to give up civil liberties in the name of freedom? Or should we lie down, and trust that our government will do the right thing. After having my eyes opened, I made a decision to eventually go into politics or teaching, so that I can one day make a positive contribution to something, either the world, or moulding a young child’s mind. Both of these things have merit, as one day they both will effect someone or something. The idea of positive change is something everyone has, but few act upon it. I would like to make a positive change in the world, as even a small change can make the world of difference.
Let there be order
It is important for people to feed their minds by reading books and learning about history. As we go through our adolescence we learn that there is no dead end street to learning and that you will never know enough about anything. By reading, it creates an imaginative framework in which you can explore many events in the past and relate them to current topics. It helps individuals learn more about their identity between the human mind and the world. In George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty Four he created a scenario in which we could not only relate it to the past and other works of literature, but it left you wondering whether or not these chain of events would ever become one’s reality.
In Margaret Atwood’s article The Guardian she states, “Nineteen Eighty Four describes what it’s like to live entirely within a system”, something that you will not understand unless you read the book. What she said in this article and in this quote is becoming more and more evident as time goes by. Our society today, after the tragic 9/11 event has become very keen on surveillance and on making sure all is in control and order. We see camera on every street corner and now it has been said that they have created speakers in which those who are watching you can yell out instructions for you to abide by. It is scary imagining the kind of life Winston in Nineteen Eighty Four has to go through. There were people watching him all day, everyday making sure that he was doing only what they thought was the norm. What is even scarier is picturing today’s society with the rules and expectations Oceania had. It makes you wonder whether or not this will become a reality, where the government is the highest power and has the capability of brainwashing you into thinking what they want you to think.
Furthermore, Atwood asks herself what George Orwell would think if his predictions ever became true and I feel as though he would smile and say, I told you so or, you didn’t see this coming? Our world is truly messed up, we have the media presenting us with ads, movies, songs etc that make us believe there are high expectations within a society to look your best, be the best and have the most. What we do not realize is that this is the beginning of world domination. If we can be that easily manipulated into thinking that we are not good enough unless we look, act, are the way the media exploits us to be then we are setting ourselves up for failure.
I believe that every person should indulge their time into reading Nineteen Eighty Four or one similar to it like Brave New World because, I think that it is important that every person knows how the world works. We all unconsciously help promote the inevitable information that people of a higher power want us to believe in and live for, that one day will come back and haunt us by either taking over our lives or adding to our future loss of dignity.
I believe that 9/11 changed it all and that since that day the government has crammed down on all societies so that they know what is happening all the time. On the contrary, as Northrop Frye says in the Educated Imagination, “Literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination,” but if we let others control what we think or what we read then we won’t have a true identity.
In order for this message that all societies will become corrupt and alter your way of thinking, those who are aware of this drastic change that may become the veracity need to let others know that it is important to stimulate your mind and read. Personally, as I grow older the more amounts of books I will read. I know that it is important to learn and in order to have a better idea of the world and what goes on in it I have to remain independent and have my own opinions and ideas.
Anything worth doing should be done and I feel as though getting the point across that literature is a way of life and the food for thought and individualism is important. I know that I require an imagination in order to build and reason and solve bigger and better things and I won’t ever let anyone take that from me.
Checkpoint
In life, it is imperative to have a solid foundation before beginning to entertain thoughts of establishing anything else on that base or else the task is doomed for failure, a fact that Northrop Frye visualizes for his readers of the Educated Imagination as trying to study mathematics without having an intimate understanding of the multiplication table. The lesson of a strong background necessary for progress is further emphasized in George Orwell’s 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”, where the totalitarian government of Ingsoc is able to retain its power over the people of Oceania by manipulating history so that the citizens are unable to recognize the fallacies of their own society and, as such, are led to falsely believe that Ingsoc is leading them to paradise because they are unable to compare their society with others. However, it is also essential to realize that the concept of a solid foundation for success is not just applicable in mathematics or history, but can also be applied to any topic, such as a Grade 12 University English course where success can be found if a student takes the time to periodically reflect on what they have learnt thus far, so that it becomes easier to be able to integrate that information with what is to be learnt so that the lesson intended to be learnt also becomes easier to distinguish.
In the Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye makes a bold statement through “Poetry is the simplest form of literature”, in which he claims that it is fundamental for a student in an Ontario university streamed course to be able to understand poetry before being able to analyze any other form of literature. However, through the analysis of a variety of poems, Frye’s statement gains merit in the mind of a student as a meager number of lines and words about a summer’s day or a red do not represent their own literal figure, but, more importantly, symbolize a message. As a result, poetry is the simplest form of literature not because it is regarded as the shortest mode of literature, but it is the simplest form of literature due to its ability to explain an important moral or lesson in a relatively short span of time. As well, it is essential to realize that literature is not to be used as a mode of escapism, but as a medium for which a writer is able to convey an important message by giving it a form their reader can relate with, such as the lessons that Orwell teaches through 1984 and Animal Farm, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character is a youth who, like all adolescents, finds the world unfair. At first, Hamlet chooses to deal with his conflicts of his uncle marrying his mother and taking his dream of being King by choosing the extremist path of action, a passive course in which he bottles up his emotions and thoughts, “It is not nor it cannot come to good, but break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.”. Eventually, frustrated by his lack of progress in becoming King of Denmark, Hamlet chooses to go to the other extreme in which he acts without rational, “Oh from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody or nothing worth”, but although Hamlet is able to achieve his goal of becoming King, it also results in his untimely short death. As a result, while the Hamlet’s death is tragic, it is important to realize that Hamlet’s fate represents the dangers of dealing with extremities, a message that Orwell portrays in the claustrophobic worlds of 1984 and Animal Farm, in which the extremities of free will being discouraged and the ignorance of the masses is a major theme.
As a result, the common theme found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 is the dangers of extremities which is still applicable even today from the four hundred and forty year time period that Shakespeare and Orwell were writing for because while the threat of communism that plagued Orwell’s lifetime is over, it has been replaced by terrorism from the Islamic societies. Even today, elements of Orwell’s 1984 are evident as the government authorizes its police to disrupt its citizen’s privacy, all in the name of eliminating terrorism. If Orwell was alive today to comment on the current state of the world, I believe he would say that it is our human nature for the desire of power, but the most imperative thing is to minimize that instinct of dominance and avoid an extreme path to achieve power. As a result, while it does become quite hectic and paranoid in a post-9/11 world, I feel that it is important for the need of the middle path of action as the solution of life and not extremity, one where I can be able to take the time to rationalize the world around me and act in a way that benefits the world from turning into an Orwellian future without being a part of the ignorant masses.
So it came to pass, the days at freedom
Beautiful lives bestowed upon the people, only to be stripped away in some decades to come. Even though that can be attempted through Communist dictatorships, strict Fascist regimes or even the totalitarian rule of “Big Brother”, it will all come to pass, yet humans will be constantly oppressed by propaganda, forced into a cage, where only fear and hatred breeds, and consequently sent off for processing or a cure at the “Ministry of Love” if any rational thought is noticed. These imprisonments of the mind, eradicate all space for transvaluation, all intellectual freedom and leave the human in a form of “malleable goo”, where he will be no more than a “creature of whatever social values get to him first: he has only the compulsions of habit, indoctrination, and prejudice” (Frye). Therefore, failing to stand for reason and morality and subliming to follow a mob. Accordingly, this is where governments, corporations, and even religions step in, because they want to maintain a certain power that grants them the ability to bend human minds as God had when he twisted the tiger’s heart, “Tiger! Tiger! ... What the hand dare seize the fire?/And what shoulder, and what art,/Could twist the sinews of thy heart?” (Blake), and that ability also mirrors the desire to seize the human “fire” or better known as the idea of crushing the human nature, as witnessed in Nineteen Eighty Four. This idea will never cease to exist as long as human ideologies exist, which in essence are human nature because one will always push for his own ideas, but if human perceptions and goals are wiped out, an Oceanic dystopia is doomed to follow as witnessed with Hitler, Stalin, and Big Brother, which are parallel images to governments, corporations and religions. Duly, my personal struggle against these titans, which subdue mankind into an inner state of coma, begins with the assimilation of personal knowledge alongside my adolescent experiences, understanding Northrop Frye’s work in The Educated Imagination, and finally coming to terms with Atwood’s final point, along with personal hopes for achieving a personal lifestyle.
Young adults move swiftly past each other, hauling loaded carts of adolescent memories with them. Whether it be romantic experiences, or fulfillment of desires, dissidence does take place in adolescent years as teens do ache for the feeling of independence. Even if it may be an illusion of independence, teenagers do seek it as a need of breaking free from parental rule. This form of adolescence and youth is finely portrayed in Hamlet, but the desire for a romantic experience is evident in The Dead by James Joyce:
“But now, after the kindling again of so many memories, the first touch of her body, musical and strange and perfumed, sent through him a keen pang of lust. Under cover of her silence he pressed her arm closely to his side; and, as they stood at the hotel door, he felt they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure.”
Personally, at times I do feel the need to leave all the duties and responsibilities in a corner and embark on adventures, even if it be jumping around on a bicycle, freestyle snowboarding, seeking companionship or isolation. Still, throughout these adolescent years, teens tackle various struggles in their lives such as peer pressure, presence of narcotics, and sexual desires. Also, the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11 of 2001, thirteen days after my arrival to Canada, drastically impacted the youth as the 9/11 propaganda massacred the adolescent minds into states of fear and hatred towards the people resembling a typical “terrorist”, which would be any dark, coloured person wearing a turban or someone resembling a fanatic of Islam. The post 9/11 western society is not a red, red rose to live in as an adolescent because you have media constantly spamming your mind and filling it with fear that the enemy is still alive and poses a great threat to your society, thus, entrapping your mind in a state where you no longer posses an unbiased, prejudice free thought process. Suitably becoming a being focused on social values and the only aspects that would drive or motivate you would be indoctrination, prejudice and habit, as stated by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism.
Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination, appeals to me as a book regarding life and finding our own standpoint in it through educating the imagination. I believe that to be necessary as all our communication, literature and even sciences are crafted from our imaginations. The ideas presented in the vocation of eloquence essay strike me, due to the image that if we can successfully educate our imagination, we can look down upon the human race and fix our destructive and prejudice breeding qualities. Also, the importance of educating the imagination blew me off my feet like a thunderstorm because if the human race becomes sound in its decisions, and contains an educated imagination, we will be able to fix the imperfections in our society since we model it based on our imaginations. Also, the two powers granted to us by literature have a significant affect on me because its portrayed that through literature we have the power to create and the power to understand our society. Only through literature one can properly assess what he wants to build or construct and likewise when trying to understand someone else’s design or articulation. If common ideas or compositions such as literature do not exist, then chaos will reign supreme.
Finally, the thoughts of Orwell based on the idea presented by Atwood that to attain utopia, human kind must endure a dystopia, well I believe that Orwell would have said that no doubt we will go through not one but possible more dystopias to truly achieve a state of perfection where humans might live in unison. However, Orwell has a mind of his own which is really far away to be asked to pitch in on Atwood’s question but my theory shall remain that human kind will have to go through all the misery imaginable to finally enjoy what they had all along. As for my future hopes and dreams, I plan to study a Fine Arts program at York University for a bachelor degree or an honour’s degree, the rest is uncertain as financial circumstances can be unpredictable. However, I shall use William Blake’s quote to finalize my ideas, “We become what we behold”, meaning that, whatever we dream, imagine and create is what we will become in the end as the human character is unalterable, just ask O’Brien why he failed with Winston.
It’s Your World
At the stages of growing up from a youth to an adult many experience the dramatic changes in the way they view the world. As we become older we start to become more aware of our society and start to be conscious of our surroundings and what is presented to us. Through the experiences of adolescence we start to form and create our individual self and our beliefs. We find our place in society through the way we create our own opinions and beliefs, which results from how we understand and are affected by our surroundings, and our ability to question and argue our decisions.
Throughout life we have always been taught to read continuously by means of learning and understanding the meaning. In high school teenagers are given many forms of literature to read and study. For each novel and play students analyze the readings completely to understand what it tries to portray. This enforces the method of critical thinking, which helps young adults interpret and learn from what they read. In Northrop Frye’s the Educated Imagination he explains the importance of reading stating, “Literature gives us an experience that stretches us vertically to the heights and depths of what the human mind can conceive […]” (61). Reading any form of literature expands our own thoughts in what we perceive in the story, characters, symbols, and even theme. It helps build our own ideas and creativeness towards our knowledge and understanding. From continually reading young adults are able to train their minds to evaluate what is given to them and also come up with their own response and thoughts on what they perceive. In result of studying literature teens are able to come up with their own understandings and the ability to structure and articulate their own opinions. Again author Northrop Frye claims that literature helps to understand the world we live in and allows us to make our own opinions (Frye, 1964). For this reason we are able to comprehend what we see in the world more efficiently from the fact of reading literature. This skill can go even further especially for young adults who are bombarded with many forms of communications like advertisements. With the ability teens become more critical of what they see and come to understand what is being communicated. The importance of reading is an essential necessity to building knowledge and understanding to what we perceive from our world.
In the recent years especially young generations growing up have been affected by the significant changes that have had an impact in the way they view the world and society. For the past couple years going through adolescence I myself have been that generation which has been directly affected in this post 9/11 world. In the tragic events of September 11 it became a significant event that redefine the world we know. Following that event the reaction throughout the world seemed to be panic and fear. Under the direction of numerous governments especially in Canada and United States a number of changes were made to adjust the outcome of 9/11. Security measures were heighten which led to a number of new precautions in specific places like airports, boarders, and many other public areas. Television itself had also been completely affected as it constantly displayed unpleasant and troubling headlines on the news everyday. Since the event of 9/11 I notice the headlines for the news reports to be alarming and never positive or hopeful. There always seem to be a reoccurring of terrible events that made so much attention, which showed so much emphasis on how scary the world is. For me I found that to be one of the main reasons why there is so much hysteria in society. As an adolescent I feel that we are at a constant state of fear because of the images that are depicted to us every single day which have affected my view in society.
The ability to make a response or a reasonable argument towards society demonstrates the characteristics of an individual. To question and criticize an aspect of society expresses the consciousness and free choice of human beings. Relating back to the society author Margaret Atwood asks, “What would George Orwell have to say about it?”, relating to George Orwell’s dystopia in his book Nineteen-Eighty Four. Atwood refers to Orwell’s book, which is about totalitarian society that suppresses the people by dehumanizing them. One of the slogans depicted in the book states, “WAR IS PEACE” (6), which is said to be the reason why their society can maintain order and control over the people. Orwell uses this slogan to show emphasis on the meaning of war and the fear and terror that results from it. The phrase has a distorted message, which refers to a term in the book called doublethink. This term refers to the acceptance of something known to be negative, an example of a kind of indoctrination set up by the government. In a way we can relate this phrase to the present war in Iraq and how certain leaders state that their reason is to bring order and control in Iraq. Reading Nineteen-Eighty Four myself, young adults will find that Orwell is trying to emphasize and tell us to be aware of the surroundings we live in. By illustrating in a dystopia Orwell points out the wrongs and tyranny that the world could possibly form into. This leads to my point that Orwell is telling us that we should be cautious of the activities happening in the world. We should be able to identify the unfairness we see by forming and justifying our own opinions. We have the freedom to make conscious decisions based on our understanding and our morals.
Living in our world today we have the capability to come up with our own ideas and opinions in society based on the ability to criticize, to comprehend, and arguably question our surroundings. Young adults become more and more involved with society and with their own opinions and beliefs have the ability to make their own decisions with the example of voting. Individuals that can look at the world by separating themselves from it show the distinction of someone who can defend his/her self against the world.
Nineteen Eighty-Four only a few decades off
In our post 9/11 world, we see this our country as one of the leading countries in the freedoms its citizens have, but it is always the countries with the most lose who are the ones who hand over the power the quickest. Our freedoms are slowly being taken away for our protection against terrorism. We are engaged in a war that has no foreseeable end. America is slowly turning into the world that is portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and us teenagers have to either live with it or fight it.
Our freedoms are slowly being taken away for our protection against terrorism. With the American government passing the USA PATRIOT Act, they are allowed to do things which deny the freedoms which were given to the American citizens in the Constitution. This is frightening because America is the most powerful country in the world. If America is taking away the freedom of its own people what other things will they get away with to protect people from? In our world today, democracy is supposed to be the form of government that we cherish and uphold. But that democracy is slowly turning into a dictatorship because the governments are giving themselves power that they should not have. We must find a way to limit the amount of power that is given to our government or else we will be living in a world very similar to that of Oceania.
We are in a war that has no foreseeable end. The war began with airstrikes on October 7th, 2001. Now into the sixth year of this war we are beginning to ask ourselves if this war will end. Whether we should call it the War on Terror or World War Three is yet to be seen, but this war is far from over and it has lasted longer than both World Wars. This gives meaning to the party slogan in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “War is Peace.”
The way this war is going, it will be a constant war for sometime to come and with the threat of constant war comes political peace because people want the war to be finished and do not want to be captured by the enemy. We are slowly building up to the point where a democracy is not the most effiecient government and has to become a dictatorship.
I just hope that the War on Terror does not cross into Canada or else we will be in a mass panic looking towards America for help. The reason we would be looking towards America for help is because of our lack of state-of-the-art military technology. As a peace keeping country we do not see the need to constantly update our military technologies to the most recent of its kind because we usually played a peace keeping role and see little or no action. If the fight was brought to our land, we would see the error in our ways because we would be at a major disadvantage and indebt to America for sometime to come.
In our world today, terrorists believe that killing themselves will grant them their god’s favour for dying as martyrs. What they are actually doing is committing suicide and taking innocent lives with them into the afterlife. A martyr is someone who is persecuted and dies for their faith. Martyrs do not commit suicide or kill innocent people, only extremists do. And there is the whole point of the War on Terror, to fight Islamic extremists. But do not be fooled an extremist of any religion can be dangerous because of their complete faith in their beliefs makes them believe in ideas that are not part of their religion’s belief system.
There have been many prophecies about two thousand and twelve being the end of the world and we are four years away from it, but what if two thousand and twelve is our entrance into Nineteen Eighty-Four. If our world is turning into that of Nineteen Eighty-Four we should be running for our lives because more lives will be lost just because somebody wants power. We have seen the signs but will we act upon them before it is too late? Only time will tell and let us hope time tells a different story.
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