Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell: Chapter 9-10 and Wrap Up

 Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell: Chapter 9

Bonus: 

 

Wrapping up! (I did not watch this)

Summary: THE PIGS ARE CAPITALISTS

Commentary:  

 After much choking, during which his various chins turned purple, he managed to get it out: "If you have your lower animals to contend with," he said, "we have our lower classes!" 

Orwell does a lot better with 1984. He tries to have it both ways in Animal Farm. It's not direct enough to be readable as an essay critiquing Stalin (ala Goldstein's book), but it's too didactic to be a good story.

But really, what I learned is that I remember a lot more when I take notes, and it's a lot easier to write these.

Onto... something? tomorrow? I'm not sure. 

 

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 21 (Closing out Part 3, and wrapping up)

1984 in a nutshell. Part 1 good. I think when people reference 1984 it's 90% stuff from Part 1.

Part 2 is one third Orwell sneaking in an essay, one third shitting on Julia, and one third everything else. The argument is that Winston is preconditioned from his horrible facist society to hate women (and thus he's nasty to Julia), but I don't know that I buy it. Julia is, factually, a bad character. She's super devoted to Winston (a loser) and kind of brainless.

Part 3 is mostly the same scene (that mostly just repeats Part 1) over and over.

All told, I think you could keep most of Part 1, and cut Parts 2 and 3 down to a single chapter each and improve it tremendously. Part 1 is really good. Everyone should read it.

In the end, the most important quote is:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

1984 is about how authoritarians, both on the left and right, deny basic reality. As soon as you give them that toe hold, you've already lost. Marcus Aurelius was right, you have to hold truth above everything else.

 I was on a plane today (and the chapters were short) so pretty easy to close out the end. I've got a couple days to fill before I hop into A-Z. Might dip into the other blogs.

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 20 (3.4)

 At this point, things are pretty repetitive.

 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' 

That's the best quote in the chapter, but it's not illustrating anything that hasn't been 10 times before. Winston continues to almost (but not quite) break. 

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius translated by George W. Chrystal (~180) Book 12 and Close Out

 Meditations by Marcus Aurelius translated by George W. Chrystal (~180) Book 12 

Bonus:

Summary: WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE AND BE FORGOTTEN!

Commentary: 

 If then, now that you are near your exit, setting behind you all other things, you will hold alone in reverence your ruling part, the spirit divine within you; if you will cease to dread the end of life, but rather fear to miss the beginning of life according to Nature, you will be a man, worthy of the ordered Universe that produced you; you will cease to be a stranger in your own country, gaping in wonder at every daily happening, caught up by this trifle or by that.

Live to succeed, not avoid failing.

Not a ton of comments on Book 12, so I'm just going to jump into the final overview.

I've said it several times, but the basic issue with reading all of Meditations is that it's really repetitive. Some minor variant of "memento mori" is probably in there, on average, every other page.

Again, that's not MA's fault, since the whole thing is basically just his journal, not a text book or whatever.

As a philosophy, I think stoicism is decent. You're gonna die, live up to your virtues, worry about yourself (it's all you can do) is all good advice. I don't think I'd hand someone the whole text as a way of learning it though.

If I was going to construct my own 5FSOB I think I'd probably just excerpt whatever section presents the whole thing the best (11.18?) and call it a day.

Projectwise, I learned not to get in the middle of too many different multi-part things at once. And not to try to paraphrase every line.

I'm gonna finish up 1984 next, then I'm into poetry for April.

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 19 (3.3)

 A couple important distinctions in this chapter:

1. "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power."

I think we often feel the need to give people/characters a reason to want to be evil, controlling assholes. Sometimes, they're just evil, controlling assholes for its own sake.

2. "The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred."

Being a hater is so much easier than being creative and tolerant and all those other things. Leaves more time for POWER. Also, they want to "abolish the orgasm."

3. "It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide."

I think Winston is right. Eventually, the whole miserable pile will collapse. Either because it can't maintain itself any longer (can you really motivate enough people this way to build a long term sustaining society) or because some challenge arrives that (in its diminished capacity) it can't face.

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 18 (3.2)

 Orwell's writing is a little dry for a torture scene. Thematically it works:

O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.

'There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?'

'Yes.'

And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment -- he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps -- of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had faded but before O'Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some period of one's life when one was in effect a different person.

'You see now,' said O'Brien, 'that it is at any rate possible.'

'Yes,' said Winston.

The Party can make you not just "reject the evidence of your eyes and ears," but actually convince you that your reality is different.

There's plenty of fodder for the O'BrienXWinston shippers.

And it gives us this scene:

 

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 17 (3.1)

 Apparently, they've destroyed so much of English that only 12 words rhyme with rod.

English is apparently regarded as a relatively difficult language for rhyming.

This gives me ideas for A to Z this year...

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 16 (2.10)

 THEY GET CAUGHT (they are idiots). 

As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful marelike buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose.

Julia doesn't think she's pretty.

 

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 15 (2.9.3)

 Orwell's essay is starting to get questionable here:

 The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

I would argue that most middle class people are happy to remain middle class, or maybe slightly move up to a more comfortable middle class, not to become high class. I have no idea where his idea that a common aim for the low class is to abolish a class system at all comes from.

Likewise, his claim that mechanization removes the need for social levels, even if people still have different jobs. Even if we're entirely post scarcity, some jobs, hobbies, etc. will still be more prestigious than others.

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

This part is spot on though. Along with:

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.

Alternative facts!

But remember, 1984 is a book by a socialist about bad socialists, so:

Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. 

Julia dozes through the whole thing and tells Winston he's good at reading, because of course. 

 

 

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 14 (2.9.2)

 Continuing with Orwell's essay Goldstein's book.

In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, [...] But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society.

I feel like if you can get people to build temples and pyramids, you could make up a religion that manipulates people the way you want without (or at least with a lot less) endless war. Also, not sure about his claim that:

In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat

There were wars that lasted for literal hundreds of years. The current war has been going on for a few dozen years. That's peanuts.

  

 

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 13 (2.9.1)

After a couple pages of Hate Week (and Winston and the rest of his department having to swap Eurasia and East Asia again) this chapter is mostly Winston reading Goldstein's book. It's the longest chapter so far by quite a bit, and has a bit of a "I just wanted to write this essay, but no one would publish it so I hid it in a novel."

I'm going to ramble about fonts in web writing some next week. For today, I'm just going to make fun of Orwell:

A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart easily, as though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription on the title page ran:

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE
OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

by

Emmanuel Goldstein

[Winston began reading.]

Chapter 1.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable....

 The font isn't actually Courier, but he does switch font for the Goldstein excerpts. I really feel like:

1. Primary font

2. Secondary font

3. ALL CAPS

4. Italics

is a lot for one page.

Add in that awkward bracketentical and the period ellipse and I'm over it.

Long story short, Goldstein's book says that the war doesn't actually matter. It's just a way of diverting resources so that the class order is maintained. We finally get the boundaries of Oceania (it's America, British Isles, Australia, and a smidge of Africa). How the other two countries can't pick off Australia and the Isles is beyond me. He goes on about it for quite a while, but I want to pull one sentence.

 For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.

 I think this is probably the most wrong part of Orwell's thesis. Most people just don't want to think. It's too much work. You could argue that people are trained not to or whatever, and that might be true, but it's clear that you can have a majority literate population and they can still choose to remain ignorant. He kind of gives himself cover with the "leisure and security" line, but there's a lot of secure and leisurely unthinkers out there. (Huxley is probably right that providing leisure and security is an effective means of preventing thought for most people.)

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 12 (2.8)

Winston and Julia go to O'Brien's house by separate routes, but arrive at the same time. Winston leaves without the Newspeak dictionary.

I can only conclude he wants to get caught.

He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her.

Silly woman. (When she does speak, it's to yell NO she won't be separated from Winston.)

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 11 (2.7)

 Winston was a shitty kid (to be fair, he was starving) and still has mommy issues.

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 10 (2.6)

 The missing one is on the other blog. Oopsies.

I have a student who is obsessed with Winston's obsession with O'Brien. She's convinced that Winston is a closest gay man (and possibly trans). She will love this chapter:

It had happened at last. The expected message had come. All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen. [...]  he became aware that someone larger than himself [...] It was O'Brien. [...] At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only impulse was to run away. His heart bounded violently. [...] Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. [...]  pick it up at my flat [...]  "If you ever want to see me, this is where I can be found," was what O'Brien had been saying to him. [...] He knew that sooner or later he would obey O'Brien's summons. [...] Ministry of Love. [...]  a foretaste of death

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 9 (2.5)

I lost a part somewhere. I'll figure that out tomorrow.

 Winston has stopped drinking, put on weight, and is healthier. I guess Julia is bringing him more healthy snacks when they fuck?

I learned about a new nursery rhyme. It's a "cumulative song" like "Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" so here's the last verse:

This is the farmer sowing his corn,

That kept the cock that crow'd in the morn,

That waked the priest all shaven and shorn,

That married the man all tatter'd and torn,

That kissed the maiden all forlorn,

That milk'd the cow with the crumpled horn,

That tossed the dog,

That worried the cat,

That killed the rat,

That ate the malt

That lay in the house that Jack built.

They think about trying to escape to the proletariat, and that seems kind of plausible. The Party doesn't seem to to aggressively police the Proles, and isn't that basically just erasing yourself?

A "strange intimacy existed, or seemed to exist" between Winston and O'Brien.

Julia suggests the bombings are false flags, which I'm inclined to agree with. She doesn't realize/care about the Party erasing history though, because she's a dumb girl. 

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 8 (2.3)

Winston continues to call women ugly. We learn that there are automatically produced songs now, even more automated than the books Julia works on, no human intervention. Winston is mad that Julia has her period and feels he has a right to her poon. They use blackberry leaves for tea and have "proper white bread."

Julia puts on makeup, which he loves. He lets her see him naked for the first time (he was too insecure before).

Casually Completing Classics:1984 Part 7 (2.2)

 We finally find out Julia's name is Julia. They go off into the woods and don't fuck. But then they do like four pages later.

Winston admits to wanting to rape and murder her, and then tells her he wants her to have fuck as many guys as possible.

Winston is such a chud.

Casually Completing Classics:1984 Part 6 (TWO)

 Oh boy, it's one of those books that's divided into parts and the chapter numbers reset. Couldn't at least do 2.1? 2.I? B1?

Winston sees the girl at work. She hurt her arm on a "kaleidoscope" that they use to make/transport their trashy prole novels. I looked it up, and kaleidoscope does not mean something else in British. Earlier in the book:

 Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section—Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak—engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.

It's like a robot Madlibs? Mechanical LLM. Mechanical LLM would sell as a short story idea. 

She slips him a folded up paper. He hides in the bathroom until he calms down (without reading it) then goes back to his desk, mixes it in with the other papers, and works for a while.

Eventually he unfolds it. It says "I love you" because of course it does. This woman he's met like 3 times and just incel glared at is in love with him, because reasons.

He thinks about her naked, with less murder this time (but still some murder). He's convinced it's not a trap, at least. 

We learn that no one sends letters anymore. They use preprinted post cards, kinda like the ones you use for correspondence chess.

Thanks, Wikipedia.

She disappears for a while and he's worried about her, but she comes back. They manage to meet at lunch and plan to go to the Victory Square, where they briefly hold hands and see some prisoners.

This whole scene brings the logistics of actual dating/fucking to mind. We know that you're not supposed to love your spouse or enjoy sex, but how do they keep population numbers in the party from collapsing? Do they promote proles? Are there enough people surreptitiously, awkwardly fucking to keep the numbers up? 80 years after the novel was written, with much of the developed world struggling with demographic issues, this part seems less predictive/likely than the rest.

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 5 (Chapter 8)

 This is a long, kind of weird, chapter.

Winston goes to the prole part of town, where he asks an old man at a pub about the before times. He doesn't do a great job of asking questions, and the old man does a worse job of answering. He gets upset, leaves, and goes to the antique store he got the diary in. The guy there is happy to tell him about the before times, but Winston seems less excited then you'd expect. He's interested, to be sure, but he just freaked out on someone for not doing the same thing this guy is doing and he's not that into it.

Blah blah women hating.

He sees the "young and lusty" woman and fantasizes about killing her again (no rape this time).

WIP, FIS, IIS count: 3

I feel like you could cut most of the old man (and a good chunk of the antique shop) and this chapter would work just as well.

Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 4 (Chapter 7)

 This chapter starts off with a pseudo-epigraph from Winston's journal, "If there is hope [wrote Winston] it lies in the proles."

And then it's mostly him saying they just need to RISE UP. The party doesn't even bother trying to indoctrinate them, or even surveil them fully. (This is a different from the modern age, where the lower class is the easiest to surveil, since they're attached to smart phones 24/7.)

I like that jus primae noctis has become a right of the capitalists in the urban legends of the oppressive future. 

It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the party was trying to achieve.

People talk about how prescient 1984 is, but I don't see this quote passed around a lot, and I think it's relevant. How many people today feel like nothing even matters? How much of the stuff people do obsess over obviously doesn't? He then goes on to describe how they're in a boring dystopia.

It's "the lonely hour fifteen". I'm starting to wonder if they're just in 24 hour time.

It's starting to sound like Oceania is just "The West". They talk about working with New York and Canada.

This is also the, "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." chapter.

I think people think too much about the thought police parts of 1984 and not enough about the denying reality parts.