Welcome to 2044
I read a few articles this week about the 60th anniversary of the George Orwell novel 1984 (including this interesting one at National Review Online) and one thing that struck me is that very few literary works get reviewed 60 years after their publication. Even fewer good ones get reviewed/taught/discussed 60 years later. Everybody knows at least a little about 1984, even those of us who have not yet read it (In school, I was in the class that was assigned Animal Farm instead. Interesting book. Hated the pigs).
But this is not a review of 1984. That would be silly since I just admitted I haven’t read it! But it seems I should. Traditionally, reading has been seen as a way of passing on culture – not the kind of culture that causes people to donate money to the opera or spend time at museums but the kind that shapes the way people think. That’s why an old fashioned Classical Education valued Socrates and Thomas Aquinas among others. Agree with them or not, these were smart people and excellent teachers.
Well, that’s the official story, anyway.
It’s interesting that the list of important books for a Classical-like education now includes 1984, a book that has infiltrated popular culture with phrases and ideas about the awfulness of a huge, all-controlling government, without actually doing much to discourage the growth of such governments. Don’t believe me? Use Google or whatever resource you want and try to develop a comprehensive database of government operated databases. Don’t forget to include notes about laws allowing or even requiring these to exist as well as the sources of information (such as intercepted emails, credit reports and public records such as court filings) that go into them.
Maybe, instead of discouraging those things, 1984 provided the inspiration. It has certainly inspired plenty of books and movies along similar themes. Arguably, the entire sub-genre of dystopian science fiction started with 1984. Personally, I always found that good science fiction taught more about people and society than the majority of the so-called classics I read in school. I preferred Asimov to Hemingway, Heinlein to Homer. (ANYONE to Homer, really, though a couple of the movie adaptations were somewhat enjoyable). Few English teachers sympathized with this view.
Maybe it’s different today. That’s something that would be interesting to hear: Are there more science fiction books infiltrating the things considered classics? Probably Fahrenheit 451. That’s the only one I can think of but I’m a student of computers and security, not literature (though I’ve also had some short stories and poems published – mostly fantasy stories and science fiction poems, believe it or not). In a world where Twitter is the new literature (see below) and cars and TV sets contain computer chips, there may one day soon be practical value as well as intellectual in science fiction classics about a robot uprising, or first contact.
Now if someone could feed 1984, or even some of the more traditional classics, into the 140 character chunks of a Twitter stream, maybe I would get around to reading it sooner.
Random sources of Twitter Literature (some of it surprisingly good, though no classics yet):
- Thaumatrope — I should mention this one has bought 2 of my pieces, one of which appeared on Christmas Eve last year.
- VeryShortStory
- Outshine
- nanoism
LinkedIn
Technorati Favorites
I did have to read 1984, as well as Animal Farm. Parts of 1984 were good from what I remember, but then other parts really drug. I might appreciate the literary value of it more now if I went back and re-read it. You don’t appreciate the classics much in high school.
When I was in high school I developed the opinion that the classics were chosen BECAUSE they had so little value to students. It was a scam to make teachers seem smarter than they were. Maybe I don’t still have that opinion (or maybe I do).
In the case of 1984 it seems possible that what made it a classic was the cultural significance of the ideas in it, rather than the quality of the writing. If that’s true, then maybe it should be used in history classes, to show the growth of ideas about government and totalitarianism, than in literature classes where it just torments young people.