(2 of 10)
What does it stand for? That question and the imminence of the Orwellian year have galvanized a small army of professors, critics and writers, journalists, pundits, social scientists, politicians and professional doomsters; hardly anyone paid for thinking out loud seems able to resist the temptation to play with Orwell's numbers. The game began in earnest last January and could, thanks to crowded conditions, easily extend into 1985. The action takes different forms: an apparently endless round of academic seminars and symposiums, coast to coast, from Manhattan College to Stanford; a swelling stream of magazine articles ("On the Brink of 1984") and books (1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century); a CBS documentary last June anchored by Walter Cronkite, plus some six hours of TV programming to be shown in England.
A new 17-volume edition of Orwell's complete works will be published next year in the U.S. and England. A wax figure of the author is to be installed at Madame Tussaud's in London at the end of December. Science-fiction buffs discussed the father of Big Brother in Antwerp this fall. Futurists look forward to gathering for the same purpose in Washington next June, well after the separate Orwell festivities planned by the Smithsonian Institution and Library of Congress. By then hearings scheduled by a House Judiciary subcommittee on "1984: Civil Liberties and the National Security State" will be completed.
Orwell experts jetting from one gala to another can keep track of the time through "The 1984 Calendar" ($10.95), the inspiration of two Michigan State graduates. Billed as "a day-by-day history of the increasing erosion of civil liberties in the U.S.," it measures 17 in. by 34 in. and features black-and-white photographs of U.S. Government buildings (the IRS, FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs) and of police riot squads and jail cells. Each date is annotated with one or more reminders, trivial as well as grim, of the loss of freedom; few may recall that on Aug. 1, 1973, the Washington Post reported a private investigation launched by the Nixon White House on the Smothers brothers. Can Doublethink T shirts and Big Brother barbecue aprons be far behind?
This snowballing imprecision has been in progress for almost a decade. Author Anthony Burgess recalls teaching in the U.S. at various times in the 1970s. "American college students have said, 'Like 1984, man,' when asked not to smoke pot in the classroom or advised gently to do a little reading." Now merely mentioning the date can convey muzzy criticism of whatever the speaker happens to dislike: advertising, computers, beeper phones, freeways and domed stadiums.
Such verbal knee jerks might be dismissed as harmless. But they never were by Orwell. "The slovenliness of our language," he wrote in 1946, "makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." And it is a surpassing irony that the title Orwell made famous has become a symptom of the very sloppiness he deplored: what he called a "Meaningless Word," a ramshackle abstraction inviting everyone to come in and stop thinking for a while.