11 - Oceania’s Dirt

Summary

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel about being dirty and dirtied. This chapter shows how the representations of things like mess and dirt and associated feelings like nausea, disgust, and squeamishness are bound up in revealing ways with Orwell’s depictions of the differences between totalitarian rulers and the subjects they rule. Moving in sequence through considerations of how Orwell gives filth, nausea, and disgust interesting things to do in the novel, the chapter traces a pattern of symbolic relations which culminates in the differences between the apparent cleanliness of Oceania’s political systems and the nigh-on inescapable muck of its citizens, and of the spaces they inhabit. The puritanism of Ingsoc accepts the reality of dirt, seeks to annihilate the sex instinct, and is temperamentally opposed to the aesthetic. In tracing that puritanism, Orwell made a narrative virtue of squalor. Coursing through Nineteen Eighty-Four, in other words, is a pattern of relations to do with the political work of filth and the ideological consequences of its avoidance (or apparent avoidance). This actualizing of squalor enabled Orwell to create a perennially applicable literary dystopia. It also helped him think through the complexities and inconsistencies of a politics built on the logics of filth.