This chapter considers the politics of the archive in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The manipulation of history and of the individual experience of time is a key way through which power maintains its dystopian and totalitarian hold on Oceania. I examine images of manipulated public and individual archives in Nineteen Eighty-Four, from the memory holes to doublethink, arguing that the Party’s control of time is aimed at fashioning the present as the culmination of history and at ensuring the future as mere reproduction of the present. If the Party’s power works along temporal lines, the same is true of Winston’s rebellion, which begins in earnest with Winston writing a diary addressed to the future and the past. I examine images of archives that seek to fissure the Party’s totalitarian control of time, from Winston’s fragile memories to the diary itself. The volatility and violent erasures characteristic of Oceania’s archives entail that Winston’s challenge to the totalitarian closure of the Party’s endless present – a challenge encapsulated by his diary – is unsuccessful. Yet Winston’s testimony finds its hoped-for future readers: us. The chapter concludes by gesturing to how the trope of a diary counteracting power’s control of the archive returns in ensuing dystopian novels.

An introduction to the history Nineteen Eighty-Four, its key themes, and the way the chapters in the book intersect with and respond to them.

The chapter draws on The Lion and the Unicorn to argue that Nineteen Eighty-Four, like ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, represents a shift in Orwell’s thought as he critiques a meritocratic social order in a depiction of a dystopian society ordered around intellectual ability. The chapter examines intellectual control in Oceania through two processes: firstly, ‘doublethink’, a process through which the most intelligent members of society must submit themselves more completely to an act of self-hypnosis and secondly, the chapter contextualizes Ingsoc’s slogans against Animal Farm to argue that Orwell identifies political slogans with mind control. The chapter argues that the novel is Winston Smith’s thwarted bildungsroman, analysing how its form is designed to interrogate Ingsoc’s slogans. It examines the scenes of Winston’s self-education as he reads Goldstein’s Book and the children’s history textbook and suggests how the novel’s torture scene is aligned with the pedagogic, as the pupil/teacher relationship is redefined by Orwell as a relationship based upon intellectual manipulation. The tension between the pedagogic form of the novel, which explores political slogans and creates curiosity in the reader, and its criticism of the catechistic model of teaching, renders the novel paradoxically an anti-pedagogic pedagogic text.

Every novel creates its own map, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has at least two. One is the geopolitical map of the world, on which the warring forces of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are locked in an unending struggle for dominance. The other is the geography of social interaction, private space, and psychological interiority located in the perceptions and the mind of Orwell’s anti-hero, Winston Smith. Each has its own language, the geopolitical map being described in journalistic and strategic language, the private domain in the familiar novelistic discourse of private life. Orwell said Nineteen Eighty-Four was inspired by the Teheran conference of 1943, in which the leaders of the Allied powers discussed dividing the post-war world up between them. But he also wrote a novel about the fate of a private citizen in an imagined age of totalitarian surveillance, desperately seeking sanctuary spaces in which to take refuge from an all-seeing regime. This essay describes the global and the personal geography of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and seeks to show how these map on to each other, how brutal power seeks absolute control of both, and how each nonetheless retains a fragile space for resistance and hope.

This chapter examines the posterity of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the comics medium. Drawing from adaptation theory, it examines a broad range of mainstream and alternative comic books, showing how they use, adapt, update, and sometimes reinvent Orwellian material, with strategies ranging from close rewriting (Ted Rall’s 2024) to intertextual reference (Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta with David Lloyd and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Kevin O’Neil) and sometimes irreverential allusion (Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan). In so doing, comics writers and artists interrogate the cultural standing of comics and its ties to the literary canon, pointing to their own status as authors. They underline the pleasures of reading, viewing, and rewriting texts, and reflect upon the nature of fiction. They also use Orwellian themes of authoritarianism and control in order to reflect upon the history of the medium, looking at the superhero genre in particular. Finally, they address the specific issue of visibility and surveillance, which is of paramount importance in visual storytelling, and allows them to physically engage the reader in specific ways. Thus, these authors use their Orwellian intertext as the site of a politics of resistance to cultural hierarchies and political oppression.