For decades, outside of feminist scholarship and readerships, French-Cuban-American diarist, novelist, and essayist Anaïs Nin was primarily known through her famous friends—most notably the experimental novelist Henry Miller, but also psychoanalyst Otto Rank. She had affairs with both men, and inspired some of their work, but Nin has always deserved much wider appreciation as an artist in her own right, whose surrealist explorations of sexuality, and sexual abuse, and posthumous collections of erotica rival Miller’s body of work—and for many readers far surpass his talents.
Now Nin’s expressive face and oracular quotations have taken over the Tumblr-sphere, such that she has been called the “patron saint of social media” and compared to Lena Dunham. Whether one finds these terms flattering or not comes down to matters of taste and, probably even more so, of age. But those who wish for a short introduction to Nin outside of the world of memes and macros will surely take an interest in the 1952 film above, “Bells of Atlantis,” shot and edited by her then-husband Ian Hugo (also known as banker High Guiler), with Nin in the starring role as the queen of Atlantis. Coilhouse offers this succinct description:
Over cascading experimental footage, Nin reads aloud from her novella House of Incest. We catch glimpses of her nude form swinging in a hammock, and we see her shadow undulating over sheer fabric blowing in the wind, but for the most part, the imagery, captured by Nin’s husband Ian Hugo, remains very abstract.
But it is not only the rare, hazy glimpses of Nin and the snippets of her reading that should draw our attention, but also the burbling, whistling, hypnotic electronic score, composed and created by the husband-and-wife-hobbyist team of Louis and Bebe Barron. Over a decade before Delia Derbyshire wowed audiences with her Dr. Who theme, the Barrons were making unheard-of experimental sounds using the technology available at the time—tape machines, oscillators, microphones, and other such low-tech analog devices.
“The Barrons were true pioneers of electronic music,” writes Messy Nessy, “and one of the crown jewels of their auditory collection is the soundtrack for the 1956 thriller sci-fi film, Forbidden Planet,” the first major motion picture with an all-electronic score. “Bells of Atlantis” breaks ground as an even earlier example of the form, and its hallucinatory visual journey recalls the surrealist filmmaking of decades past and looks forward to the psychedelic 60s.
Both the sounds the Barrons produced and the visions of Hugo turn out to be, in my humble opinion, the perfect setting for a brief introduction to Nin’s voice. After watching “Bells of Atlantis,” put on some more early electronica, and read Nin’s 1947 House of Incest for yourself, a hallucinatory prose-poem about, in Nin’s description, the “escape from a woman’s season in hell.”
“In 1977, Armistead Maupin wrote a letter to his parents that he had been composing for half his life,” writes the Guardian’s Tim Adams. “He addressed it directly to his mother, but rather than send it to her, he published it in the San Francisco Chronicle, the paper in which he had made his name with his loosely fictionalised Tales of the City, the daily serial written from the alternative, gay world in which he lived.” The late 1970s saw a final flowering of newspaper-serialized novels, the same form in which Charles Dickens had grown famous nearly a century and a half before. But of all the zeitgeisty stories then told a day at a time in urban centers across America, none has had anything like the lasting impact of San Francisco as envisioned by Maupin.
Much of Tales of the City’s now-acknowledged importance comes from the manner in which Maupin populated that San Francisco with a sexually diverse cast of characters — gay, straight, and everything in between — and presented their lives without moral judgment.
He saved his condemnation for the likes of Anita Bryant, the singer and Florida Citrus Commission spokeswoman who inspired Maupin to write that veiled letter to his own parents when she headed up the anti-homosexual “Save Our Children” political campaign. When Michael Tolliver, one of the series’ main gay characters, discovers that his folks back in Florida have thrown in their lot with Bryant, he responds with an eloquent and long-delayed coming-out that begins thus:
Dear Mama,
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. Every time I try to write you and Papa I realize I’m not saying the things that are in my heart. That would be OK, if I loved you any less than I do, but you are still my parents and I am still your child.
I have friends who think I’m foolish to write this letter. I hope they’re wrong. I hope their doubts are based on parents who love and trust them less than mine do. I hope especially that you’ll see this as an act of love on my part, a sign of my continuing need to share my life with you. I wouldn’t have written, I guess, if you hadn’t told me about your involvement in the Save Our Children campaign. That, more than anything, made it clear that my responsibility was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual, and that I never needed saving from anything except the cruel and ignorant piety of people like Anita Bryant.
I’m sorry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it for most of my life. Revulsion, shame, disbelief — rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes.
You can hear Michael’s, and Maupin’s, full letter read aloud by Sir Ian McKellen in the Letters Live video above. In response to its initial publication, Adams writes, “Maupin had received hundreds of other letters, nearly all of them from readers who had cut out the column, substituted their own names for Michael’s and sent it verbatim to their own parents. Maupin’s Letter to Mama has since been set to music three times and become ‘a standard for gay men’s choruses around the world.’ ”
Those words come from a piece on Maupin’s autobiography Logical Family, published just last year, in which the Tales of the City author tells of his own coming out as well as his friendships with other non-straight cultural icons, one such icon being McKellen himself. “I have many regrets about not having come out earlier,” McKellen told BOMB magazine in 1998, “but one of them might be that I didn’t engage myself in the politicking.” He’d come out ten years before, as a stand in opposition to Section 28 of the Local Government Bill, then under consideration in the British Parliament, which prohibited local authorities from depicting homosexuality “as a kind of pretended family relationship.”
McKellen entered the realm of activism in earnest after choosing that moment to reveal his sexual orientation on the BBC, which he did on the advice of Maupin and other friends. A few years later he appeared in the television miniseries adaptation of Tales of the City as Archibald Anson-Gidde, a wealthy real-estate and cultural impresario (one, as Maupin puts it, of the city’s “A‑gays”). In the novels, Archibald Anson-Gidde dies closeted, of AIDS, provoking the ire of certain other characters for not having done enough for the cause in life — a charge, thanks in part to the words of Michael Tolliver, that neither Maupin nor McKellen will surely never face.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Most reputable doctors tend to refrain from diagnosing people they’ve never met or examined. Unfortunately, this circumspection doesn’t obtain as often among lay folk. When we lob uninformed diagnoses at other people, we may do those with genuine mental health issues a serious disservice. But what about fictional characters? Can we ascribe mental illnesses to the surreal menagerie, say, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? It’s almost impossible not to, given the overt themes of madness in the story.
Carroll himself, it seems, drew many of his depictions directly from the treatment of mental disorders in 19th century England, many of which were linked to “extremely poor working conditions,” notes Franziska Kohlt at The Conversation. During the industrial revolution, “populations in so-called ‘pauper lunatic asylums’ for the working class skyrocketed.” Carroll’s uncle, Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge, happened to be an officer of the Lunacy Commission, which supervised such institutions, and his work offers “stunning insights into the madness in Alice.”
Yet we should be careful. Like the supposed drug references in Alice, some of the lay diagnoses now applied to Alice’s characters may be a little far-fetched. Do we really see diagnosable PTSD or Tourette’s? Anxiety Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder? These conditions hadn’t been categorized in Carroll’s day, though their symptoms are nothing new. And yet, experts have long looked to his nonsense fable for its depictions of abnormal psychology. One British psychiatrist didn’t just diagnose Alice, he named a condition after her.
In 1955, Dr. John Todd coined the term Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) to describe a rare condition in which—write researchers in the Journal of Pediatric Neurosciences—“the sizes of body parts or sizes of external objects are perceived incorrectly.” Among other illnesses, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome may be linked to migraines, which Carroll himself reportedly suffered.
“At several points in the story,” writes Barker, “Alice questions her own identity and feels ‘different’ in some way from when she first awoke.” Seeing in these descriptions the symptoms of Depersonalization Disorder (DPD), Barker describes the condition and its location in the brain.
This disorder encompasses a wide range of symptoms, including feelings of not belonging in one’s own body, a lack of ownership of thoughts and memories, that movements are initiated without conscious intention and a numbing of emotions. Patients often comment that they feel as though they are not really there in the present moment, likening the experience to dreaming or watching a movie. These symptoms occur in the absence of psychosis, and patients are usually aware of the absurdity of their situation. DPD is often a feature of migraine or epileptic auras and is sometimes experienced momentarily by healthy individuals, in response to stress, tiredness or drug use.
Also highly associated with childhood abuse and trauma, the condition “acts as a sort of defense mechanism, allowing an individual to become disconnected from adverse life events.” Perhaps there is PTSD in Carroll’s text after all, since an estimated 51% of DPD patients also meet those criteria.
Prosopagnosia:
This condition is characterized by “the selective inability to recognize faces.” Though it can be hereditary, prosopagnosia can also result from stroke or head trauma. Fittingly, the character supposedly affected by it is none other than Humpty-Dumpty, who tells Alice “I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet.”
“Your face is the same as everybody else has – the two eyes, so-” (marking their places in the air with his thumb) “nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s always the same. Now if you had two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance – or the mouth at the top – that would be some help.”
This “precise description” of prosopagnosia shows how individuals with the condition rely on particularly “discriminating features to tell people apart,” since they are unable to distinguish family members and close friends from total strangers.
Scholars know that Carroll’s text contains within it several abstract and seemingly absurd mathematical concepts, such as imaginary numbers and projective geometry. The work of researchers like Kohit and Barker shows that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland might also present a complex 19th century understanding of mental illness and neurological disorders, conveyed in a superficially silly way, but possibly informed by serious research and observation. Read Barker’s article in full here to learn more about the conditions she diagnoses.
A common joke has Americans overawed by people with British accents. It’s funny because it’s partly true; Yanks can grant undue authority to people who sound like Sir David Attenborough or Benedict Cumberbatch. But in these cases, what we generically call a British accent should more accurately be referred to as “Received Pronunciation” (or RP), the speech of BBC presenters and educated Brits from certain middle- and upper-class areas in Southern England. (If you like Received Pronunciation, you’re going to love “posh” Upper RP.) Received Pronunciation is only one of many British accents, as comedian Siobhan Thompson shows, most of which we’re unlikely to hear narrating nature documentaries.
RP is also sometimes called “the Shakespeare accent,” for its association with famous thespians like John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier, or Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. But as we’ve previously noted in a post on the work of linguist David Crystal and his son, actor Ben Crystal, the English of Shakespeare’s day sounded nothing like what we typically hear on stage and screen.
What linguists call “Original Pronunciation” (OP), the actual Shakespeare accent, had a flavor all its own, likely combining, to our modern ears, “flecks of nearly every regional U.K. English accent,” as Ben Crystal tells NPR, “and indeed American and in fact Australian, too.”
You can see the Crystals explain and demonstrate the accent in the video above, and make sense of many Shakespearean puns that only work in OP. And in the animated video at the top of the post, get a whirlwind tour from Chaucer’s Middle English to Shakespeare’s Early Modern variety. Along the way, you’ll learn why the spelling of English words—both American and British—is so confusing and irregular. (“Knight,” for example, which makes no sense when pronounced as nite, was once pronounced much more phonetically.) The range of regional accents produced a bedlam of variant spellings, which took a few hundred years to standardize during some intense spelling debates.
You’ll get an introduction to the first English printer, William Caxton, and the “Great Vowel Shift” which changed the language’s sound dramatically over the course of a couple hundred years. Once we get to Shakespeare and his “Original Pronunciation,” we can see how rhymes that don’t scan for us sounded just right to Elizabethan ears. These lost rhymes provide a significant clue for linguists who reconstruct OP, as does meter and the survival of older pronunciations in certain dialects.
When the Crystals brought their reconstruction of Shakespeare’s English to the stage in hugely popular productions at the Globe Theatre, members of the audience all heard something slightly different—their many different dialects reflected back at them. Listen for all the various kinds of English above in Ben Crystal’s recitation of Hamlet’s “to be, or not to be” speech in Original Pronunciation.
Haruki Murakami readers, or even those of us who’ve just read about his novels, know to expect certain things from his books: cats, ears, wells, strange parallel realities, and above all music. And not just any music, but highly deliberate selections from the Western classical, pop, and jazz canons, all no doubt pulled straight from the shelves of the writer’s vast personal record library. That personal library may well have grown a few records vaster today, given that it’s Murakami’s 69th birthday. To mark the occasion, we’ve rounded up a few hit playlists of music from the Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and 1Q84 author’s work as well as his life.
Finally, you can close out this musical Murakami birthday with the Spotify playlist above of music from his own vinyl collection — though at 3,350 songs in total, it will probably extend the celebration beyond a day. Even that listening experience surely represents only a fraction of what Murakami keeps on his shelves, all of it offering potential material for his next inexplicably gripping story. And though the English-speaking world still awaits its translation of Murakami’s latest novel Killing Commendatore, which came out in Japan last year, you can hear the music it name-checks in the Youtube playlist below. Something about the mix — Richard Strauss, Sheryl Crow, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Duran Duran — suggests we’re in for another Murakamian reading experience indeed:
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
When the term “witch hunt” gets thrown around in cases of powerful men accused of harassment and abuse, historians everywhere bang their heads against their desks. The history of persecuting witches—as every schoolboy and girl knows from the famous Salem Trials—involves accusations moving decidedly in the other direction.
But we’re very familiar with men supposedly selling out to Satan, dealing—or just dueling—with the devil. They weren’t called witches for doing so, or burned at the stake. They were blues pioneers, virtuoso fiddlers, and guitar gods. From the devilishly dashing Niccolò Paganini, to Robert Johnson at the Crossroads, to Jimmy Page’s black magic, to “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” to the omnipresence of Satan in metal…. The devil “seems to have quite the interest in music,” notes the Polyphonic video above.
Before musicians came to terms with the dark lord, power-hungry scholars used demonology to summon Luciferian emissaries like Mephistopheles. The legend of Faust dates back to the late 16th century and a historical alchemist named Johann Georg Faust, who inspired many dramatic works, like Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Johann Goethe’s Faust, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Mikhail Bugakov’s The Master and Margarita, and F.W. Murnau’s 1926 silent film.
The Faust legend may be the sturdiest of such stories, but it is not by any means the origin of the idea. Medieval Catholic saints feared the devil’s enticements constantly. Medieval occultists often saw things differently. If we can trace the notion of women consorting with the devil to the Biblical Eve in the Garden, we find male analogues in the New Testament—Christ’s temptations in the desert, Judas’s thirty pieces of silver, the possessed vagrant who sends his demons into a herd of pigs. But we might even say that God made the first deal with the devil, in the opening wager of the book of Job.
In most examples—Charlie Daniels’ triumphal folk tale aside—the deal usually goes down badly for the mortal party involved, as it did for Robert Johnson when the devil came for his due, and convened the morbidly fascinating 27 Club. Goethe imposes a redemptive happy ending onto Faust that seems to wildly overcompensate for the typical fate of souls in hell’s pawn shop. Kierkegaard took the idea seriously as a cultural myth, and wrote in Either/Or that “every notable historical era will have its own Faust.”
Modern-day Fausts in the popular genre of the day, the conspiracy theory, are famous entertainers, as you can see in the unintentionally humorous supercut above from a YouTube channel called “EndTimeChristian.” As it happens in these kinds of narratives, the cultural trope gets taken far too literally as a real event. The Faust legend shows us that making deals with the devil has been a literary device for hundreds of years, passing into popular culture, then the blues—a genre haunted by hell hounds and infernal crossroads—and its progeny in rock and roll and hip hop.
Those who talk of selling their souls might really believe it, but they inherited the language from centuries of Western cultural and religious tradition. Selling one’s soul is a common metaphor for living a carnal life, or getting into bed with shady characters for worldly success. But it’s also a playful notion. (A misunderstood aspect of so much metal is its comic Satanic overkill.) Johnson himself turned the story of selling his soul into an iconic boast, in “Crossroads” and “Me and the Devil Blues.” “Hello Satan,” he says in the latter tune, “I believe it’s time to go.”
Chilling in hindsight, the line is the bluesman’s grimly casual acknowledgment of how life on the edge would catch up to him. But it was worth it, he also suggests, to become a legend in his own time. In the short, animated video above from Music Matters, Johnson meets the horned one, a slick operator in a suit: “Suddenly, no one could touch him.” Often when we talk these days about people selling their souls, they might eventually end up singing, but they don’t make beautiful music. In any case, the moral of almost every version of the story is perfectly clear: no matter how good the deal seems, the devil never fails to collect on a debt.
Reading “availeth much,” to borrow an old phrase from the King James Bible. To read is to experience more of the world than we can in person, to enter into the lives of others, to organize knowledge according to useful schemes and categories…. Or, at least it can be. Much recent research strongly suggests that reading improves emotional and cognitive intelligence, by changing and activating areas of the brain responsible for these qualities.
Is reading essential for the survival of the species? Perhaps not. “Humans have been reading and writing for only about 5000 years—too short for major evolutionary changes,” writes Greg Miller in Science. We got by well enough for tens of thousands of years before written language. But neuroscientists theorize that reading “rewires” areas of the brain responsible for both vision and spoken language. Even adults who learn to read late in life can experience these effects, increasing “functional connectivity with the visual cortex,” some researchers have found, which may be “the brain’s way of filtering and fine-tuning the flood of visual information that calls for our attention” in the modern world.
This improved communication between areas of the brain might also represent an important intervention into developmental disorders. One Carnegie Mellon study, for example, found that “100 hours of intensive reading instruction improved children’s reading skills and also increased the quality of… compromised white matter to normal levels.” The findings, says Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, suggest “an exciting approach to be tested in the treatment of mental disorders, which increasingly appear to be due to problems in specific brain circuits.”
Reading can not only improve cognition, but it can also lead to a refined “theory of mind,” a term used by cognitive scientists to describe how “we ascribe mental states to other persons”—as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes—and “how we use the states to explain and predict the actions of those other persons.” Improved theory of mind, or “intuitive psychology,” as it’s also called, can result in greater levels of empathy and perhaps even expanded executive function, allowing us to better “hold multiple perspectives in mind at once,” writes Brittany Thompson, “and switch between those perspectives.”
Improved theory of mind comes primarily from reading narratives, research suggests. One meta-analysis published by Raymond A. Mar of Toronto’s York University reviews many of the studies demonstrating the effect of story comprehension on theory of mind, and concludes that the better we understand the events in a narrative, the better we are able to understand the actions and intentions of those around us. The kinds of narratives we read, moreover, might also make a difference. Onestudy, conducted by psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano of the New School for Social Research, tested the effect of differences in writing quality on empathy responses, randomly assigning 1,000 participants excerpts from both popular bestsellers and literary fiction.
To define the difference between the two, the researchers referred to critic Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text. As Kidd explains:
Some writing is what you call ‘writerly’, you fill in the gaps and participate, and some is ‘readerly’, and you’re entertained. We tend to see ‘readerly’ more in genre fiction like adventure, romance and thrillers, where the author dictates your experience as a reader. Literary [writerly] fiction lets you go into a new environment and you have to find your own way.
The researchers used two theory of mind tests to measure degrees of empathy and found that “scores were consistently higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts,” notes Liz Bury at The Guardian. Other research has found that descriptive language stimulates regions of our brains not classically associated with reading. “Words like ‘lavender,’ ‘cinnamon’ and ‘soap,’ for example,” writes Annie Murphy Paul at The New York Times, citing a 2006 study published in NeuroImage, “elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.”
Reading, in other words, can effectively simulate reality in the brain and produce authentic emotional responses: “The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life”—that is, if the experience is written about in sensory language. The emotional brain also does not seem to make a tremendous distinction between reading the written word and hearing it recited or read. When study participants in a joint German and Norwegian experiment, for example, heard poetry read aloud, they experienced physical sensations and “about 40 percent showed visible goose bumps.”
But different kinds of texts elicit different kinds of responses. We can read or listen to a novel, for example, and, instead of only experiencing sensations, can “live several lives while reading,” as William Styron once wrote. The authors of a 2013 Emory University study published in Brain Connectivity conclude that reading novels can rewire areas of the brain, causing “transient changes in functional connectivity.” These biological changes were found to last up to five days after study participants read Robert Harris’ 2003 novel Pompeii. The heightened connectivity in certain regions “corresponded to regions previously associated with perspective taking and story comprehension.”
So what? asks a skeptical Ian Steadman at New Statesman. Reading may create changes in the brain, but so does everything else, a phenomenon well-known by now as “neuroplasticity.” Much of the reporting on the neuroscience of reading, Steadman argues, overinterprets the research to support an “[x] ‘rewires’ the brain” myth both common and “mistaken.” Steadman’s critiques of the Brain Connectivity study are perhaps well-placed. The small sample size, lack of a control group, and neglect of questions about different kinds of writing make its already tentative conclusions even less impressive. However, more substantive research, taken together, does show that the “rewiring” that happens when we read—though perhaps temporary and in need of frequent refreshing—really does make us more cognitively and socially adept. And that the kind of reading—or even listening—that we do really does matter.
Many fictional locations resist mapping. Our imaginations may thrill, but our mental geolocation software recoils at the impossibilities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—a series of geographically whimsical tales told by Marco Polo to Genghis Khan; or China Miéville’s The City and the City, in which two metropolises—Besźel and Ul Qoma—occupy much of the same physical space, and a secretive police power compels citizens to willfully “unsee” one city or the other.
Miéville himself might disavow such attempts, as he disavows one-to-one allegorical readings of his fantastic detective novel—those, for example, that reduce the phenomenon of “unseeing” to an Orwellian means of thought control. “Orwell is a much more overtly allegorical writer,” he tells Theresa DeLucci at Tor, “although it’s always sort of unstable, there’s a certain kind of mapping whereby x means y, a means b.”
Orwell’s speculative worlds are easily decoded, in other words, an opinion shared by many readers of Orwell. But Miéville’s comments aside, there’s an argument to be made that The City and the City’s “unseeing” is the most vividly Orwellian device in recent fiction. And that the fictional world of 1984 does not, perhaps, yield to such simple mapping as we imagine.
Of course it’s easy to draw a map (see above, or in a larger format here) of the three imperial powers the novel tells us rule the world. Frank Jacobs at Big Think tidily sums them up:
Oceania covers the entire continents of America and Oceania and the British Isles, the main location for the novel, in which they are referred to as ‘Airstrip One’. Eurasia covers Europe and (more or less) the entire Soviet Union. Eastasia covers Japan, Korea, China and northern India.
These three superstates are perpetually at war with each other, though who’s at war with whom is unclear. “And yet… the war might just not even be real at all”—for all we know it might be a fabrication of the Ministry of Truth, to manufacture consent for austerity, mass surveillance, forced nationalism, etc. It’s also possible that the entirety of the novel’s geo-politics have been invented out of whole cloth, that “Airstrip One is not an outpost of a greater empire,” Jacobs writes, “but the sole territory under the command of Ingsoc.”
One commenter on the map—which was posted to Reddit last year—points out that “there isn’t any evidence in the book that this is actually how the world is structured.” We must look at the map as doubly fictional, an illustration, Lauren Davis notes at io9, of “how the credulous inhabitant of Airstrip One, armed with only maps distributed by the Ministry of Truth, might view the world, how vast the realm of Oceania seems and how close the supposed enemies in Eurasia.” It is the world as the minds of the novel’s characters conceive it.
All maps, we know, are distortions, shaped by ideology, belief, perspectival bias. 1984’s limited third-person narration enacts the limited views of citizens in a totalitarian state. Such a state necessarily uses force to prevent the people from independently verifying constantly shifting, contradictory pieces of information. But the novel itself states that force is largely irrelevant. “The patrols did not matter… Only the Thought Police mattered.”
In Orwell’s fiction “similar outcomes” as those in totalitarian states, as Noam Chomsky remarks, “can be achieved in free societies like England” through education and mass media control. The most unsettling thing about the seeming simplicity of 1984’s map of the world is that it might look like almost anything else for all the average person knows. Its elementary-school rudiments metaphorically point to frighteningly vast areas of ignorance, and possibilities we can only imagine, since Winston Smith and his compatriots no longer have the ability, even if they had the means.
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