Missing the Point
A new audiobook has been released covering George Orwell’s seminal work 1984. And they got it wrong.
A new audiobook has been released covering George Orwell’s seminal work 1984. And there is, shall we say, a certain bit of irony surrounding it.
At nearly three and a half hours, it also runs about a third of the length of other “1984” audiobook versions. This is because, save some key passages, it radically alters the text. Gone are Orwell’s sardonic third-person descriptions. Here instead is Andrew Garfield’s breathy Winston, muttering to himself and “you” (us, the listeners of “the future”) with all the trappings of 21st-century speech and sensibility. What is happening in Oceania is “surveillance,” he explains redundantly. If his thoughtcrimes are discovered, he’ll be consigned to a “terrible job in the suburbs” — or worse, in which case he’s not sure what to do. “I’m a coward,” he remarks, with palpable self-loathing.
Instead of Orwell’s words, this version relies heavily on audio effects, from gadgety voices of telescreens whirring “Microphones enhance” to a cinematic score performed by the London Metropolitan Orchestra (featuring pop disco and video game synths galore) to the extravagant heavy breathing of Winston and Julia (Cynthia Erivo) as they declare the liberatory power of their love. The resulting experience feels less like a book than a high-budget play behind a curtain, or a movie watched with your eyes closed. (Tom Hardy also appears briefly as a steely but avuncular Big Brother, and Andrew Scott is harrowing as Winston’s torturer and foil O’Brien.)
In one sense, this approach emphasizes the paranoid qualities of the story, engulfing the listener and closing in. But stripping “1984” of so much of its language mostly serves to undermine the novel’s central themes about language — its role as a tool of state repression, its ability to structure not only communication but thought.
That last paragraph may be the most important. The entire point of 1984 is the use of language and how the language the state insists upon using can warp the mind of the citizenry.
The idea that the language has been updated is cultural Orwellianism itself. No, it is not the state that has ordered this adaptation to strip the Orwellian language in place of a more modern vernacular. But stripping the language undermines the message of the story and undermines the culture itself.
One of the reasons that 1984 is such a powerful work is the language Orwell uses. Newspeak is used by the state in the novel in order to dumb down the citizenry and to eliminate certain thoughts being possible in Oceania’s society:
The intellectual purpose of Newspeak is to make all anti-Ingsoc thoughts "literally unthinkable" as speech. As constructed, Newspeak vocabulary communicates the exact expression of sense and meaning that a member of the Party could wish to express, while excluding secondary denotations and connotations, eliminating the ways of lateral thinking (indirect thinking), which allow a word to have additional meanings. The linguistic simplification of Oldspeak into Newspeak was realised with neologisms, the elimination of ideologically undesirable words, and the elimination of the politically unorthodox meanings of words.
There are modern equivalents of Newspeak. The most obvious example is the proliferation of bizarre pronouns and the insistence that somebody of a certain sex is not. But there are others. “Cancelling” someone is Newspeak. Calling people “transphobic” is Newspeak. And the list goes on. Like this.
There is not a whole lot of room between “Freedom is slavery” and “a man is a woman”.
Fundamentally, this audiobook reimagination of 1984 is Newspeak itself.
There is no doubt that 1984 is worthy of a modern reinterpretation. But bowdlerizing the language for modern audiences is not the way to do it.