The "scanty plot": Orwell, Pynchon, and the poetics of paranoia

      In truth the prison, into which we doom
      Ourselves, no prison is; and hence for me,
      In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
      Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground.
      --Wordsworth (199)

Not least among the prescient aspects of George Orwell's 1984 is its articulation of a paranoia that is at once dismal and thrilling. If today paranoia's distinctive sensibility--its blend of grandiosity and abjection--has become a commonplace of the modern novel, with writers from Pynchon to DeLillo to Amis riffing on the suspicion that the world might be a setup, Orwell's version lays the groundwork for their sense of paranoia's possibilities. In this essay, I treat the paranoia of 1984 as more than just a topical thematics that reacts to the political conditions of Orwell's time; I argue that the novel also responds to the condition of the literature of his time. By looking at 1984 and then, briefly, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as counterpoint, I pose Orwell's paranoid poetics as an effort to mediate between competing literary discourses and their attendant models of subjectivity.

That Orwell explicitly intended 1984 to address topical political realities has been well documented. (1) In a letter to Francis A. Henson in June 1949, commenting on the germ of the novel, he wrote: "totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences" (Howe 287). Following along these lines, John Atkins, in an early response to 1984, claimed that the world of 1984 is "not imagination at all but a painstaking pursuit of existing tendencies to what appear logical conclusions" (252). Similarly, Irving Howe, a champion of the work, wrote that the "last thing Orwell cared about, the last thing he should have cared about when he wrote 1984 is literature" (322). (2) Such statements as these lay the groundwork for reading 1984 in terms of its clear-sightedness, its evocation of "history as nightmare" (the title of Howe's article), rather than in terms of the work's literary qualities.

But it is not only Orwell's visceral revulsion at totalitarian politics that shapes this critical response: it is also 1984's rejection of novelistic conventions. For example, while Howe calls 1984 a "remarkable" book (321), he also suggests that it does not meet the requirements of the novel as genre:

      It is not, I suppose, really a novel, or at least it does not
      satisfy those expectations we have come to have with regard to
      the novel--expectations that are mainly the heritage of
      nineteenth century romanticism with its stress upon individual
      consciousness, psychological analysis and the study of intimate
      relations. (321)

Howe continues: "Orwell has imagined a world in which the self, whatever subterranean existence it might manage to eke out, is no longer a significant value, not even a value to be violated" (322). Here he gestures toward a possibility for reading 1984 within, rather than outside of, the tradition: Orwell's "violation" of the notion of self is not simply a violation of an a priori assumption about the nature of the human; it is the violation of the self as literary category, as a quantity derived through literature and within the dynamic process of narrative development. In this sense, if 1984 is only dubiously literature instead of politics, Orwell at the very least cares enough to speak to literature and the novel tradition. What then is the relationship between 1984 and literature, and, by extension, its literary period?

We might begin by considering the climax of the novel. The climax appears to be the scene in Room 101, where Winston is introduced to his greatest fear, the rats. "Do it to Julia!" he cries (190), proving that love is no match for torture, and that the perfected totalitarian state is capable of erasing the last vestige of humanity. But we might offer a different climactic scene. Immediately before his capture, Winston stands in front of a picture on the wall of his hideaway. "We are the dead," he says. He is shocked when "You are the dead" is repeated back to him, the voice coming from behind the picture (147). The scene continues:

      "Now they can see us," said Julia.
      "Now we can see you," said the voice....
      "The house is surrounded," said Winston.
      "The house is surrounded," said the voice. (148)

Winston still has yet to be turned inside out and reconstituted as an empty shell, a good citizen of Oceania. But while the annihilation of Winston the character has yet to come, here we see the calculated annihilation of Orwell's novel. A text that once included multiple voices contending with one another to define themselves and the fictive real collapses into monologicity. The rest of the novel will be taken up with an interrogation in which one party already knows the answers, and in which the ultimate confession is a fait accompli. As Howe suggests, it is the end of character as a category in possession of agency, interiority, essence--in short, in possession of itself. But Winston's end is not the starting point of the novel, it is the conclusion. If Winston begins as a familiar character--the hero of a quest romance--he ends as quite another: an environmental fixture. Winston's walls cannot stand in the face of O'Brien's assault on behalf of Big Brother and the Party. "We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves," O'Brien says (170). With this "violation" Orwell's novel stages an anxious, reflexive encounter not just with the politics of the day but also with specifically literary models of representing the subject.