Murakami Salutes Orwell: How "1Q84" Pays Homage to "1984" (Part 2)

Here the reader arrives at the junction where Murakami’s work crosses from the metaphysical to the real and tangible, for in the single-moon world we have also had the misfortune of witnessing writers persecuted for their ability to tell a different “truth.” Salman Rushdie’s fate after the publication of The Satanic Verse is well-documented and needs no reiteration. A more discriminate look at literary history gives us several more voices hushed by the Authorities: Turkish author and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk was arrested for comments about the massacres of Armenians in the First World War. Nigerian protest author Ken Saro-Wiwa was tried by a military tribunal and hanged. Yu Jie, author of China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao, a controversial book that cast a critical light on the premier, landed in hot water with the Chinese authorities, and had to emigrate to the USA for his own safety. His close friend and Nobel Prize-winning literary critic Liu Xiaobo called for political reforms and the end of communist single-party rule, and is currently incarcerated as a political prisoner in China. Cuban author and poet Reinaldo Arenas’ openly gay writings brought him into conflict with Castro’s regime, and in 1973, he was sent to prison after being charged and convicted of “ideological deviation.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, no stranger to Stalin’s gulag, made an unsuccessful attempt to get The Cancer Ward (a political allegory about his country’s corrupt governance) published. The book never saw the light of day in the Soviet Union. Almost a century before him, fellow author Fyodor Dostoyevsky was incarcerated by Emperor Nicolas I for being part of the liberal intellectual group the Petrashevsky Circle. He was sentenced to death by firing squad, but the sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard labour in Siberia. When one thinks of exile, how can one not go back a few thousand years and greet Ovid, who gave us Ars Amatoria and was banished from Rome by the Emperor Augustus for its “immoral content”?

Our literary history is littered with hushed sufferance and injustice. The pen is, contrary to popular belief, RARELY mightier than the sword; that is artistic idealism, and it is no contender to narrow minds with political power. Murakami’s 1Q84 is unequivocal on this point, which brings us to the classic it pays homage to: George Orwell’s 1984.

Orwell’s seminal work is widely known for its ultra-realistic portrayal of a totalitarian society at work. His Oceania is a frightening dystopia where the Party’s authority is uncontestable, and anyone who attempts to question the Party will have to face grave consequences. Like all totalitarian societies, Oceania, too, is wary of the power of the written word, and works hard at undermining that power. Hence the protagonist Winston’s job – to rectify and alter historical facts to make the Party look noble. But Winston’s job entails more than that. Orwell writes:

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs – to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance (38).

This passage makes a clear statement on the stance of totalitarian regimes vis-à-vis the written word. It is something that needs to be contained and tamed, curtailed and excised, lest it should incite dissidence.

In a disconcerting exchange between Winston and a “comrade” named Syme, the reader gets an even more penetrating view of the Party’s relationship with the written word. Syme, a philologist, works in the Party’s Research Department, and his task is to collate the latest Newspeak dictionary. He has the following to say:

We’re getting the language into its final shape – the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying (italics mine) words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone (48).

It seems that Syme is aware of the reason behind the mutilating of words. His justification of the act is chilling because it sounds familiar to the reader who inhabits the real world:

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten (49).

The act of linguistic mutilation, then, is in fact an act of thought subversion. If a people could not have access to a wide range of vocabulary, it would never be able to form “thoughtcrime” and oppose the ruling party. Language is essential to human thought and expression; its mutilation will inevitably lead to the inferioritisation of the human mind and spirit, reducing him to half a man – incomplete, crippled, and devoid of a will.

Tengo and Fuka-Eri of 1Q84 are guilty of exactly just that: thoughtcrime. In Book 2, Chapter 6, Ushikawa, a mercenary detective hired by Sakigake, confronts Tengo with his “crime,” which he initially denies. Ushikawa then makes an explicit reference to Orwell’s work:

It is not, of course, a, uh, crime in any legal sense, or in any this-worldly sense. If I may be allowed to quote from George Orwell’s great classic, however – or, rather, from his novel as a great source of quotations – it is very close to what he called a ‘thought crime.’ By an odd coincidence, this year just happens to be 1984 (413).

By co-writing Air Chrysalis and making it available to the public, Tengo and Fuka-Eri have committed an unforgivable act of insurrection. A “totalitarian” organisation such as Sakigake cannot simply let them go unpunished.

In case the reader still doubts the power of totalitarian regimes to overcome the individual who does not play by the rules, in Book 3, he reads the following about Stalin’s secret police, narrated by Tamaru:

“A candidate would be put in a square room. The only thing in the room is an ordinary small wooden chair. And the interrogator’s boss gives him an order. He says, ‘Get the chair to confess and write up a report on it. Until you do this, you can’t leave the room.’ ” (34)

Aomame remarks that it is “pretty surreal,” but Tamaru assures her that there is nothing surreal about the story, and that it is all too real:

“Stalin actually did create that kind of paranoia, and some ten million people died on his watch – most of them his fellow countrymen. And we actually live in that kind of world. Don’t forget that.” (34)

Tamaru’s warning might as well be aimed at the reader, who, couched in complacency, may be inclined to think that the worlds portrayed in both 1984 and 1Q84 are creations of over-imaginative fiction writers. The truth is far more sinister. The worlds in 1984 and 1Q84 are – perhaps with the exception of a few creative alterations – exactly like our own: paranoid, oppressive, ruled by reactionaries with too much power.

Towards the end of Book 2, in Chapter 20, Tengo, confounded by the chaos his ghostwriting has engendered, asks himself: “What kind of reality mimics fictional creations?” He refuses to believe that the world he and Fuka-Eri have created is real. He calls it “a fictional world, a world that does not exist in reality” (579). Tengo cannot be more wrong. Reality and fictional creations, at least in 1Q84, are inseparable twins; they interact and influence each other in truly extraordinary ways.

Link to Part 3: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/03/murakami-salutes-orwell-how-1q84-pays_22.html

Orwell, George. 1984. Penguin, 2000 ed.

Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84. London: Harvill Secker, 2011 ed.