Dystopia Critics

• 'A human society stripped of the last shreds of community’ -Bell
• 'The frightening aspect of George Orwell’s imaginary world is that it is somewhere – in and around us’ -Bell
• 'The shrinking gap between imagination and reality is what heightens one’s sense of fear in reading Orwell' -Bell
• 'Once the secret of pure power is learned, Orwell suggests, the human being becomes completely malleable.’ -Bell
• 'It can be said of Orwell that he is the best kind of witness.’ -Rahv
• 'Vision not of the remote but of the very close future evoked in his novel - a vision entirely composed of images of loss, disaster and unspeakable degradation' -Rahv
• 'And we are confronted, not with some abstract homily about abstract power, but the reality of complete and utter social power perpetuating itself, confident of its own morality' -Schellenberg
• 'The greatest enemies of the totalitarian state are not ideas (which can be dealt with dialectically) but aesthetic and erotic sensations' -Anisimov
• 'Orwell does not deal with the totalitarian hostility to art, but the dramatic quality which makes his satire so readable is due to his perception of the totalitarian hostility to love’ -Anisimov
• 'Orwell’s romanticism towards the proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four can be interpreted as the nostalgia of The Common Man.’ -Rodden
• 'I consider Orwell’s book primarily a satirical dystopia, directed chiefly at the Soviet Union though not excluding the West, a warning to his contemporaries of a possible totalitarian state 35 years away' -Rodden
• ‘ It's my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he's usually been given credit for’ -Atwood
• ‘The central axiom of the tyranny he describes is that reality is not external; reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else.’ -Dutt
• 'Orwell borrowed from present-day Russia more than from any other country' -Mann
• 'The main concern of Orwell’s novel is the recognition of how closely human freedom is allied to historical veracity, to a faithful accounting of the past.’ -Mann
• 'Absolute power cannot be maintained without depriving human beings of their past, the beauty and value of the past’ -Mann
• ‘Orwell is enabled all the more effectively to probe the consequences of the human soul of the system of oligarchic collectivism' -Meyers
• 'Mr Orwell’s book is less an examination of any kind of utopia than an argument, carried out at a very high intellectual level, about power and corruption’ -Warburg
• 'Orwell’s innovation is to abolish the end. Where other ideologies have justified themselves in terms of a future goal, Ingsoc, the doctrine of the Party in Oceania, is aimless' -Pimlott
• 'Sexual hysteria is used deliberately to ferment a sadistic loathing of imagined enemies and to stimulate a masochistic, depersonalised love of Big Brother' -Pimlott
• 'Orwell reminds us how shaky is our hold on objective knowledge, and how uncertain our grip on the past' -Pimlott
• 'The author offers a political choice – between the protection of truth, and a slide into the expedient falsehood for the benefit of rulers and the exploitation of the ruled, in whom genuine feeling and ultimate hope reside' -Pimlott
• 'This the novel is above all subversive, a protest against the tricks played by governments. It is a volley against the authoritarian in every personality, a polemic against every orthodoxy, an anarchistic blast against every unquestioning conformist' -Pimlott
• 'There must be resistance - so that the powerful, in overcoming it, can experience the thrill of power' -Patai
• O’Brien ‘has gone to a great deal of effort to turn Winston into a serious opponent' -Patai
• ‘The game of power cannot be played alone' -Patai
• ‘Julia’s love for Winston makes him healthier, whereas O’Brien’s attentions destroy him physically; but Winston’s true alliance…is with O’Brien, who engages him in combat and recognises him as a worthy opponent – a recognition that means more to Winston than Julia’s love' -Patai
• 'Western hemisphere Iran'
• 'The interconnected nature of social categories such as race, class and gender; regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage'
• 'Speculative fiction' -Atwood
• 'Having been born in 1939... I know that established orders could vanish overnight' -Atwood
• 'Nothing that I have written hasn't already happened. And nothing we build doesn't already exist' -Atwood
• ' 'It can't happen here' couldn't be depended on: anything could happen anywhere given the circumstances' -Atwood
• 'Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems nonsense, in a period like our own, to think one can avoid writing of such subjects' -Orwell
• 'I write because there is some lie that i want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention' -Orwell
• 'The masterpiece that killed George Orwell' -McCrum
• 'Atwood's novel frequently involve emotional archaeology: her characters are presented to us at some point of crisis: flashbacks sketch out the family histories and adult situations that have led them to those crises' -Potts
• 'Atwood had Iran in mind, and her memories of Kabul... the book seems ever more relevant in a world of jostling theocracies and diminished civil liberties in both east and west' -Potts
• 'Her choice of a female narrator turns the traditionally masculine dystopian genre upside down... Atwood gives us a dissident account by a Handmaid who has been relegated to the margins of political power... allowing Atwood to reclaim a feminine space of personal emotions and individual identity' -Howells
• 'The satiric view shifts back and forth from amused detachment to moral indignation' -Dvorak