That Year Is Almost Here

But George Orwell's message for 1984 is bigger than Big Brother

He thought it was "a good idea ruined," that futuristic fable he had planned on calling The Last Man in Europe. But he was always pessimistic about his own writing. This time the gloom was deepened by illness. His tuberculosis had worsened. The task of typing and revising the manuscript had broken him physically. He lay in a sanatorium bed when his book was published, in June 1949; the name that appeared on its cover was Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Come Jan. 1, the fictional date of George Orwell's final and most famous book becomes fact at last. It is a looking-glass anniversary, a remembrance of things future, and an accidental one at that. Orwell's manuscript, which has just resurfaced after years in a private collection, reveals that the author had considered both 1980 and 1982 for the time of his story. So what is about to happen might have occurred two or four years earlier, or not at all; had he stuck to The Last Man in Europe, there would have been no occasion to commemorate.

Tens of millions have read it, in 62 languages: the story of Winston Smith, a minor bureaucrat in the totalitarian state of Oceania. War with the world's two other superpowers, Eurasia and Eastasia, is constant, although the pattern of hostilities and alliances keeps changing. Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old newspaper stories to conform to current Party ideology. He uses the official language, Newspeak, a version of English being pared down to make unorthodox opinions impossible to conceive. Privacy has vanished. Waking and sleeping, Smith and all Party members are observed by two-way telescreens; posters everywhere proclaim BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. Suddenly, Smith commits a thoughtcrime: "Down with Big Brother." He also begins a love affair with Julia, a co-worker at his office, another heinous offense. The Junior Anti-Sex League indoctrinates the virtue of celibacy; procreation will soon be carried on solely through artificial insemination ("artsem," in Newspeak). All personal loyalty belongs to the Party. Winston and Julia are caught by the Thought Police and hauled off to the Ministry of Love. He is relentlessly tortured, then taken to Room 101, where his worst fear has been readied by interrogators. As a cage bearing a rat is being pushed toward his face, he begs that this punishment be inflicted on Julia instead. This betrayal eliminates the last trace of his integrity. He has become a good Party Member.

For all its readers, for the countless millions who have heard of Big Brother and the estimated year of his arrival, this New Year's Day offers some unsettling moments: that glimpse of the new calendar, the first chance to write 1984 in a diary or on a letter or check. Orwell spelled his title out, a practice followed in the first editions: the book had a name, like Utopia or Leviathan, not a date. But the shorthand 1984 also gained wide currency. And those four neutral integers, fused so long in the public consciousness, have acquired the shimmering, brutal power of the hieroglyph.