"A Boot Stamping on a
Human Face":
Orwell's 1984 as a Process of Defacement
In a recent article for the Times Literary Supplement (April 15),
scholar Roger Scruton notes that “human beings are alone among the animals in revealing
their individuality in their faces. The mouth that speaks, the eyes that glaze, the skin
that flushes, all are signs of freedom, character and judgement, and all give concrete
expression to the uniqueness of the self within.”
George Orwell also suggests this in his anti-utopian novel 1984,
but from an infinitely less positive perspective. The book’s protagonist, Winston Smith,
is punished for his rebelliousness against totalitarian Oceania by being literally
de-faced, conditioned into seeing his own face as only a reflection of absolute leader Big
Brother’s dehumanized image, a mustachioed figure incessantly propagandized in his
rigidly controlled state.
From the onset, 1984 uses the face to define the uniqueness of
its fictional characters. The wife of Winston’s neighbor, Mrs. Parsons, is “a woman
with lined face and wispy hair.” An old man, bumping into Winston, had a
“whitestubbled face” that “had flushed pink.” A young man named Wisher is
“silly-faced.” Another person is a “beetle-like man with a flat face and tiny,
suspicious eyes.” The high Oceania official O’Brien, the antagonist of the novel’s
anti-hero Winston, has a “grim” and “heavy” face, which when bent down displayed
“the line of the nose,” and “looked both formidable and intelligent” (O’Brien,
though an instrument of Big Brother’s Oceania, has not lost all his individuality
despite his belief in the new order).
Winston and Julia
When Winston remembers his past – anathema in totalitarian,
ahistorical Oceania, where memory and the past are frowned upon – he thinks about faces.
His mother nursed “his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three,
with a face made simian by thinness.” He recalls that his “mother’s anxious eyes
were fixed on his face.” His face is what first reacts to his environment: when he
ventures into a pub frequented by “proles” (the lowest social stratum in Oceania) “a
hideous cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in the face.”
Soon after Winston meets Julia, the rebellious girl with whom he falls
in love, “the memory of her face came back.” Seeing her again, he notices that the
“smile on her face … looked faintly ironical,” a facial condition at odds with
Oceania’s solemn posters of Big Brother. When they first kiss, she “turned her face
up” and soon “the mass of dark hair was against his face” (thanks to her, “The
process of life had ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces
at the telescreen,” the two-way television perpetually indoctrinating Party members).
In the forest clearing where Winston and Julia make love, “she turned
and faced him. … But for a moment he did not look at her body; his eyes were anchored by
the freckled face with its faint, bold smile.’ “Later, “he pulled her down so that
they were kneeling face to face.’” Later still, Winston “sat up and watched the
freckled face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her hand.” (Aren’t
freckles means par excellence of defining a face?).
Not long after Julia and Winston become aware of each other’s
presence at their workplace, the Ministry of Truth, Winston sees:
“A figure in blue overalls was coming down the pavement, not ten
metres away. It was the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair. … She
looked him straight in face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.”
When Winston tells Julia, after their first kiss, “You are ten or
fifteen years younger than I am. What could you see to attract in a man like me?” Julia
– “used to judging people by their faces” – replies: “It was something in your
face. I thought I’d take a chance. I’m good at spotting people who don’t belong. As
soon as I saw you I knew you were against them.”
During one of their secretive rendezvous Julia puts on make-up – a
remnant of pre-1984 era when people could still embellish – and “individualize”–
their faces.
“He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her.
What he had actually expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked. The
transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that. She had painted her
face.”
“She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters and
bought herself a complete set of make-up materials. Her lips were deeply reddened, her
cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to
make them brighter. It was not very skilfully done, but Winston’s standards in such
matters were not high. He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with
cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was startling. With just a few
dabs of colour in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above
all, far more feminine.”
Later, “[w]hen Winston woke up … . Julia was sleeping with her head
in the crook of his arm. Most of her make-up had transferred itself to his own face or the
bolster, but a light strain of rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone.”
When they are about to part, Julia says, “I must start washing this paint off. What a
bore! I’ll get the lipstick off your face afterwards.”
Defacement
When Julia and Winston “secretly” meet O’Brien, he – playing
the role of the revolutionary to trap them – “warns” her that, as a result of
Winston’s struggle against the status quo,
“…even if he survives, it may be as a different person … . We
[the anti-establishment “Brotherhood”] may be obliged to give him a new identity. His
face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair – even his voice
would be different. And you yourself might have to become a different person. Our surgeons
can alter people beyond recognition.”
As Winston and Julia leave O’Brien’s living quarters, the
official’s “yellow-faced servant,” Martin, is instructed by his superior to
“[t]ake a good look at these comrades’ faces before you go.” Martin follows the
order and
“[e]xactly as they had done at the front door, the little man’s
dark eyes flickered over their face. … He was memorizing their appearance, but he felt
no interest in them, or appeared to feel none. It occurred to Winston that a synthetic
face was perhaps incapable of changing its expression.”
These references – being altered beyond recognition, a synthetic face
incapable of changing its expression – are a foreboding of what happens to Winston after
he is arrested. Incarcerated at the Ministry of Love, Winston and other prisoners are
subject to torture, including what I’d characterize as defacement, the abuse and
ruination of the face, the destruction of its unique identity (a brutal 1984 version of
identity theft). Early on in his cell, Winston notices that:
“The door opened, and another prisoner was brought in whose
appearance sent a momentary chill through Winston. … what was startling was the
emaciation of his face. It was like a skull. Because of its thinness the mouth and eyes
looked disproportionately large, and the eyes seemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable
hatred of somebody or something.”
Reintegration
Eventually, Winston’s beatings grow “less frequent.” But some
questioners “saw to it that he was in constant slight pain … . They slapped his face,
wrung his ears, pulled his hair … shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran
with water.” In the second stage of his three-part “reintegration” (“learning,”
“understanding,” and “acceptance”) O’Brien, like the Grand Inquisitor in The
Brothers Karamazov, tells Winston what he must understand, including that is:
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a
human face – for ever. … And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be
there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that
he can be defeated and humiliated over again.”
Winston, told by O’Brien to stand between the wings of a mirror, is
overcome with fright and despair at his own defaced reflection:
“The creature’s face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent
carriage. A forlorn, jailbird’s face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald
scalp, a crooked nose, and battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce
and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his
own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside.”
“You have thought sometimes,” says O’Brien after Winston has seen
the sorry sight of his ruinous outer self, “that my face – the face of a member of the
Inner Party – looks old and worn. What do you think of your own face?” Spinning
Winston round so that he is facing him, O’Brien continues:
“You are rotting away … you are falling to pieces. What are you? A
bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing
facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity.”
Months after his encounter with O’Brien, Winston, no longer tortured
and fed three meals a day, believes he has “capitulated,” that he has “accepted
everything.” But he wonders about his face:
“He ran a hand over his face, trying to familiarize himself with the
new shape. There were deep furrows in the cheeks, the cheekbones felt sharp, the nose
flattened. Besides, since last seeing himself in the glass he had been given a complete
new set of teeth. It was not easy to preserve inscrutability when you did not know what
your face looked like.”
And he still has strong doubts about Big Brother and his omnipresent,
inhuman poster-face:
“What was the most horrible, sickening thing of all? He thought of
Big Brother. The enormous face (because of constantly seeing it on posters he always
thought of it as being a meter wide), with its heavy black mustache and the eyes that
followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his mind of its own accord. What were his
true feelings toward Big Brother?”
Later, in an area at the Ministry of Love many meters underground,
“as deep as it was possible to go,” Winston is made to complete the final stage of his
“reintegration” process – “acceptance.” He is in Room 101, with O’Brien, who
calls the space “the worst thing in the world,” telling Winston that “in your case
… the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.” O’Brien picks up a cage full of
these rodents, presses its first lever, and tells Winston:
“When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up.
These starving brutes… will leap on to your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes
they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the
tongue.”
As the mask closes on his face, Winston suddenly understands that there
is “just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment” and he shouts
frantically:
“Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what
you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”
Faceless in Oceania
“Reintegrated” and resurfacing in London from the depths of the
Ministry of Love, Winston can’t fail to see a poster of Big Brother, and the “huge
face gazed back at him, full of calm power.” He eventually is in touch with Julia, and
both realize they have betrayed the other. “Her face,” he observes, “was sallower,
and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple.”
Exchanging a few words, they know they will never see each other face to face again.
With Julia no longer part of his life, Winston realizes the
“long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain”:
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to
learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless
misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented
tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right,
the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
Winston’s and Big Brother’s faces become one and the same, at least
in Winston’s reintegrated mind. Big Brother is no longer a poster or portrait, but a
mirror. Big Brother is now the perfect reflection of him, a re-faced Winston.
The Complete Make-Over State?
Today’s industrialized world is a far cry from Orwell’s 1984.
But the book perhaps holds a lesson for the twenty-first century. Round the clock, we are
increasingly under pressure to remake our “imperfect” faces. Products and processes
promising to “make us look better,” widely advertised in the mass media, are
everywhere, part of the urban and rural landscape in numerous countries. Of course, the
outcome of “changing our faces” can be positive and lead to improved health –
nothing more beneficial than better teeth, for example. But in the process of letting
ourselves be remade to look like generic movie stars, do we not risk the danger of losing
the unique features of our very own, “imperfect” human faces, those essential
indications of the infinite variety of our individualities?
John Brown
The text used is located on “The Literature Network” at http://www.online-literature.com/booksearch.php
John Brown compiles the “Public Diplomacy Press Review,” which covers media items
dealing with U.S. foreign policy, international broadcasting and media, propaganda,
cultural diplomacy, educational exchanges, anti-Americanism, and the reception of American
popular culture abroad. It is available free by requesting it at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com
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