Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Tradition of Satire

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is routinely described as a satire. But why? Satire is usually thought of as a mode of literature or art that uses comic techniques to ridicule and diminish its targets. Yet does any reader find Orwell’s chilling vision of the future – a boot stamping on a human face forever (NEF, p. 280) – a rollicking good time? The novel’s prevailing tone is not even darkly funny in the manner of a writer like Evelyn Waugh, whose bleak judgements are registered with amusement or even delight. If laughter is necessary for satire, Nineteen Eighty-Four hardly seems to qualify. Animal Farm (1945), the novel Orwell completed just before Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a different story. It fits comfortably in the category of the beast fable or allegory, an ancient satiric form, and its comic reduction of human actors or social groups to talking barnyard animals has clear precedents in works like Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’. In treating a weighty subject like the Russian Revolution through the simple form of a children’s ‘fairy story’, Orwell’s fable makes plain its didactic intent, while employing the fantasy, whimsy, and humour normally seen as components of satire. But while Nineteen Eighty-Four is pervaded with – even built upon – irony, it contains very little of the wry, playful spirit of Animal Farm. True, a reader like Anthony Burgess keenly perceives moments of black comedy in the book. He cites the weary Winston labouring through his morning calisthenics under the dour watch of the telescreen – a surveillance technique, he proposes, that Orwell adapted from Charlie Chaplin’s silent comedy Modern Times (1936). But it’s hard to consent to Burgess’s broader judgement that ‘Orwell’s book is essentially a comic book’ (Burgess, 1985, p. 10). It seems far more probable that the word satire, having fittingly been applied to Animal Farm, was then uncritically transferred to Orwell’s follow-up, which shared its anti-communist theme.