A still from the film version of 1984. Click for more information.
Choosing 1984
In “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” John Holt offers a litmus test for reading:
I would like you to read a lot of books this year, but I want you to read them only for pleasure. I am not going to ask you questions to find out whether you understand the books or not. If you understand enough of a book to enjoy it and want to go on reading it, that’s enough for me…
I don’t want you to feel that just because you start a book, you have to finish it. Give an author thirty or forty pages or so to get his story going. Then if you don’t like the characters and don’t care what happens to them, close the book, put it away, and get another. I don’t care whether the books are easy or hard, short or long, as long as you enjoy them.
The bolded sentences give us our approach to novels like 1984. You’ve had Orwell’s book for a while now, and the important question is this: Have you given the story 30-40 pages? If not, that’s your assignment. You need to read far enough into 1984 to determine if you are going to keep reading or not.
We need to tweak Holt’s language a bit to make it more meaningful, of course. Waiting for an author “to get his story going” isn’t precise enough to be useful, and there are other reasons to continue a book beyond “lik[ing] the characters.” What matters is that you should be getting something out of 1984, and if you aren’t, you have the right to stop reading.
This is part of our reading process, which you should review as necessary:
To make any decision about what you need, you need to invest in the attempt. You can’t begin a book expecting to hate it, nor should you bring your previous reading experiences to that particular table. Start clean. Recognize that many folks, including your teacher, think highly of the book you’ve been given. Then give Orwell a chance to hook you.
If you invest in the attempt, you can make a respectable decision to stop. Either way, you need to account for your decision, which brings us to what you do after giving Orwell at least 30-40 pages:
Write reflectively and metacognitively about your decision to continue 1984 or your decision to stop 1984. Explain your reasons as a result of earnest attempt to invest in the book’s world and characters. Justify the time you dedicated to reading the rest of the novel, or justify the choice to put it aside and look for other texts.
This will be a formal assignment at some point, and you will be encouraged to choose a “replacement” from a list of other dystopian novels (e.g., A Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World), if you stop reading 1984.
As always, the thinking that surrounds any decision is more important than the decision itself. Some of you have are deep into 1984, and a few have already finished the novel. Some read it previously. A few will have forgotten that it was assigned. All of you, to a person, can answer the prompt above by reflecting on the decision to keep reading.
I also invite you to share your experience with your peers in class and interstitially. Would you recommend the book? What general reasons for reading it (or not) would you give? Here is a student answering those questions eloquently back in 2016:
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Reading 1984 Online
Through the following site, you have the option of reading some or all of 1984 online:
http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/
We have enough hard copies of the book for all students to have a copy during any period of silent, sustained reading1, or for any close reading exercises. We have enough for a handful of you to borrow copies to read on your own. This online version is another way to read, though, and it presents a few unique opportunities.
One compelling reason to use this online version is that we can then use Snap&Read to translate the text, Co:Writer to take notes, and an open browser tab to look up character and plot summaries. We’ll review how those two plugins work as necessary, so that your Chromebook (or other device) can become a powerful tool for navigating a difficult text. Using other resources, from John Green’s Crash Course to old teacher banes like eNotes, is a way to borrow insight from others.
Another compelling reason to work online is what happens if we search “1984” — just those four numbers — in Google. The first page of results contains no fewer than three articles about how the novel relates to contemporary America. Keep looking, and you will find dozens more articles from just the past few years.
This isn’t about the politics of any of those articles, by the way, nor should you read too much into the political perspective shared by many of them; our lesson here is about the way this country talks to itself, and about itself, and how this novel now factors into that discourse. As a makerspace, we are concerned with literary resonance, not political beliefs.
Here is one of the articles in those search results, from The New York Times:
Another is from The Atlantic:
And here is a third, from The New Yorker:
One way to deepen our experience of a novel is to look for how real folks in a non-academic world talk about it. For instance, I might encourage you to scroll back up in this instructional post to the following paragraph:
This will be a formal assignment at some point, and you will be encouraged to choose a “replacement” from a list of other dystopian novels (e.g., A Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World), if you stop reading 1984.
If you click on those links, you don’t get descriptions or summaries of the novels; instead, you get essays about those novels, and more specifically about how those novels are part of our national discourse. The first one is by the author of A Handmaid’s Tale herself, Margaret Atwood:
The second, from 2017, compares 1984 to Brave New World in the context of modern America:
Again, this is not about advancing a political agenda. We are a course in rhetoric and argument. We must notice, as Charles McGrath does in that second article, how important 1984 and other dystopian novels have become to our country’s discourse. This is the currency of political debate, and you should use the resources of our makerspace to make sense of that currency — and to use it yourself.
Which is to say that it matters what you believe, just like it matters what these writers believe. You need to be able to wade into this discourse effectively, having read some of the literature mentioned, and thus having earned your seat at the table. You need to know how you would respond to the rhetoric in use in the following paragraph of McGrath’s article:
“Donald Trump was inaugurated. All of a sudden, as many commentators have pointed out, there were almost daily echoes of Orwell in the news, and “1984” began shooting up the Amazon best-seller list. The most obvious connection to Orwell was the new president’s repeated insistence that even his most pointless and transparent lies were in fact true, and then his adviser Kellyanne Conway’s explanation that these statements were not really falsehoods but, rather, “alternative facts.” As any reader of “1984” knows, this is exactly Big Brother’s standard of truth: The facts are whatever the leader says they are. If you’re a rereader, thumbing through your old Penguin paperback, those endless wars in “1984,” during which the enemy keeps changing — now Eurasia, now Eastasia — no longer seem as far-fetched as they once did, and neither do the book’s organized hate rallies, in which the citizenry works itself into a frenzy against nameless foreigners. Even President Trump’s weirdly impoverished, 12-year-old’s vocabulary has an analogue in “1984,” in which Newspeak isn’t just the medium of double talk; it’s a language busily trying to shed itself of as many words (and as much complexity) as possible.
We can (and maybe should!) analyze articles like this as a class, looking for how they lean on literature to score political points or to stake a political position. This is how the real world uses literature, after all, and why we use the reading process we use. It’s also why you must choose to keep reading:
To repeat the end of that instructional post, you are always after a novel that
- teaches you something about how you read;
- serves as “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” using most or all of the ideas under that aegis; and
- is well-written enough to teach you how to write.
1984 is one such novel. If, through your own search or with the help of your teachers and peers, you find a suitable and more interesting alternative to 1984, you should read it.
Ask questions below. Look to Google Classroom for formal assignments related to 1984.
And we will fold these in from time to time, I think, to see what it does for you. How often do you truly get to read in silence during a school day? It’s worth exploring. ↩