Review: Nathan Waddell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four (2020)
Fig. 1 Nathan Waddell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) as a novel has taken on a life divorced from its creator. In political parlance, the book—or terms from it—have been used to herald apocalyptic prophecies, no matter the political affiliation. For example, recently in the United States, Senator Josh Hawley, R-MO, used the term “Orwellian” to describe a publishing house’s cancellation of a book contract. At the same time, sales for Nineteen Eighty-Four rose throughout the Republican Trump presidency (2017-2021), with many commentators connecting the Trump presidency, Brexit, and other conservative or far-right movements as fascist in the image of Big Brother and the Party. Thus, the release of Nathan Waddell’s seventeen-essay collection The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four (2020), which brings forth enlightening and dynamic new additions to scholarship on the novel and Orwell’s literary history and legacy, is welcomed with ovation (Fig. 1). The book is divided into four parts—Contexts, Histories, Questions, and Media—with four essays loosely tied to each part’s theme. It also includes an introduction by Waddell and a coda at the end by Adam Roberts, which offers a hopeful reading of where Orwell’s pinnacle work might go in the future. As a companion text to Nineteen Eighty-Four, the book brings engaging and insightful additions to the field, but as a book on its own, it struggles to establish itself as a companion to the book, quickly bringing in other works by Orwell or from Orwell’s life to supplement the sparse readings of Nineteen Eighty-Four. This review focuses predominantly on the fourth part of the companion, which will be of most interest to readers of Fantasy/Animation.
Adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four have been both carefully curated and wildly influential and ‘Part IV: Media’ outlines them exhaustively yet in an introductive way. Daniel Buckingham begins with ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four on Radio, Stage, and Screen’ by looking at multi-media adaptations, which he sees as signifying the lasting qualities and economic profit the story has made. He approaches adaptation through the theories of Julie Sanders, Dennis Cutchins, and Linda Hutchinson, and looks to the Nineteen Eighty-Four scholarship of adaptations written by Suzanne Spiedel and Crispin Aubrey. Buckingham notes the changes and replications performed in the eleven adaptations he covers, looking at how conceptualizations of sex, violence, and technology change over time. He sees a split between pre- and post-1984 (the year) adaptations, with the most prominent adaptation, Michael Radford’s 1984 (1984) being the focus (203–204). For all adaptations, though, he reads ‘both escapist consumerism and a challenge to dominant ideologies’ being performed (210). Some chronology or notes depicting the versions used would have heightened the reading experience, as Buckingham’s approach to Nineteen Eighty-Four adaptations is broad and the reader can become lost in the eleven versions Buckingham uses to support his argument.
Like Buckingham’s approach to radio and screen adaptations, Jamie Wood’s ‘Making Nineteen Eighty-Four Musical: Pop, Rock, and Opera’ tracks the development of music adaptations of the novel across time. From David Bowie and his desire to produce ‘organic music’ based on the novel to chronicling the four ages of ‘rock‘n’prole’ [sic], Wood exhaustively shows the influence Nineteen Eighty-Four has had on the underground (and sometimes overground) music scenes. A highlight of Wood’s chapter is the expansive timeline of music albums connected to Nineteen Eighty-Four provided at the end and the data visualisation shown throughout the essay that supports Wood’s innovative claims and connections.
Fig. 2 - Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan (1997-2002).
Isabelle Licari-Guillaume’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four and Comics’ takes adaptation theory and Orwell’s work to different heights than Buckingham’s articles. Like Wood’s article, Licari-Guillaume’s essay must look to appropriation and integration of Nineteen Eighty-Four since no official graphic adaptation had been made by the date of publication. Licari-Guillaume argues that contemporary resistance to, acceptance of, and argument with the politics of the novel can be seen in the narrative and artistic choices made in Ted Rall’s 2024 (2001), the work of Alan Moore (V for Vendetta [1982]; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier [2009]), Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles (1996-2002), and Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan (1997-2002) (Fig. 2). Without a direct-to-comic graphic novel adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Licari-Guillaume’s assessment shows the way Orwell’s novel intermingles with the cultural zeitgeist, allowing her to both further Orwell scholarship with glosses and assessment of various adaptations, while furthering adaptation theory itself, wrestling with ‘adaptation as a two-way process’ between what comics do to their progenitor and what their progenitor does to them (244). Licari-Guillaume has prepared a strong hermeneutical foundation for future graphic adaptations analysis, especially due to Orwell’s work being released from copyright, and in the light of Mariner Books recent publication of graphic novel adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Fido Nesti, 1984: The Graphic Novel [2021]) and Animal Farm (Odyr, Animal Farm: The Graphic Novel [2019]), books that were not released at the time of this companion’s publication.
Soraya Murray approaches Orwell’s adapted work similarly to Licari-Guillaume in ‘“In this game that we’re playing”: Nineteen Eighty-Four and Video Games’, since there is no direct-to-video-game adaptation of the novel. However, instead of building an Orwellian adaptation theory, Murray emphasizes methodologies used to analyse video games and their ability (or non-ability) to provoke thought in players (248). Whether a video game can be used as a tool for critical engagement is a question that overshadows her essay, to the paradoxical benefit and detriment of her approach. The theme connects the adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four to broader conversations in video game theory, but it also becomes a preoccupation to her engagement. However, the use of video game theory allows Murray to look deeply at the moments when the player becomes either the Big Brother or the resistance to the totalitarian government and what that means for a society that creates and plays games that envisage dystopian futures. Thus, her work on outlining and showing a genre of Nineteen Eighty-Four-inspired games that tackle simulation, subversion, and resistance is crucial to future work and lays a powerful foundation for further development.
The first three parts of the companion are focused on contexts, histories and questions. Part I contains essays on education, geography, archival politics, and humanism, and provides readers with a glimpse into how Orwell’s world might have shaped the dystopian landscape of Airstrip One. Diletta de Cristofaro’s ‘The Politics of the Archive in Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is particularly interesting because it shows, using a quote from Derrida, how in Nineteen Eighty-Four the control of history—the archive—was key to the Inner Party’s control of the present and the future. This relationship between politics and archive pairs nicely with Natasha Periyan’s ‘Teaching and Learning in and beyond Nineteen Eighty-Four’, which deals with education and uses the ‘meritocratic social order shaped by mainstream educational policy for much of the twentieth century’ to interpret Nineteen Eighty-Four’s connection of teaching and torture to the ‘paradoxically anti-pedagogic pedagogic function of the novel’ (24). Together they show that Orwell was looking at both the political state and the individual self in crafting Nineteen Eighty-Four, making an argument against the totalitarian state but also for the informed and engaged citizen.
Part II of the companion situates Orwell’s work in its moment in history. In essays touching on H. G. Wells, modernism, satirical tradition, and Orwell’s literary influence through time, it gives readers a broad look at the environment into which Nineteen Eighty-Four came. The final two essays in Part II deal with Orwell in relation to contemporary and future literature. Sarah Cole’s ‘Wells, Orwell, and the Dictator’ is an engaging comparative literature piece that looks at the political and authorial relationship of Wells and Orwell. Cole argues that the difference between Wells’ and Orwell’s approaches to government, political power, and societal hierarchy was optimism and pessimism, respectively. Whereas Wells could dream of a future in which humanity was utopianly at peace, Orwell saw humanity through a lens of pragmatic darkness. While Cole’s article builds a strong literary bridge between Wells and Orwell, limited work is done connecting, for example, Orwell’s pessimistic attitude to his lived experience during the Spanish Civil War and subsequent disillusionment with the realities of the socialist project. Cole provides no reason as to why Wells might be the optimist and Orwell the pessimist, instead simply beginning the article with this polarity already determined and then tracking the differences through the literary history instead of the lived history. While Cole’s essay would have been improved with an argument as to why or how Wells and Orwell came to sit on two different poles, the essay is still a good primer to the connection between the two authors.
The collection jumps into interrogating the core text more in Part III. Janice Ho investigates the relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the current European refugee crisis by comparing various government tactics, mostly by western European governments like UK and France, to the methods used by Oceania to enunciate Orwell’s views on government scapegoats and efforts of mitigating human suffering (or, at least, mitigating a populace’s views of human suffering). Peter Brian Barry’s insightful essay into how evil is presented in Nineteen Eighty-Four provides openings for new conversations into not only evil in the text itself, but also evil in relation to dystopia, science fiction, and literature in general. As there is no genealogy of the concept of evil provided, the reader might become lost in Barry’s philosophical essay.
This collection is a wonderful addition (or introduction) to Orwell scholarship and can be well-used in a course on Orwell or dystopia. Although it has no bibliography (each essay has endnotes), the text contains a ‘Further Reading’ section at the end, which points the investigator to more than forty monographs published on Orwell. The essays are robust but not definitive and have many future possible intersections. For example, they could be deployed to discuss politics, dictatorship, and evil (as in Barry’s, Cole’s, and de Cristofaro’s articles) or could be used in a general discussion of adaptation and literature (as in the essays in Part IV). A newcomer to Orwell scholarship will be introduced to the various conversations and themes that one can engage in their work, while the veteran Orwellian scholar can continue to consider, with these authors, what Nineteen Eighty-Four meant to the twentieth century, means to us today, and might mean to those in our future.
**Article published: March 4, 2022**
Biography
Adam McLain earned a BA in English, Editing, and Women’s Studies from Brigham Young University in 2017 and an MA in Theological Studies in Women, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion at Harvard Divinity School in 2020. He is currently a Harvard Frank Knox Traveling Fellow, studying Twentieth-century Dystopian Literature and the Legal History of Sexual Violence in the UK. He blogs at amclain.com and socials @adamjmclain.
