PHI 3882: Comments on first set of paper, Fall 2011

Looking over these papers, one lesson emerges: make sure you pay close attention to the text being studied.

Consider the following:

In Nineteen Eighty Four we can name three essential activities for the Party members. These would be labor, fabrication and action - labor and fabrication being the most important ones. Labor is directly associated with the survival of the individual as an integrant of the society. Fabrication is the transformation of the world by men's hands, for their own purposes. Amongst the three, action would be the one exclusively human. ... Action is where we can find the public space, where relationships between humans are formed. In public space and politics men put into practice their animal nature and transcend their essence to become the owner of their personal destiny. By limiting every individual's actions, the Party had absolute control over their reality and destiny.

As the footnotes make clear, the division of human activity into labor, fabrication and action comes from Hannah Arendt. One can also divide human activities into eating, drinking and sleeping, and in Nineteen Eighty Four, eating, drinking and sleeping play their role. But does this help us understand the novel? Not really. The only point about Nineteen Eighty Four made in the paragraph above is that the Party restricts people freedom of action, and thus controls people. The theory that is taken from Arendt isn't really playing any role - except to demonstrate that the student has done some research.

Now here, I have to reveal a sad truth. Research is like advertising. Someone once famously said "Fifty percent of the money I spent on advertising is wasted, the trouble is, I don't know which fifty percent." So too, a lot of your research will lead to a dead-end, and will not be usable in your essay. Try to recognize when this has happened, and don't be too demoralized.

Here's a different example:

This happens in our real world as well. We see that people break the law as criminals who deserve punishment, just as the people in Winston's society did. Winston is a model character for every criminal that exists. By definition, a criminal is "guilty of a crime." They rise against the values of a society; they don't comply with the laws, as Winston...
...Winston hates Big Brother, he hates his co-workers, neighbors, friends. Their values disgust him...

Of course Winston is, in the society that he inhabits, a criminal. He is also, as we saw, a character who has a dark side to his nature, as well all do. However, is he really a role-model for every criminal? Winston is motivated by political ideals - criminals are motivated by laziness, greed, desperation. Some people become criminals because they are stupid, others because they are master-minds. Winston does hate the values of his society, but he doesn't hate everyone he meets: aside from Julia (where hate turns to love) what about Mr. Charrington, or the old prole in the pub? What about Parsons - he finds Parson tiresome, but does he really hate him? The student who wrote the paragraph above is in the grip of a theory - Winston as a criminal - but this theory has led them to overlook some basic points about how Winston's character is presented: he represents all humanity: true he has his flaws, but he has good moments as well. He cannot be reduced to a creature of pure hatred.

A third example:

The best example for me that Orwell uses to accept that Big Brother is not the replacement of God but the antagonist is the appearance of Ampleforth. "These things happen," he said vaguely,..."I have been able to recall one instance...It was Kipling. I allowed the word 'God' to remain at the end of the line ... It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was 'rod'..."
Evidently, there exists a replacement for the word 'God'...when Ampleforth is replacing the word God he should replace it with the word Big Brother. And even if Big Brother does not rhyme, it does not matter because rhymes are a concept of Old English...in the end Orwell put that example not just to show a lack of rhyme, but for a reason.

If Ampleforth could not replace the word God for Big Brother then the events could only guide us to a simple conclusion. God is the antagonist of Big Brother because if you are trying to replace a word for another the simplest way of doing it should be using a synonym. And the word God is not a synonym of Big Brother for Ampleforth. And if the following statement is true, then it converts the story of The Fall of Man im a Utopia because in a way we dream that the Spirit of Man becomes redeem and taht achieve a moral excellence and that mainly it controls its own Free Will ... The Spirit of Man makes a decision in which it follows the direction of our Protector ...The idea of a Protector becomes debatable only if we think of God as our Protector...

This places too much weight on one remark by Ampleforth. The student is interested in finding a religious meaning in Nineteen Eigthy Four, and that idea is worth pursuing. But how central is religion to Orwell's own concerns? If this essay is correct, then Orwell chose to declare the true meaning of the novel in this one comment by Ampleforth, a comment that seems so irrelevant to the main plot. The difficulty comes because the student is determined not only to find a religious significance in the novel, but to suppose that Orwell himself planted that significance there - "Orwell put that example not just to show a lack of rhyme, but for a reason": that's a claim to read Orwell's mind. As I've tried to explain, you can free yourself to find deeper levels of meaning in a novel when you are prepared to go  beyond a statement about the author's conscious intentions.

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