Scars in the mind: horror and fear

I must say it, I believe I am part of the 0,000001% of my classmates that did not have to read 1984 as an assignment for middle/high school, thus, I asked many of them, the ones that already read it, about what they felt and/or remember about the book, and most of them agreed on something: all they could think of was how frightening they were once they were reading it/finished reading it. And now I understand why, but who would not be scared? We are talking about the presence of some of the most triggering elements a human being could ever find in his/her life. 1984 is one of the most important literary works of the XX century, not only because of its writing and content quality, but also because its relation to the foresight of different events that have actually been happening, as a sort of prediction.

Furthermore, this post will focus on Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Man of the Crowd" as well, aiming to connect certain concepts presented in both works.

• Fear, reign o’er me

Starting with 1984, one of the main elements of this masterpiece is the lack of privacy. It is the year 1984 and London is under the power of the dystopian totalitarianism of The Party. The Big Brother’s regime has taken all over freedom by rejecting any kind of autonomy thinking and everything has been developed up to a desolation and mental coercion regarding the upcoming dependence on the government. Every movement, every thought, every rebellious kind of act was under the supervision of different Ministries, which were the way how the government was divided in order to maintain control. Well, this measure had no other goal than controlling the population by brainwashing them through different types of torture. This method of manipulation and surveillance to dominate every human life led to a mixture of feelings and emotions throughout the history. One of these moments that caught my attention was when Winston recognizes Julia after talking to Mr. Charrington, he gives an impression of being terrified, but in the sense of being scared of a continuous belief he had in his head since he thought he was being followed by her, expressing his feelings of fear in an odd mixture of hate and love, in which he also states that he thought of causing her physical harm: “He could keep on her track till they were in some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with a cobblestone. The piece of glass in his pocket would be heavy enough for the job.” (85), however, the idea was deserted rapidly.

Terror management is also a key feature in these kinds of regimens, in which they provoke citizens to be under a constant fear of death because if there is any kind of rejection or avoidance of the rules.

“The TMT (Terror Management Theory) is rooted in a long tradition of thought regarding human awareness of death and its role in psychological functioning The theory posits that to manage the potential for terror engendered by the awareness of mortality, humans sustain faith in worldview which provide a sense that they are significant beings in an enduring, meaningful world rather than mere material animals fated only to obliteration upon death.” (Greenberg & Arndt 398)

The TMT is shown in the main characters of the novel, being Winston the one portrayed as an undercovered rebellious at first which only expressed his thoughts in his diary in order to keep them hidden, Julia, who wants a change of the system, but is not that interested since, perhaps, she still keeps certain fear by having a complete change after all they are currently living, and O’Brien, who although was never actually part of the brotherhood, was part of the Inner Party and followed the rules of converting people to his side, as it was an obligation for the members of it.

• Into the psychological world of mystery

According to Zimbardo, “terrorism is about one thing: Psychology. It is the psychology of fear. It is the psychology of inducing fear in a target population for political objectives. It is the weaponization of fear and anxiety induction, usually by a small group opposed to the political, economic, religious and/or social agenda of a larger, more powerful, entrenched group.”.

The propaganda, the settlement of the Newspeak, the telescreens and the machines that control every aspect of each human being is what pressure is causing in the society, making the place unbearable to live and giving it the sense of emptiness.

This change of weather had an odd effect upon the crowd, the whole of which was at once put into new commotion, and overshadowed, by a world of umbrellas.” (428)

Illustration by Harry Clarke for a
London edition dated 1923.

This sensation of scenery is also developed in the mind by certain moments in "The Man of the Crowd", in which according to the narration, the action of the participants become clearer, as the shades (light) and weather of the scene changes, giving it another aura. Within the text, we can see that the unknown man is presented after a huge introduction of the details noticed by the narrator, but obviously his expression, the feature that interest the storyteller the most depicts a special essence in the character, that separates him from the rest of the crowd. The mystery of the man by itself and the thoughts of the narrator towards the possible options of the man’s reasons to move around and live in his own world makes me think of an invisible person. Not as a transparent one, but as a human created by the nature itself and built by what the person who is watching him believes he is. According to Silviu Mihai, “ being a man of the crowd implies the feeling of loving being incognito, which takes the man up to the point of modesty” (1), leading me to believe that this status of “being incognito” can be accurately used when someone does not want to show him/herself after doing a particular action that could have lamely consequences or after the revelation of a secret. That point allows me to connect this man with the beginning of the story: “There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.” (425), perhaps, stating that the man’s boundaries are his actions and that’s why he keeps an expression that makes him to isolate from the rest of the crowd. Secrets seen as something negative can also be noticed in 1984, where, for instance, Winston keeps his ideas hidden in a diary, his secrets, since are dangerous according to the plan of the totalitarian system, and dangerous of himself as well, due to the exposure of torture he can be involved if he demonstrates his real thoughts towards the government.

• “But he/she didn’t see me.”

In both texts, we can notice the idea of being followed/follow someone as a way to discover the motivation of certain people to act. In "The Man of the Crowd" it is the central theme, since the narrator, after noticing some characteristics of a group of people he sees (crowd) focuses on a man who has a particular expression he had never seen before, and continues following him, being really careful in order to avoid arousing suspicion, so as he can discover why the man has that expression and why he moves around shop by shop. In 1984, Winston feels constantly followed by Julia, since he thinks she is following him because she is a member of the Thought Police, and could expose him to the truth that he is actually against the system. However, she happens to be also against the doctrine, so he can feel more confidence and start a hidden relationship. But, why do these people called the attention of both narrators? In Orwell’s novel, even though Winston thinks that Julia is a loyal member of the Party, she still gets his attention, an uncertain feel, but still she is part of his thought evidently through a great part of the beginning. In the case of Poe’s, the narrator pays attention to the man because of his expression, but even though it is never said why exactly he has that expression nor another reason of why this man was so important for the narrator, he might see himself reflected to him, just because the way he behaves. Paul Hurl points out another reason of what could refer to the focus towards the man: “The narrator cannot classify the man's face because the face itself represents the already-generalized character of the crowd. The stranger is no just another face in the crowd; it is all them” (131). Nevertheless, I would rather focus on the action, since what is followed is what the characters have done, as Winston’s main actions to be followed for are his diary and his thoughts, and the man could be thinking about a crime he committed or a sudden thought he might have had.

• Emotional terror: violence to escape

In the end of 1984, Julia and Winston are found in their affair and are both punished, and O’Brien tortures mentally and psychologically to Winston since he was not liable to accept the doctrine, even though under pressure O‘Brien reaches his goal and “dehumanize” Winston, by leading him to betray his ideas and Julia. But what is in Room 101? Simply a place to face your fears.

"Do anything to me!" he yelled. "You've been starving me for weeks. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five years. Is there somebody else you want me to give away? Just say who it is and I’ll tell you anything you want. I don't care who it is or what you do to them. I've got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn't six years old. You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch it. But not Room 101!" (195) - the first prisoner.

Placed in the Ministry of Love, which maintained the law and order, the place with no windows, is supposed to cure the “mental disabilities” of people who is against the system, by inducing shock through violence, and there is no escape unless they change of mind. In Poe’s and Orwell’s texts I see, somehow, fear is used to escape, since, for instance, in the first case, the narrator sees from the outside what I believe he captions himself, which could mean that he is trying to see how the man escapes from his own mind, his own cause of that expression, so he can do the same. In the latter, Winston, from the inside of the bubble, sees his own escape as keeping with him a diary in which he can write from a place that is not under the vision of the cameras, but this diary gives him the opportunity to have his own stream of consciousness and makes him aware of the relations he holds within his work/town. Both characters reject what relates them with society; Winston rejects society as well as the unknown man rejects the same flow of the crowd.

Conclusion:

Torture to the mind: we all have our background, we all have our own thoughts, but we are all under pressure by what mass asks for. People and media, the highest controllers of the world, of your own mind. Just go on with your life. I can say just one thing, and it is that I am very thankful that I got to read this masterpiece now, in a moment of my life where I can make sense of more things.

References

Arndt, Jamie & Greenberg, Jeff. Terror Management Theory. 2008.

Hurh, Paul. American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville. Stanford University Press. California, 2015.

Mihai, Silviu. Mystery and Modernism in the Man of the Crowd. 2010.

Orwell, George. 1984. Penguins Books Ltd. New York, 1950.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe: The Man of the Crowd. Castle Books. New York, 2002.

Zimbardo, Philip. State Terror and State-Sanctioned Terrorism: Models of Mind and Behavior Control in Orwell’s 1984, as Operationalized Jim Jones in the Peoples Temple Mass Suicide/Murders. 2005.

In the Middle of the Crowd

Imagine a person, male or female, just that. No more than the simplest person you can picture for a while. The person follows the commonest routine, as everybody does. Do not make any interpretation of that routine by now. Routines are recurrently alleged to be dehumanizing and tedious, but they bring life structure and predictability nonetheless; and we, people, need probability to proceed with an essential notion of safe. In spite of this all, the person suddenly gets an awkward sensation one morning and start wondering about the purpose or lack of thereof their actions have had, why he or she is here fulfilling the same process step by step, if this fits an internal certainty of happiness, satisfaction and humanity, what his/her role in society is, what an isolation s/he feel although living in a world full of people. Then the person sees him/herself alienated in the middle of the crowd.

The shock

Such perception of the self as the stranger in a world full of familiarity commences with a shock, a moment that defines the identity, establishing a before and after immediately store in the most profound part of oneself (Gutiérrez, 2000: 165-166). The unnamed protagonist of Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" is categorizing freely the people who walk around him, guessing somehow who they are, when he unexpectedly is strongly caught by the disturbing apparition of an elderly man. 

With my brow to the glass, I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age,)—a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression. 

“The Man of the Crowd”, p. 233

Harry Clarke's 1923 illustration on
Poe's short story.

It is easy to guess how things, how people, how places are and going to be, that is why strangeness is normally found alluring. The unpredictable leads oneself think about how I am going to react to this henceforth, am I going to be likely, unlikely? That is the challenge to our identity that the shock (caused by finding strangeness) triggers. Condition which is personified in the figure of an "old, short, thin, decrepit and apparently feeble" man who catches the observer's attention in such way that he follows him across the paths and passages of the city.

The observer in the decadent London in 1984 is Winston Smith, the central character of Orwell's novel, which begins precisely with the shock day of Winston: April 4, 1984. In a new social order sustained in a set of mechanism whose foundation is falseness, Winston is actually an agent that maintains the functionality of these precepts. His duty implies the reformulation of truth in a never-ending task to make population stay deceived. But in the latter days, he has started to dream, feeling the insisting desire of writing by hand in a new journal, trying to recall old memories of a blurred childhood when, he is almost sure, London was diametrically different to today’s lugubrious city. While he performs his role during the Two Minutes Hate, Winston gets aware of a persisting sensation of imprisonment. By the end of the novel's first chapter, he will be actually fully aware of his alienated condition, because of the consequences it represents in a world permanently watched: Being vaporized.

The arrests invariably happened at night. [...] In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.

For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:

theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck I dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother (sic)

1984, p. 39

The search

Alienation emerges as a consequence of existentialism, that is, a consciousness about human existence, it mysterious and unsolved origin, purpose and end due to its inherent constraints -death, perception and interpretation- (Saleem, 2014: 68). After an age of apparently unstoppable human progression and perfection, in the Modern Era human capability to sow tragedy and extend suffering to their peers reached its topmost; thus, war, persecution, consumption, famine, inequality and ruin constituted a testimony of how far decay and pain can get (p. 69). 

Was Poe an example of
a real-life alienated person?
Why?

Logically, generations previous, current or later question themselves if they are equally able of doing likewise or agree at different extents. The answer for many was 'no', and this convinced 'no' lead to a search for an identity now dispossessed and lost, for that very deep purpose of life and meaningfulness of existence in a hostile and despairing world, the same that previous generation failed to find. 

The figure of the stranger towards who direct our hopes appears as a way to confirm alienation in “The Man of the Crowd”, if we considers how the protagonist reacts to the perplexity that the old man caused him. His walk behind the old man to snoop him is perhaps motivated by a desire of revealing a hidden meaning (Gutiérrez, 2000: 167). Why the observer surprises himself following an unknown man across the city? What could explain such fascination? We are here invited to follow the stranger the same way the protagonist does, perhaps encouraged by a strong desire, a deep conviction, that in the encounter of the only evidence of our alienation (another person who also seems to be) a turnaround to this emptiness will wait. 

Goldstein could be the ‘stranger’ followed by Winston, pursued by Winston, searched by Winston. Julia and O'Brien, the landmarks in the night city and its intricacies, alleys, passages, turns, corners and crannies that could lead you to the encounter in the same way they could get you away from it. They could give you the usefulness of a book, the candor of a relationship, relive the happiness of love, the certain of complicity, the safety from information, the pleasure of secrets, the hope for privacy in the midst of a world self-monitored by his obsession with the stillness of homogeneity. Dismally, you will ever prone to disappointment because of the tricky paths of a city, of the many layers of a person's face. In the mood of alienation, everyone deserves distrust, no one is completely certain, not even the stranger who is not desired as a person, but as what the person represents for the alienated: A break from desperation. 

The Fallen Hero

John Hurt as Winston Smith in Michael
Radford's 1984 film adaptation of the novel.

Heroism and alienation tend to be linked by readers as alienated characters are recurrently misinterpreted as a people blessed by a sort of empowerment that differentiate them from the crowd and, in turn, placing them at a superior position of awareness; consequently, the alienated character is expected to manage significant change for both him or herself and the others, provoking a chain of revolutionary facts that leads minds to a wave of awaking that free masses from their existential struggles (Resch, 1997: 155).

Notwithstanding, the self-recognition of alienation do not necessarily denote heroism. We may interpret that for Poe's protagonist, there is a hope of heroism deposited in the stranger. The stranger is considered by the observer as someone who fastens the two extremes of a circle the observer himself has not been able to: Have an identity in a dispossessed world and the observer does get from this idol an image of his behavior which is coherent to the fascination he has been object of: The stranger never breaks down the illusion, there is no more sense in following him, that his nature, being an enigma.

…the shades of the second evening came on, I grew wearied unto death, and, stopping fully in front of the wanderer, gazed at him steadfastly in the face. He noticed me not, but resumed his solemn walk, while I, ceasing to follow, remained absorbed in contemplation. “This old man,” I said at length, “is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. 

“The Man of the Crowd”, p. 237

Although the protagonist seemed to get what he expected at some extent, much of the stranger’s heroism comes from his mind rather than reality. The alienated needs the alienated, that’s why he created a hero somehow, likewise many readers do with Winston. As for the reading of 1984, Winston is mistaken as an archetype of political leader, a revolutionary icon and, ultimately, a hero. Although, if we consider his hopeless on the possibility of the prole's recovery from their inability to think by themselves, the image of Winston as the potential middle-class hero within the dictatorship of the Big Brother vanishes in some way. 

Talking [Winston] to her [Julia], he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

1984, p. 185

Thus, Winston moves dramatically from the generosity and stoicism of heroes to the prejudices and egoism of an individual who just desires desperately to escape from the system of which he is captive (Resch, 1997: 171). This is a powerful portrait of how alienation is rather connected to the risk of individualism than the willingness for heroism. Winston does not believe profoundly in the possibility of a new and luminous society, he is rather certain that collapse approaches every day (p. 172). And he just wants a chance, an alternative to not be there when the day has come.

Alone in a world of lonesome people

From the reading of the both Poe’s and Orwell’s work as well as the essays consulted to deepen the theme of alienation, I have noticed how alienation is markedly connected to the celebration of our individuality and an overemphasized concern on it. At a point of our lives, we, or some of us, feel we have diluted in the middle of the crowd, which terrifies us as it contradict a natural tendency to wish the certainty of meaningfulness. Think about globalization: By approaching cultures around the world, aren't we taking the risk of homogenized traditions, beliefs and values in such way that diversity would extinct? What the purpose of being another else? Distinction is a mechanism to make our identity noticeable, at least for ourselves. Who knows, maybe want they the observer suddenly look at us and think “that person… that person who is so…” or we can inspire the search of a freer world in the next Winston Smith. We need the certainty that we are someone. Not only someone else.

Thought-provoking questions

George Orwell

After reading this entry’s conclusion, would you agree or disagree? What would you say it could another factor, maybe a more decisive, which would explain alienation?

Is alienation a phenomenon that has affected any character you know from another work? I’d like to know what you could share. 

I personally hypothesize that Orwell's perception of his own alienation was one of the factors that led him write 1984, what do you think about?

I proposed an analogy between globalization and alienation. How elese could you relate these concepts?

If you have finished 1984 and “The Man of the Crowd”, what’s the parallel you could establish between how both protagonist finally resolved the identity struggle and the search for a figure of heroism?

Comments are welcome! :^)

References

Gutiérrez, F. M. (2000). Edgar Allan Poe: Misery and Mystery in "The Man of the Crowd". Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, 1(2), 153-174.

Orwell, G. (2009). 1984. Buenos Aires: Emecé.

Poe, E. A. (2006). The Man of the Crowd, in Kennedy, J. G. (Ed). The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. London: Penguin Books, 229-237. 

Resch, R. P. (1997). Utopia, Dystopia and the Middle Class in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Boundary, 2(1), 137-176.

Saleem, A. (2014). The Theme of Alienation in Modern Literature. European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, 2(3), 67-76.