The Living Dread

          The Living D(r)ead

A subjective interpretation of existential fears expressed in Orwell’s 1984 and The Portable Edgar Allan Poe.

Though it may seem difficult and distant to understand the thoughts and emotions of these authors’, from so many years ago, it is amazing to realize how the human soul is capable to connect and survive over time. On the one hand, it is the ontogeny of the emotion of fear which is responsible for our commonalities and empathy with it (Ekman, 1979). On the other hand, I believe it has to do with art. According to Poe “love dies, but art is immortal”, this way, for him the only way of achieving immortality and to transcend space and time, is through art. It is every writer’s mystery, his sacrifice in confronting beauty and pain that keeps literature and art alive. As Orwell describes in his essay “Why I write”:

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one was not driven on by some demon who’m one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality.

These personal demons are unmasked in their work and through the horror and fear of their existence, they waken our own. In both Orwell and Poe we feel their internal suffering, the sadness of their loneliness and the ordeal they must have gone through by putting into words their pain and fears, by showing what so many don’t want to see. They open a channel to our senses, our hearts and minds, they shake us awake and make us feel alive, it’s as if they were saying – Hurry up, wake up before you really die! Through their words they transport us, not back in time, nor to the future, but to our present state. Orwell, through his eye makes us lift ours and look around, and Poe makes us look inside.

Both Orwell and Poe are masters of horror, forcing the reader into a dark world of the unknown, into nightmares and states of emotional numbness and fear, into the awareness of human’s hopelessness and fragility, both presenting their horrors through a personal manner and way.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

In reading 1984, a dark dystopian world of perpetual war and public domination, we can see Orwell’s fear in the system, in the control of men’s minds, in the control and manipulation of truth, because those who control men’s minds control truth, and “those who control the past, control the future”. The idea that governments could control people's minds terrified Orwell. His fear is focused on being stamped on, on being trapped, from the outside in, with a constant omnipresent eye observing and controlling his thought and action. It is not the time and rhyme from Poe’s golden bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells – jingling and tinkling today, it is an Orwellian bell ringing in our brain more than sixty years later, reminding us that we live, as in Airstrip One, surrounded by surveillance, exposure and control.

In 1984 we can see Orwell’s fear of the totalitarian state satisfying its lust for power:

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

If power is an end, and the object of anything is the object in itself, we are confronted with the hopelessness and coldness of an existence with no meaning, and once we lose meaning we lose part of our humanity. The possibility of men losing their most human qualities, becoming soulless automatons without being aware, losing their sole and mind, would be like surviving between the living dead and being more dead than alive.

As Fromm (1983) mentions, Orwell depicts the completely bureaucratized society, in which man is a number and loses all sense of individuality. Living under this mind-deceiving invincible power, the total subversion of the individual’s ideology and psychology is only a step away. We witness this transgression, in uncomfortable awareness, when O’Brien is in the process of breaking and annihilating Winston Smith.

You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. …  When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. (Orwell, p. 208)

Through this discourse we are presented with the real concept of power, dark power, the persecution of individualism, the manipulation of (un)free will and the statement of independent thought as crime. The control of thought leaves humans helpless and submitted; they are left with nothing of their own. It is a breaking in and a violation of the soul. It wipes out memory and past, and with no past anything can be true. Orwell shows us how fragile and blind we can be if we live encapsulated and unaware. He warns us not to be brain washed, to hang on to our existence, to not be part of the dehumanized soulless living dead.  

Another frightening aspect highlighted by Orwell is how language canbe manipulated and re-constructed to narrow consciousness, creativity and thought. As Syme explains, new-speak is about inventing and destroying words. Every concept or notion will be covered by one single and rigid word, with no other meanings possible, with no other words available. Concepts are constructed and given a name. Words such as thoughtcrime, duckspeak, ownlife, memory hole and doublethink from non-existence become real, terrifyingly and horribly real.     

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words...

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow therange of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. … Every year fewer and fewer words, and the rangeof consciousness always a little smaller. (pg.43)

It is a machiavellic move the destruction of language. It is the 

final check mate of power over humanity, over human history, over 

humanlife. Human’s essence lies in language. With no language we 

disintegrate in ignorance and unconsciousness. Dreams disappear, 

knowledge disappears, and the expression of thought and feelings 

disappear. How many times in our history have books been destroyed, trying to abolish knowledge in pursuit of control? 

Orwell’s writing shows us his social and political concerns, also his fear in the future and in the horrors that the human race, under totalitarianism, can erect. This is why, as Orwell states in “Why I Write” (1946):

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

His legacy is a warning, through his dystopic writing he shows us 

the future of a hopeless mankind, the depressing picture of an 

unconscious wiped out human race, 1984 is, as is Winston’s diary, 

directed to those who are still human, who are alive and who still 

have hope.

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, 

when men are different from one another and do not live alone--to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink--greetings!

On the other hand, Poe presents us with different horror stories of darkness and fear. His writings are about realistic terror, through his words and descriptions we experience the pure sensation of terror left bare and exposed. Poe in a wonderfully horrifying way depicts and scrutinizes man’s inner emotions and fears. He goes deep inside, in a pre-auto-analysis style, unveiling the demons and gloom he carries within. His morbid acuteness of the senses agitates the reader’s soul by stirring up any sentiment that has experienced the slightest sensation of terror. In my opinion Poe wakes up the scared and lonely child that lies hidden inside each of us. He breaks through the fortresses, built up to protect our soul, and takes us on a horror ride to our inner fears. He unleashes dread. The House of Usher falls, as do the labyrinths to our sorrows, leaving us scared and exposed.

As in Orwell, in Poe’s stories there is also a constant eye, but it’s the eye telling the story, describing calmly everything it sees. Through these graphic gory descriptions is terror coldly installed.
Poe’s personal fear of death permeates his tales, the fear of something, though destructive, seductive and unknown, the fear of death installed in the soul. 

Poe's characters, Prince Prosperous in "The Masque of the Red Death", Roderick Usher and his anonymous friend and narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher", the man and his stalker in "The man of the crowd",are as the characters in Orwell, typically without ties. We see no families, no parents, no  children. All we see are spiritually and emotianally unnatached living dead souls, all of them different types of last men.Through Poe we see terror but also the presence of tormented and very complex human souls. 
His fear of death and loss are expressed in his melancholy, as is his yearning to trascend through art and the beauty of words.He also warns us in his way to not give in to the living dread, not to forget what it is to be human. 

“You are the last man, said O'Brien. You are the guardian of the human spirit.”