LILEKS (James) :: The Bleat 2021 FRIDAY

On Wednesday we were supposed to have absolutely wild weather - warm, then thunderstorms, then murder winds and a severe storm, followed by a 40 degree drop on temps. This has never happened before, according to records that stretch back to Pangea. The good things happened; the bad things did not. It was not just warm, it was romantically foggy.

The fog erased my building.

It made the awful powerplant smokestack look even more ominous and primitive:

That's such an unforgiveable thing. A big brutalist fist that looks like it should rise from some totalitarian state.

Speaking of which! I’m looking forward to the female-centric retelling of 1984. Really. There’s no prohibition on telling other sides of a famous story it’s all the rage these days. We retell Oz from the Witch’s point of view, 101 Dalmations from the dog-napper’s side. The trick will be making Julia adhere to the book, and I don’t think that will happen. What we know of her will be chalked up to the Male Gaze, and the character will take inspiration from Susanna Hamilton’s stern performance in the remarkable movie of the same name, and year. She radiates a fierce sense of self-contained power and intelligence.

The Julia of the book is a rather shallow. Almost lightweight.

The Guardian article says:

Publisher Granta said that Julia understands the world of Oceania “far better than Winston and is essentially happy with her life”.

See, that’s not quite right. She has no interest in understanding it at all. She’s “essentially happy” in the sense that a file clerk in Hitler’s office was happy in 1941.

The article goes on:

As Orwell puts it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “in some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda … She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her."

Acute in seeing how the manipulations were obvious, less susceptible because whatever the Party said didn’t affect her. (Yet.) Let’s go to the original source.

“I’m not interested in the next generation, dear. I’m interested in us.”

“You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,” he told her.

She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight.

In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed.

Don’t trouble her pretty little head with all that “mutability of the past” nonsense.

So will Julia turn out to be someone who is passionately interested in Truth and Justice, after all? Will her disengagement from the truth of her society turn into . . . say, #resistance? After all, the Julia of the book came around to joining the underground. What really counts is whether Julia’s lack of interest in objective reality, in the past and lack of understanding of its virtues, her indifference to the corruption of language, will be seen as negative things.

That might offend certain segments of the audience.

But I don't think they'd notice.