Poke Poke Poke (repeat as necessary)

Just finished 1984, which leaves Jane Eyre as the only real book left on the summer reading list; should be able to finish that and Ulysses while flying to, driving about, and returning from the East Coast (ick), and then I'll have a week to write the 1984 essay, and a while after that for the Jane Eyre one, though I might just get 1984 out of the way now while it's still fresh.

SAT on Saturday and I'm annoyed with the whole having to study for it deal, which is silly given that it's supposed to be an aptitude test, though clearly fails in that regard as studying does help. So, I shall continue to throw monkey wrenches into the system so long as the system requires that I take a test that is four hours long and consists of first grade math, useless grammar rules, and obscure interpretations of even more obscure prose passages.

Anyway...deep breath, deep breath...

Posted an inordinate number of pictures on FaceBook the other day which as precipitated a near flood of photo comments, though I suppose that is my penance for flooding all of the people in the pictures with notifications that they have been tagged in a picture. Blargh. Kat got cranky [kranky] about one bad one from prom, and I deleted it...eventually.

Funny, finishing 1984 has taken all of the desire to write out of me, which is perhaps a little worrying, but I've had studying and Rock Band and Grant Theft Auto 4 to keep me preoccupied (the last having only just managed to establish a foothold in the realm of my attention, and only because several of its missions entail escorting a stoned Jamaican fellow about and shooting a large number of vaguely unscrupulous other fellows).

Anyway, reading 1984 for the second time in only a few months was not particularly enjoyable, most of its potency being lost; O'brien's last rant was rather dull compared to the first time I read the book, and most of my mental energy went into picking apart aspects of Ingsoc thought that we will likely never end up discussing in class because we will likely never discuss the book at all, it being a Mertens class. The conclusion that I reached was that Ingsoc will fail for the same reason that power hungry groups have been falling for the entirety of human existence--the most flagrant sin of all, blah blah blah--hubris. Their problem is that they do possess near total power and are working toward making their grip on that power permanent, but in so doing they are setting the stage for their own destruction. If the Party does succeed, as it plans to, in creating a Newspeak language where there is literally no capability to think improperly, then there is no mental language with which to describe deviancy; with the mind being as malleable as the party wishes it to be and reality as viewed by the citizens of Oceania similarly subject to the will of the Party, it follows that eventually, the Party will succeed in temporarily eradicating all resistance, at which point the Party will have achieved a perceived lock on power, assisted by the full use of Newspeak. Thus the Party will have eradicated the disease, but become utterly vulnerable to a recurrence--the Party will have willingly destroyed its ability to perceive any deviancy and will believe that their world is perfect insofar as they want it to be; persons who do no exhibit proper behavior will simply be glossed over by Party members, beyond the members' perception, existing in nearly an alternate universe. From there it is only a matter of time before a handful of intelligent Proles emerge or the Party conditioning process fails ever so slightly in the raising of a child, and then those liberated individuals could conceivably walk into a Ministry and massacre its workers with a machine gun and surviving Party members would fail to see that anything had occurred. The flaw lies not in the Party's failure to grasp power, but in their impulsive use of it; for the Party, it is not enough to have power, it must be exercised in some feeble attempt to assure themselves that they really are in control. It is not really necessary to alter the mind and soul of every deviant, but rather just to have the power to do so. The exercise is totally unnecessary, and by continuously exercising its power, the Party ensures that it will eventually seal itself off from concrete reality and while within the collective mind of the Party the Party will have total control, it will in actuality have only succeeded in blinding itself to any sort of resistance, sealing itself off into a ball and a state in which it is totally vulnerable to assault, not of verbal or logical means, but physical force should suffice. Though there would be no real need to do so as the Party would be effectively blind to all free persons and those liberated individuals need not bother themselves with a few million people living in rundown slums in London.

I could go on about other things, Winston's pseudo-betrayal and such, but I don't know that there really is any need to. That is merely picking nits with Blair's logic, and the end result is more or less the same. If there is no choice, then there is no culpability, but Winston and Julia are estranged either way. More interesting, perhaps, is whether or not Winston really could have withstood the rats, or if he was merely told by O'brien that he could not and therefore became predisposed to believe what he was told, at which point the action became involuntary. Either way, Winston had no choice in the matter--if we remain with Blair's established rules, that is--and thus cannot truly be blamed for what he did.

Blargh...enough academic ranting.