An essay about the school Orwell went to from age 8 to 13; after going to another school, Eton, he went into the colonial police. Both Musil and Orwell were soldiers - they look at total institutions from inside.

We can look at the two texts to compare British & Austrian schools; but the main issue (and controversy) about "Such, Such Were the Joys" concerns whether it was the germ out of which 1984 grew (given that Orwell may have been working on both at the same time).

Anthony West: "In 1984 the whole pattern of society shapes up along the lines of fear laid down in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ until the final point of the dread summons to the headmaster’s study for the inevitable beating. In 1984, the study becomes Room 101. As these parallels fall into place it is possible to see how Orwell’s unconscious mind was working. Whether he knew it or not, what he did in 1984 was to send everybody in England to an enormous St Cyprian’s to be as miserable as he had been. Only the existence of a hidden wound can account for such remorseless pessimism."

These critics emphasise Orwell’s sick mind, including a kind of schizophrenia about having two different names.

On the other side are people like Orwell’s biographer, Bernard Crick, who argue:

a. That the school and its teachers were not as bad as Orwell claimed.

b. That Orwell was a highly sane man, rather than a mentally crippled one.

c. That Orwell was a great political writer with something important to say about totalitarianism, rather than a neurotic pessimist with a hang-up about his childhood. 1984 is about the Spanish Civil War and World War II, not about an 8-yr old who’s afraid of a beating.

I incline to compromise: 1984 is a general view of a totalitarian society, but it has a strongly individual flavor, & much of its power comes from deep down in Orwell’s psyche.

Some arguments for reading "Such, Such Were the Joys" and 1984 at least side by side:

Not just Freud, but also Musil, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and many others argue that the most important events of a life have already happened by the time one enters university, and perhaps much earlier. Children are both plastic and sensitive; apparently small events can have huge effects on them, especially episodes of cruelty or injustice.

Removing a child from its parents makes it much more vulnerable to such events; the child has lost its main defense against the world, and also those who can make sense of what is happening.

In Torless, the hero is exposed to evil and sexual events coming from its peers; in "Such, Such" they come from Sambo and Flip - good parents are replaced by diabolical ones.

Vertical oppression is probably more extreme than horizontal, because the oppressors have more power relative to their victim; also, the boy in Orwell’s essay is about half the age of Torless, and hasn’t yet acquired any intellectual defenses.

Also, in Torless it is possible to appeal to a higher authority, the teachers - they set a limit to what can happen. In "Such, Such," as in 1984, there is less justice at the top than anywhere else. Establishes a basis for Orwell's later anarchist beliefs: the higher up in society, the more powerful, the worse. Hope always comes from below - from the proles, in political terms.

In both books, evil is mixed up with sexuality and primary functions of the body. Again, Orwell is more primitive and extreme: transgression in his essay is bed-wetting rather than homosexuality. Basini is punished for something he chose to do; Orwell for something he didn’t want to do, but couldn’t help doing anyway.

Loss of control, regression to infancy, senseless floggings - all of this anticipates the tortures and mutilations of 1984, where a central concern is the awful things that can happen to the body.

But also, Sambo & Flip set out to mutilate the mind - they are Orwell's original manipulators and brainwashers, forcing you to admit what you know to be untrue.

Got a scholarship to Eton but did no work at all for six years - no chance of going on to university.

Went into the Imperial Police and served in Burma (Myanmar). Rejects power and the imperial system (his family tradition). A misfit in the ruling class, but no love for those he rules - both sides are corrupted.

After five years resigns from the police (1927) to become a writer. Works as a dishwasher in Paris, travels in England as a bum to see society from the bottom up (after having seen it from the top down at Eton). Publishes Down and Out in Paris and London.

Writes novels and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a report on poverty and unemployment in the North of England. But creates a scandal by attacking left-wing intellectuals in the second half of the book.

Central to Orwell's writing: affection for ordinary working=class people, hatred and mistrust of those who come forward to take power in their name.

1936, Spanish Civil War. Orwell goes as a journalist in 1937, then signs up for a left-wing militia, the POUM. Fights for six months, badly wounded. Has to flee Spain when his comrades are purged by the communists; writes Homage to Catalonia.

His Spanish experience provides the most deeply felt political background for 1984, especially the ideas about trying to hold on to the truth in a ruthless & totalitarian world. Much discussion in Homage to Catalonia of how newspapers and government figures deliberately suppress the truth and create a nightmare world where no one can be trusted.

Read from pp. 188-189.

The communists, including some Russians sent by Stalin, claimed to be fighting Fascism; but they also conducted a vicious war against their enemies on the Left, many of whom were tortured, disappeared, or just rounded up and shot. They were accused of being Trotskyists, or worse - agents of the Fascist enemy.

A good example was what happened to Andres Nin, one of the left-wing leaders. The communists arrested him, then staged an "attack" on the jail by armed men who spoke German - to make it seem that he was a secret Nazi who was being rescued by them. The men took him away and he was never heard of again - almost certainly he was killed by the communists & his body disposed of (June 1937, while Orwell was at the front).

Six years later (1943) Orwell is working as a journalist in London - can't fight in WW II because of his Spanish wound and ill health. Makes notes for a book called The Last Man in Europe. All the essentials of 1984 are in these notes; the book is completed and published six years later; Orwell dies soon afterwards, in January 1950.

Other experiences contributing to 1984, besides the psychological wounds of his childhood and what he saw first-hand in Spain (individual experience has an absolute truth-value for Orwell - no questioning of the self and morality as Torless does).

1. The rise and near-triumph of the European dictators, especially Hitler and Stalin; and the similarities between them. Bitter enemies in the thirties, sudden allies in July 1939, surprise attack on Russia by Hitler two years later. (British CP follows the Soviet line).

2. Especially, the Soviet purges that began in December 1934 with the assassination of Kirov. Confessions by the Old Bolsheviks, swear that white is black.

3. The propaganda and neglect of people's real needs in the Soviet five-year plans. 2 + 2 = 5 a favorite slogan.

4. Shabbiness, decay and shortage of everything in England during the War and afterwards - provides a lot of the everyday detail for the book.

5. Orwell's work during the War at the Ministry of Information. Gigantic art-deco building devoted to propaganda and lies, lots of intellectuals employed there.

6. Belief in the general bloodthirstiness and immorality of intellectuals as opposed to the decency of ordinary people, who still believe in absolute right and wrong.

7. Difficulties that he had with publishing his books and articles: fellow-travellers in the publishing industry make trouble for The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and 1984 itself.

1. Orwell's wife dies suddenly in 1945, leaving him lonely and adrift. Later affair with Sonia Brownell, marries her on his deathbed - model for Julia.

2. When the War ends, wants to live in the country - chooses an extremely remote house on the island of Jura - feeds his "Last Man" fantasies.

3. In 1947, halfway through the book, becomes ill with TB, has to go to a sanatorium. Orwell a dying man: struggling to say the last word about contemporary politics, but also a deeply isolated and despairing individual.

4. Illness makes you a child again; Orwell's condition perhaps re-activates some of the complexes of his schooldays.

Two kinds of science fiction: a) speculation about alternative worlds or the distant future; b) allegories of the present. The latter are almost always dystopian, taking current evils and projecting them into an even worse near future. Orwell writes this kind of SF in 1984 (as does Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale).

Second kind can be called "topical SF," and one if its problems is that it may quickly become silly as the actual future diverges from your predictions. Orwell cleverly gets around this by assuming that the Big Brother regime is an economic and scientific failure, so that everyday life goes backwards - people are poorer, dirtier, more limited than they used to be, so little need for new inventions. Two exceptions are:

1. The telescreen. Television was just beginning in England, Orwell brilliantly assumes that it will be used to watch people, rather than vice versa.

2. Social changes that don't depend on technology, but contribute to the nightmare atmosphere, notably the metric system and the 24-hour clock. This is the "Little England" side of Orwell, and uses a cunning piece of false logic: the Continent is the birthplace of totalitarianism, the metric system is Continental, so the metric system is totalitarian.

How much does it matter that, in 1984 or 2000, the future has turned out differently, and much better? Does this make the book worthless?

a. Could be argued that 1984 is a warning, along with Animal Farm. Orwell tried to prevent something happening, and his two books were outstandingly successful in doing this.

Related issue: to what extent did Orwell seriously believe that something like this might happen? Is the book an expression of his own profound pessimism, or just a clever fantasy?

Certainly he took the dystopian future seriously in 1938:

"The terrifying thing about the modern dictatorships is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted, because of 'human nature' which as a matter of course desired liberty. But we cannot be at all certain that 'human nature' is constant. It may be just as possible to produce a breed of men who do not wish for liberty as to produce a breed of hornless cows. The Inquisition failed, but then the Inquisition had not the resources of the modern state. The radio, press-censorship, standardized education and the secret police have altered everything. Mass-suggestion is a science of the last twenty years, and we do not yet know how successful it will be."

The hero of his novel, Coming Up for Air, puts it even more strongly:

"The world we're going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan world. The colored shirts. The barbed wire. The rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day and the detective watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It's all going to happen. Or isn't it? Some days I know it's impossible, other days I know it's inevitable."

Given that in five years vastly worse things did happen, Orwell looks like quite level-headed prophet in 1938.

b. The view that Orwell was an extremist or neurotic pessimist can also be challenged by pointing to the enormous popularity of 1984. Whether or not things turned out so badly, the idea that they might still has a powerful, general appeal. Orwell's skill as a writer comes in here: he is able to arouse strong, primitive feelings in his audience, almost regardless of the book's relevance to the current situation. 1984 succeeds as a social myth, whether or not it's "true."

In the real history of postwar Europe religion, and especially Roman Catholicism, played a major role in resisting communism and finally defeating it. I asked myself, why is there no religious opposition to Big Brother, Newspeak and the rest? Then I read a critic who said that "obviously, O’Brien is a God-figure"; and the book started to make a different kind of sense.

Orwell was influenced by Dostoevsky’s "Grand Inquisitor" chapter in The Brothers Karamazov. Jesus comes back to earth and starts healing people; the Grand Inquisitor arrests him and explains to him that he must be killed, because people don’t need and shouldn’t expect to find happiness in freedom; they need an absolute authority to tell them what to do.

He claims it as a merit for himself and his Church that at last they have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy. 'For now' (he is speaking of the Inquisition, of course) 'for the first time it has become possible to think of the happiness of men. Man was created a rebel; and how can rebels be happy?’

Happiness lies in submission to an irrational authority; this is precisely what O’Brien is trying to teach Winston. We can see a parallel with Orwell’s personal situation and the "problem of evil": God tortures us with cancer and tuberculosis, but also demands that we worship him. Like the Party, God also kills us, even if we submit.

The "problem of pain" goes hand in hand with the "problem of pleasure": here the focus is on Julia and sexual as opposed to intellectual rebellion. We may consider it chauvinistic that Orwell defines Julia as "all body" - "with Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality." But this is a conscious decision on Julia’s part: "When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour."

Not necessarily gone sour, but certainly diverted into a different course - which is typical of Christianity as well of political dictatorship.

The problem of pleasure, in other words, is "why shouldn’t we live entirely for the physical pleasures of sex, eating, drinking, etc. - since, after all, it was God who made these things pleasurable."

Julia is a philosophical hedonist, and in her own terms is right to fall asleep when Winston is reading Goldstein’s book to her.

From another point of view, however, we can criticise Orwell for making women and proles equivalent to each other: they subvert Ingsoc by retreating into their bodies, rather than attacking it directly. But this raises the question:

The biggest single reason was not intellectual failure, but dishonesty. Fraternity and equality were noble ideals but, as in 1984, the Inner Party–the Nomenklatura in Soviet terms–started to live for their secret privileges; and these could not be kept secret indefinitely. The causes of the Protestant Reformation were similar: Papal nepotism.

O’Brien won’t fail because he is a torturer, but because of his wine and his manservant. These privileges were sexual as well: Mao regimented China and put everyone in uniform, but led a secretly corrupt sexual life. Orwell shows the privileges, but doesn’t realise that they are the Achilles Heel of the entire system.

Example of Bulgaria.

A sad thought that it didn’t seem to be moral indignation at tortures and deportations that brought down the Wall, but envy and disgust with the hypocrisy of the rulers. So 1984 was proved wrong, but not because of the intrinsic nobility of people like Winston.