1984: Between Memory and History

Few things are as disturbing to an historian as the future in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. Here is a future of radical authoritarianism, where the state controls and monitors every aspect of human life, including memory. Events and experiences of past and present are salvageable insofar as they legitimize the regime’s dominance. In this dystopian world the historians are “ministers of Truth,” engaged daily in both the revision of artifacts and documents, and their systematic destruction. Nothing is free, not even the consciousness of history. The questionable O’Brien puts it distinctly: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

1984 raises very serious questions. What happens, for example, when memory is preempted and recreated? How does society change when the act of remembering has been restricted? What is the fate of a people’s identity when their past is confiscated? These questions are particularly relevant in the context of Pierre Nora’s article, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” in which the author suggests that a prominent condition of modernity is the replacement of lived memory with critical history, the substitution of sites of memory for real environments of memory. However, the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century—of which the hegemony of memory is a prime symptom—complicates Nora’s argument, especially where it equates modernity with the effort to achieve historical exactitude. 1984 is only a fictionalized model for a world in which collective memory and milieux de mémoire have been invented, but there are real examples, particularly in Germany under the Third Reich and in the Soviet empire after the Second World War. What this evidence suggests is that lived memory can be revived, though drastically distorted, if only to maintain the power of a ruling group. In turn, the will to remember is not necessarily endemic to the modern age, but must struggle with the will to reinvent the past.